On May 8, a 19-year-old college freshman from Englewood named Trent Davis appeared on the WB game show Steve Harvey’s Big Time Challenge and rapped the first 600 syllables of the Declaration of Independence in less than 60 seconds. The competition for the show’s $10,000 prize was stiff: he had to beat out a six-member precision lawn-chair drill team, a man who climbed a 20-foot pole upside down, a dog that stacked Frisbees its owner had scattered around the stage, and a guy who snapped a bundle of pencils on his buttocks with an assist from his twisted-up boxer shorts.
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Billed as “Motor Mouth” by the show, Davis fired off the words so fast they might as well have been a stream of encrypted data. Harvey played to the studio audience, waggling his finger up and down across his lips in the international sign for “babbling crazy man.” But as soon as Davis finished, Harvey replayed the video of his rap in slow-motion with the text of the Declaration scrolling across the screen so everyone could see that he’d indeed been quoting the Founding Fathers.
Davis has also been trying to make a name for himself as Trent G, rapping at the East of the Ryan and at the Lick down in Harvey, among other places. He’s got a few demo tracks circulating and plans to put out a full-length album himself next month, though he hasn’t decided on a title yet. Back in early 2003 he enjoyed a few minutes of fame when Da Brat played the E2 nightclub: at the end of her show, when she asked if anybody in the crowd rapped, lots of people raised their hands, but Davis ended up onstage with her doing a bit of his own song “Any Style.”
Before his spot on Big Time Challenge, he’d tried to jump-start his hip-hop career using a couple local connections–he knew one of Louis Farrakhan’s bodyguards, who thought he could get Davis a gig at one of the minister’s public events, and he’d met a guy who’d been in a few R. Kelly videos. Neither man was able to help him, but since winning a $10,000 prize on national TV, Davis is feeling more optimistic.
