Cover Story: Kelela

Story: Lawrence Burney

Photography: Myles Loftin

Design: Iris Lee

Just over a calendar year ago, Kelela made the return her fans had been praying, pleading, and tweeting for with her second studio album, Raven. It was her first full-length offering since 2017’s Take Me Apart, an album that showed her enduring the uncomfortable process of dissecting personal relationships, primarily ones that were long past their brighter days. That project helped emphasize what’s made Kelela so successful in forging her own path for more than a decade, which is that her music has true dual-effectiveness. Yes, the lyrics tell deeply resonant stories about vibing with a stranger at the function and creating a fantasy in your head of what life could be with them as a companion. Or they may be about trying to hold onto a love that’s begging to be set free. But you could very well bypass all of that and just enjoy the heart-pounding production she engages with to tell those stories, which has always called back to the foundations of Black electronic music from different pockets of the world, thus thrusting Kelela’s sound into a borderless future that is constantly playing with multiples styles at once. 

Raven built on that legacy, but it also achieved a pace that the Maryland-raised singer hadn’t yet executed up to that point. Where her Cut 4 Me mixtape and Take Me Apart felt like different moments of one long, bass-thumping night in the club, Raven has periods of stillness that happen leading up to — and after — the sweaty gyrating and two-stepping. It’s bookended by angelic incantations in “Washed Away” and “Far Away,” songs that give the floor to Kelela’s falsetto entirely, without the presence of drums. Instead, what lies underneath her admissions of feeling thrown off her axis — and the clarity that comes from new alignment — are meditative ambient soundscapes that accentuate her (and our) need for healing coming out of a global pandemic that ran parallel with intense racial unrest in the U.S. in 2020. 

By adding those tranquil elements (there’s also “Holier” at Raven’s midway point), Kelela reminded us of how restorative nightlife spaces can and should be. It’s the pauses from the turn up that actually make the turn up more valuable here. At the end of the day, clubs do exist to entertain, but for a lot of people who traverse these underground sanctuaries, they’re also a site of refuge. Very few things rival getting over a shitty or emotionally-disorienting day/week/month with a strong drink, your favorite people, and the ability to hear the music you most adore blared at volumes that aren’t achievable in any other space. So, with this framing, we’re able to see the value Kelela puts into herself not only being an architect in the Black alternative world, but also an active participant who depends on it for survival. I think, more than anything, that’s what Raven makes clear and it’s a joy to view it through that lens. 

The album’s interior still feeds the appetite for her forward-thinking approach to dance music. “Contact,” my personal favorite, is, in terms of production, somewhere between DNB and early-generation Baltimore Club. Crafted by Philly-to-Berlin producer LSDXOXO and frequent collaborator Asma (of NGUZUNGUZU), it chronicles a night on the town: hitting Los Angeles’ Interstate 405, bouncing from function to function, smoking spliffs, and getting swallowed up by the beat vibrating through a party. “Closure” sees her wanting one more night with someone who’s a good time but non committal. She’s joined there by Jersey rapper RAHRAH GABOR who shines in her cameo with hilarious references to the Chappelle’s Show Clayton Bigsby character. Intergalactic synths, bells and crashes lay under a plea for another chance on “Enough For Love.”

In early February of this year, Kelela returned with what’s become a tradition in her career: a remix version of Raven that recontextualizes the album by calling in producers and artists who also populate the Black underground ecosystem. On it, “Washed Away” goes from a calming ambient tune to a thumping beat made by Atlanta’s Ethereal with vocal contributions from Dallas singer Liv.e. Similarly, “Holier” gets a jolt of energy thanks to JD. REID transforming the song into something I’d like to hear a UK Drill rapper hop on while Shygirl offers some raps and melodies. This type of reconfiguration emphasizes Kelela’s gift for world-building and it also magnifies her commitment to paying it forward to artists in her orbit that aren’t often given the opportunity to shine outside of their respective corners. 

In a series of conversations since the original Raven dropped last year, I spoke to Kelela about how her DMV upbringing influenced her musical identity, taking on a leadership role in the scene, how, in her absence, she was affirmed by her fans, and how the commitment to transformation is paramount to her survival as an artist. 

I would like to go into your musical origins. I’m familiar with your jazz foundations and kind of your broader influences, but I’m really interested in your regional influences coming up. Because club music is obviously a strong foundation of your sound and Black punk culture was really pioneered in the DC area. As well as go-go. And I think all of those have shown up in your music throughout the years. 

I love that question because I’ve never gotten a chance to really talk about that. It’s more nuanced than the broad strokes that I usually give because people ain’t tryna hear all that. There's so much there. My friend Asma and I, our musical partnership is so rich because we kind of grew up in this similar regional context and there's so much overlap in the subcultures that we passed through. Like the culture of tape dubbing and having go-go tapes. Your popularity was directly correlated to which go-go tapes you had access to. And then at the same time, both of us have gotten into some shit that has nothing to do with our sort of locale. It’s a wide range of some shit that feels down home — from the culture that we come from — and then there's other things that feel pretty far away from that. But when you look closely it is still very related. 

My earliest memories — let’s talk about PGC 95.5. The Donnie Simpson morning show, in particular, would have a gospel moment to start your day right before some other shit. And then a go-go moment just kind casually creeping in. These things coexisted in a way and these days it's giving very separate. For me as a singer and just as a listener of music, I think it’s important to say that those things live inside me right next to each other. That’s before I was buying my own shit to listen to. Then I started switching to 92.3 when I could drive to get me right for the day with some Baltimore Club. When I think about what was going on, it's really such a beautiful thing to be in this conversation right now because it's bringing up the foundation of how I'm thinking about these things and how they don't feel disparate at all. It’s so obvious to me now, the fluidity. 

That's why I asked about those early foundational influences because I think what’s always pulled me into your work is how it's a natural musicality. It doesn't feel like, okay, my theme for this is this. These things  just bleed into each other because they are of you.

Yeah I’m not trying something on. You know what I'm saying? Club music is not new for me. When I go to approach it, the shit feels very natural and I'm not thinking hard about what to do. I'm like, yes, I know exactly where to go. And it feels very easy. 

Even drum and bass, they’re all branches of the same tree. 

All of that. It’s a language that I'm speaking and I don't know how I learned it. It's really cool to say that out loud now because I know that all those things were coexisting very easily and very naturally. I guess I just grew up in a time when that was very much a thing and it’s not a thing now. I think the other part is that there's different periods of time when white people decide to “legitimize” a certain subgenre of Black music and that's just a never-ending thing that keeps evolving and keeps going. And that’s what makes that subgenre rise to the top. That erasure of the past that happens when white people find something is another part of this that I think is going on in the background. That's what creates those divides. And part of the point of the record is to make those subgenres feel very much adjacent to one another. And to say that this was started by niggas.

That's one of the things I really enjoy about Raven. And it's not that this is like a new thing for your music, but I always appreciate how you give a particular type of space to the production. Sometimes when I listen to your music, I'm zeroed in on the lyrics. At other times I'm lost in the production. They support each other equally, but it just depends on whatever space you’re in. For instance, in the morning, if I smoke a jay and take a shower I'm probably gonna be focused on the lyrics. But if I'm out at a function and I got a couple drinks in me, I focus on the production.

That's the best feedback because I know that's how I'm listening to music. What I want is a layered piece of art, depending on the context, but also depending on where I'm at. You know, sometimes it's like I wasn't in that place all the way and sometimes I really was in that place. You might listen to a song and go, whoa, I never heard that lyric. Or it’ll hit in a different type of way. So for me that speaks to the richness. I am putting so much intention into the lyrics so that it's a standalone thing. Like, you could read them.

Photography: Myles Loftin

For some reason I've never seen you really speak about the Aquaphoria mix. Maybe you have. 

I bring it up but people don't ask me so much about it. I bring it up because I was just doing what felt natural, but it kind of was a preface, in a way that I didn't realize, to this record.

That's why I asked, because it feels very aligned with Raven. Ambient music already can take you to a special place and then your melodies in the background are an added layer.

My goal was, I wanna give niggas a soundtrack for that moment and it traverses a lot of weird shit. It’s experimental as we’ve always been. Me and Asma did not know what we were doing but I felt like Warp wanted me to do a more hype beat-centric mix, I was very much not in that zone at all. I was listening to ambient music and I didn’t know what to make of that. So I told Asma let’s just go with it and make an ambient R&B mix. So we went into the studio one day and we just randomly searched — it’s giving Google — this was not methodical. But we found so many beautiful things and it was very fruitful.

Have you had any meaningful meditations on the fact that you’ve been doing this for just over a decade now? 

It makes me think about staying true. I've started from a very vulnerable place. I've just never let that go. it's giving heart on the sleeve, it's giving, tenderness. Intimacy. Those things are just pillars, I think. And I feel really proud that that's a thread and something that I've started with. I've never turned. I could say anything through that lens. I know what I'm giving — in anybody's collection. And I think what feels powerful about it for me is that it also speaks to who my fans might be, what their perspective might be. What their value system even is. I think my fans, when they see each other they’re like, Oh, you love Kelela too? Ok! I fuck with you. I don't know you, but I feel connected to you. I feel so proud and happy that that is my legacy. That's what I've always wanted and it feels like it's a real thing. You know, I'm thinking about doing missed connections at the shows. I feel like the connection rate would be very high. Just because of why you might like this type of music, you know? I know that these are the things that people are craving right now. I think that we want a soundtrack for those types of feelings and I feel very happy to be bringing that. 

I think that connection is evident. Because I feel like even when people were at their most demanding of you to put music out, it never was like she fell off or I don't know what's going on. I mean, it might have been like, I don't know what's going on with her, but I hope that she's coming back soon. 

We exist right now in a culture of entitlement when it comes to the consumers. It used to not be like that. It used to be like, whoever's putting music out right now is who I'm consuming. Like, thank you, it's great. And then whenever somebody comes back, we'd be like, oh, cool, amazing. It wasn't giving like, WE WANT THE MUSIC, WHERE’S THE DAMN MUSIC. It was not all the way that, you know? And I feel like that context, it just makes it so that people are feeling very entitled to your output all the time. And we're encouraged to just be continuously producing. Never not. I feel like, my fans, it was giving: whatever Kelela is doing right now, I know whatever the fuck it is she's supposed to be doing, she’s making the thing that I know I'm craving. So let’s run up Take Me Apart and these little mixes. People would be saying it in the most considerate and holistic way. 

You know how rare that is? It says so much. I would be marveling while reading. It was really touching for me. Cause I'm like, oh my God. Like, the fact that that is a value that we share, it makes me be like, wow, this is so powerful. I think a lot of my peers, they want to attract a certain type of audience and sometimes they’re mad about who they actually attract. That's a thing. It’s not until the pandemic when I felt like I was fully off the social media and not doing anything in the moment so people weren’t reacting to something. So whatever you say in this moment, it's just from your own volition. The music is sustainable. It’s gotta be because you just feel inspired to do that, you know? And when they would say shit, it would be like, just speaking to my real values , what I really care about. It would be really funny, but it also speaks to something vulnerable. I just felt really solidified and affirmed that like, yes, bitch, that's the type of impact that you are having. And that's how they're fucking with it. It’s not just hype. And for me there's nothing more that I would want as a foundation. Obviously I have ambitions to have more things and stuff, and hopefully provide a way for more people. That's ultimately what I would want to be able to do and get more resources to do it. But this is the most fulfilling and that's the thing that really matters. It’s this connectedness, this exchange that I'm in with my audience and how it helps us through.

Photography: Myles Loftin

Raven has been out for a year now. Any reflections?

It’s a great feeling just to get the music out and for me, the big feat of this past year and a half has been getting visuals out. I obviously had music videos before but I was able to express a range of feelings through the visual language that I wasn’t able to achieve on the first record. That’s a big part because there’s always been a whole world I’ve imagined up alongside the music. When I’m making music I’m in a movie. Just being an indie artist — I’m not saying we can’t bust through those feelings — but capitalism has a lot to do with the choices that we can even make. So that’s one thing I’m feeling so proud of. More than the music being popular or people fan-girling, I think the healing people have expressed and feeling supported is why I feel so fulfilled. That was definitely the point. I guess a lot of people use that rhetoric but for me it means a lot that people feel touched or safer or heard. Especially Black women and queer Black folk. I feel like I got my vision out. 

Now that you say it, I guess a lot of my favorite Black indie artists who build these alternative worlds that you get lost in sonically, there aren’t a lot of videos coming out of that group of artists. With Raven we got to see those songs. 

I’ve felt stunted by my circumstances, if I’m being completely honest. I wanted to do a video for every song on the record because it was bringing up so much imagery. I was like, we have to do this. I wasn’t able to do it for every song but between the original record and the five singles that we put out and being able to top it off with the remix vignettes, it really felt full circle. Sometimes our visions can’t come out the exact way we want them to and they take a different form. I’m glad I didn’t let it go. This partnership with Yasser Abubeker who’s been directing a lot of these visuals, we’ve had so much fun and there’s so much excitement. It’s grueling and a lot of work goes into it. I feel like his Janet, I don’t know how to explain it. We found each other and he feels so motivated. For me, I just wanted to do this with somebody for so long. I’m feeling so inspired by this period. There’s maybe three more vignettes that we haven’t released from the remix project. 

How’d you and Yesser link?

My friend Mischa throws a party called PDA in London and that’s a site of so much convergence for me with the brilliant Black creatives out there. I’ve met so many people through her and at this party and the social sphere that surrounds it. I met Yesser through that community. I feel very much tied to the community and then we make art. That’s why, for me, it feels so rich. Our intersection isn’t just on a job. And when people are in the same community, it doesn’t feel like a commission. We’re not making hella money, it’s not giving that. It’s giving, where are we gonna find the money to do this? We’re on a constant quest, making so many decks. I’m a deck queen. Decks on decks on decks…This weekend I’m literally tryna figure out how I’m gonna do this DIY video for a song that’s coming out next Wednesday. That’s where our minds are. We just don’t always have the budget. There’s all these tweets I see all the time, a couple people were saying you can tell Kelela don’t have the same budget as these major label girlies be having but she flips that shit. I was like, period. That’s exactly what’s going on. Everybody knows it. It also speaks to my fans being critical thinkers — queer Black people who be thinking about shit will read you down but, also, the joy is so ever-present. It’s in the forefront. That commentary has been ringing in my ears. I’m dealing with one constraint and it’s resources. It’s definitely not anything else. 

I love that the remix version of your albums is becoming a tradition. I’m curious about how you’re choosing your collaborators outside of the usual suspects. 

Some of them are people who exist within the sphere of community I’m in contact with and see regularly. And it’s a lot of people who I’ve never met before. They might just be from Soundcloud. Like Flexulant is somebody that Mischa told me I should hit up. The edits were next level and it was clear that they would go in. What I’m looking for in remixes is a real reinterpretation and recontextualization. Something that makes me like, Woah this feels like a flip. Flipping is a practice that comes from the jazz girl in me applied to the club girl in me. I’m using jazz as my map, it’s the foundation that was laid for me early. That’s how I’m approaching club music and that’s what I’m looking for from these producers. The criteria is: am I feeling like I’m reimagining this thing? And now is the message — sometimes people can do this by chopping vocals, they make a new sense of the same message which for me, that’s the next tier. It gets me very excited and makes me feel like a nerd about this. What I really wanna get into is, did you hear how they flipped the lyric through this vocal chop? And now it says this. A great example is on “Cherry Coffee” MikeQ did a remix on the Cut 4 Me remix project, there’s one line that I pass through on the second verse: “Pray to the Almighty / That you figure out.” And he took just that one line and added a “Ha!” and it takes it to this gospel place. 

Those two lines can start to mean something different when you hear them over and over. Like, I have to really take this in because this is all they’re giving me. That’s really the foundation of club music. 

For me, that’s that shit. I don’t have a hard criteria but these are big signifiers of what makes me wanna put something on the project. Another example is the “Fooley” remix. The sample, said what I said. “I wanna submerge.” That is exactly what I was tryna say. I maybe said four lines that entire song but the lyrics that are there make a really clear implied message. He takes that and it makes so emotional; I’m on the edge again about an old feeling but it’s been brought new. Then it makes me feel more connected to the artist and my community. I’m like, Oh my God, I’m in this divine conversation with my peers that the larger community can witness and participate in and find catharsis in. That back and forth as a personal, one-on-one thing is so valuable but then the meta part of that where everyone can feel implicated in that, that’s also me. It’s so powerful. I feel like I make original albums so I can remix them. 

Are you typically thinking of remixes even when you make the original albums? I ask because your writing makes it so the production can fit regardless.

I will say that I’m an artist with a pretty wide range of things I can do. I thought I was gonna be a jazz girl and I thought I was gonna be an indie girl. I could do many things and feel comfortable in those worlds but there is something about dance and club music that feels really expansive. Like, no one is gonna be like, why are you doing that? At least, not on the Black side. The white techno side is very mechanical. Like, why are you using that BPM? White culture guides what the vibe is. But when I think about how I can apply my range to a genre of music, it felt like dance music was the one I could start with and say so many things from that place that a lot of people would get. I think that’s because dance music feels so tied to ambient music. A lot of people who make club music already make ambient music. They have some other way they express themselves. And for me, because of that range, I can go into a rabbit hole of what is the original version. It helps me make decisions because I know this track will have many different lives. So tryna figure out what the direction of the sound is for a track, a lot of times, like on Take Me Apart I was working with songwriters and that’s the difference. Starting on a guitar or any cordal instrument is different from writing over a track that’s preexisting. I can expand the arrangement. So it’s like, is this a ballad? Should we double time it? We could do this on a harp. I have such a wide range of things I love so I can take too much time to decide. What the practice of remixing and editing saves me from is feeling like this is gonna be the version that I sing for the rest of my life like a lot of my peers. They’re not singing any other version live every time. There can be a beauty in that but that’s something I could never deal with.

