CTR-1

Before there was a stage name, there was a promise. A Brooklyn kitchen, a fading afternoon, and a mother’s last words etched into a little boy’s heart: “Boy, you got one choice in life, and that’s always choose the right.” She was gone soon after. His father had already slipped away to ADDICTION. What remained were those words—and a fight to live up to them.

Homes changed. Schools changed. CTR-1 learned early to travel light: a notebook, a cheap pen, and a head full of beats. When the noise around him got loud, he wrote—poems that turned into prayers, prayers that turned into rhymes. He saved nickels picking up cans, bought a used turntable and a handful of records, and taught himself to cut, blend, and loop under streetlights until the city hummed with him.

His sound hit like 1980s asphalt: boom-bap drums, scratched hooks, and choir stabs that felt like the front row on a Sunday. The bars were clean but cut deep—mercy, repentance, second chances, and the steady question: What would the Savior do? He never claimed perfection; he claimed pursuit. Aligning his will with Christ was the mission, the mic just the instrument.

Word spread from rec centers and church gyms to park jams and late-night radio. The kid with the spiral notebook became CTR-1, a local legend with a testimony you could nod to—part alley cipher, part altar call. Between songs he talks plain about loss, about addiction’s echo, about a God who meets you where you are and walks you where you can’t go alone. The hook is simple, the invitation simpler: Choose the Right.

Today, CTR-1 stands where pain and praise shake hands—one foot in the past, eyes on the kingdom, both hands on the decks. He’s proof that even when life is unfair, grace is undefeated. One choice. One mic. CTR-1.