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Life`s Work
Kem has carved a niche for himself in the music world. His jazz-influenced contemporary R&B vocal styles are claiming a loyal following in an African-American musical environment dominated by hip-hop sounds. When he signed to the venerable Motown music label and his debut release, Kemistry, climbed to the top reaches of industry urban-music sales charts, these events marked the beginning of a new chapter in Kem`s life. His career accomplishments were personal milestones as well, for they came at the end of a series of trials that extended down to the depths of homelessness. With a five-album deal inked at Motown, Kem stood ready to make music that fit neatly into a set of retro trends that had appeared in African-American music, and at the same time was rooted in his own experiences.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Kem has refused to discuss his age, and his characteristic shaven-headed appearance makes it difficult for observers even to feel confident that a guess is reasonably accurate. But he told the New York Amsterdam News that "I grew up in the late `70s, early `80s, when most of the radio stations were Top 40." He said in 2002 that he had been sober for 12 years, and the period of his life that he lost to drug and alcohol abuse took place during his late teens and early 20s. Kem was probably born, therefore, in the late 1960s. His birth name was Kim Owens; the "Kem" spelling was a mistake on an associate`s part that the singer adopted because he thought it sounded distinctive and marketable.
Kem`s family moved from Tennessee to the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, when he was young. When he was four, he began to explore the keyboard. "My grandparents had a piano in their house and my earliest memory of playing was on that piano," he told Jet. "There`s something about a piano that turns me on." He made little headway at first. A babysitter taught him to play the harmonically ambitious "Color My World," by the pop group Chicago. "I played that song for about three years straight," Kem told Cleveland`s Scene Entertainment Weekly. "But what that did was it gave me an idea of what chords were all about."
Also influenced by R&B giants of the day like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and by jazz-popsters Steely Dan and Grover Washington Jr., Kem became fascinated by music in high school. He sang in the choir, kept up with releases by Michael Jackson, Prince, and jazz-pop phenomenon Al Jarreau, and gravitated toward musically talented classmates like keyboardist Brian O`Neal. The two spent their lunch hours in the school`s band room. "Kem would come in and just watch me, and I started teaching him a couple of things," O`Neal recalled to Ebony. (Other than that, however, Kem was essentially self-taught.) The two dreamed of a musical career. "But after high school, he went in one direction and I went the other," O`Neal said.
Kem couldn`t attribute his later problems to the surroundings in which he grew up; he remembered his childhood as a happy one, and he was raised, he told Ebony, in a "professional, middle-class family." Underneath, however, his feelings told a different story. "I left my parents` home when I was 19," he told the magazine. "And I left as a teenager who was lost, depressed, insecure, full of fear and trying to mask all of that with alcohol and drugs." His descent into homelessness was gradual; at first he limped along by staying with friends, and then, when he had to take
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