We keep coming back to jazz. Do you see remixing as an extension of the jazz tradition?

This tradition to me is a very Black tradition, a Black American tradition of “I’m not tryna hear that shit twice” and improvisation being kind of inherent in what makes us think it’s good. So that’s a big part of what I love about these projects. You’re right, it is a staple and my legacy. I’m never gonna not make them. And I’m never gonna not approach music that way, in general. When I think about early Betty Carter vs older Betty Carter, I do want that kind of legacy where you’ve heard the same song — it is the same song — but technically these are not the same version. You’re gonna get a whole ‘nother thing from this. It’s so cathartic for me and fulfilling. So maybe I’m not writing to remix but I can make decisions quicker because I know that shit is gonna live many different lives. 

Hearing Liv.e on the remix project made me think about you being on pinkpantheress’ last album and you talking about how you didn’t have a lot of peers in your space when you came out. Now, I would be willing to bet, partially because of you, there are a lot of young artists that exist now who are similar. I love to see that you’re reaching out to the younger generation and saying, this should happen. I love seeing the generational throughlines and the branches of a tree. 

Maybe it’s like some corny elderly shit but I feel that way. I love the reach out and making you understand the connection over time. I’m reading this book — Blues People by Amiri Baraka — let me tell you something, it is tearing me out. And it’s making me feel very affirmed in my practice. The bridge-building and world-connecting that I’m doing. It’s something that I’ve thought about extensively when making music. I live on a faultline sonically and my approach, I’ve been deeply immersed in the jazz scene and those niggas listen to hip-hop and jazz. And then being in the white, indie punk space where they’re really immersed in that and not really anything else. They feel cut off from other things. Being in these worlds makes me want to make this point of finding the reason why I can hear when a Black person is making the music. What is that? It shows up in so many contexts. Like, where our traditions differ. So when the babies are coming up I want them to see that. There’s a level of isolation that I experience as a Black woman in dance music. It did not feel like I had a lot of peers who did similar things when I was starting off and that isolation, the remix project is a rebuttal to that. It’s my answer to that isolation. I’m drawing the lines very deliberately and saying to you, there is no disparity. These things are very much part of the same community. They’re different but look at how delicious they pair together. 

Revisiting 'Tha Bloc'

Words by Lawrence Burney

Photos courtesy of t.p. Luce’s archive

In 2004, one of the most important pieces of East Baltimore documentation was released when t.p. Luce’s Tha Bloc: Words, Photographs and Baltimore City in Black White and Gray was published. In it are beautifully-shot black and white photos (captured between 1995 and 2003) of people living their everyday lives: getting ready for church, loving on each other, shooting dice on the porch, playing video games with extension cords coming from inside the house. There’s poetry inspired by the people you see. But really, the poetry goes beyond the specific faces of growing children, adolescents carrying pistols, and adults holding things together. These words offer commentary on the circumstances that many of these characters find themselves in as a community. Most are spending the majority of their time working and making a way for their families. Leisure is hardly achieved. Growing boys are emotionally and mentally hardened before they reach high school age. Shallow political campaigns half-heartedly attempt at placing bandaids over gaping wounds. Tha Bloc is just as much an assessment of the things wrong with American society as it is one of the specific neighborhood that t.p. Luce lives in. And it’s so spot on — equal parts uncomfortable, heartwarming, and matter-of-fact — that it makes me wish there were more just like it.  

This book holds a special place in my heart because most of it is shot on Ramona Avenue, a street in Northeast Baltimore’s Belair-Edison neighborhood. My family lived on this block from the time I was 9 until about 15. A lot of the people photographed are people I saw everyday. I’ve known some since elementary school and some I still rock with today. And to make it even crazier, t.p. Luce is the father of one of my closest friends. Curiously enough, I don’t remember seeing t.p. around when I was a kid. The majority of the book was shot on the 3300 block of Ramona Avenue and I stayed on the 3200 block, which are only a few steps away from each other. Part of me wishes I could rewind the clock and cross paths with t.p. as a kid so my younger self could be immortalized in the project, but coming across it in my young adulthood felt like such a divine connection that the FOMO doesn’t strike as strong as it could. 

When I finally found out about it, I was transfixed with it. I knew that he was originally from New Orleans, went to college in New York City, and moved to Ramona Avenue when his kids were very young. But I had so many more questions: Why’d he move to Baltimore? Why this neighborhood? Why was Tha Bloc made? Who was it intended for? Why don’t more people know about it? Over the years, I’d only spoken to t.p. about it in passing. But I was finally lucky enough to sit down with him to learn about the origins of the project, its legacy, and how he feels about it now that it’s almost 20 years old in depth. And even better is that he allowed me to dig through his archive of photos from the project (some that made the book and more that didn’t) and share them for this story. The majority have never been seen by the public. 

What drew you to Baltimore and, specifically, this neighborhood initially?

One of the things that made me move to the city was economics, in the sense that I didn't want to go back down south and I wanted to live somewhere where you could afford a house with a yard for a reasonable amount of money. That's actually what I'm thinking about at the time. And when we moved here, to this neighborhood, it was because the house was available. It was not because this block was mostly Black because it wasn't. From all these houses, I would say two were Black couples. All these houses were white people. I didn't know at the time, I figured it out later, but they were all old Polish immigrants. The majority of them were Polish immigrants. There was still some people, other white people who lived here who were newer. And so years later, it was literally White Flight in real time. And I watched it happen. And that's sort of what started Tha Bloc — watching people just literally flee.

Because Black people were coming.

Because Black people came. Well it was one particular episode and that is, they blew up the Flag House Courts. When they blew up the Flag Houses, within two weeks of those Flag Houses blowing up, this whole area changed. Because people, literally, whenever they moved the people out, a percentage of them were left to their own devices. And it appeared that they just walked over here. So, I used to see people all of a sudden on Belair Road. And I'm seeing all these people just  meandering. I'm like, "The hell's going on?" And all of a sudden, Belair Road became a strip for a minute. There was prostitutes working Belair road. And I'm like, "What just happened?"

In the span of, what? A year?

I don't know. I mean, it was less than a year. This was the mid-90s. I'm thinking like '93, some of this was in '93, '94. And then, all of a sudden people started moving out. What happened is the people from the Flag Houses, they started moving in here under — I don't know what — I would assume Section 8. I don't know. I mean, just all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom. And they weren't homeowners, they were renters. Here, here, here. And that happened within a year. All of a sudden, you started seeing white folks were just leaving. Now, the old guy here, Mr. Carl, he didn't leave. Him and his wife stayed there and he talked to me about this. "I'm not going anywhere. I think you're fine here. I like all the people around here. All these people telling me I'm going to leave. My kids come and say, 'Oh, you going to leave?’'' He says, "I'm not going anywhere." And he told a lot of funny stories, too. And he actually died there. Because he had to be in his late 70s at the time. His wife died, and he died three months later.

When my family moved on the 3200 block, that was 2000, or 2001. But, it was all Black. It was already all Black.

No. Yeah. It became black.

We had one white guy that lived on our block that was old. Had to be like 80-something. And we just called him Pops, or something like that. And he had an American flag on his porch. I think he was in the military, or something, at one point. But, he was literally the only white person. He was in the middle of the block, on the right hand side.

There was a couple here. I called them the holdovers. There's a couple of holdovers. Carl was one of them. It was an old guy over here. Three, four, doors down. Never came outside. He used to look out the window. Kids were playing around. And I remember one time, I saw him, and he would sit in the window. And he would look at the kids playing. He would be there all day. And I would look up at him, and he would just look around. Never said anything. He didn't complain.

So, in effect, Tha Bloc started out as a project documenting this change in the neighborhood?

That's how it started off. And when I saw the kids — because I was already looking for a project because I graduated from NYU in photography — I was looking for a project, and there it is. So, I just started photographing them.

Were people receptive from the jump?

Yeah. The kids were, in the beginning. Some of the adults were. But, it was all like, "What you doing? What are you going to do with those pictures? Are they going to be in a magazine?" I'm like, they're not going to be in a magazine. And it went on for a long time. I think the book was published in 2004. I started photographing in '95/'96. Because I didn't know exactly what I was going to do. I was just photographing. And it was really in the late '90s that the project started to come into focus. And I just continued to photograph. And actually, most people got tired of me because I told them I was working on a book. There were guys that used to say that. "Yo, where's the book? Where's this book you talking about?" Because it's been years. We had kids literally grew up with me taking pictures. And they were getting ready to graduate high school. "Where's this book you talking about?" So, I told them. I said, it doesn't work like that. But I said, "I'm going to get to it." And they said, "I don't think you're writing no book. You doing something with these pictures. I don't know. You might be a fed." I'm like, a fed? I said, "Is the reason you think I'm a fed, because you don't know what a fed looks like?"

I just got to know the guys. I got to know them all. It became self-evident. A lot of it reminded me of growing up around kids. You know like, “Oh, this guy's a criminal. He's not a criminal.” All the bad characters. And I'll talk to them. I tried to. I couldn't do a lot for them. I could just do what I could do. I began to understand what I could do, and during that project. And I've been working at that ever since.

What did you feel like that was?

Well, I mean, in addition to being a photography major, I was a history major. I studied history and economics. So I didn't really understand at that moment in time, what the ghetto was in the form of, what I call a technical representation, until I did that project. That was the first time I realized, "Oh, that's what it is." Because what we do is when people think of poor neighborhoods like ghettos, most of the time, think of the shit off of television. It’s what I call a cartoon version of something, not the thing itself. But there's something underneath it. There's a mechanism, and the mechanism is not glorified. It's not sexy. It's not that interesting. What is that mechanism? That was the first time I came in contact with that mechanism, with an element of that mechanism, and I've been working on it ever since. I have a much better understanding of what it is. But part of me, what the struggle was with the project, was that I was playing around with mythologies, with caricatures.

Of the people you photographed?

Well about the people and the caricatures of themselves. It's like, there was so much imitation going on. It coincided with a bunch of stuff that I was studying outside of that project, about the role imitation plays in how you choose your primary association, both conscious imitation and subconscious imitation. Like a subconscious imitation is how we speak until it's conscious, but it's mostly subconscious. When we grow up, we sound like the people we grew up around. Because that's how the brain works. Nobody goes to a talking teacher. You learn to talk and you sound like the people, with few exceptions.

When you look at Baltimore now, in what ways do you feel like it's different? I mean, actually, not even just Baltimore. This block, in particular.

This shit, it's really more or less the same. I mean, there's less kids, at that moment in time-

There's way less kids. 

At that moment in time, there was hella kids everywhere. Kids all over the damn place. There's less kids. But, I mean, I don't know. It's just, to me, all the problems that I think we're facing is that, I think, the community is just breaking down. I've watched the communities break down. I watched this one — to the degree that it was together. It broke down. I didn't know that's what was happening at the time. When I looked back at it, I understood why. I now understand why it broke down. People have to — what makes a community is the kinetic energy of the commons. And what sits at the center of the commons is some form of commerce. If you don't have that, then you just have a neighborhood. You don't have a community. Because community is shared sacrifice, shared generosity, shared being. It is: “I am with you today. I will be with you tomorrow. I am going to travel with you, as you will travel with me. I am your people, and your people are my people.” In a real sense. In a sense that we have common action. What we have is, we just have common geography. There's no common action. There's no common being.

Do you feel like it was a community here at one point?

Oh, there was. But, the thing about it is that, what breathed life into the community was the commercial center. And the commercial center was the plant at Sparrows Point. And when Sparrows Point went away, and the pension got looted, the shit fell apart. That's why Pigtown looks like Pigtown. That's why those white folks, they moved out to White Marsh. That's why White Marsh is borderline white trash out there. That shit's crazy. People couldn't find themselves together. They couldn't do it. Part of it is going to be economic. But, the other part of it is that we, as America, became comfortable with the centralized economic infrastructure. That post-World War II. That was America. 

Those old communities, they didn't completely go away. They mostly went away. And the communities supported by the economic infrastructure, they became — I refer to them, and this is probably not the best — sort of corporate communities. Not because the communities had corporate people, it's just it was supported by the corporation. And once the corporation went away, they fell apart. This fell apart. Because when I moved over here, I coached little league over at Gardenville. And that was 50/50. It was half black, half white. But, you could still see it was a community. The people still worked at the plant. They still had those jobs. The mothers came, they volunteered, the rec made money. They sold hot dogs, popcorn. They had the bull roast over at St. Anthony's. The bull roast at St. Anthony's, the City Councilman showed up, the Fire Chief, the Police Chief, everybody showed up. Father so-and-so from St. Anthony's. That was it. That's all gone. That's gone, gone, gone. I think the rec is still there. But it doesn't function.

What was people’s perception of you starting Tha Bloc? 

There was one old lady who used to say, "I don't know why you hang out with those kids all the time, they're nothing but trouble." I said, I don't hang out with them. They hang out with me. I'm not going with them. They come with me. I don't go over there. They come over here. I was trying to help them out as best I could. And some of them understood that. Most of them didn't. I mean, some of them did, but I wasn't really prepared to do anything for them. I understood what their problems were, but I couldn't do anything.

Did that come with feelings of defeat at times?

No because, once again, I'm from Louisiana. My dad would always say, "Shit is what it is." I remember one time when I was a kid, it was one of those days, man. I was like in the third or fourth grade. Everything went wrong. My bike chain broke. So I had to roll my bike all the way back to my house. And then my tire was running out of air. So I brought it over to Mr. Bossy at the gas station to fill it up with air. The fucking tube pops. So I walk my bike back to my house and I just pushed the shit down. And I said to him, I said, "Man, why is all this happening to me today? Why me?" And my dad looked at me, he said, "Why not you? Who are you? Who are you for shit not to happen to you? Shit happens to people all the time. There's some shit happening around the world right now way worse than this." I don't pity people. I don't feel sorry. I don't do that. It's like every day, man. 

Did you have particular aspirations for it once it got published?

I mean, I was just going to do whatever I tried to do with it. You know? I wanted it to be a gallery show, which I got. 

Where was the show?

I had a couple of shows. I had one at the African American Museum in Philly. It was a small part of another larger show. Had one at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, a part of a larger show. But I had a solo show at Anacostia, DC. And that worked out real nice. I wanted to do more gallery events, but it was too difficult. Because it's like a lot of things, man. Doing artwork at the bottom without playing the big game, it's too hard. It's too hard to make money.

Yeah. It's extremely hard.

You can't really make money doing that. And I had my kids to deal with. There was no way I had the flexibility. Don't have the money to say, "Okay, well, I'm going to tour this and I'm going to go all..." There was no way I could do it. There was some opportunities, but they weren't enough.

You say you started shooting projects after Tha Bloc that never came out. Did you already have a clear-cut concept on what your next projects were?

Yeah.

Were they related to the concept of Tha Bloc?

Well, they were in a way, but the relationship would've been too abstract for people. And I'm still going to finish them. I mean, I got two books I'm getting ready to do now. One, soon as I hook that printer back up, I'm going to print my temps up. You know? I've been waylaid too much by life events. You know what I mean? It is very difficult, because I don't rely on any of the projects to make money. So consequently, I don't have deadlines. And as events happen around me, it becomes less and less of a priority. But it's going to become more and more of a priority very shortly. Then I'm going to spend a whole hell of a lot more time doing that than I have been. I've had a couple of projects in Baltimore that I could never really pull off in the pandemic. I had to say, "I got to wait this out." But I'm still there. I still got a lot more to do.

Welcome to Deetranada’s World

Deetranada isn’t concerned with proving herself to anyone. Just a few months shy of her 21st birthday, the West Baltimore phenom has reached a level of maturity that’s manifested deeply in her music. The enthusiastic, bold rhymes she so effortlessly spit as a 14-year-old have slowly evolved into the razor-sharp lyrical adroitness some of her peers can’t hold a candle to today. She’s not the same little girl people still compare her to from Lifetime’s The Rap Game. Much has changed for Deetranada since her 2017 appearance on the teen competition show. Her enlightened outlook on life, reformed artistry, and stronger grasp of her identity have allowed her to let go of her inhibitions and get lost in her own world — NADAWORLD. 

The 20-year-old is fresh off the release of her sophomore album, which she worked on tirelessly for two and a half years. “I've been listening to this album for a year straight before everybody else could hear it,” she tells me on a video call. On the day of its release (2/22/22), she posted up at Baltimore’s Motor House, face primed with makeup wearing long wavy tresses down to her waist, to eat empanadas and toast to her accomplishments along with fans and supporters. Two days after NADAWORLD dropped, we hopped on a zoom call. She looked cozy, wearing an oversized white tee with slime green lettering. She’s not in album mode anymore. “Excuse my hair,” she says, looking down at me with a thick afro, fresh out of braids, framing her face. Her physical appearance doesn’t mirror that of her usual flamboyant style as she’s understandably fatigued from album rollout activities, with a few appearances scheduled in the coming days. The same day we speak, she’s set to pop up at local strip joint Two O'Clock Club for CIAA tournament week and has a DTLR event the following day. In between gigs, she’s home catching up on sleep. But she still musters up enough bubbly energy for an illuminating 30-minute conversation, peeling back the layers of her orb. Her phone screen shakes as she walks and talks with me, aimlessly wandering around her new apartment — a proud accomplishment that still puts a cheesy grin on her face. 

Just a year ago, I spoke to the young talent about the new age renaissance taking place in Baltimore, an exciting time for the city’s brightest stars getting their moment to shine beyond state lines. During that exchange, Dee was in awe of her peers that were drawing more eyes to the city’s DIY scene. But tonight, she only speaks on her own path and what her intentions for NADAWORLD are. “I wanted to make sucka-free music,” she shares. “Basically, I didn't want to have to second guess anything that I made. Every song that y'all hear on NADAWORLD, I didn't once think, ‘Oh, I hope they like it.’ Like, nah, I felt 100% about every song that I put on there and I wasn't going to finish that album, or put it out, until I felt like I was putting out quality shit.” Her particular approach has been groomed since she was a young girl, growing up on her parents’ stacked CD collection that included legends like Rakim, Lauryn Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, Lil' Kim — “all that good shit.” Her aspirations of becoming an artist were seeded in her mind when she was a preschooler writing papers claiming her future as a “famous musical artist.” Rapping was never not an option for Deetranada. “I always told my mother, ‘Ma, if rap don't work out, I'm going to jail,” she shares amusingly. “She would be laughing and shit, but like I'm dead ass serious. That's why I always make sure I'm the best rapper out of all these streets, for real.”

