When I’m just sitting still in my home or in my car,
or even at a venue, even at an event, I can hear the music just fine
But once I start moving and there’s
all this motion and my equilibrium is changed,
my perception of sound changes with that,
and suddenly it becomes muffled.
And other times it sounds like complete silence.
Hi, my name is Jacob Lyons. I'm also known as Kujo, or Krazy Kujo,
in the b-boy world and on social media.
I was born completely deaf in my right ear with sensorineural hearing loss, so the auditory nerve is dead.
From a young age, I began to have ear infections and then a couple of accidents here and there
which caused me to gradually lose hearing in my left ear.
People thought I was an idiot, because with hearing loss comes speech impediments, and I had multiple
one of which was a stutter, another which was just not being able to pronounce certain sounds very well.
Kids are very quick to humiliate
anyone that they can, really,
especially when there’s a group of them and they’re all on the same page and you’re alone.
It’s really easy to get bullied,
so that happened to me a lot as a kid.
I started dancing at the age of 15, which is now 25 years ago.
And I went to this school wearing my get-up
and noticed across the way,
a bunch of other kids wearing pretty much the exact same clothes
and they noticed me
and I just sort of assumed that I was in trouble, I was about to get jumped.
Instead of hitting me up and asking me where I was from, they asked me if I danced.
And that was a big surprise and I said I don’t, but I would like to learn.
Getting into dance gave me a much more constructive outlet for that energy, for that rage.
So I could just put
what I wanted to express into movement, you know,
and that was really invigorating and
quite literally a lifesaver.
So for breaking, it’s literally life itself.
You’re surrounded by your peers, by your community.
So it’s got that ancient earthy rooted sense of
just being in harmony with everyone around you,
with the earth, with the universe and all of that at once.
When I go into something like
contemporary or modern dance,
then I feel like that echoes the sense of silence and freedom
and existentialism and nihilism that I’ve come to embrace in my own inner world when I’m breaking.
The first problem that I ran into when I started to learn to dance in high school was
that I just couldn’t hear the music, in the same way that everyone else did.
So...
I was accused of not being able to dance.
I had not publicly spoken about my deafness amongst the community, even here in LA,
so a lot of people that I'd known for years, even decades, did not know that I couldn’t hear
because I just didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to.
I would almost have rather them think that I’m kind of dumb or I'm kind of crazy
than to reveal that, "oh, I just can’t hear."
I invent my own context, I invent my own structure,
I invent my own beat.
To this day, I still don’t know if I’m going to be able to hear the music when it’s my turn to dance.
And I don’t know if I’m going to do anything on beat or if I’m gonna just get lost in my own world again
and fumble around and hope I do something cool,
or what. Yeah, neverending.
That process is so important to me too, because it’s an adventure every time.