SUPA BWE: RECORDING ARTIST. CHICAGO, IL
PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF:
My childhood was kinda crazy being that my mother was from England and my father was from the projects. My dad was a cop / gang banger/ crime boss and my mom, a very educated, very straight edge woman. Being that my mom was focused and proper, she used to have me sit outside and read which would get me beat up because kids would call me a fag, a bitch, and throw my books. I'd tell my mom but she would just think I didn't feel like reading and whoop my ass. I saw a lot of strange parallels growing up, but we eventually got out of the hood, moved to Oak Park, and I was able to get a very different view on life that wasn't just about drugs and what the other n*ggas do on the block. There are other ways.
TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR LOVE FOR MUSIC AND HOW THAT ALL STARTED.
I've always loved music because of my mom. She's from England and loved everything - world music, Irish folk music, metal, punk, emo, Depeche Mode because she's a 70's baby, but she grew up in the 80's and was into all that weird stuff. But my dad - he just really loved gutter shit, like street stories that really talked to him. He really liked that kind of music. So watching my dad grow up and watching my mom grow up and listening to what they listened to, I was able to understand the different stories being told. Like I knew why my mom would listen to Sinead O Connor's Pheonix From the Flame because that's how she felt; that's how she grew up and that's the pain she was going through. But I also knew why my dad listened to Master P's Swamp N*gga because he was actually out there on the streets doing that shit. That's how I was able to pull from the bad and the ugly and the good and everything else and translate it for me as I watch my parents translate music for them. They translated it with their lives and I'm able to translate from it to my life now because of it.
WHAT PERSPECTIVE DO YOU THINK YOU BRING TO YOUR MUSIC?
The perspective that I stand out with is that we are all shit ... and not in the way that everyone is worthless because I don't believe that at all, but I believe everyone does bad things and lies about doing bad things. I think the people that are able to fess up and say they fucked up, my bad, lets fix this are the people who are less shit than others. But I want to instill this next thought into young black men. Because as a young black man, I think the biggest thing in my life that held me back was that I made excuses for myself all the time and always had reasons to validate my excuses and shit. When I was just being a bitch, I was just a bitch ass n*gga. A lot of times, people don't even know that they bein bitch ass n*ggas, like they think that everything is okay when the whole time, it's like no - you a bitch ass n*gga influencing other bitch ass n*ggas to be bitch ass n*ggas and now you got a world full of bitch ass n*ggas. Look at Trump, look at Hillary; fuck both of them, all these snakes. They're all snakes because that's just all they know.
DO YOU THINK YOU'RE ABLE TO SHIFT CULTURE THROUGH YOUR MUSIC?
In a way. I mean, I just want self awareness you know? Self reflection. Ego death, if anything. Mothaf*ckas just need to understand that they're not special, you know? Like stop acting special and actually do something for someone else. I mean you don't gotta go feed homeless people or shit like that but you also don't have to throw plastic on the ground just to be an asshole.
"I JUST WANT SELF AWARENESS YOU KNOW? SELF REFLECTION. EGO DEATH, IF ANYTHING."
HOW DID YOU GET TO THE POINT WHERE YOUR PERSPECTIVE BECAME UNIQUE AND YOUR OWN? WERE THERE SITUATIONS YOU WENT THROUGH?
Losing things, you know? Kinda beating drug addiction... trying to beat myself... I've had a lot of good friends and I've lost all of them. I only have a few of them left and time after time, I realized I always did what I thought was the right decision but I wasn't always moving righteously. Like - you can be right, but you're not being righteous. For example, part of the reason my band - Hurt Everybody - broke up was because a lot of times, I may have been right but I was never righteous in the way we discussed it. Because I was more like, "Shut the fuck up, let's get this money, y'all playin." And they were like "Well, we believe this" but I was just like "Nah, I'm right. I'm not gonna hear anything you're saying." I wasn't being righteous but yeah, I learned this through loss.
WHAT DO YOU THINK THE RIGHT STEPS ARE when you're building?
When you start not going outside ... when you stop picking up your phone and it doesn't bother you ... when you wake up and you get anxious because you haven't started working yet - that's when you know you're working. Everybody says you gotta make it an obsession, but it's beyond an obsession. You ever have that significant other that's like shady as shit and you can't stop snooping on them? When work is just like that, that's when you know you got that flame and you gotta exploit that; you gotta take that madness to a whole new level and keep creating.