Deetranada’s vision for the future was built largely out of her dreams to be a rap star, but much of it also had to do with getting her life on the right track. “When I was going through a lot of dumb shit in school and people was making fun of me, it was getting to a point where I had to defend myself every day in and out of school, at home, and in the streets,” she remembers. “I saw my life going a certain type of way and teachers were alerting my mother. My mother was worried, crying to me and shit every day.” So, in an effort to steer herself onto a better path, Deetranada made a change and adopted poetry as a practical outlet for her emotions. Writing down rhymes and turning them into melodic flows saved her life, and she hasn’t looked back since.

Up until she traveled to Atlanta to star on “that show,” Deetranada had only toyed with the idea of being a rapper. Still a novice at her craft, she started making music by recording songs on her phone and uploading them to SoundCloud. Early tracks like “Deheyedration” and “The Real (Live)” that she wrote in her teenage years are some of the first displays of Deetranada’s passion colliding with her ambition. But as far as true belief in her skills, she was still finding her footing. To push herself, she used her music as an opportunity to wrestle with the criticism people had of her music: “Ah, shut that up, yo thought she could sing / that was whack, backtrack, bring it back,” she raps on “Deheyedration.” “Yo Diamond I told you should just quit this whole music thing, I mean you can’t rap you’re never going to make it.” Once the people around her started pushing her to keep chasing her dreams, it lit a fire under the budding rapper. For her 15th birthday, Deetranada’s mother gifted her a special surprise: an hour of studio time at Above Ground Studios. She took full advantage of her small window, ripping beats off of YouTube and SoundCloud to play around with, figuring out what sounds fit her bars best. But low and behold, that day at the studio, she ran into someone else who would be pivotal in jumpstarting her career. “This nigga walked in, he had braids and like golds and glasses and shit,” she recalls. “And he was like, ‘Damn, she hard. I got to get your information.’ He asked me for an interview and that was my first time being around people, as like a rapper, who were actually listening to me. His name was Lawrence [Burney].” Before she even graced our TV screens or called herself Deetranada, the rapper knew she had people right here in the city holding her down. So she had no choice but to start believing in herself more. 

Deetranada had everyone’s attention after her impressive TV debut, and momentum from the breakout moment gave her the perfect opportunity to formally carve a lane for herself. Despite it being a launching pad for her nationwide buzz, the experience taught her more about how to move in the industry than how to be a successful rapper. “I can say fuck it now because I noticed myself feeling like I needed approval from motherfuckers after that experience,” she says now five years removed from the show. “I realized I had to surround myself with people that actually had good intentions for me and I have.” After filming her season of The Rap Game, Deetranada went on to make noise on her own merit, advancing from a talented local teenage rapper to an artist with notoriety. Her vicious freestyle on The Breakfast Club in 2017 put a lot of people on notice to take her more seriously, but that was only the beginning. 

Deetranada’s 2017 mixtape, Adolescence Swim, arrived shortly after her radio appearance to offer a taste of her musical prowess. But its title was a constant reminder of her age and a hindrance that gave people an excuse to be skeptical of her skills. With that in mind, her actions became more intentional and she started working on material that could allow her to control her own narrative: DEEvsEVERYBODY!, her 2019 debut album that finally placed her at the center of the world she was living in. “At the end of the day, it's like don't nobody got me but me,” Deetranada declares to me. “I could vent to as many people as I want, but I'm the one who has to deal with my problems. I'm the one who got to feel these emotions and go through these struggles, so why not make the best out of it?” The dark nature of tracks like “FLAWS!” from the album offered a deeply personal understanding of Deetranada’s scattered mindset and purely embodied the idea of everyone being against her: “I hate myself for everything I do, everything I say / Everything I lose and everything I made / I don't do this for you, don't this for they.” The album as a whole helped paint a bigger picture that humanized Deetranada’s most intimate feelings, and for that, she finally discovered what could become her superpower: freedom. DEEvsEVERYBODY! proved that the rapper matured significantly in the two-year gap between her mixtape and album, but it also demonstrated she had a lot more growing up to do. So instead of dropping another project the following year, Deetranada instead released her solo single “19” — a track that appeared on NPR’s esteemed list of female rappers who dominated 2020 — on her 19th birthday. The fiery two-minute song was her way of proclaiming herself as the hardest rapper out and previewing the kind of rhymes she aimed to flex on NADAWORLD. Compared to her previous works, Deetranada had a goal to be more carefree and carry on with an unapologetic attitude on her new album. This time around, there’d be no mistaking her capabilities as an artist. “I obviously have a God-given talent,” she says, “so I can't sit here and ignore my purpose and act like I ain't got shit to do, because it can get taken from me just like that.”

The title of Deetranada’s sophomore album means more to her than just a new body of work. To her, NADAWORLD is a lifestyle she embraced in 2019 and has been engulfed in ever since — she even has it colorfully tattooed on her right arm. That lifestyle, of course, being all about her and existing in her own world after always feeling alienated. The rapper tapped Baltimore’s Static6ix to produce head-bobbing tracks like “Yuh Yuh!,” “Get Paid,” “I’m That,” and “Purple Punch” featuring OTR Chaz because she favors how hard her voice sounds over his beats. SevynTheVillain is another local name she enlisted to handle the booming production for “Bread Talk.” The album also features Atlanta rappers Yung Mal and Mpa HeadShakur — folks she connected with years back during her time in the city. Unlike her debut, Deetranada mixes the opposing styles of Baltimore and Atlanta on NADAWORLD, two places that have shaped her, to innovate a sound that fits her musical brilliance like a glove. Her eclectic network is another contribution to her experimental sound and popularity outside of Baltimore — popularity that's helped her reach folks in places she hasn’t even stepped foot in yet. 

The new formula she’s testing is one she took a chance on because she wanted to prove her style shouldn’t and cannot be put in a box. “My first album, I had nothing but Baltimore producers and nothing but Baltimore features,” she explains to me. “But I'm more than just my city, for real. I can show niggas I can do more than one thing and I can cater to a different type of crowd.” The obvious difference between DEEvsEVERYBODY! and NADAWORLD is the choice in content, but the stark contrast is attributed to Deetranada’s maturity. She’s no longer rapping like she has something to prove. Now, she’s only concerned with her own opinion more than others. “DEEvsEVERYBODY! was my teenage emotions really getting the best of me, and me taking all the negative that was in my life and amplifying it,” she adds. “NADAWORLD is just taking that negative and going like, ‘Fuck y'all, fuck this shit for real, like I don't give a fuck about none of this.’ I could be gone tomorrow so I might as well drag while I'm here." 

As Deetranada continues her transition into adulthood, she hopes that the life lessons she’s learned can be heard loud and clear on NADAWORLD. But more than that, the real takeaway from her new album is elevating her reputation from the “lyrical miracle” rapper she’s been labeled as to an artist confidently making decisions that show how far she sees herself going. So for her, it’s alright if her more seasoned peers choose to still sleep on her, or solely praise her skills in public rather than offer a chance to collaborate. “I act accordingly with shit like that,” she says. “So, I still stay to myself, and I don't take nothing too personal because it's all a gimmick and a game.” But that thought is a part of her master plan as the people’s underdog because she’s still aiming straight for the stars. “I got a whole bunch of plans this year,” she says before we conclude our conversation. “I just can't wait to take this shit to the moon, because I really have been manifesting it, and it's crazy seeing everything coming to fruition.”

Zadia's Homegrown Melodies

Cheyanne Zadia leans back into her cushioned seat reeling from a long day directing a photoshoot across town. The restless 28-year-old – donning a mustard-colored hoodie matching the golden walls of The Demo Tape office –adjusts the shiny, smoked out lenses perched on her face. She schools me on her lengthy resume as one of Baltimore’s most creative playmakers in the underground music scene. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to come across motivated artists dedicated to their craft. But Zadia’s tireless work ethic is unlike any other. Most people Zadia’s age are busy settling into their life’s work, but her journey as an artist is just getting started. The fashion designer/stylist turned event curator turned musician wears many hats. In her eyes, she’s a vessel that connects people from different walks of life through her talents. When she’s not working on songs for herself or other artists, Zadia is teaching her class of students in performing arts, off planning a festival, or producing and directing films for her own music – the list goes on. No one day is ever the same for Zadia, but the home-grown curator finds comfort in staying busy. The raw talent and passion as an artist is apparent, but her drive to show the world her city’s beauty is even more clear.

During the summer months, Zadia treks through her stomping grounds with her live band in tow for the East and West Baltimore tours promoting her newly-released project, Vacants. On a neighboring corner in West Baltimore, she rocks to the sounds of striking percussion, a blaring trumpet, and a jamming keyboard. She, along with an eccentric Al Rogers Jr., draw a small crowd of watchful listeners as they tag team another one of their musical collaborations. She waves more spectators over saying “Come on over, we don’t bite.” The Vacants tour, originally called the Sidewalk Serenade, is fully underway with an important message for Baltimore – one Zadia felt necessary to deliver personally.

Vacants, composed of 9 short tracks, is the soulful singer’s debut album she began composing more than five years ago. The jazzy project serves as a loving ode to Zadia’s West Baltimore roots, but furthermore proves she has more to offer. The thoughtful artist, who is normally concerned with putting her team on first, took this as an opportunity to put the spotlight on herself. Her shy approach to making music put her lyrical prelude on ice for years, but 2020 showed her it was now or never. “You're either going to put the music out or you're going to be scared for the rest of your life or you could die tomorrow.” The daring singer emulates this message on “Live Alive (shower song),” the acapella track that serves as the halfway point on her project. “It seems like we don’t get the recognition til we die, I’m gon’ celebrate myself til the day I close my eyes.” The absence of instruments on the interlude echoes her poetic words that toss fear out the window and preach the gospel of life’s bittersweet truth. Her gentle voice fuels the pleasant, melodic composition her project maintains on opening and closing tracks “Sunsets” and “Protection,” respectively. Zadia’s harmonious debut starts and ends on the same accord, driving home her point of spreading love, peace, and understanding to all.

Much like her artistic path, Vacants bridges the gap between West Baltimore’s charm and shortcomings as Zadia sees them. I spoke with the budding vocalist to talk about her career as a creative, expectations for her music, and how she wants her legacy in the city to be remembered.

Everyone comes into their artistry through their life’s journey. So, where does Zadia’s story begin?

Zadia: My story starts at a very early age. I was probably maybe one or two when I first started singing in the choir at church. That kind of morphed into making music as a hobby and helping my friends who took music more seriously. My career as an artist, as a curator started with curating events for different artists in the city. That helped me build bonds and connections with artists that I now call my friends. Some of my friends who knew that I actually could create music and sing and stuff outside of curating would push me to make a project and to drop some music and I finally did in 2020. So, now we're here.

What was life like for you growing up here in the city?

I'm from West Baltimore — Beechfield, Treemont, Yale Heights, Irvington; you got to list them all like that, the whole zone 29. Growing up I was always surrounded by family and extended family. I grew up on a lot of love. I was always surrounded by art and culture and I grew up in a family of singers and musicians, so that played a major part in my love for music.

How did you get introduced to Baltimore's creative community?

I don't think anybody introduced me to Baltimore's creative community.

You introduced yourself?

Yeah. Even though it was a community that existed way before me. I feel like I definitely cultivated my own section of Baltimore's creative community and that kind of added other areas of culture within the city. I've always been creative and I just started curating my own shows. And from that it kind of attracted all of the creative people that I needed. 

Did you see a trend start from you creating these events? What kind of void did it fill in the city?

I don't want to call myself a trendsetter because it's so cliché and kind of corny to me. But, I will say that I think I created experiences that gave other artists, like myself, permission to create space for themselves.

Have you had a turning point in your career yet where something lets you know you're on the right track?

Honestly, this year was the turning point for me. For whatever reason, I hadn't put out music. This year showed me don't hold back and ever since I dropped music it's been blessing after blessing, opportunity after opportunity, press after press. I know 2020 has affected a lot of people in negative ways, and me too in certain aspects, but I feel like we all needed this break. Taking this break allowed me time to really tap into myself, into my purpose, and into the music that I feel so many people need to hear and can relate to.

You put a project out in June called Vacants. What's the meaning behind that title?

Vacants represents Baltimore to me, West Baltimore particularly. There's 18,000 vacant homes in Baltimore city alone. You know how small our city is. 18,000 vacant homes to me was a reflection of the city as a whole. I feel like Baltimore has been going through something, even since I was younger, that we haven't quite been able to pick ourselves up from and this project is a reflection of that.

I wanted to tell my story while also reflecting on all the untold stories of those vacant homes. I always knew when I first dropped my project that I wanted it to be something Baltimore-related that reflected my experiences in the city and life growing up.

You had a couple artists like Al Rogers Jr., Sennison, and others featured on the project. What was it like working with people like that?

They all family. This joint was really like a family affair. Mostly everybody that was on the project I've known for years and years. Al, that's one of my dogs since 2012; 2011, 2010 I don't even know. That's been my guy. Sannison has been my guy. Bobbi and Josh, I tell them all the time they family for real. I feel so connected to them in many ways for many reasons. I could just relate to them. It really just felt like I was working with family. What I'm used to. Like when I grew up in the church singing amongst family. I don't really do friends, I do family. This project really felt like I just brought in some family members.

For the project, you and a couple local artists got together to do pop-up concerts  in East and West Baltimore. What was it like doing those pop-up shows and being able to give back to the city like that? 

It felt like it was needed. It was something that was necessary. We had been cooped up in the house for months. No live music, no live interaction, no hugs, no daps, no nothing. It was like when we hit the streets with the music it was kind of like almost an awakening. A lifting of a dark shadow. It was like you could literally see and feel that this is something that we all needed. We needed that interaction with the city just as much as the city needed that interaction with us.

Is there anybody in Baltimore that you look up to right now?

Creatively, I look up to authors in the city like D. Watkins from East Baltimore. He just recently got married and had a baby and he's still writing books. I look up to stuff like that. One day I hope to have a family of my own and still be a creative force and also an impact in the city and give opportunities to younger artists. I look up to Miss Tony too  because she said, "How you wanna carry it?" And she meant it and that's how I'm carrying the rest of my music career. Yeah, like what's up, what's up? I'm taking it to the top.

When it's all said and done, how do you want your legacy to be remembered in the city?

I want to be remembered as someone that cultivated love and connected so many people. Someone that was just a bada** artist at all levels. Whether it be directing, producing films, making music, I just want to be like someone who lived fully and completely and didn't hold anything back. I feel like a lot of people are talented and they know that they're talented and gifted at certain things, but society tells you that you have to stick to one thing. They make it seem like you can't do everything and I feel like I can do all things, you know? I just want to be an inspiration to people and I want them to know that you don't have to just stick to one thing. You can do all things.

serpentwithfeet digs for the roots

I spent the first 18 years of my life in a city that nurtured my creativity and taught me to be demanding. I could write a lot about the city of crab feasts. But I decided to make a lil' list or whatever. Here it is.

WHEN I THINK OF BALTIMORE I THINK OF :

 - skateland on fridays and endless refills of sprite remix.  

 - turning any dull moment into rapture simply by banging out the infamous Baltimore club beat on my chest… or  table… or refrigerator.

 - skipping school with the homies to get chicken boxes. when textbooks grew uninspired and couldn’t offer travel, we found flight in overly-seasoned wings and greasy ass fries. 

 - dance recitals masquerading as fashion shows. 

 - the prestigious blue on my tongue & lips after sipping a Huggie at the family reunion. 

 - the dragons i’ve been blessed to unleash.

 - me pitifully deepening my voice when i say “back door” on the bus because niggas with soft voices weren’t in vogue yet.

 - school trips to The Great Blacks in Wax Museum and the half-horror half-pride that accompanied me. 

 - teachers & principals who refused to teach the star spangled banner but made sure we knew all 3 verses to "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

 - the temporary safety that silence provided

 - the young entrepreneurs that kept all of us boys fly ... AKA ‘girls that braided hair’

$20 for straight-back cornrows 

$25 for zig zags

$50 for a full head of two-strand twists 

 - a Nextel chirping on somebody’s hip

 - 3-part harmony

 - collard greens flirting with the mac & cheese

 - obnoxious laughter

 - unanswered questions

-serpentwithfeet

Music is at its most rewarding when it can help you cling onto life’s fleeting moments and savor them in the same way you’d take your sweet time eating a meal that you don’t want to end. And, in doing so, it also brings you closer — pleasurably, reluctantly, or otherwise — to the people and spaces you shared those moments with. L.A-based, Baltimore-raised singer serpentwithfeet could give a masterclass on how to freeze time in this way. His music, which has R&B, opera, and gospel in its DNA lends itself to diving into the subtleties. And when paired with production that takes you on winding trips filled with tension, mysticism, and despair, those moments are given such rich texture that you get lost in them. 

In earlier music, like his 2016-released debut EP blisters, it felt as if the singer born Josiah Wise was reckoning with loss — maybe romantic or familial, maybe loss of his former self in some ways — and dealing with the anger conjoined with that loss. The Haxan Cloak’s production extended these feelings of mourning with ominous soundscapes that were so busy that they could induce instant anxiety. In music videos around that time, serpentwithfeet presented himself with more of an eerie flare: a huge bull ring piercing, black lipstick, and a chilling stare. In the years since, the music and videos he’s released have gotten much more delicate. There’s no shortage of acute detail and thoughtfulness in his writing and song-structure, but his delivery isn’t as heavy-handed. Projects like his debut album soil and his most recent in DEACON, feel like they’re guiding Black people — and more specifically, Black gay men — on how to be present in their love and in their lives. How to get lost in the small moments and how to advocate for yourself when things aren’t going your way. 

