Published: January 26, 2007 08:57 pm      

PROFILE: Falls female rapper looking to beat the odds

When you open up a concert for 50 Cent, you’d better have your eyes open, wide open.

Deana Barlow, better known to most folks as Wenzday Atemz, learned that fact fast in 2003 when she hit the stage at the Buffalo Convention Center in advance the original gangsta himself.

“It was the scariest thing ever,” Barlow said. “When I first started (performing as a rap artist), I never opened my eyes. I couldn’t. But I did then and it was all there in front of me, 15,000 people. The feeling was amazing.”

If you think the route from Chilton Avenue in the Falls to sharing a stage with 50 Cent might be a strange one, you’d be right. Yet for Barlow, it all seems perfectly natural.

“I always used to rhyme, I’ve been doing it since I was young,” she said. “I always envisioned being on stage, it’s very natural.”

Still, the specter of a 29-year-old white female rapper is a little an unusual to most folks. Yet it doesn’t deter Barlow, a graduate of the old LaSalle High School, who still lives on Chilton Avenue, right near her mom.

“I moved across the street from my mom so I could bug her for a home-cooked meal,” Barlow laughed.

She says her mother always thought she had the potential to be someone special in the arts. Especially after her third-grade teacher told Barlow’s mom to keep all the journals and stories she wrote.

“(The teacher) told my mom to save all that stuff because I was going to be a famous writer some day,” Barlow said, with a smile. “I wrote a lot when I was younger. I kept journals. All my songs are about real life, my life, they’re very personal.”

She went to college near Albany, but the school didn’t seem ready to welcome someone with a ear for rap and hip hop.

“It just wasn’t where I was at with the hip hop,” she said. “It wasn’t what I thought it would be. My music lives in me and they were trying to tell me what I knew.”

When she came back to the Falls, she enrolled at Niagara County Community College and was accepted into music classes even though she had no formal training.

“My professor at NCCC let me into the program because she thought I knew music after hearing my demo (tape),” Barlow said. “But I didn’t know what all those note things were on the paper.”

From there she began working in the studio, recording original songs and collaborating on songs with other artists. When local hip hop station WBLK played a few of her songs, some people there encouraged her to enter a competition to open the 50 Cent concert.

She beat out 250 other competitors and hit the big stage. Then she opened another concert for Ice-T.

“Right then I knew I wanted to be that performer where someone was opening up for me,” Barlow said.

She took the bold move of competing in the Rap Olympics, a nationwide “freestyle rap” event covered by MTV, that discovered Eminem. She finished in eighth place, remarkably high considering she is white and female.

“Yeah,” Barlow says, not dodging the racial and gender obstacles she faces to realize her dream. “It’s tough being a white female (and being accepted). They didn’t expect me to say and sound like I did. There isn’t a white rapper yet who’s really locked into a deal,”

Her stage name comes from the Addams Family character Wednesday Addams. The variation on the spelling, Atemz, represents her drive to always move forward with her music.

“I’m up and at ’em,” she said. “It’s also about if (the cartoon character) grew up in the hood, this is how’d she end up.”

Barlow’s character and career have received another boost recently. Working as a waitress at the Hard Rock Cafe in the Falls to help pay her bills, Barlow has had a company commissioned commemorative pins created in honor of Wenzday Atemz.

“I felt very honored,” Barlow said. “(The Hard Rock) is a huge company.”

Not to mention one with deep roots in the music business. As part of the company’s upcoming Breast Cancer Awareness promotion in October, the Hard Rock here will hold a concert event where Barlow will be one of the performers.

“She will be a part of that program, which is still being planned,” Said Kim Williams, sales and marketing manager for the Hard Rock. “(Barlow) keeps the music alive both in the front and back of the (cafe). We back her and hope she makes it all the way.”

Williams said Hard Rock’s decision to create Barlow’s limited edition pin, there are only 300 of them, which feature the character of her alter ego, is not an everyday occurrence.

“It’s a really big honor,” Williams said. “It’s really cool to have her image on the pin. To have one made with the likeness of an employee is very rare.”

Then again, Barlow is starting to make a habit out of doing rare things, like being a white female rapper.

“I was discouraged for awhile, but the inspiration to push ahead came from my grandmother, Carolyn Smeal, who just passed away before Christmas,” Barlow said. “I wanted to show her I could do it, I need to prove it to her up there, so I won’t quit.”

Barlow also pushes ahead in the memory of her brother Ronnie, who died at the age of 8, when she herself was still a toddler.

“I feel him,” she said, “My parents told me while he was alive he would always hold me, he never put me down.”