Vice interviews Denver's Wheelchair Sports Camp

 Vice recently published a Q&A with Wheelchair Sports Camp's Kalyn Heffernan about songwriting, weed and Kanye West.

Excerpt: 

Kalyn Heffernan is 42 inches tall, has been diagnosed with a brittle bone disease, is confined to a wheelchair, smokes lots of weed, and won't hesitate to publicly shame anyone who gets on her bad side with a brutal rap track. Kalyn is the emcee and driving force of Denver’s Wheelchair Sports Camp, a hip-hop group that mixes classic beats with jazz and avant-garde sound experiments. The group formed while Kalyn was in college, with just her rapping and a DJ supplying the beats, but has evolved into a shifting lineup that sometimes features drums, a saxophone, and even a sitar.

Her music deals with social inequalities relating to handicap people, as well as getting blazed as fuck and how much cops suck. On her song, "This Bitch…" Kalyn attacks problems with healthcare, and on "Party Song" she taunts, "rock, let the midget hit it/cops on my jock, make 'em, cough/cus I'm sicker with it." More recently, she's started to make beats for rapping Haitians who were displaced by the 2010 earthquake, and called out Goodwill for paying handicap people less than minimum wage.

Read the rest here.
Enjoy this story? Sign up for free solutions-based reporting in your inbox each week.

Read more articles by Eric Peterson.

Eric is a Denver-based tech writer and guidebook wiz. Contact him here.
Signup for Email Alerts