During a recent phone conversation while he finished getting his car detailed in LA, I spoke with serpenwithfeet about his growth over the years and how he’s spending more time thinking about his foundation. He even wrote a note about his favorite memories of growing up in Baltimore City. 

I love the idea of you writing out sort of a love letter to Baltimore. And I was just wondering, has home been on your mind more lately? Or is it just something that you want to get out?

I don't know if home has been in my mind more or less than it ever has been. I think I'm always considering how things began or what my origins are. I like to think that I spend a lot of time reflecting. And I think within my work, because the name of the game is always challenging myself. I'm always trying to challenge myself and be anew. And I think I’m just trying to understand, what has my art been? What is in my character arc? What things have I learned as a young person that I want to keep with me? What things do I want to discard?

So I think creatively, I learned so much in Baltimore. And my imagination was nurtured in Baltimore. Obviously this is where I was born and raised. The first 18 years of my life was in Baltimore City proper. It's important for me that I understand what the beginning was for me. I was given a lot of space. A lot of space to be imaginative, a lot of space to be creative. So I think for that reason, I'm just always looking for new ways to say thank you.

What are some of the challenges you have found placed in front of you as far as wanting to grow or becoming new? Do you think of it in that way where it's like, okay, this is the thing I'm trying to conquer right now? Or is it not that linear for you?

I don't know if there's anything that I'm trying to conquer. I don't know if I would use that language. But I would say that I'm challenging myself. I'm always trying to be a better writer, a better storyteller. Always trying to be more clear and really get to the essence of what I'm trying to say. I think being more direct. As much as I love the ornate and I love the fluff — I think that's beautiful and I think it has a space right now — I don't know if that's as important to me. Even I think about songwriting with visual storytelling. So I think that's been a fun exercise just daily. If I'm telling a story to a friend, I want to get to the punch line, like let's get to the thing. Let's begin at the punchline. So I don't know if there's anything I'm trying to conquer right now, but I think being more direct is really important to me.

Would you say that's something that you can feel yourself getting clearer in when you're having conversations with people? Is that something you can feel that you're getting stronger at? 

Yeah. And I think to be clear and to be less abstract. I think I've been more intentional about using my voice and using it boldly. And ask for what I want. Stating what my needs are and what my expectations are. And if it's clear then it's fun, but it's important for me to state it. And I don't know that I've always felt comfortable expressing what I need or expressing what makes me uncomfortable. And now I'm not interested in babysitting anybody anymore. I feel like I used to always be afraid. I used to be afraid to speak very directly and very honestly. And now I don't have the bandwidth to do otherwise. I don't have the bandwidth to neglect myself. And I just think I'm just learning. I think for a long time I felt not completely in my body. I feel way more in my body now. In the past year, past couple years, I've just felt that way. And so I'm just leaning into that. That's where I am now.

One thing I've always really, really appreciated about not even just your work, but your communication on social media, is that your words really place me within your feelings. I think you do really well at magnifying small moments that feel very strong, but they could also be fleeting if you don't pay attention to them in life. And that's just something I always really felt like stood out to me about your work. And I wonder if that is something that you were intentional about capturing: those fleeting moments where the emotions might stick out the strongest, but it might be hard to articulate those moments.

I don't know what to blame it on. I don't know if actually blaming it on me being a July cancer, or me being an R&B fan. I think when we long for someone or we miss someone, when we have kind thoughts of someone, we think about those small moments. We think about the way their hand touched our knee. You think about the way they laughed that time and the sun danced on their skin a certain way at four o'clock. And it was a different kind of light than the sun at noon. And you notice those nuances. Those are moments that make great songs, for me, for my taste. I think making a verse about the way somebody's eyebrows sort of rise and contort when they're talking and how you might be facing because you're watching their eyebrows. I think those make great songs. And the musicians that I love, they're so specific. And the writers in general that I love, they're so specific. And what is that saying, the genius is in the detail. So I realized when I first started making music that — I don't know if this will sound pretentious or arrogant — but I realized that when I'm thinking about men, I'm thinking about those small moments. And I often think that the culture around manhood or just maleness, whatever you want to call it, says that we shouldn't be focused on the minutia, that we should be focused on big pictures. And that the details are for women or for girls or for cis-women and they're not for men.

Right

I knew early on before I put out the EP in 2016, I wanted to focus on the specific details. And that's what a lot of the first music was about — that I noticed this small change happened. And it might seem insignificant to you, but it's huge to me. Can we talk about it? That's what dealing with the whole first EP is about, is that intersection. You think I'm being petty, but I think I'm observant. How do we navigate this? So I think now the music is different because that's the point, that music is supposed to change over time. I think that it's really important for me to be specific. So I'll just say that.

Who in your opinion is really great at those small details? The people that you listen to and it's like shit, ‘I need to make people feel the way this makes me feel, because it is that sharp.’

There's a bunch of writers and musicians. I often think about two Black queer folks who's writing I enjoy so much. And it's Jericho Brown and Dante Collins. They're both poets. And I've purchased their books and I read their books often, their poetry books. And it's so incredible and so rich and so lush. I love entering their world when they write, the world that they create with their writing. I love entering it. And as far as musicians, I think a lot about SZA, I think a lot about Frank Ocean. I think they're both so special and I think such guiding stars for our generation.

SZA’s “Good Days” is so beautifully written it’s crazy.

Yeah. It's so wonderful. And when I think about Frank Ocean, what I think about a lot is permission and how he gave many of us permission to be vulnerable, permission to be honest about who we are, permission to put our hearts, not only on our sleeves, but to put it on the table, on the plate, on the dashboard, and take your heart wherever you go. So oftentimes we are told, leave your heart at home, leave your feelings at home. I think Frank and SZA remind us, bring your feelings with you. There's plenty, which I think there's such a beautiful message, because so often we're told — and when I say we, I'm thinking about Black people, and I'm thinking about Black men and more specifically Black gay men — we're told to get over it. You being petty, sensitive, picky and whatever. And these two artists say, you're not doing too much, actually you can do more. And that for me as an artist is incredibly encouraging. But just as a feeler and as someone who has been loved and enjoys loving others, it's just great to be reminded that it's okay to own my feelings.

Maybe a year ago now, through Instagram voice messages, we were briefly talking about where you were going musically and I was curious to know what space you’re in right now with it. 

We'll see where the music goes. I'm still exploring at the moment. I can't say anything definitive. But yeah, I think what I'll say, what I've probably said a million times in this call already, is that I'm just trying to challenge myself. So that's in songwriting, that is in the sonic landscape. I plan to be brand new. I want to be brand new. So we'll see how that manifests itself over time. The plan is for me to be brand new.

You’ve performed with Björk for a string of shows this week. What is something that you experienced with her from a vantage point that you didn't necessarily get to experience just as a listener and an admirer?

It's such a large show, and there's so many moving parts and it's genius, what she's done with set design and with her orchestra and with the people who are doing electronics, and the lighting. There's just so many components which make it a truly theatrical experience. So I think just witnessing how specific she is. That's the first: how specific she is. How genius she is at marrying sound with texture, marrying sound with architecture. The way that she marries design, I'll say. And yeah, she's been such a big part of my life and my career since I started. I got my first project in 2016, and to be able to perform our song together on stage, it feels like a true gift. But again, I'm learning from her. I feel like I'm still learning while I'm on stage. I'm learning how she is playful, and the way that the set starts and the way that she weaves in and out of songs and the pacing. So like I said, I've been a fan for years, so I've watched her performances on YouTube. And so to see it up close and in person, it's a wonderful lesson.

I know you only got a couple more minutes, but what was the last film you watched that really spoke to you?

The last film? That's a good question. I can't speak on the last film because honestly, I can't think of anything at the moment. But I will say there's a web series that I've watched that I really enjoyed called For the Boys on SLAY TV. And I know a lot of the Black gays watch it, and I'm just happy to see more Black queer men, more Black gay folks, and I wouldn't even say more because that could even be condescending because we've been doing it. We've been doing it for so long, but I'm happy that we have more platforms now versus so many of the legends, and all of them are not still on Earth with us. They took a lot of risks by making films and putting out publications and poetry books. They took so many risks. So the fact that we can do it now and put it on YouTube, I think that's just such a wonderful, wonderful gift. So For the Boys has been great. I laughed a lot, and I thought it was really beautiful to see what they put together.

Up Next: OTR Chaz

I became familiar with OTR Chaz’s music somewhere around 2019. It was either through a Baltimore rap-generated YouTube algorithm or through a reference from a friend. But whatever the introduction, it didn’t take me long to become a fan of his music, which I’m pretty much listening to everyday at this point. Chaz feels like one of the more spot-on depictions of what young Baltimore looks and feels like right now. Stylistically, he’s on trend: long hair that’s typically in braids or twists, designer tennis shoes, and crisp white tees. Musically, he’s part of a class of Baltimore artists who, over the last few years, have been carving out a melodic brand of street storytelling over pounding production. Artists like StayTrue D-Nice, Leekonnacomeup, and his regular collaborator Roddy Rackzz are just a few names that occupy this space. The sound itself is not entirely original to Baltimore. There are definitely cues being taken from Atlanta but there’s something about the slurring of words, local slang, and regional dialect that make them undeniably Baltimore. 

And what makes the West Baltimore native stand out is that he’s the most well-rounded of this bunch. He can give hard-hitting crooning like he does on “3 Letters,” high-pitched damn near ballads with songs like “Politics” or he can go punchline crazy like he does on “Movin.” Over the past three years he’s been consistently dropping quality music every few months and more and more, it feels like he’s just one breakout track away. It helps his chances that he has the hottest producer in the city as he main guide in White Boy (the producer’s locally-ubiquitous “White Boy came with the bag like it’s Christmas” tag comes from Chaz’s “Get in Dere”). I recently met Chaz in a studio in Parkville, just outside the city, to talk to him about his musical approach, what he thinks he needs to reach the next level, and what his place is within the local scene. 

I had to go back and listen to your older music and that first tape — More Than Rap — was interesting. Because it's so different from your other shit. 

That was some real rapping shit. With that, I was just rapping because I wanted a rap. That was when I was thinking, am I ready to just rap, or am I trying to be a rapper? I had to think of what do niggas want to hear? Like what type music do niggas wanna hear? ‘Cause I'm saying the same message, but it's how you word that shit. 

So what made you make the pivot though? Like, was it, ‘This ain’t traveling the way I want it to travel?’

Yeah. That and it just wasn’t — I knew it was hard — It just wasn't what niggas wanted. It’s like you go in the Gucci store with a brand new pair of [New Balance], like, “Yo these is the 990s” but everybody like,”Bro, I want the Gucci’s.”  

When did you realize that? Did somebody have to tell you like, dummy this not working out or it was something that you sensed?

It was more so, I had to sit back and think like, this shit a business too. You feel what I'm saying? Like, I had to think about my name and all that. Because I ain't never had no nicknames. So I'm like, is niggas even gonna buy music from a nigga named Chaz? I had to think about all that. Because it's certain shit that just make me not wanna fuck with a nigga. Just ‘cause I don't like your voice or it be a little thing that will fuck your whole package up.

One thing I think that's interesting about what y'all got on your side of town is that y'all hood probably produced the most rappers since this current Baltimore scene started taking off in 2013-2014. Tadoe, Lor Stackks, Twon O.D., Roddy Rackzz, and you. 

Yeah. Quality rappers. 

I just wonder, what was that like for you? I look back at old videos, like the Twon O.D videos or old Lor Staccks videos and I see y'all in those videos way younger. What was it like to witness that?

When Stackks was really first popping for real, I ain't really want to be a rapper. I ain't even know I could really rap. I ain't even really give a fuck. It wasn’t really doing nothing to me or for me because I wasn't benefiting from it. Lor Stackks my cousin so it’s just regular. But now this shit is more open. Like it was niggas rapping then. But niggas wasn't willing to share the limelight. Even now it’s niggas that still wanna be that nigga, but they more willing to work with another nigga. Because every time ain't your time. 

When would you say you started realizing you had a real audience?

I ain't gon lie, I knew niggas was really fucking with my shit when I dropped “Monopoly.” But see, that bitch ain't even really — it showed me niggas was paying attention to some of the shit I'm doing. But then I dropped “Steal Da Wave” and I didn't even like that song like that. I did that song in like 15 minutes. That bitch did like a 100k views fast with no promo. I couldn't even promote it on Instagram ‘cause they kept saying I was trying to sell weed in the video. Then it was “Get In Dere.”

“Steal Da Wave” was the one for me when I was like, ‘I really fuck with yo.’ It was the hook. 

Yeah. I fuck with it, I just ain't like it at the time. I like it more now.

It’s just one of them songs you don't even realize you're listening to. You sing that shit throughout the day. To me, it just feels like you are super musically-inclined. And when I say that, I mean like I never really heard you out of pocket on anything. 

Because niggas don't be knowing: It's about the delivery. It ain't even about what you say, it’s how you say it. We could both say the same word at the same time but my shit might sound more appealing. It’s just how I twisted the word.

Sometimes when I listen to you, I feel like you remind me of Future the most. You don't sound like him. It’s more about your ability to get into different pockets consistently. 

That's what I had to realize to myself. I had to realize that you supposed to take — you supposed to learn — from the niggas that inspire you. You could take it into you, but once it come outta you, it’s something different.

Who would you say that you incorporate into your style?

Future, Thug, Uzi. But I like Drake too ‘cause I like to sing. 

Compared to when you first started, how do you feel like the Baltimore scene has grown? Or even if you don't feel like it's grown. From my perspective, 2016, it was like, ‘Alright, we got something here. And it's a couple niggas I think could make it.’ But now it's hella artists that I feel like could be stars based off music solely, based on views, based on all that. But to me at this point, it's more like who got the personality, who got the best team around them. 

Well as far as structure, Baltimore don’t got none at all. But it's hella talent, hella potential. Ain’t nobody a nigga could go to that can put nothing on in Baltimore. It ain't even a nigga who don't live here but still a big homie. Ain't none of that. You can't even go to a nigga for a question because they ain't never did shit. Fuck is you gonna tell me? Then even the niggas who think they did shit, they don't wanna tell niggas anything.That's why this shit so fucked up. Niggas really think they doing shit. Not even the artists, but the niggas who job was to find artists and and put niggas in position. And they not. Who you think the biggest alive right now out of Baltimore? 

A rapper? Probably Shordie Shordie.  

Right. Or King Los. That's what I'm saying.

So what’s the answer? Do we team up with people from the DC area? Or do we figure it out on our own?

No. We just gotta — all the niggas that's doing it right it now in Baltimore is like the big homies. The only other niggas I could say who I’ve even thought of as an inspiration is G-Rock or Lor Scoota. And they gone.  

And even they ain't really break out. They was on the way.

That's what I'm saying. Like nobody else really can't tell me some shit that I ain't already did to make me look up to you. Ain’t even did nothing to make me wanna do that.

Do you feel like you need to leave?

I used to think that, but it's not even that. Cause you can put the music anywhere. You feel what I'm saying? I got niggas who listen to me in Africa and shit like that. It ain't hella plays, but they got a phone somewhere over there listening to that shit. It's definitely about your team. And it's about the timing. Really be about the time.

Do you feel like you got that good structure around you?

No, I definitely got good structure right now, but it still gotta be the right time. You can get as much money as you want and then still never be a star. Or it can be the right time for you and you have no support and you can be a broke star. You just hot. Niggas could have been probably did some shit just for some fame and followers. But I don't be on that route. I’m tryna have all that at the same time. 

I'm assuming you and Roddy Rackzz grew up together, but when did y'all start actually looking at it like, alright, we can approach this like a duo? Or an unofficial duo. Y’all have hella songs together.

We ain't never even talked about being a team ‘cause we already together. So I ain't even think of it as like, we need to make it a thing. Like I ain't never once —I ain't gonna say never — but I don't go make songs and be like, I need to get Roddy on this song. I be with Roddy already. We be already in the studio and just made the songs. Everything we do be natural. 

Was it the same with White Boy’s production? 

Yeah, like, even with his name, bro. I said “White Boy came with the bag like it’s Christmas” on “Get In Dere” but he wasn’t even thinking about beats or nothin’ at the time. We was talking about some whole other shit. But any nigga got a banger out right now, it’s probably on a White Boy beat. That’s facts. My voice on every one of them songs. 

Do you feel like he brings the best out of you musically?

Yeah. It's like 50/50 ‘cause he might need niggas around him to feel a certain way for the beat to come out. He might be in a whole different mode if he go by his self. Same way I need the beats. But I need them to be the way I be feeling. We gotta feel the same way. 

Where do you see yourself within the whole Baltimore scene? 

All I'ma say is if it was a Mount Rushmore, I gotta be one of ‘em. I don’t even give a fuck who else on that shit.

Wale: The Weight of a Region

Words by: Lawrence Burney

Photos by: Kyna Uwaeme

For me, Wale’s story continues to be one of the most interesting in rap music because, for many years, I’ve felt like he sort of operates in a perpetual state of limbo. His skills are undeniable. He’s in constant radio and nightclub rotation year after year with catchy songs that keep his name in the mix. If he didn’t explode onto the national stage like he did in the late 2000s, then the DMV rap scene would probably not have produced as many hopeful stars as it has in the years since. There were early co-signs from JAY-Z, and other hip-hop legends. He’s been Grammy nominated. And, as it stands right now, he’s the most important rap artist to ever come from the DC area. It’s even more special that he got to where he is, partially, because he was masterful at joining rap with the formerly-dominant homegrown go-go, making it palatable to the mainstream in ways that it hadn’t been before. But that’s not enough for him. 

