The London rapper’s new album found its genesis in words written to come to terms with an unprovoked, racially motivated street attack he suffered in 2021. The result is a project that provides a stark snapshot of the state of the nation.
“The nature of my content was sometimes getting boiled down to ‘he's an anti-establishment rapper’ and like, yes, naturally - I'm fucking black. There is more though. There’s more that exists to a person than just the chagrin and disdain they have for the political schema they find themselves in.”
Though still faithful to the hallmarks of breezy, beautiful R&B, Joyce Wrice is testing the genre’s limits.
A shared appreciation for past heroes able to create entire worlds within their songs became the catalyst for FlyAnakin and PinkSiifu’s collaborative concept - a fictional record store named FlySiifu’s Records & Tapes.
New York City producers Tony Seltzer and A Lau have been friends for 10 years, and estimate the number of songs they’ve made together at close to 1,000.
For an artist that’s held strong in the Greater Seattle Area—a region that’s still finding where it fits into the oversaturated hip-hop landscape—Khris P has emerged as one of Tacoma’s leaders.
“I can't sit here and not be appreciative and humbled. There's a lot of people who wish they could do this type of thing. But at the end of the day, you still got your ups and downs, especially with something strenuous like this. After two months of that, you're like, ‘what the fuck, man?’”
JPEGMAFIA is mid-way through watching a 5-hour cut of Watchmen as he picks up the phone for our conversation. A few joints down, he expresses a slight anxiety about his first UK interview - not that any nervousness showed through the course of an hour-long chat that touched on politics, celebrity, success and his military past.
The Los Angeles rapper's new album Even God Has A Sense of Humor steers towards jazz, soul, and a search for self-knowledge: “I made some of these songs, and these songs in turn grew to teach me about myself and the world”
“I listen to Deftones a lot. I like Nirvana. I fuck with KISS. I really like KISS. Ever since I looked them up on the internet I fucked with it.”
“There’s definitely two sides to hip-hop, and I’m blessed to be in the camp I’m in. In another world I could be having to rock skinny jeans, leather jackets and a Goyard purse. That’s not really me, though.”