Harvey “Frzy” Daniels performs in front of a sea of lights from mobile phones during “A Concert for Unity: To Rebuild and Reopen Tree of Life Synagogue” at the Byham Theater on Dec. 2, 2018.
Story and photos by KRISTINA SERAFINI
February 18, 2020
Harvey “Frzy” Daniels did not plan to become a rapper.
Aruiana Coates reacts as she tries on Frzy’s chain as he shows Aruiana’s classmates Symaria Jetter and Mara Berry his Emmy during a Black History Month Speakers Program at Fulton Elementary in Highland Park on Feb. 21, 2019.
When he was a kid, he wasn’t even allowed to listen to rap music. Will Smith was the exception.
One day in 2003, during his senior year at the since-shuttered Career Connections Charter High School in Lawrenceville, he was unknowingly roped into a national music contest sponsored by the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
“My friends signed me up to be funny,” Frzy said of the contest.
He remembers the boys snickering — obviously very proud of their joke — as he took the stage in front of his peers and a panel of judges. Unprepared, he ended up rapping about what the judges were wearing.
And he won.
At that moment, he was all in.
“It was interesting because it came out of left field,” said his mother, Brenda Daniels. “I knew he liked music, but basketball was his life.”
Before that fateful day, Frzy would ride his bike through the streets of East Liberty, dreaming of one day making it to the NBA. He excelled in basketball and was offered a college scholarship, his mother said.
He got his talent and love of the game from his father, Harvey Kenneth Daniels, a standout at Kent State who went on to play semi-pro ball. But that’s where the similarities end. The younger Harvey was determined not to be like his dad, with whom he had a rocky relationship for most of his life due to his father’s history of substance abuse. Frzy, now 34, doesn’t touch alcohol or drugs of any kind.
Though Harvey is now clean, the relationship between father and son remains strained. Frzy still recalls, in vivid detail, some of the fights between his parents from the time he was just 3 or 4 years old, even before his sister, Jasmine, was born. He said he’s held on to the memories to know what not to do.
“I feel like at that point I was training my brain to have (an) ultimate memory,” he said.
Frzy said his ability to retain information and use it to effortlessly stitch together rhymes on the spot has helped him stand out in his career.
“I’m an information junkie, so anything I’ve experienced in my world, I absorb, I keep, I hold and I reuse,” he said. “Kind of like mental recycling.
“Before my name was Frzy, it was Freestyle because that’s just what I did, that’s all I really knew how to do. That’s how I found out I could rap in the first place.”
Frzy winces as Jen Matthews, a registered nurse at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, hooks him up to an IV to receive a steroid treatment for thyroid eye disease on July 22, 2019.
Instead of going to college, Frzy opted to jump-start his rap career. He competed in local rap battles on WAMO and won so often that they ended up retiring him from the weekly call-in contest. He signed with a management team and would go on to perform alongside notable acts as Machine Gun Kelly, Kid Ink, Nelly, Rick Ross, Lil Wayne and Naughty By Nature. He even had a stint as the spokesperson in a national campaign for the Subway Melt sandwich.
But the past year and a half has been the best of his career, beginning in October 2018 with a regional Emmy Award. He was recognized for his collaboration with WQED on his hip-hop version of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” for the 50th anniversary of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
“It’s cool to have something that rappers or musicians really aren’t supposed to win,” he said. “It’s a TV award.”
Since the Emmy win, the opportunities haven’t stopped rolling in.
Frzy was chosen as one of the faces of fashion accessory company Steve Madden’s “Self-Made” Campaign with his own billboard in Times Square. He was featured on Sirius XM, invited to the MTV studios for “Total Request Live,” has spoken at Harvard and the Berklee College of Music, and is a celebrity ambassador for WhyHunger.
He’s kept busy locally, too. He helped sell out the Byham Theater with a concert in December 2018 benefitting the Tree of Life Synagogue, performed in the last two WPXI Holiday Parades, threw out the first pitch at a Pittsburgh Pirates game last spring, participated in two fashion shows in the fall and wrote the song “Gold In It” for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
On Jan. 11, 2019, he was honored with his own day in Allegheny County.
“This is the place where I grew up. That, to me, is insane, to get 24 hours dedicated to you,” Frzy said. He and his girlfriend Sé Marie, an actress, now split their time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Frzy took aim at a world record rapping for 31 hours. For some perspective here’s a look at how long 31 hours is.
He plans on reserving that day each year to do something special. This year, he unofficially broke the Guinness World Record with a 31-hour freestyle rap marathon, performing the weekend of Jan 11-12 at The Block Northway mall in Ross. The previous record for “Longest Rap Marathon (Individual)” was 25 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. (The Guinness organization takes up to 12 weeks to review evidence of the feat before officially naming him the record-holder.)
Frzy said he’s not afraid of failing because he knows how good he already is. His goal is fearless: to be the best rapper of all time. But he’s savoring every moment on his climb to the top.
“You have to fall in love with the journey. If you’ve got a good pace going, then you should be confident that nothing’s going to stop your pace. You’re going to get there when you’re supposed to get there,” he said. “Trusting in yourself and trusting in your talent and wanting to be great — there’s no Plan B.”
Brenda said she always knew her son was meant for greatness.
“He’s shooting for the stars and he’s almost there,” she said. “They don’t even know what’s coming.”