Wale wants to be considered along with the greats of his class — the Holy Trifecta of artists who carried the rap ethos of the 90s and 2000s over into the internet age: Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and J Cole. What self-respecting artist from that generation wouldn’t want to be mentioned in those circles? Shit, even artists like Wiz Khalifa and Kid Cudi have dedicated international cult followings. But where things have gotten tricky for the DMV titan is when he’s had contentious ways of expressing the frustration of feeling like he’s being underestimated. And undervalued. There’s no need to get muddled in the specifics. Anyone who’s been on the rap internet for the past decade can attest to the fiery — sometimes head-scratching — debates Wale’s gotten into with complete randoms about how he’s an elite spitter or when he tries to prove that he hasn’t gone Hollywood on DMV artists trying to climb the ladder. The rants, digs at other artists, and what people perceive as whining about support has surely turned some off to the point of no return. And that probably stings for him. Especially considering that the majority of those moments came more than four-five years ago — when he says he wasn’t in the best emotional space — and are still thrown in his face as if that’s the type of time he’s on at every waking moment. 

Wale has made plenty of iconic music moments. “Work” from his 100 Miles & Running mixtape during my high school days still gets the occasional listen. He was possessed on that. His Seinfeld-inspired About Nothing series was one of the best executed rap concepts over the past decade, joining social commentary and comedy into the themes of his songs. “The Bmore Club Slam” produced by Baltimore Club legend Scottie B from that series’ inaugural installment is what made me become an early fan. That track’s opening seconds, where Wale denounces the DC vs Baltimore rivalry and criticizes Baltimore station 92Q for not playing his music, are proof that he’s never shied away from advocating for himself. Ambition felt like he was being molded for superstardom under Rick Ross’s MMG label. A more recent favorite is “June 5th/QueenZnGodZ” from his short 2020 EP, The Imperfect Storm, which was largely inspired by the wave of unrest in response to George Floyd’s killing that year. On it, he talks about the frustration associated with America’s anti-Blackness, pointing out that his daughter had to witness killings by police while scrolling social media. There’s plenty that makes Wale appealing, but there’s also something that often feels vacant in the music and the marketing. 

Every one of the peers that he wants to be in association with have something that anchors them. Drake is unrepentant in his love for cheesy, over-the-top theatrics and has never ran away from being made into internet punchlines. He actually uses them to his advantage when crafting his endless Instagram caption bars. Kendrick Lamar assumed the role of a Nas for millennials: the dude with street ties who didn’t fully jump into that water, but has firsthand accounts of the ramifications that come from that lifestyle and how it affects a generation of kids who can’t escape their affiliations. J. Cole is an everyman whose subject matter hasn’t really changed much since he was a college-aged kid trying to make it. His commitment to being “normal” will help him appeal to 18-25-year-olds for eternity. It’s hard to say what Wale’s hook is. He’s huge with HBCU-adjacent crowds, always has a song on radio, and can rap with anyone, but the music isn’t always vulnerable in a way that makes you feel like you have a deep understanding of him. It’s a feeling more than anything. And, of late, the music feels like it’s almost too on-trend, making sure it hits all the spots to get spins. That seems to be the constant dilemma he finds himself in. How does he, as a decade-plus veteran, breakthrough to the crowds he really wants respect from while making sure he doesn’t fade away commercially? I’m not sure what the answers are. 

During the late summer of 2020, when it felt like the pandemic was maybe coming to an end (we were very wrong), Wale invited me to a couple studio sessions in LA for what I believe turned out to be a couple tracks from his latest album, Folarin II. We talked about how he’s judged by rap fans, the impossible standard he’s held to by the DMV, his desire to reach more people, and the never ending hunger to prove himself. 

You’ve been talking about trying to make a perfect album, or feeling like you got to present perfect shit to be considered. But do you feel like perfection is something worth trying to attain? Or is it more like you just feel like somebody is ready to pick apart any type of deficiencies you might have?

Yes. And I think that anything that I do wrong — I make music for everybody. But for some reason, I can't get it to everybody. And that sometimes frustrates me. And I may not be open about that. But I've been trying to get a different perspective on that shit and not be negative. It's just like, man, I gotta find a way to get it to everybody. Because a lot of people know I've been doing this for sometime. A lot of people don't know. And I want to be in those conversations because I work hard on this shit.

Maybe it's a social media thing that clouds people’s judgment of you. 

I'm really grateful for everything I got. But at the same time, I want to be great too. Nigga, I want to be better, to be honest with you. I know I've done great things, and I've done amazing things. But I still love the art form. I want to still be in the conversation of niggas that I grew up idolizing. I’m in the second quarter of this shit.

Second quarter of your career you mean? 

I think so. I’m getting to my seventh album. 

What does that second career phase look like for you?

I don't know. I want to be one of the leaders of this shit. As far as the direction the culture is going in. The knowledge I've obtained. I want to be able to still be part of it because I enjoy hip-hop, I love it. You feel me?

Do you not feel like you're regarded in that way?

Um, yeah. But it's just like you gotta keep pushing yourself. You gotta keep doing it, otherwise it's going to be like, whatever. But also at the same time, I still want to keep getting better as an artist. I really want to be better as an artist. I want to learn from other niggas. That's why I talk to Thug, I talk to Durk, I talk to niggas around the way just to ask what they think of what’s going on. Because I want to get better, as everything. As an artist, as an entrepreneur, as a producer, song writing. You see all this shit. I want to get better at everything. I've always been into it, but now I just want to get way better at everything. And I think I've been able to show that with my last album. Now it's like okay, what now? And that's where I'm at. Get to it.

Wow…That's Crazy is one of my favorite projects you put out. Not even just recently, in general. It’s super solid. 

I appreciate that. I think that's my best project. But you know, somewhere along the line, I lost the people, maybe. When physical sales was popping, I was always in the top ten. But it is what it is. At this point, I just be like, I want them to hear me. Because I know what I mean to a lot of niggas whether they are in the industry, whether they are just from DC and they've seen it all come up. And I wear that as a badge of honor. I want to make them proud too. Even my biggest critics will begrudgingly fuck with a nigga. And I like that. I want to make everybody from home and everybody from early on to be like damn, I've been here from the long run. From beginning to now. At the same time, I still want to be great. I talk about it all the time. If you listen to songs like “88,” “Legendary” and shit like that.

I think something that's really interesting about your career in general, as opposed to a lot of your peers, is that you’ve made legendary strides on the mainstream level, but you really gave light to a whole fucking region.

Yeah, but sometimes when I say it, people be—

It's just a simple fact. It's not even a debate.

It's just weird, though. I was really young when I came into it. The older people [at home] were like, “We been doing this” and the young niggas was like, “You a rap nigga. This is go-go. We ain’t thinking about that.”

Right.

It's tricky. Sometimes I be like, I ain’t do enough. It's like imposter syndrome. That's what they call it when you're like, why am I here? I don't deserve to be here. Even my baby muva, one time, she was like, "Nigga, you're the first nigga from DC." Even if we’d be arguing and she'd be like, "Nigga you did that for real." But I got to remember that shit, bro. It ain't all the time. It's not all that time.

Do you feel like you gotta consciously remind yourself of what you’ve done?

I don't know, man. I feel like somedays I do. But you know what it is? I got good friends. I got friends like Thug and Cole and Flex and Ade. I got friends that be reminding me. That helped a little bit. It helps. It definitely helps.

Just to know it's just not internal?

Yeah, that helps. It's like, bro, all I want to be great and rep this whole DMV shit. That's all I want to do, put on for niggas that was like me. I never was pressed to be no street nigga. That was always me. Not only my circle, but I represent the niggas like that. And also, children of immigrants. My father drove a cab. My mother worked odd jobs, nursing and everything. We lived in a one bedroom apartment in Northwest. And I remember being robbed on the 4th of July. Somebody ran in our shit. I remember my brother used to fall off the bunk bed and wake everybody up. All types of shit like that.

I think about that. I think about how far I came. I think about, bro, there was a point when nobody thought there would be a rapper from DC. And I did that. But also, as somebody that came up under Jay, up under Ross, I'm like, am I doing it right? Am I helping? Because it will always be like, you don't help [the DMV] and I'm literally trying! You've been with me for two days and you see, I'm trying to get everybody to come through, show love to niggas, and blah blah. I'm trying bro.

We lightly touched on it, but that topic tends to come in waves. It's like you know it’s going to happen every six months. Somebody gonna post about Wale not helping the DMV.

I just don't understand why that narrative exists. Even somebody is going to read this shit and be like, who he help? And it's like, bro. It's just that the people I help, they may not be as passionate about saying, “He helped me,” as I am about defending my own name. And that's cool too. That's fine. That's very, very fine. But I don't know man. I love the DMV so much. I’ve spent time in the studio with Tate Kobang, Rico Nasty came to my old studio before she blew up, me and Shy Glizzy did the “Southside” joint early on. 

As you continue moving forward and continue to stamp a legacy, how do you start to track your success at this point of your career? 

I really can’t track my success. I really can’t bro. I just go in, I do the work and come up with the ideas. I did a freestyle the other day about just being fearful and how I don't trust nobody and shit like that. That's how — right now, in this moment — how I feel. I'm scared of people. I don't trust nobody. I'm so uncomfortable. I'm paranoid. I saw Nipsey die on my Instagram. So I got things in my mind. I'm not all the way right. So, I try. But it’s not a layup at all. 

Do you get into modes where it's like, this is a particular theme that I'm operating in right now, but that don't mean this album is particularly going to be just this? And I don't even mean just sound. I mean a general mode or something that's on your heart as you’re recording.

That was like The Imperfect Storm. Right now I'm recollecting, it could be something previous. There's no urgency for me to talk about today. And Imperfect Storm was urgent. Everything is right now. Getting your mind back off that and getting into album mode, that's why I really don't have an idea. I'm just trying to make everything as good as I can. But it's like bro, I hear Imperfect Storm was flawless, it's perfect. It's my best EP I've ever put out, and it's my most recent project. That should show you musically where I'm at. But it just didn't reach the people it was supposed to reach. I know in my heart of hearts. I wanted to make a project in real time. I want people to know what I'm thinking, how I feel.

Diary: Joony

Sometimes I feel helpless. Like I’m in a fuckin time loop. On some prisoner shit. There’s certain aspects of me that aren’t there to benefit me and it gets hard to deal with. Sometimes I just don’t know what to do about it.

 I hate that shit. I really love everyone. Genuinely. But sometimes I can’t find that same love for myself. Sometimes I wish my dad never got sick so he could’ve had the chance to give me some tough love. I wish he beat my ass a few times so I wouldn’t have ended up like this. I feel like, since birth, I’ve evaded discipline in almost every way, shape, and form. And it’s starting to take a toll on my life and how I’m navigating through young adulthood. 

 Sometimes I wish I could do more for my mom yo.

 I hate seeing her work. She lost her husband and had to take care of him for 10 years until his body finally gave up. That shit’s sick yo. I know me, Memie, and Buta is all she has left and that’s why I been tryna quit the drugs. This shit get hard bro. I can’t let anything happen to me for my family’s sake. I love them so much. Sometimes I just wanna cry (lol), but I got shit to do and shit to prove. The fans, my family, and this music shit be the only things that kinda keep me happy. If I ain’t have this shit I don’t know what the fuck I’d be on. 

Diary: Zhariah

Photos by Diamond Dixon

One thing 2021 taught me is that moving by yourself in certain situations is key. For an artist a strong team is what can make or break you. As an independent artist once you get to a certain level where you're getting recognized by established artists and A&R’s you have to remember that you got their attention by being yourself. You created something that sparked their  interest and you need to keep going. It's easy to get lost in your head and think you have to outdo yourself or outdo your competition but honestly, you just have to do what makes you happy. Once you turn your outlet into a job it gets frustrating  (unless you're signed) Then it’s honestly the best job ever. Sometimes as humans we operate in a way that society tells us. We're told to humble ourselves or to be nicer, especially Black women. Black women are always afraid to be the villain and why is that? I think in 2022 and beyond, knowing your worth is also demanding of people to pay you respect.  As an artist that means getting paid your worth especially if you know you're the best performer on the list. As a woman that means eliminating the narrative that we have to be less intense. Women never get to be in their villain era and most times that just means being direct and taking no one's BS. Men get to be direct all the time and I believe now that applies to women. You know what you bring to every environment and it's imperative that others around you know that. Personally I think that's how I manifest everything I want. I see what I want and I go after it no matter how big or scary it may be. I also know when I'm the best in the room and I don't downplay myself to seem more humble. I am very humble, but I also know that I have to be my biggest cheerleader. 

The moment I started listening to multiple sources was the time that my career didn't perform as well as it has in the past. I realized at the end of 2021 that only I know what's best for me and my career. I think that's a part of having intuition, even when my health went bad I knew that I needed a certain diet and I also know what life path is perfect for me. I decided instead of college, I want to put my all into my EP because I believe it will bring me the abundance I desire. I know that my goal isn't to have a cap and gown in 3 years, my goal is to be signed by a label that supports my brand and vision.  That’s because intuitively I know what's best for me at this time and I want anyone that supports me to know that it's not about following your dreams, it's about doing what you feel because our time on Earth is short and we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Society will always tell us what we should be doing at certain parts in our life when we should just be doing what we want to do. Everything is not black and white. There's multiple ways to get our desired outcome.

Shordie Shordie: From Northeast Baltimore to the Stratosphere

Wordy by: Alphonse Pierre

Photos by SHAN Wallace

Shordie Shordie may be the biggest rapper Baltimore has yet to see, but he’s having a relatively mundane day. He’s passing the time by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare until he has to help his son with the online school duties thrust upon parents in the pandemic. “These virtual classes some bullshit,” admits the frustrated 24-year-old over FaceTime, in a bedroom with the blinds shut so tight like he’s afraid of the sun. “I don’t understand it, and my son is too young for this shit.” Shordie is grounded, still in touch with everyday life, and hanging around the same parts where he grew up: Baltimore’s Northeast side. He acknowledges that he probably shouldn’t spend as much time in the city as he does because with popularity comes a rise in attention both positive and negative. 

Born RaQuan Hudson, Shordie’s connection to Baltimore is too deep to leave for good; he never sounds more at peace than when he’s listing his favorite places in town to grab a bite: Valentino’s, Italiano’s, and East Perry Carryout. Though, you won’t catch Shordie romanticizing his neighborhood. He speaks about how it’s transformed from underdeveloped and defunded, into a family-oriented area. After getting his football playing dreams ripped away from an injury, Shordie turned to the only other thing that seemed comfortable. “In my head it felt like a nigga just told me, ‘You gotta go to the streets,’” he says. He spent most of his days aimless, hanging out with his friends in the park, and trying to find ways to make fast cash. 

One day, after he graduated from high school, a freestyle session erupted on the block and turned into Shordie’s friends pushing him into a studio. “I didn’t even fall in love with music; I was falling in love with how niggas was embracing me,” he says, smoking out of his bedroom window. “There wasn’t a lot of niggas rapping in the city, so getting love felt like I had a key to a golden door.” Around the same time, he formed a trio with his brother Lor Dee and his cousin Purp called Peso Da Mafia. In 2017, the crew dropped “Money Man,” a dancing-ass-rap-song, which became a regional hit. “I feel like Money Man, I do the money dance,” Shordie raps with a scratchy-voiced melody on the hook, unleashing a persona with the ceaseless energy of Russell Westbrook’s MVP season. This combination would quickly turn him into a local star. 

At the end of 2018, Shordie released his breakout mixtape, Captain Hook. Over melancholy piano beats that sound familiar to the production in the Deep South, Shordie wails, coos, and sometimes even howls stories about heartbreak and struggle. Lyrically, the mixtape resembles records from Lil Baby or Lil Durk, with how easily Shordie swings from lighthearted sex rhymes to gloomy autobiographical stories. “Make money/Chill wit the crew, I really don’t know what we can do/Take money/We used to rob, you move you know we gon shoot,” he raps on “Voice Mail.” It’s like you’re shadowing him through Baltimore. Then, there’s “Focused,” where his life seems like a blur of getting high, hitting up girls, and trying to find ways to secure some bread. No relationship to Baltimore is needed to understand where he’s coming from. 

But it was the final track on Captain Hook that would forever engrave him in Baltimore hip-hop lore. Earlier this year at a show in Silver Spring, Maryland, Shordie’s childhood friends appeared  from backstage with his platinum plaque for “Bitchuary,” which made him the first Baltimore rapper to have a platinum single. “Real niggas cried,” he admits, reflecting on the moment. 

On the surface, “Bitchuary” is pure fun; Shordie lays his croaky and colorful melody over a YG! Beats-instrumental that has the upbeat vibe of a West Coast anthem. You could imagine L.A.’s Shoreline Mafia or Vallejo’s SOB x RBE on the same beat. But it’s the hook that stands out. “‘Cause bitch, you a, bitch, you a/Bitch, you a, bitch, you a, bitch, you a, bitch, you a/Bitch, you a dog and your homegirl too, ayy,” Shordie wails on the chorus: after one listen it’ll be memorized. “Bitchuary” may be a party record, but it was made through pain. “If you slow it down, and I let up on my energy, ‘Bitchuary’ is really a sad song,” says the 24-year-old. “That song was made when I was depressed in Atlanta, going through it, feeling real lonely and overlooked.” The platinum-selling record has a perfect balance: It sounds like a smooth DJ set cheat code, but it’s layered with relatable musings on growing up in a neglected city and being numb to traumatic surroundings — an element present in much of Baltimore’s most popular hip-hop. 

Still, the city having major rappers of its own seemed like a pipedream. Shordie can’t exactly pinpoint why the city couldn’t get a rap scene off of the ground, but he does partially blame a mentality that swept through Baltimore. “Niggas have too much pride. If someone has too much going on, people want to stop them,” says Shordie with exasperation. “Baltimore is the murder capital; a lot of time things stop before they get started. Before we couldn’t even have a block party without it getting shot up. But it’s changing now. We can do block parties and niggas don’t bring bad energy. Good things come with that.” 

