Despite being born with severe hearing loss, Matt Maxey, who has used hearing aids since age 2, wasn’t introduced to American Sign Language (ASL) until his teens. Fittingly, given the Georgia native’s current work as an in-demand interpreter making hip-hop accessible for the deaf community, it was through music that he got hooked. Being asked to sign for his local church choir on Sundays as a high schooler “made it easier for me to understand how to apply the sign language they were teaching me because I didn’t have the opportunity to use it in conversation,” Maxey tells Yahoo Life, noting that he had little exposure to others with limited or no hearing growing up, relying instead on his hearing aids and speech therapy to help him communicate with the world at large.
Fast-forward to the present day, and Maxey’s mastery of ASL, and passion for music, specifically rap and hip-hop, have helped him carve out a powerful space in the deaf community. As the founder of DEAFinitely Dope, Maxey works to bridge the gap between deaf culture and hip-hop culture, a mission that includes creating videos in which signs along, in his trademark animated style, to tracks from the likes of Tupac and 2 Chainz, interpreting at events (including Chance the Rapper shows), hosting ASL lessons for the cannabis industry and consulting with businesses to boost accessibility. (He can also be booked through Airbnb for a lesson in serenading a sweetheart in ASL.)
“It’s a language,” he says of his efforts to “break barriers between music and sign language” with DEAFinitely Dope. “It’s accessible. It’s a possibility to make life better for the people that didn’t know it was possible. So many deaf people don’t go to music events because they already assume that it’s not made for them. But to show the videos, to show the culture, to show presentations, to show performances involving sign language and music, would help lessen that stigma so that it became more of a norm instead of … a novelty.”
Matt Maxey’s mastery of ASL and passion for music have helped him carve out a powerful space in the deaf community. (Photo: Matt Maxey)
Signing along to songs is a skill Maxey honed while attending Gallaudet University, the only college of its kind tailored for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. He admits that he lagged behind his peers there due to his limited experience with ASL; most were already fluent, while Maxey had previously prioritized speech therapy over signing. Struggling to learn and communicate with his classmates, he decided to “take all the music that I loved listening to and could actually understand, and try to apply as much ASL vocabulary as possible until I could apply it into society.”
He calls music his “primary language,” something he attributes to his close-knit family …….
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/matt-maxey-deafinitely-dope-asl-hip-hop-212125452.html