Brian Wharton needs to make $30 today–every day, in fact. That’s what he pays for his room at the Lakeview motel he calls home. Wharton is better known around town by the variety of names he uses as a rap artist–most often Sharkula, Thigahmahjiggee, or Thig–but better still as that guy on the el platform who sells homemade tapes and CD-Rs out of his backpack.
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The 30-year-old Wharton spent his first few years on the south side, but his family headed for the safer streets and better schools of Homewood when he was five. In his early teens he was an avid skateboarder, hanging with a bunch of white kids and listening to bands like the Dead Milkmen, the Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag. But Wharton’s older brother Rob was playing hip-hop and house records, and soon Wharton was hooked: “I got into [break dancing] and graffitiing and DJing around then. I was into Kurtis Blow, Jimmy Spicer, Doug E. Fresh, Busy Bee–all that stuff.”
Upon graduating from high school in 1992 Wharton went off to Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he was a walk-on pitcher for the baseball team. But after taking a line drive in the face one day at practice, he decided his future lay in music: he quit the team and before long the college.
Wharton’s response to the disappointment was to create a new persona: “Sharkula came about ’cause I got sick of getting sharked like that, so I said, ‘I’m gonna shark you.’ It was a more aggressive personality.” Using that and a variety of other pseudonyms (Force Face, Cumberjack, Action Blackson) Wharton continued making his own mostly freestyle cassettes and selling them on the street. While some of the literally hundreds of recordings approximate conventional production techniques, many others are weird audio diaries, found-sound recordings that document Wharton walking around the city, riding the el, accosting strangers, and spouting–sometimes belching–his bizarre raps over the background noise in parking lots and record stores. “I just put it out all raw,” he says. “Some people may say, ‘This shit is crap!’ But others might say, ‘This shit is great!’ Or ‘It’s good crap,’ you know what I mean?”
“It’s a true story,” he says. “I know it’s not too glamorous. I’ll suffer some, and I gotta make sacrifices. But it allows me to live this lifestyle. I sleep four hours a night, but I can be out in the city all day and network with people and sell my music and perform. This is the only job I’ve ever had that I would consider doing for the rest of my life.”