Baltimore’s rap scene finally began to develop solid roots of its own in the 2010s. Dancing-ass-songs, of course, like Lor Scoota’s “Bird Flu” (if we lived in a just world, the boy who hit the dance in the patterned polo would have gotten his own show on Disney) and Young Moose’s “Dumb Dumb” were foundational. Both gave voices to the Black youth of Baltimore, who were finally in control of their own stories. Then there was “Bank Rolls” by Shordie’s older cousin Tate Kobang. Similar to “Bitchuary,” it has an irresistible dance rhythm — it’s produced by Baltimore club artist Rod Lee — and every word that leaves Tate’s mouth is memorable. But it’s deeper; the song feels like you’re on an It’s A Wonderful Life-style tour through Tate Kobang’s hometown. Yet, there was always something around the corner that curbed their momentum, and even Baltimore’s signature rap songs weren’t reaching the heights they should. It was a long and grueling fight to be recognized, which made the success of Shordie Shordie’s platinum record feel like a sigh of relief: a rapper from Baltimore could breakthrough — it was possible. 

It wouldn’t be outrageous to say that Captain Hook is one of the stronger rap mixtapes of 2018. Each of the nine tracks is a moment, and it’s since become as foundational to Baltimore’s hip-hop scene as “Bird Flu,” “Dumb Dumb,” and “Bank Rolls” were. “It showed niggas how important projects can be,” says Shordie. “Like one song and visuals are cool, but when you put it on a project it really bangs.” 

Aside from a few singles, like 2019’s Shoreline Mafia-assisted “Both Sides,” the mixtape’s success gave Shordie time to follow-up his breakthrough. This past April he put out More Than Music, a brighter and more upbeat project. More Than Music isn’t the same unskippable feat that Captain Hook is, but it does carry some of Shordie’s best songs yet. Most notable is “Save a Little,” where his purposely off-key and nasally voice deliver the gloom: “Come from where the kill and they drill, it’s a lifestyle/Give that a boy a chance and he will do it right now/Cop a couple grands, to get to banging off a trap phone/Feds come round’ now he old when he come home.” Similarly, “L.O.V.” is essential; it’s a bitter love ballad that if sung by an R&B singer might be more dramatic than that time Tyrese threw a tantrum on the floor in the “How You Gonna Act Like That” video. But Shordie’s swagger is too cool and calm for all of that. Though, like countless other artists making music in this time, Shordie’s record has been impacted by the global pandemic. “It’s hard cause I was going to tour and really push this,” shrugs Shordie. “It was a setback for real.” 

Regardless of unforeseen obstacles, More Than Music remains another step forward for Baltimore’s hip-hop scene. “It don’t matter if you get a million dollars tomorrow; it don’t matter if you find yourself a nice studio, if you skip them steps you won’t make it,” says Shordie, speaking quickly and passionately about the exciting scene that he has helped build in his city. “As long as I’m alive, it’s up in Baltimore.” The curse has been lifted.

Navigating Virality From Baltimore's 2015 Uprising

Shawna Murray-Browne / Photo: Joshua Slowe

During the final week of April 2015, Shawna Murray-Browne and a couple friends decided to hit the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenue (locally known as Penn-North) on the city’s westside to make their presence felt. What brought them and thousands of others — from near and far — to the streets of West Baltimore was the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore City Police nearly three weeks prior. On April 12th of 2015, Gray was arrested by officers for possessing a knife. According to witnesses at the scene who filmed the incident around Gray’s Gilmor Homes, officers used excessive force, including knees to the back of his neck and bending his legs backwards to get him into the police van. Unable to move due to this handling, Gray arrived at the University of Maryland shock trauma center in Downtown Baltimore in a coma. During the week following his arrival, Gray had three broken vertebrae, including his spine being 80% severed at his neck. On April 19th, Gray died while still in a coma, a week after his arrest. 

At the time of his death, Murray-Browne, an integrative psychotherapist, was working in Baltimore City public schools as a community coordinator and had become especially focused on what was happening in the wake of Gray’s passing. Her practice at the time was primarily centered around equipping Black children and their parents with the tools to process what was happening throughout the city in a way that resonated with them culturally. 

“On the one hand it was really beautiful because you saw an outpouring of folks who are not from the city of Baltimore, ain’t never been here, and might not ever come, actually show some interest in solidarity,” Murray-Browne said during a stroll through Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park on a sunny, yet windy March afternoon. “But the downside of the white gaze and the way that media was portraying that experience meant that only certain stories were amplified. And the people who have been doing movement work were framed in a way that was commodified. Framed in a way that was clickbait and not really telling the depth of the work.” 

She found herself directly affected by being seen through that gaze in the aftermath of her trek to Penn-North that day. Dressed in all white with a headwrap to match, Shawna and company came with healing properties such as crystals and sage to cleanse the space. A photo of her — sitting on the ground with her legs crossed, eyes closed, and sage in hand while people embrace each other in the background — was captured and spread like wildfire on Facebook and Instagram. It has become both a highlight and a dehumanizing experience for Murray-Browne since who had hoped that her virality would have resulted in some outside interest in her healing work. It mostly just attracted people using her photo as a meme that incorporated spirituality into internet jokes. She laughingly admits that a few were comical, but many teetered on a dangerous line. 

Most opportunistic was when someone from Mom’s Organic Market realized that Murray-Browne had a tote bag of theirs in the photo and reposted it to their social channels, completely ignoring the necessary context needed. “Essentially they were using my image to draw more business for them,” she assessed while sitting on a park bench. 

On those same streets during April 2015’s unrest, a host of others began to experience hypervisibility due to their participation in bellowing out their frustrations in the name of Freddie Gray, along with the unanticipated residual effects that came along with it. 

Kwame Rose / Photo: Joshua Slowe

The footage of Kwame Rose feverishly contending with Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera’s right-wing on-the-ground reporting is one of the more recognizable moments from that time. Rose, 21 then, donned a black snapback cap turned backwards, a black zip-up hoodie and an intensity in his gaze that can be felt through the screen when you go back and watch it now. In the time since, he’s essentially become a face of that movement, both by outsider media’s hunger for content and his own motivations to be heard. He was a central character in the HBO-produced, Baltimore Rising, a documentary that followed activists, cops, and community members in the wake of the unrest. And since, he’s been the subject of protest news specials by outlets like VICE, as well as working in the Baltimore City mayor’s office under Catherine Pugh, the city’s mayor from 2016-2019. 

“When Freddie Gray died that was the first time I ever participated in protest,” Rose recalled sitting on a stool on the rooftop of his Downtown Baltimore apartment building. “I never imagined that me being out at a protest, that my life would be like this. But I guess it’s life.” 

The video of Rose letting off steam to Geraldo amassed millions of views across social media in a span of 24 hours and it catapulted him to a life that he wasn’t remotely prepared for. Before that, the spirit of community mindedness was in his work, but it was in its embryonic stages. 

When he returned home from college in Texas a couple years before the unrest, Rose and a few friends started a nonprofit organization called Brothers In Action that worked out of West Baltimore’s Booker T. Washington middle school, providing life skill training and field trips with young men who weren’t performing well academically. But after witnessing the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown (both around the same age as him), Rose felt the urge to involve himself on the ground when fatal policing was shaking his hometown. And like many, the decision to do so led to quick viral fame with little-to-no preparation for the aftermath — both negative and positive — that would follow it. 

Devin Allen / Photo: Joshua Slowe

On the other side of the camera during this time, instead of being the subject of moments being captured, photographer Devin Allen was doing the shooting himself. But, in a number of ways, he was poised for the contributions he’s made to giving the world an intimate look at Black Baltimore’s struggle for liberation. 

In the early part of the 2010’s Allen began to ingratiate himself with Baltimore’s creative community by trying his hand at taking photos. It was a hobby — a way for him to develop a new skill as the pressures of being a young father were starting to intensify. He’d shoot young artists in the city who needed photos more regularly as social media’s role in marketing began to ramp up. Around this same time, a high school friend of his named Sean Gamble was killed in a shooting that involved an off-duty cop outside of Baltimore’s Select Lounge in January of 2011. The off-duty cop, William Torbit Jr., was also killed when police officers arrived to a heated altercation outside the club, unaware that he was an officer as well. 

“When he got killed, everybody was protesting and at the time, in my headspace, I was like, ‘Protesting don’t get you nowhere, man. This is life. It is what it is,’” Allen says while sitting in the kitchen of his Baltimore home. “So in 2014 when Mike Brown died, me and some others went to the local protest. Just seeing all the people congregating like that, it was so indescribable because that was my first time. After that, from already being inspired by Gordon Parks, I always tried to make my work meaningful.” 

A year later, fueled by the memory of his friend Sean and the uptick in police brutality against Black people across the U.S., Allen hit the front lines of Baltimore’s unrest in response to Freddie Gray’s death. A photo he captured downtown, with a man running towards a cop car with his face covered, has been synonymous with The Uprising since, landing him a cover on TIME magazine, a full-time job shooting campaigns for Under Armour, and a fellowship at The Gordon Parks Foundation. 

“I think a lot of people already had their purpose but that made people more eager and stronger,” he remembers of 2015’s Uprising. “It’s sad but I feel like it might have been the best thing to happen to Baltimore because he gave a lot of people a voice. He made a lot of us more powerful. And it put a lot of the issues that we get blamed for, it got put on the politics in Baltimore. If the Freddie Gray situation never happened you would have never seen a lot of stuff that was happening here get aired out. Even Barack Obama was calling our kids thugs.”

Virality (the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another) is at the root of popular culture in today’s society. More often than not, it’s used as a tool and proof that whatever you create (even your online persona itself) has the cache to attract a mass audience. And if you can prove that you’re able to do this with any amount of regularity, then you can leverage that influence to make money or to get to the next step of your career. This is especially true in the creative fields of the past five-to-six years. 

More than ever before, the music industry is signing artists like Bhad Baby, Lil Nas X, and countless TikTok stars to record deals because their popularity stands the chance of being a great tool to sell music and ad space. In 2015, a woman named Zola went on a 148-tweet long thread about a crazy road trip from Detroit to Florida for a quick cash come up at a strip club. The thread made so much traction that film studio A24 (Moonlight, Uncut Gems, Midsommar) is adapting it into a film that’ll be out later this year. 

But in the case of going viral for your involvement in a movement that wouldn’t have existed if a 25-year-old Black man wasn’t killed by police, complications are all but guaranteed because activism isn’t perceived as something that should ever be self-serving. Murray-Browne, Rose and Allen all spoke on the lasting effects that virality had on them both during and after The Uprising:

Shawna Murray-Browne:

Folks don’t have any appreciation for the beauty of Black folk. They just saw a Black woman in white garb and used the image and also conflated multiple Black women as one being, so it led to a dehumanization process. And so the way that it informed my work later is a couple of things: one, I ended up actually establishing Healing Bmore Activists as an intentional initiative that would do more than just sporadically hold healing space for change makers in the city but would actually talk about things that were seldom discussed around racial battle fatigue, superwoman schema, John Henryism and really put it in a context where folks can remember how to heal themselves. And think about how to incorporate those healing technologies in the movement work that they’re doing. 

Kwame Rose:

The day before the Geraldo video I had like 43 followers on Twitter. I don’t think I ever sent a tweet. It automatically jumped to thousands of people knowing who I am and being on every major news channel. I had no choice. And still figuring out how to feed myself from all of this and for a while I didn’t. I don’t regret any of it. I’ve been able to have experiences I never dreamed of. 

Folks see you a certain way and what they don’t realize is that you’re still a person tryna navigate life. It’s hard. I don’t wanna talk about niggas dying everyday because that’s what my career is. I go through this thing all the time where — my whole career, no matter how successful I get is built off of people dying or trauma or pain. Even during Covid-19, yeah we’ve been able to feed all these thousands of meals and pay millions of dollars plus to restaurants but it’s all at the expense of people suffering. We’ve been able to help but why can’t I do something where I don’t gotta solve people’s pain? Because then I gotta take that home. 

I have spent my entire adult life in the public eye. Since three weeks before my 21st birthday, I’ve been on TV, on camera, folks have known me. And in a way, for me, I feel like I’m judged and criticized a lot more for my mistakes because I’m supposed to be this perfect hero. And I’ve learned over the years I don’t care about nobody’s opinion of what it is I should or shouldn’t be doing.

Devin Allen: 

It’s a burden that I gotta bear. My career is built on the broken back of Freddie Gray. Period. Everything I have, all my success is always gonna be tied back to that, regardless. Even if you look at George Floyd I’ma be tied to that too because I had the TIME cover that represented their story. I understand having a larger purpose in life and God put you in positions for those moments but it is a heavy burden. Like, a lot of people don’t know I was suicidal. Growing up in the hood, I’ve seen people get shot. It’s a part of the culture here and a lot of Black communities. And I’m so used to it, but that’s different. To be getting tear gassed and pepper sprayed, dealing with PTSD. And around that time it was so much going on and I ain’t have nobody to talk to. Everybody’s championing me. I’m meeting everybody. John Singleton comes to Baltimore and does a talk over at Douglass, I go take a picture and bring him a magazine. Carmelo [Anthony] in town, let’s go eat crabs with Melo. 

But when I go lay down at night it’s like yo, this shit’s crazy. I’m stressed out. I’m tryna run around everywhere, I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating. I’m working at night, go take pictures, everybody wants me here and there. And then people still need me on the front lines. It just got to a point where I just broke. 

In the years since Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore has been forced — on a institutional level — to reckon with much of what has been wrong with the city for decades. A year-long investigation of the Baltimore Police Department by the US Department of Justice concluded that the city's officers engaged in unconstitutional practices, leading to disproportionate rates of stops, searches, and arrests of black residents. 44 percent of their stops were made in two predominantly black neighborhoods, which made up only 11 percent of the city's population. Black residents accounted for 95 percent of the 410 individuals police stopped over ten times from 2010 to 2016. 

In the years following the DOJ report another police scandal surfaced with the Gun Trace Task Force, a special unit whose members all engaged in racketeering, planting drugs on citizens, and robbing others at gunpoint. The majority of those officers were all handed federal prison time between 2017-2019. In 2020, former mayor Catherine Pugh was sentenced to three years in federal prison for fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion. And in 2021, federal prosecutors began to investigate City Hall office of Council President Nick Mosby and his wife, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby for their businesses, travel and tax deductions. The need for accountability in Baltimore has been felt with intensity over the past six years, and that has reached the activist community as well. Both Kwame Rose and Devin Allen have faced criticism for their alliances to people and corporations that don’t exactly line up with what some deem ethical. 

In Rose’s case, he worked in Catherine Pugh’s office as well as with Bernie Sanders during his most recent campaign trail. When asked about those decisions he said, “I will say this unapologetically until the day I die: Free fucking Catherine Pugh,” with passion. “That wasn’t just a politician to me. That woman is like my grandmother. That woman is my friend. I talk to her damn near daily from federal prison. She offered me a job to come learn how government works.” 

“Joe Biden’s team reached out to me last year and asked me to do some work for them. I don’t fuck with Biden’s politics,” he continued. “There’s a price tag that comes with this. This is something I get paid for that I have expertise in. Y’all need my help for community engagement or outreach? Y’all are gonna be clients. So there is a strategic process in a way. Number one, if someone’s paying for my expertise on a situation of what they should do then yes, I am gonna approach it from a business perspective because that’s how I’ve been able to change this from just being a young broke activist who everybody loved and was on TV to actually putting myself in a position where I get paid for my thoughts. The system ain’t going nowhere and we know it’s broken but it’s about how can we affect the most tangible change.”

For Allen, the criticism that he’s faced is for working for Under Armour, who gave the photographer his own line of shoes and apparel this year in which a portion of the proceeds go to teaching photography to local youth. In 2011, the company’s CEO, Kevin Plank, contributed $100,000 to the Baltimore City Police Department’s southern district as part of an initiative to provide it with new bikes, tasers, and computers. In 2016 it was announced that Plank was investing $5.5 billion into developing the Port Covington area of South Baltimore, which would effectively lead to more racial and class disparities in the city. 

“This is my thing, at the end of the day I’m a human being. I’m from West Baltimore,” Allen says to those critiques.  “You coming at me for working at Under Armour but you won’t come at a lot of people in the activist community who went to Johns Hopkins. You can go there and it’s ok — and we know everything that school has done. I gotta provide for my family but what you also gotta understand is that I’m looking at it like that can give me a way to affect these kids. I can use my support from Under Armor to do good things in the community and pay it forward. I’m a photographer. I never came out here and said I’m an activist. You never hear me talk about politics. I stay in my lane. Everybody got a role. Some people are meant to organize. Some people are meant to document. You can call me a concerned citizen. Everybody has a purpose. We gotta stop policing people.” 

As far as the lasting effects all of this has had Allen, Rose, and Murray-Browne, each seem to have a tight grasp on how this shaped them for the better — and to be a better resource to their communities. 

“There’s social movements like the textbook version and then the social movements like the way we been shaking shit up that might not be described as a social movement,” Murray-Browne reflects as we wrap up at Druid Hill. “For me it’s a reminder of why it’s important for us to know our history and why it’s important for me to center Black history over everybody else and everything else because if we forget then we’ll take the same missteps our ancestors took in trying to change stuff. The lasting impact on me is I’ve really been trying to contend with what does it mean to be free. What is liberation? And what is my responsibility to this particular location here in Baltimore City? What is my responsibility to the African diaspora altogether? So it has really put me in a place of thinking about legacy.”

Support for this project was provided by Open Society Foundations

RSVP to True Laurels Issue 05 Launch

A celebration for the release of the fifth issue of Baltimore + DMV-focused music and culture magazine, True Laurels. The event will provide the public with the first look at the new issue. Magazines and True Laurels' "—just to live—" hoodies will be available for purchase. A few surprises in store as well.

