Offwhyte

Offwhyte (born Ryan Fernandez on August 22, 1977 in Pell City, Alabama) is an American rapper. He has released several projects under the hip hop label Galapagos4, of which he is a founding member. He resides in Los Angeles, California although he launched his musical career within the underground hip hop scene of Chicago, IL. He is known also as Offwheezy.

Career

Offwhyte's most recent release is Mainstay, his third full-length album, a work filled with charismatic philosophies, potent verbal imagery, and a wide range of musical styles.

Offwhyte started performing in the late 1990s, spitting raps at hip hop parties and open mic poetry nights. He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago with his long-time friend Jeff Kuglich. There they met a graffiti writer and painter, JASH of Chicago’s legendary DC5 crew. The three developed a friendship that would become the foundation of Galapagos4 records.

Squints by Offwhyte was released in February 2000. It was the second CD on the fledgling Galapagos4 label. Urb Magazine hailed it as "ingenius" and the Village Voice described it as “free-floating intelligence”. Hip hop heads took quick notice to Offwheezy’s lyrical dexterity and untamed production skills. The classic CD has been repressed several times and is considered to be the album that broke the monotony of Chicago "battle rap" that was prominent in the scene at that time.

His second album, The Fifth Sun, was released in November 2002. The album was licensed for foreign distriubtion by British electronica label Peacefrog, and Galapagos4 followed its release with their first European tour. The Fifth Sun gained airplay on BBC Radio 1 and on many other radio stations across Europe. Offwhyte has since embarked on several European tours and lived in Zurich, Switzerland briefly in 2004 to record the Crossing the Potomac EP with DJ Reezm and Justin Sayne.

Ethnicity

A Filipino-American born in Pell City, Alabama, Offwhyte's birth certificate was marked "white". This is because in Alabama in the 1970s there were only two classifications of race on a birth certificate: white and black. Offwhyte has not yet sought to get this formality corrected.

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