Kevin Coval: From Popular Suburban Jock to Def Poet

The journey is often better than the destination at which we arrive

A quirky story about a local Chicago boy who makes, if not good, at least very interesting journey through the byways of life after growing up in sequestered suburbia.

Photo: Colleeen Durkin/colleendurkin.com

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The Bomb Dropper: Kevin Coval’s unlikely journey from popular suburban jock to iconoclastic def poet
by Michael Volpe
New City Lit

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An interesting story about Kevin Coval, who progressed the maze that is his life and came out the other end–well, we’ll let the reader decide how it all worked out for him.

Readers beware: twists and turns ahead.

From The Bomb Dropper: Kevin Coval’s unlikely journey from popular suburban jock to iconoclastic def poet:

When Kevin Coval and I attended Glenbrook North in the early 1990s, two cars were exceedingly popular among students: the Chevy Blazer SUV and the Toyota Celica. In fact, a license plate on one of those shiny red Celicas back then summed up life at high school in Northbrook pretty well: “THNKUDAD.” Though alumni of Glenbrook North include late filmmaker John Hughes, former Cub Scott Sanderson and former WFLD reporter Lilia Chacon, most graduates wind up in a boardroom or courtroom or on a trading floor.

Nobody expected Kevin Coval to end up on stage, especially as a hip-hop artist. After all, hip-hop was born and bred in the inner city, where violence, poverty and misery created a tempestuous story line for many of its most successful artists. The closest thing to violence in Northbrook usually happened on the straightaway from that infamous scene in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” when Matthew Broderick, pretending to be his girlfriend Sloane’s dad, picks her up in his friend Cameron’s dad’s car. At GBN, as the natives call it, all the light poles are on the right side of the street except one. As the straightaway turns into a curve, though, there’s one pole on the left. Those slick Blazers and Celicas that got going too fast on the straightaway used to crash into the pole as they cruised around the curve, back when it was on the right side of the street. If things really got crazy in Northbrook, teenagers might find a fake ID, get some beer, and head to Gilson Beach to cause havoc. Not exactly thug life. In Northbrook, there aren’t many drive-bys—only drive-thrus. Coval says he was first inspired by hip-hop in the early 1980s. I like to think there was some inspiration from the Business Administration class we all had to take to graduate from GBN. After all, that’s where we learned the value of cornering a niche. Being a white Jewish kid from the uber-wealthy North Shore of Chicago obsessed with hip-hop is a niche of one.

Another John Hughes film, “The Breakfast Club,” is based on Hughes’ own experience of GBN and while everyone likes to make comparisons between their own high-school personas and the characters of the film, the analogies hit closer to home for us. Kevin Coval was akin to Emilio Estevez’ character, Andrew Clark, the popular jock. I was more like Anthony Michael Hall’s painfully nerdy character, Brian Johnson. That might be too kind. The losers would let me hang out with them, but I wasn’t technically even part of that clique. More than anything then I wanted to be popular, just like Andrew Clark, just like Kevin Coval.

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“Every man had his own quirks and twists.”
–Harriet Beecher Stowe

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After all, Coval was part of a crew that included the biggest big man on campus: Chris Collins (GBN ’92). Collins was GBN’s star basketball player and he had the qualifications to back up that honor off the court, too: his father, Doug Collins, coached the Bulls back then (now he coaches the 76ers). Coval was popular: He played basketball with Collins, coming off the bench when GBN made the sweet sixteen in 1992, and he also came off the bench the next year on the elite eight team that went downstate. He was a part of the singing and dancing troupe Boys of Spartan Spirit (described as “Senior Studs” in our yearbook), and he was a Vice President on the Student Association Board his senior year. He was also a peer group leader his senior year, giving him the trifecta of coolness along with BOSS and the SA Board. Outwardly, Kevin Coval had it all in high school.

An outcast, I dreamed of being a popular athlete like Coval, enjoying the perks of popularity. I was astonished when Coval told me recently, “I was living a double life.” I never knew that underneath the jersey, Coval faced feelings of alienation and isolation.

Coval struggled to understand how he fit in, at GBN, in Northbrook, and in the world. “I believed we were working-class,” he says. That’s an ironic statement, starting with the reality that Northbrook doesn’t really have a working-class population. According to the last census, the median income was just below $100,000, and the average home value was just below $400,000. Second, Coval’s dad, Danny Coval, was one of the original investors and partners in Lettuce Entertain You, Chicago’s now-legendary restaurant conglomerate. Danny Coval says he left the business when it was only eight restaurants—now there are sixty-four—largely because “the culture was growing too corporate.” If he hadn’t gotten out, the older Coval estimates his share would now be worth north of $20 million. Kevin says, “I’d see all this wealth and wonder why they had so much and others didn’t.” In his piece “White,” Kevin writes,

Continue reading: The Bomb Dropper: Kevin Coval’s unlikely journey from popular suburban jock to iconoclastic def poet.

Well worth the click to read the rest of this piece, which uses the story of Kevin Coval as a backdrop for explorations in Chicago lore, politics, basketball, rap and open mic nights.

Plus, it’s a break from the never-ending 24/7 cycle of recrimination that has become the world of American politics. Not that that’s a bad thing.

But, everyone needs a break.

by Mondo Frazier
image: Photo: Colleeen Durkin/colleendurkin.com
Excerpted from The Bomb Dropper: Kevin Coval’s unlikely journey from popular suburban jock to iconoclastic def poet by Michael Volpe.

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