Where: SOMEWHERE®

1239 First Street Southeast

Washington, DC 20003

When: Sun, February 23, 2020

2:00 PM – 5:00 PM

RSVP HERE.

For The Love of Lexington Market

In her own words, Baltimore-born photographer SHAN Wallace talks about the intention behind her Golden Time of the Hour project, in which she regularly documented the patrons of Lexington Market, an iconic Baltimore landmark that was established 1782. This year, thanks to $40 million in financing and new management, the market will be closed and renovated, leaving many Baltimoreans to believe that what has made it such a treasure will be disposed of in order to accomodate transplants. Below, SHAN talks about her fondest memories of the congregational space and why it holds such value in her heart:

I think the first time I went to Lexington Market with my camera was in 2015 and the reason I did it, at that time, I was still tryna figure out what type of photographer I wanted to be, what type of work I would make. And Lexington Market was a place where I felt comfortable, it was a place that was very familiar for me. I went a couple times but stopped because I'd yet to conceptualize my work. I hadn't thought about what would be my purpose for doing it. I started back about 6 or 7 months later. It was like, I have this camera, and I wanna photograph people in an environment that gets ignored. I started going every Saturday then started going a few times a week. Then I started giving people physical copies of photos [of themselves] because I saw it as a way to collaborate with people so we could have joint ownership of the work. But it was also a way to spread love and positivity at Lexington Market. It was transformative for me because I saw how people’s impressions and self-esteem changed once I engaged them. At the time it was just something I wanted to do but then that graduated to knowing the market was gonna change. I loved reconnecting with some people that I'd seen throughout my entire childhood. 

On a personal level, Lexington Market was one of the few memories I have of my mother who died when I was in the 11th grade. We would get flavored water, we would get pretzels, she would get cornbeef sandwiches, I would get chicken. It was always a place we’d go for many reasons: to get food, to meet people, to see her friends, to go shopping. It was like a hub. It was a part of our weekly ritual. This project is very personal because a lot of the people I photograph are a part of the same community as my mother. My intuition tells me that. Some of those people have worked there for over 20 years. I went to go talk to one lady—she was a janitor—and I was like, “You know, you’ve been working here since I was a kid,” and she was like, “Yeah, I’ve worked here for 27 years.” I felt connected to the city there. It’s very Black Baltimore. Even going to high school—I lived in East Baltimore but I went to Edmondson [in West Baltimore]—I would have to go right across the street from the market to catch the 23 bus or the 40 bus to school. So as I got older, it was a place I would see my friends. I got in a shit ton of fights there. So to hear it was changing only motivated me to think more critically about the work and the project and the process. 

During the project, I started to connect with more people and I started to actually talk to the people who ran the market because I was just doing this on my own. I started to learn about the market’s mission and its core values from a corporate level. I learned that the market is one of the longest running markets in the world. It’s so old that slaves were sold there in the basement. They’d get held and fed down there and then they’d be brought out front to be sold. There are Baltimore Sun archives of ads that confirm this. Learning about that added a lot of context to my everyday conversations. These personal histories are tied to the market. My goal wasn’t to create a story that a reporter could do. Anyone could come to Lexington Market and take pictures. But what I wanted to do was, I really wanted to have moments and memories attached to the photographs I was taking. I knew I had to continue and it was hard because I was traveling a lot and I always wanna be there. But I knew I had other places to be so I really had to organize and be intentional about what time I was going. 

Before then, I always felt like it had this bad rep. We all know, you can go there to get anything: drugs, clothes, food. And it’s populated with all sorts of people from addicts to dealers to students to working class people to homeless to people that work around there. A lot of the businesses that were around there over 10 years ago aren’t there anymore so a lot of the surrounding parts of Lexington Market have changed. It was important for me to step out and get those surrounding parts like the homies outside the hair store or the Israelites on the side preaching their word. It rewarded me with a lot of words of encouragement. So many of those people are part of my chosen family who still stay in touch with me. In the beginning, it was like I had to help people understand how to engage with me because so many people weren’t used to having their photos taken. Giving people photographs was one of the biggest parts because it became an agreement. It was a way to collaborate and a way to build that trust and love. It was an honor. 

Diary: Miss Kam

Today I’m on a mission. On a mission to manifest everything big and small. To become the woman I’ve dreamed of being. I am blessed and grateful to be alive! I feel like I’m on top of the world. This past week has been extremely enlightening. I’ve been seeing my dreams and goals manifest before my eyes. I’ve become closer to God. I feel so in tune with my purpose. I’m starting to see why everything is happening. I know that I am someone great. I am destined to change a lot of narratives for a lot of people. I am destined to be beyond successful. I am MISS KAM. I am the greatest female artist of all time. I am leading the revolution of music in 2020. I am shaping the future for myself, loved ones, and the world. I am genius-level talented and creative. I am what the game and industry have been looking for and craving. I am the IT girl. I have everything I want and need to succeed and be the best. I gain everything I want and need to succeed and be the best. That is my word.

I declare this as a beginning of a new cycle. The change is here now. The beginning of abundance, overflow, surplus. I am grateful for everything I have experienced thus far. I am grateful for every loss, for they have been replenished with something greater. I am grateful for the pain I have felt, for this joy feels so much better.

“Things don’t happen to you, they happen for you.” I’m not really sure what this is for, but I have faith in you God. I have faith that everything is going to be ok. I don’t know how, but I just know. Everyday I’m alive is a day full of miracles. I am divinely guided by God, my angels, and my ancestors. No weapon formed against me shall prosper. It never has, and it never will. Amen.

How Space + Time Informed Abdu Ali's FIYAH!!!

It’s not often that, in real time, you can sense that someone will be the type of artist that’ll be studied, analyzed, and borrowed from for decades beyond their genesis. But Baltimore’s Abdu Ali has felt like one of those artists for nearly ten years. Their music intertwines the sounds of Baltimore club music, punk, rap, and jazz in a way that feels like a new genre is being carved out, but no one has come up with a suitable way to categorize it just yet. In the early days of Ali’s artistry—on projects like Invictos & Push + Slay—that multiplicity of sound was there, but the most prevalent feature was their rage. Industrial synths, unhinged wails, and club music 808s laid the foundation for Ali to share their feelings of being ignored (or, in some cases, discarded) by society for defiantly existing as their true self. That palatable fury came through in full force, but with that, Ali’s music often felt like it was best suited for witnessing in a venue setting, when the transferrable energy of nightlife crowds would physically bolster those feelings. 

Over the past four years or so, Ali’s music has kept those core principles and energy in tact, but has been smoothed out by components of free jazz. The addition of that has drawn parallels between Ali and the likes of greats such as Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, artists who used jazz in an unconventional format to articulate and imagine alternative worlds for Black people to thrive, completely apart from the ills of the physical realms they descended upon at birth. 

The artistic evolution of Abdu Ali reached its highest peak last year when they released, FIYAH!!!, an album inspired by a literary magazine from the 1920’s titled FIRE!! made by queer Black writers and thinkers. The publication, according to Ali, felt like a direct reflection of their own career-long artistic mission. Through 14 tracks, the album is stitched together by gripping interludes, cries for the feeling of freedom, and openness about their mental health. It’s the type of album that feels like it can equally be enjoyed in a club, over a glass of wine in a dimly lit living room, or being studied in a college course centered around artistic expression. In a recent conversation, I talked with Ali about the time they took to make FIYAH!!!, how the literary magazine influenced their artistry, and how they’d like people to process their work. 

How have you been feeling about the reception of your most recent album, FIYAH!!!?

The people are really loving it and I’m loving that the people are instantly being criticially engaged with the work. It’s not just like, ‘Oh it sounds good” or “I really like this song,” people are giving critical analysis. People are getting out what I want them to get out of the album. 

This is by far the longest you’ve ever taken between albums. Mongo came out in 2016. What was going on with you in the time in between?

Chile. I was a mess. I always try to stay on my hustle and do my thing but me constantly touring for 4-5 years kinda drove me insane. I felt spiritually and mentally unbalanced. I really do love performing. You can’t fully understand Abdu Ali until you come to my show, but touring is work. It’s not fun. It's fun when you on stage and the people are giving you love or whatever, but it’s a lot of work. You gotta drive long hours, take a lot of flights, be hungry, be dehydrated, deal with shitty promoters, shitty sound. Even the after effects of touring can be tough because when you tour, you’re constantly on a high. When you come home it’s like, what is my life about? But I intentionally took a break so I could focus on creating an album. When you’re in a show space it’s completely different from being in a creativity space. When I’m on tour it’s really hard to make music and I was shook when I came back because I felt like I had nothing to say. But I had to realize that I have to take time for myself for that energy to come back. 

What excites me about FIYAH!!! the most—and I been around since the beginning, literally was there when you made your first song—is being able to take it in when it was close to completion instead of every step of the way. Did you purposely isolate yourself from friends in order to get this done?

I’m really shy about sharing my music in general and sometimes you do need to not share your work with your close friends because they can’t sometimes provide a nuanced opinion on your work. It’s not that I purposely isolated myself from friends, I isolated myself from everybody. Last year I was pretty introverted which I needed to do to make this album. I even isolated myself from music; I tried not to listen to a lot of current music because it can influence your work heavily and I wanna be as original as possible. 

One of coolest things about the project that most people probably don’t know is that it’s inspired by a literary magazine of the same title but a different spelling (Fire!!). It was published in New York City in 1926—damn near 100 years ago—and had work by people like Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and the list goes on. 

It’s crazy because they made it when they were just becoming who they are to the world and it was made in Harlem in this place they called the Niggerati Manor. 

Why did you name the album after that? What did this publication do for you creatively, just as a person absorbing it? 

As a Black queer person in America, it was just so refreshing and affirming to see people that I looked up to that were gay, lesbian, queer Black people almost 100 years ago make a body of work that’s not just good, but it’s buck and provocative. It talks about sexuality and colorism. All these things you wouldn’t expect people to be talking about at that time. A lot of people don't know, but it was very hard for them to get funding for that book because people saw it as too radical. Even the NAACP wasn’t trying to give them money because it didn’t represent the “upstanding Negro” they were tryna paint at that time. The book really just felt like me and what I try to do with my music. 

I wanna talk about the concept of accessibility when it comes to Black alternative artists and how that can be conflicting sometimes. On your first couple projects like Invictos and Push + Slay, you were reimagining the limits of Baltimore Club. But even still, because of how the music was arranged, it wasn’t easy to grasp for everybody. Your average listener of club music wasn’t expecting somebody to flip the genre in that type of way. Fast forward to Mongo and now with the new album, the sounds started to become more well-rounded musically. Would you say you’ve had a more universal reception since you started to rethink how you wanna make music with adding jazz and funk? 

In the beginning it was more of me being a baby musician and not really knowing how to shape my sound and make it accessible to my damn self. It wasn’t matured yet. So a lot of people not being able to understand it was me not being at a place where I’m mature with my sound. But then on the other end, people really can’t take experimental music—which I think is funny especially with the Baltimore Club music that I was making. I took the baton from Blaqstarr who is one of my favorite music artists of all time. When I heard Blaqstarr’s “Rider Girl” and “Tote It” and all these amazing Baltimore Club classic tracks, it made me realize that club music can be radical yet tangible songs. A whole moment. I felt like nobody was able to do that before—maybe Miss Tony. Blaqstarr was otherworldly. I knew that was gonna be the backbone of my music. But as the years went by I started learning more, I did get to a point where I wanted my music to be enjoyable by everybody. Good music is music that everybody can touch. I don’t really care for avant garde artists that make music that is purposely inaccessible because it comes off as elitist.  

You have a song on FIYAH!!! titled “Spiraling.” Earlier you talked about having to recalibrate yourself mentally and spiritually. Would you say this song is the soundtrack to that process? 

Shoutout to DJ Haram, one of the best DJs and producers in the world. She just does it right every time she makes me a beat. I sent her the vocals for the chorus and I asked can she make music around it. Also shoutout to Juliana Huxtable who uses the word “spiraling” a lot. But the song isn’t just about me, it’s about what I think a lot of millennials are going through right now with mental health and tryna navigate the internet and all these distractions. We the first generation that always has a mirror up. We always analyzing ourselves and each other. This is really new for the human experience in general and I can’t wait for 20 years later when they’ll write all these social analysis books about how this is fucking our heads up. When those words came to my brain, I definitely was in an emo moment and wasn’t feeling great about life. I made that at a moment when I was not feeling my best. 

What would you say is the most challenging aspect of putting an album together?

Getting money to make it. But I feel kind of blessed because once I stopped touring, the material just started flooding to me. I never really have writer’s block. I never felt like it was challenging to make the music but it was challenging to make it cohesive. That was the biggest thing to me. This is also my first time working with session musicians and organizing that. The technicalities of recording this was the hardest.

Did the time you took to make this give you more clarity?

For sure. It gave me a lot and it grounded me. I have a lot of rage when it comes to navigating the music industry because I feel like it’s bullshit. We live in America where there is bigotry, but I feel like I’m double marginalized being queer and being Black and living in a city like Baltimore where it’s disenfranchised. Overall I felt more clarity but I can’t take a break like that again because people start forgetting about your ass. It’s people out here putting out hella music so I gotta make sure I’m up to date. Those booking requests start to simmer down when you not dropping music. 

Diary: Ghostie

Day by day, I take it in and breathe as much as I can.

How the fuck did I end up this irritated? There’s too much love floating around me. And oddly enough, it’s lowkey causing me pain. Whatever yo, all this shit is fuel anyway. That’s how I built myself, forged my armor, and wear it.

I ain’t even gonna lie, my strides of strength been going up and down. I think it’s this cold, or maybe it’s all these sirens I hear every god damn day — Lord knows my mental frizzy. I turn around and dap up my anger, confide in my malice. That feeling certainly I know well. It put all that passion into my 808s .I wonder how long I can tap into that nuclear energy. Till I croak. Tequila temper tantrums and not enough time. Life ain’t all bad I guess. At least I got a way to release; I’m smart enough to release. Some niggas don’t got that. It seems like, through all this fatigue, I’ll still get my work done because it ain’t really work. Do I measure a goal? Plot a dream? At times, it feels as though I’m writing a script and I don’t even really think that it’s that good, but I’ll still keep writing. Still have to go on. I mean, what options do I really have at this point? I’ve exhausted the others. 

The glass and needles on this road I’m walking, I’ll let it be known I sing to the boys and girls. How it feels to be a ghost, not real. People know I’m here but they can’t understand it all. I’ll keep at it. Doing it all for my folks, for my people, my friends, and my kin. I can’t imagine myself doing it for anything else.

I guess anger isn’t the only emotion that drives me to do crazy things. Family does too. They drive me. Initially some thoughts were, “This dad life is something else I tell ya.” This little one is ripping and running all around. Having a little you is great. It also taught me how to stay dangerous, crafty, and resilient. It really made me shift gears. Honesty is a huge reason why I hold an amount of impatience. You want something so bad it will work. I know this is obtainable. I’ll stop at nothing to get it. Ain’t no Google Maps for this baby. No shuck and jive, no tap dancing to get it. 100% Ghost Anti until I die. Flip life on its head and win.

I spent too much time losing. Can’t have that no more. No sir. Took too many humbles yo. Can’t stop, won’t stop on my Bad Boy shit. Although all this is new to me, it feels familiar for some reason. Some type of déjà vu. I don’t know, I’m just letting things take their course. Try not to overload my brain with thoughts. I have a knack for doing that. The hard part is recognizing.

Anyways, I’ll get there.

Chelly The MC Is The District's Leading Lady

There’s something so intoxicating about Chelly The MC’s “Northeast Baby,” that any fan of contemporary rap would be hard pressed to not—at the bare minimum—look into what else the Washington, DC native has in her catalog after hearing it. That’s at least the reaction the song got out of me when I came across it doing my usual digging for music out of the Baltimore/DMV region some time back in 2018. Though it isn’t the first song she ever released by any stretch, it has the core qualities of an introductory track to pull listeners in: a catchy-as-hell hook, geographical specificity, and palpable passion coming through the speakers. And the video only bolsters these key markers. In it, she hops around her Northeast quadrant of the nation capital with friends, while her signature fiery red locs swing. From that point of discovery, I found Chelly to be one of the more exciting artists in the area due to her ability to stand her own on tracks that can equally cater to rap purists (due to her lyrical skill and strong vocal presence) and young fans, because of her grit and adaptability on different production styles.

On her debut project, Halfway There—which is a nod to her steady career incline—that dropped in late 2018, over seven tracks, Chelly is more open than ever. She speaks about learning the hard way on who is worthy of trust, not tolerating people trying to take advantage of her, and how she deals with adversaries. In just a small sample size, it frames her as one of the area’s more promising and varied artist. And considering that the bulk of artists popping from the DMV of late have primarily been from PG County, Maryland, Chelly also is in position to articulate the experience of someone who has lived and grown in a rapidly changing city. During a recent conversation, Chelly spoke about her gaining courage as an artist, wanting to be more personal in her music, and more.

When did you become comfortable with your voice? 

I would say around 2014-2015. I was rapping longer than that but as far as getting into it, I was always comfortable with who I was as an artist but things didn’t always go as planned. I wasn’t in the studio consistently. I wasn’t always recording. But I was always writing. So around then, I was in the studio consistently. 

My introduction to you was “Northeast Baby” but I went back on your YouTube channel and found “Set Em Up” from 2013—

That’s embarrassing (laughs). 

It’s embarrassing?

It’s embarrassing but it’s good too. At one time I thought about taking it down but I want people to see that. 

I liked it because I got to see where you came from. Also because it’s a story. But it was appealing to me because it had elements of people like La Chat or others from within the Three 6 Mafia camp. Did you listen to them at all?

I actually didn’t but I get what you mean when you say that. 

Was rapping always cool to you? Because I know a lot of DC artists grew up more on go-go.

