Sharkula eats, breathes, and lives hip hop. And he’s been doing it in Chicago since 1992. He is to most people, "that guy who sells discs on the trains."

Sharkula is a street musician rapper, a sort of music vigilante. Despite his apparently marginal lifestyle, his music has connected with some hip hop fans and his most recent record, "Diagnosis of Sharkula," is well-produced and being carried by Reckless Records, among other places.

Dylan Posa, who works at the Reckless Records downtown store, said of "Diagnosis," this is “the most high quality stuff he's done."

"I Think I first met him in 1999," Posa said. "His tape had a baseball card in it and I thought that was cool…. It's different stuff, not just the notion of being different.”

Sharkula has places to stay, like a brother’s house at 298th Street or at his mom’s in Crete, but those places are never where he is when he is ready for sleep, which is usually in Wicker Park late at night after a full day of hawking his wares. So he sleeps on trains.

But he can do nothing but hip-hop. “It’s the only thing I know,” he said. It’s his blessing and curse. “I’m a hooker to hip-hop.”

Sharkula in black and white

The state knows Sharkula as Brian C. Wharton, born in 1973,  was raised in Homewood, Ill. He attended Smallville High School. He is 33. He looks younger though, 28, 25 in the poorly lit caverns where he frequents.

He takes drugs and drinks almost everyday. “Dog,” he said once, twisting his torso, raising his arms and breathing deep, “Does your liver ever hurt?”

Brian Wharton makes $15,000 a year — and consumes thousands more than that in stuff. (These are ballpark figures since there’s no real tabulation, but he has figured out how to live very efficiently, once you look at it in economic terms of opportunity cost, taking advantage of the marginal.)

He gets all his clothing for deals, $10 Pumas, free t-shirts -- cool stuff though. He often gets into clubs and bars for free because he is known.

His life is boom and bust. Once he made about $90 in 20 minutes of selling discs. But he said, “Holy shit! I got, like, a hundred bucks, that’s a lot of ****ing money!”

He says he attended Louisiana’s Southern University at 17, “It was easy, they let everyone in.” He said he walked on to play baseball, but took a line drive to the face and quit. After reading this story online, he said he made up the tale about being hit in the face and simply quit. His stories, like his identity, have a way of shifting. At www.sharkula.info, his Web site, it says he played “basedball.”

Throughout the years he has gone to school in a buffet style, attending Columbia College, Prairie State, Western Illinois, he said.

His mother, father, brother, and minor arrest record of misdemeanors, such as vagrancy are all constantly in his life.

He often stays with members of his family, who all live in separate homes. He stays in the city sometimes for weeks at a time, sleeping on trains or staying in bargain hotels for roughly $30 per night.

But ‘his place’ is in Crete, where his mother lives. He loves her very much, he says. Sometimes she chastises him about what he is doing, as does his brother. He likes to get to Crete once per week to rest. But he needs to be in the city, “‘Cause that’s where the money is,” he said.

In his room in his mother’s Crete home he has “a museum of hip-hop knick-knacks.” He probably has 90 percent of the series “YO! Mtv Raps” on VHS, recorded from live airings. You can mention the most obscure of hip-hop ephemera and he knows it.

Here is just a sampling of his alter egos: “Sharkula, Thigamajiggee [pronounced Thig-a-muh-jig-gee, and he oftens goes by just Thig], Spidermania, Dirty Gilligan, Force Face, Mr. Diffy, New Now, Quasee, Le Royal, Mr. Dearticks, Sherlock Homeboy 2028 -- I'm so many things man.”

 “He kind of has a split personality, not schizophrenia or anything, but you never know which guy you’ve got," said Brendan Kredell, a Northwestern University film student, who's documented Sharkula.

It couldn’t be verified, but he said he “spent a few days at a place once. Not anything major, no rubber rooms or anything, but I went. It was cool.”

Sharkula works

He records where he can. Mostly he rhymes and records on the street, burns it at a friend's house and sells it for the highest price he can get. $10 is the goal.

Sometimes he talks to 300 people in a day. He makes friends not to be friendly — even though he is — but to live, and sells tapes and CDs out of his bulging backpack like a one man tent city.

“Sometimes carrying this pack is hard on my back,” Sharkula said, “And I always have to watch my back.”

There are recordings of him rhyming over train whistles and kitchen cleanings. “He knows when a song is dope,” said Roburt Reynolds (Wrap), Sharkula’s friend and de facto album producer. “He won’t flow over a [lame] beat, but he’ll rhyme over an engine. People call him a savant, but he’s more than that — he’s a channel for the ever-changing.”

And he has a bit of a following. He has been the subject of no fewer than three documentaries. The most recent, made by Kredell,  is a 10-minute vignette included in "Chicago 360 v.2," which documents the culture of Chicago. 

“When we first met him, we took him out to dinner. He cried. My roommate couldn’t handle it,” Kredell said.

While shooting the documentary, Kredell saw how Sharkula has been exploited. “We met some guys who’d done videos of him… Sharkula seems vulnerable to exploitation. You get a lot of young white college kids who get him drunk and laugh at him. Some think he’s legit. Some just exploit him.”

But Kredell seems to be sold on his unique style, “I think of him as a musical Jean Michel Basquiat.”

Is it working?

Some people have compared Sharkula to Wesley Willis, another wandering street musician from Chicago who died a few years back.

Reynolds and Posa said these comparisons are made by “people who don’t know.” Posa elaborated, “They see a black guy on the street making music and they think it’s the same thing.”

Plus, Sharkula has gone where Willis did not, by releasing a feature album.

The other difference between Sharkula and Willis, “[Sharkula’s] stuff is good,” said Posa. “He transcends the gimmick of a homeless rap artist. He’s coming at it from a careerist standpoint.”

Reynolds produced "Diagnosis." He also assisted on “Martin Luther King Jr. Whopper With Cheese.” In 1999 he met Sharkula, like most people, through buying a tape.

Reynolds has probably spent the most time with Sharkula over the past year, but “There’s a lot about that guy I don’t know.” As far as where he thinks Sharkula is headed, “He has no goal in mind, just a journey.”

Reynolds can only sum it up to say that Sharkula “is hip-hop, as hip-hop as it gets.”

That doesn’t mean working with him is easy. “Nothing is the same twice, even his written stuff he changes. I’ve never seen anyone work like that. But that’s how people really are. There’s a certain genius to all of it — it’s good to get a million different takes because he’s a million different people, he’s a rolling yin-yang down the street. Even if I’m only with him I might be hanging out with 10 people.

The album has received an initial good response at local record stores like Dr. Wax and Reckless Records.

"Diagnosis" is the most important thing Sharkula has ever done with his life. He dotes over it. It took 18 months to complete compared to most Sharkula discs that are recorded in one take, burned and sold hand-to-hand. That can be successful though. He put out “Martin Luther King Jr. Whopper With Cheese” and it was voted by readers of The Chicago Reader as one of the 20 best albums of ’04.

But right now, it seems to be happening for Sharkula, people that know him are glad because he has been going through the turn-style for so long.

“[Sharkula] is a great guy,” said Posa, “That’s the thing that sold me on it, him. He’s so undaunted and upbeat.”