Go-go was really lit but because of how I was raised, I wasn’t really out here. So I wasn’t in the go-go’s or none of that. I was always into singing and doing poetry. I was into poetry hard. I stayed in the house or I was in my neighborhood. I didn’t really have permission to go out like that. But a couple of [go-go] songs I do know. We need to bring it back. I like go-go remixes. It just got a bounce to it.

You thinking about doing one? 

Yeah I actually would. I want one for “Northeast Baby” so bad. That extra bounce would be perfect. 

With “Northeast Baby” being your breakout, why do you think the people took to it the way they did? 

I wasn’t really expecting it to break out the way it did. I had wrote the hook to a different beat before I even thought about making it into what it is. I was never gon use it. I was in the studio one day and I linked with a producer. We had worked on one song and we had more time in the studio and I couldn’t find the beat that I wrote the “Northeast Baby” hook to, so after that he was like, “Let me hear it.” So I rapped the hook to him and he just put his own beat behind it and that’s how it came about. It crank so hard, I put out a snippet one day and it went viral—DMV viral, but yeah. I wasn’t expecting anything, it just happened on its own. You think of Chelly The MC, you think of “Northeast Baby.” 

Did its success encourage you in a way that made you realize you can make songs that the public can latch onto? 

Yeah because my Halfway There project from the end of 2018 crank. I love “Northeast Baby” but I love the songs on there way more. The more recent songs are fun like that but they're more serious. It’s another level. 

What do you mean when you say more serious? 

More of a message, more delivery. More of an actual story and getting to know me on a personal level. 

Before Halfway There was it difficult for you to be vulnerable in your music?

Not really because when I really clicked into my creativity, I was releasing everything—anything that was coming to my mind. Like with “Set Em Up,” I could really care less about that song because it’s so old but fans always asking if I’m gonna do a Part 3. 

As opposed to a lot of your peers in the DMV rap scene, you only have one project but have a following and base that’s comparable to artists who flood the market. Is that an intentional approach?

I think it’s good because I really think about timing. I don’t like to rush things because when I do they don’t go right. And to know that I’m the biggest female rapper in my city with only one project out—and shoutout to every female rapper in my city—I really appreciate that. But it is time for people to know my story and to hear what I got to say now. It’s a lot of DMV artists but a lot of people had their time. Everybody done blew up and got signed and did this and that. The DMV is waiting for what’s next. Especially DC because Maryland is already been lit. But DC need something next. It’s only up from here. I’m gon take L’s but Ima keep elevating. 

Diary: Brandon Woody

I was born in West Baltimore but when I was three, my mom and dad split up and me, my mom, and my brother moved Over East. I grew up on Cedarcroft by the old Mars grocery store that closed down years ago. I always wondered why they close grocery stores in Baltimore, like people don’t need them. It was a calm, yet wild experience growing up over there. I feel like East Baltimore has lots of outlandish shit just like every other hood does, but there's also respect that everyone has — even gang bangers and drug dealers, especially for kids and families. You can see so many parents raising their kids over there. I remember everyday I’d walk by these dudes that sold drugs right outside of my apartment complex. I believe the reason they never messed with me when I walked to and from the bus was because I always had my trumpet. 

Since I was eight at Leith Walk Elementary I started to fall in love with the horn and became so eager to improve. I will never forget, in elementary school, before I had band rehearsal I’d always get butterflies in my stomach. Little did I know, this was my subconscious telling me that trumpet would always be an integral part or extension of myself . When I am away from the horn for too long, I don’t feel the same. The trumpet allows me to express myself in the most honest and vulnerable way.

I started UPENDO while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts because there weren’t lots of ensembles or opportunities in place for me or my friends to play the music that we wanted to play, which was Black music. UPENDO means love in Swahili and I chose that word because all I’m trying to do with this music is to make space for, and spread, love. We are a family; it’s like 20 deep. Everybody in the family I love, trust, and honor. We started playing all around the city and East Coast while I was in high school and grew through the lessons we learned freelancing. Me and Troy — my best friend — have been writing, performing, and working since we were in high school. I owe all of my success to my family, friends, and my mentors. They truly helped me to believe in myself and be confident in everything I do. One word to sum up the group: village.

I am living the dream as we speak and have been living it. The dream is the process, the process is the dream. I haven’t even graduated from college yet. Will I ever? I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year, and the degree was never something I was looking for. I went to college because I was eager to learn more, move to California and New York, meet new people, and take advantage of the full rides that I was given. But the degree never had been an inspiration or goal for me. As soon as I got what I needed, in spring of 2018 I moved back to Baltimore to begin working on my album. I learned some of the biggest life lessons from making that decision. 

As a college dropout, I’ve taught at three different schools, gave masterclasses, and I am an artist-in-residence this year for an arts high school in Harlem where I get to compose for interdisciplinary collaborations. I say that to prove that there are no right or wrong paths for any group of people. You just gotta do you, learn the lessons you need to learn, spread love, give without expecting to receive, and be confident in yourself. 

The Gospel Of YG Teck

Written by: Lawrence Burney

Photography: Amira Green

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YG Teck’s music arrives at a perfect generational intersection. Born in the early 90s and just old enough to have consciously encountered artists like Jadakiss, Lloyd Banks, and others, his early youth was soundtracked by East Coast street music that put an equal amount of emphasis on displaying lyrical skill as it did being able to tell a compelling story. By the time his teenage years rolled around and Baltimore’s primary music of choice shifted to Southern artists like Jeezy, Boosie, and Gucci, he was able to engage with the necessity of having irresistibly hard-hitting production and innovative, cathartic rap styles. Both of these sides of the coin are present in the West Baltimore native’s music, which, over the past three years, has swept through the city with more consistent force than any of his peers. “Long as I can remember, I was rapping,” Teck, who stands about 5’7 and dons long, double-twisted locs tells me over the phone in late November. “I always felt like I was gon be that big rapper. That was always one of my childhood dreams because my favorite artist when I was young was Wayne. I used to walk around and act like that nigga. I was caught by the flashiness and the lifestyle.” The glitz associated with Wayne and the rest of the Cash Money Records family is what pulled a young Teck in, but the dedication to outwork his competition is proving to be the biggest takeaway that he got from Dwayne Michael Carter, JR..

Teck’s childhood car rides with his mother were soundtracked by early JAY-Z and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Those moments are what he believes helped make him into the artist he is now. “I can’t rap bullshit ‘cause I grew up on music with a message to it,” he says. And that thinking was backed up by even the earliest peaks into his artistry. Before he had any of his own music out, YG Teck was someone who would regularly pop up on local rap docs and YouTube channels like Baltimore Real Talk or Real Music DVD. Whenever his native Park Heights area was being explored, he could be seen—still rocking his long dreads and signature Baltimore top row of gold teeth—in studio sessions, somewhere around the way, or serving as a featured artist on tracks from guys in his neighborhood. And even then, when he’d get a short verse off or give a soundbite to the camera, there was a sense that he had a solid grasp on how to articulate the cause-and-effect of what was happening around him—not just blindly narrating it for the sole purpose of beating his chest. 

One of the first signs of his potential to be special came in 2015 on a track titled “Questions” on his debut, 17-track No Excusez mixtape that featured the late G-Rock (a.k.a. 2 Clocks), a rapper from West Baltimore’s Edmondson Village who many credit with being the key predecessor to the Lor Scoota and Young Moose-led street rap scene that started to take shape in 2014. Over a bed of looped angelic cries, G-Rock spit a nearly three minute-long verse that saw him go inward to talk about how he often questioned God about the situations he found himself in. With no hook to follow, Teck, with his light, fiery voice, came right in to reflect on his own path and establish his code of ethics: “I need 100 mil, fuck 100 stacks. Tap dance to get rich? I ain’t with none of that / Trying not to make the same mistakes twice, doing wrong to make right.” Though at the time it didn’t really seem like a passing of the torch, with G-Rock being killed just before the song could come out, Teck still recognizes it as one of the more pivotal moments in his career. “Clocks was just different. He was the first artist I bumped into in the streets,” he says with proud laughs while retracing how the collaboration came to be. “He had pulled up around the way one time and he told me he had this hard ass beat. So he played it for me and I was like, ‘Damn this bitch hard!’ He end up doing it and he sent it to me and was like’ Jump on it then.’” With palpable excitement, Teck said he was shocked, but did his best to follow. When he sent his own verse back, G-Rock was so pleased that he let him keep the song. Teck hasn’t turned back since. And now, with a few years under his belt, he is positioning himself to be the city’s foremost orator on matters that typically get skimmed over or embellished for mainstream consumption, much like G-Rock was in the early parts of the 2010’s. 

A real breakout moment came at the end of 2017 when Teck was a guest on local online station DTLR Radio with host Jay Hill. Setting the tone with an assured, “They gon have to let me in after this one,” Teck spent four and a half minutes relentlessly presenting a miniature autobiography that spanned from his lifelong desire to rise to the top to attempting to keep his close friends out of legal trouble—even going for a full minute after the beat ended. 

Prior to the freestyle’s release, he’d released two tapes (No Excusez and Eyes Won’t Close earlier in 2017), but the majority of his widespread local support came directly after the in-studio footage was uploaded to YouTube. It eventually accrued over a million views, began getting regular radio play on 92Q (previously unheard of for a freestyle in Baltimore), got an official music video, and was included on two of his tapes that followed. “That’s the thing about me: I’m one of the few artists that the city can tell you my story because it happened right in front they eyes,” Teck says when thinking about the traction the freestyle established for his career. “I’m not that nigga that popped up outta nowhere like, ‘Where you from?’ The city really know me. A nigga will be like ‘I used to see him outside’ or ‘I used to hoop with yo’ or they was over the jail with me. That DTLR shit is something they seen happen. They seen the numbers go up.” On the phone, Teck reveals that he actually never wanted the freestyle to drop because he thought that he’d done better before and has a pet peeve for releasing material that isn’t a clear improvement on past work. Apparently, fans didn’t agree with that gut feeling. 

“If I take off today or tomorrow, I’ma have everybody reaching because I been through it all.”

From that point forward, it’s felt like every couple of weeks in Baltimore are soundtracked by Teck’s music whether it be a freestyle, loose song, or project. In 2019 alone, he released three projects (Baggage Claim, Matter of Time, and collaborative tape with Young Moose, Excuse the Mud) and a string of viral freestyles that continued to build onto his legacy of resonant storytelling. In many ways, the freestyles have become what fans look most forward to. On social media, his followers beg him to drop full versions of snippets and assert that no one in the city depicts what life is like with the authenticity that he does. And just by observing his body movements while he raps, you can tell that he feels every word that he emits. Quite often, his jerks back and forth make him look like lines are literally jumping out of him. There aren’t many rappers that give the feeling that their words would be just as impactful without being backed by music, but Teck has that effect. 

YG Teck’s divine gift is that he has the ability to motivate his listeners with the transferable energy to persist. No Excusez was the title of his first mixtape but it’s also a tagline that’s grown into a personal brand for him. In local apparel stores, he sells clothing under the name and in his work and approach, you get the sense that he has zero tolerance for bullshit and stagnation. Not unlike the late Nipsey Hussle, Teck’s appeal, beyond music, is that he comes off as a man of principle—someone who has vision and the wherewithal to see that vision through no matter what obstacles may be present. “I don’t feel like I always had it figured it out but I feel like I learn as I go. I kinda know what I want in life,” he reasons. “No Excusez is something that keep me motivated and something I live and die by. I feel like an excuse is the only thing between a success and a failure. Most people that fail, they find other people to blame for their failures and always point the finger. A nigga with no excuses, they just take that shit on the chin and blame they self.” That way of seeing the world is echoed in just about every song that he’s released in recent memory. 

On 2017’s self-explanatory “No Complaining,” over beautiful sax play, he advocates for circulating money through the Black community, being cautious of predatory record labels, and investing in real estate (at the end of 2019, he rejoiced on Instagram about successfully flipping his first house). On 2018’s “Fuck the Rules” from his The Hardway EP, Teck talk-raps about widespread hardships going on in his neighborhood, stressing to people that want help to leave him alone because he has his own issues to worry about. Then, on the recent “Wishing on a Star” (which has one of the more cinematically gripping videos the city has seen), he masterfully narrates what hopelessness feels like—mentioning that a special low was having to borrow his girlfriend’s car when he didn’t have one. It’s these instances that lend weight to Teck suggesting rules to live by; he’s not yelling down from a mountain top. He makes it a point to share that he has—or still is—experiencing things that have helped him realize that some semblance structure and discipline are essential to a productive life. And sharing those not-so-glossy moments have helped bring him closer to fans he thought he’d never have. 

“I don’t really know what else to talk about, so if I don't talk about my life, my catalog ain’t gon be long at all,” Teck explains. “Most of the muhfuckas relating to this shit, I ain’t even know was living like me. You’d be surprised how muhfuckas who acting like they ballin’ walk up to me like ‘Damn shordy.’ I just look at it like, my lifestyle might connect to people in a way they scared to speak on.” 

The ability to relate to others is also what brought Teck and Young Moose together for their joint Excuse The Mud mixtape, the strongest Baltimore rap project of 2019. A completely unexpected move for anyone who follows the street scene, the two did something that many fans would have liked to see happen between the late Lor Scoota and Moose: joining the strongest voices from East and West Baltimore in hopes of a legendary outcome. But there’s a chance that that combination would have never amounted to what Excuse The Mud did in substance because neither would have had the lived experiences that made this tape such a rewarding experience. In the years since Lor Scoota was killed, Young Moose has gone through public struggles with the Baltimore City Police Department, seen artists who came after him reap the benefits of the groundwork he put in, and as a result, has had to regroup artistically. All of that can be heard on Excuse The Mud, which is arguably the strongest Moose has sounded since 2015. On it, he and Teck trade stories about the yearning to make it big (“36”), pay respects to big homies from their neighborhoods who showed them how to move (“Role Model”), and went bar-for-bar to talk their shit in top tier fashion on “Trespassing.” When I ask about the two’s chemistry, Teck says they wrapped it in just over a week, which is wild to think when considering how much they sound like a duo that’s been rapping together for years. 

Looking back on the tape, what sticks out the most is the feeling that its quality and Moose’s return to prominence would have to be connected to Teck’s rub-off effect. For someone who consistently pushes himself to be top-notch and to take full responsibility for any of his deficiencies, YG Teck is proving to not only be someone who can inspire the steadily growing audience that listens to and spreads his music, but to peers who have all the tools they need, but could use some help being steered in the right direction. And those qualities becoming clearer to the public is what frames him as an artist who needs to be treasured right now and as time goes on. “I feel like the city need that one artist who been through every stage,” Teck says before we end our conversation. “If I take off today or tomorrow, I’ma have everybody reaching because I been through it all.” 

Diary: Baby Kahlo

I have only been rapping for two years now. I remember feeling like the only female rapper in Baltimore. I was the only woman I would hear about, the only woman on these lineups, and the only woman I saw in my city doing shows every weekend. It was legit just me and Sneaky Tee. That was all I saw, but apparently, me and Tee are in two different scenes — or at least that's what the people say. I hate that because I’m from the hood...but ok. I can't wait for both scenes to merge. I'm appreciative because the scene I’m apart of supported me and got me to be on Bali Baby’s World Tour. It’s the reason I met Deetranada, and it’s the reason I’ve performed at Atlanta’s A3C festival two years in a row. 

It seems to be only two scenes in Baltimore. We call them the Art Scene and the Hood Nigga Scene. If you don’t fit into those two categories then I really don’t know what to tell you. Now is the time to grind and pop out. So do dat!

Looking back, I feel as though Baltimore Club music and the club scene initially put all eyes on our city. But, fast forward a bit to a few years back, I really feel like [Lor] Scoota, [Young] Moose, [Bandhunta] Izzy, and a few others paved the way and brought eyes back to Baltimore. Now we have people like Shordie Shordie — he’s huge. Shit is beautiful. Everything in Baltimore feels different now. I go outside and even the air feels different. I ask my friends if they feel it and we all say the same thing. There is a shift taking place in my city. Everyone knows that the city is up now. We are not up next, we are up NOW. There were two Baltimore artists, and one Maryland artist on the BET Hip-Hop Awards cyphers this year. If that isn’t enough confirmation then you are blind and you need to leave this city. 

I’m seeing now that with great power comes a great amount of leeches. I feel like I’m responsible for my culture. I'm gonna wipe these bitches off with Lysol. I refuse to allow leeches to prosper, not around me and my people. Hell no! It’s annoying that everyone wants to rap now. When I say that everyone wants to rap, what I mean is hobby rappers with zero star power, potential, and no stage presence. People are rapping because they are desperate for a way out, and they see these Baltimore rappers making it look easy. They want the chains, they want the clout, they want attention. Well news flash baby, that won't work for you. People out here paying to play, but the raps suck ass. All because they want that diamond chain, all because 1000 likes on Instagram looks nice. Baby, you are throwing your money away! But, I allow them to. I’ll keep quiet because eventually leeches go broke and they will quit. It’s irritating to watch the monkey see, monkey do behavior. This shit is life or death to me. I have no second option. I have the responsibility and the power to break generational curses, and to provide for my entire family. You bitches haven’t starved before, you haven't gone broke for this, cried for this, y’all have options. Please go be that lawyer baby! 

I saw a tweet today that said, “Baltimore only supports clout. You’d be surprised how much support you’d get elsewhere.” I read that and said to myself, “Bitch you must suck.” I am so tired of that statement. Okay, yes Baltimore may, in fact, be a popularity contest, but some of you definitely SUCK DICK! If you actually grind hard, brand yourself properly, and perfect your sound and craft then you will be seen and supported. If you suck then there isn't much anyone can do for you. This other girl chimed in and said that you have to have clout in order to get support. And that without clout you won't ever get any support. FALSE, that's called being entitled, you have to work hard! 

Anyways, I definitely look forward to seeing who prevails in this industry and who is only a gimmick. One thing I do know is that Baby Kahlo is forever. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. 

Bye hoe!