Where in the world are you?
I am in LA, although I’m looking to get a place in Maryland as well so I can be close to home. Maryland is where I’m from.
Do you miss Maryland?
Yes, but after a week of being there I don’t any more! I think it’s definitely an amazing place to live, but it’s very slow in comparison to LA. There is a lot going on in DC, but not for music. It’s more politics.
Are you going to relocate there?
No, I’m going to be in LA. I’m just going to have a place over there, get some real estate, get some equity. I am actually building another property in Joshua Tree in California, which is going to be really interesting, so my plan is to do these three [places] and then just chill on real estate for a bit and then wait for it to continue to grow afterwards if it seems like it’s working for me.
I didn’t know this from listening to your music, but you were actually born in the UK, right?
I was born in London – in Clapham, to be exact.
Do you have some English family?
My dad is from Ghana and my mum is from Sierra Leone in Africa. Mum grew up in America, then moved back to Africa and when she was about 19 she moved to London and lived there. I think my dad went straight from Africa to England – he was living there for a few years before my mum came.
Have you spent much time in the UK?
I have and I’m actually going to be there soon. I’m going to pack up and go visit. I have a lot of family out there too.
Is there anything you like to do or enjoy when you’re over here?
The UK has some of the best women – that’s one thing I will say about it. It’s a good place to be when you want to get away from what you’re used to. All the random fast-food restaurants with no real names that you have. I love that.
What kind of child were you at school?
I was a lost kid, and being a lost kid means a lot of different things for me. I always felt like I was trying to prove myself to fit in, to prove to myself that I was doing the stuff that your parents don’t want you to do, like get into a lot of trouble. I grew up middle-class but generally in bad areas, so when I went to school, it was one of the worst schools in the entire county. Because of that, it was this weird dynamic of knowing right from wrong but wanting to do wrong.
Was music a big thing when you were growing up?
When I was at school, I used to be part of a go-go band, which is what people in the DC area listened to. It was their style of music and I wanted to do something in music from the age of 16. It’s just at that time I never thought it would be what I have become now.
Do you remember a moment when you thought this was going to be your career?
It was when it was time to register for college. I wasn’t trying to go to college, so I took this last $500 and shot a music video with it and at that moment I thought, "I have to do this." I had a meeting with my friends and said that we have to turn it up, we have to make this rap shit work.
What was the initial drive to make that leap?
It was never to make money. There was a [media company] in Maryland called 1st Impression Studios and I had this concept and Chris [Hernandez, 1st Impression Studios' creative director] loved it so much. He said we can shoot this video for $500. I have a line in my new album that’s: “I never look back, look how far I have come.”
It seems like this year has been crazy, especially in America, where there has been so much going on socially and politically. How is LA at the moment?
LA is always the first to want to riot and it was intense after the killing of George Floyd. I went out a couple of times and it was unreal, like a movie. You know, I am going to do what I can in helping move America in a positive way, especially with the influence I have, but it’s crazy because we don’t know what’s going to happen.
We didn’t think Trump was going to win [in 2016] and he did. There is a lot of uncertainty. There are a lot of people who like Trump. We don’t see these people or at least we don’t think we see these people. We don’t know where this can go but I know that as things intensify, things can get really calm or really ugly.
There has been a lot of unrest this year. How does that affect you? Does it make you want to create more?
It affects me in terms of worry. I don’t let anything that I can’t fully control worry me – so, for me, I am the main poison. I look at the positives, no matter what in life, because as soon as you worry, you stop enjoying whatever is happening. We have the power and control to not let things bother us. I don’t want certain things to happen and I’m going to do the best I can to not make them happen. I am not going to worry about it and so, because of that, creating has been pretty easy. I finished an album, I’m doing multiple video productions – everything that I am a part of, I am pretty much producing myself or with someone that’s not a third party. Because the music is about done already. Everything that is going on at the moment has definitely inspired a couple of verses.
Your 2019 album, Is He Real?, is, to me, very much like a collage, because there are so many different, brilliant sounds, ideas and samples. It felt like an insight into your brain. Was that intentional?
I make music based off of what I feel and what I like – a lot of different things. The way people’s minds are trained or not trained to get a buffet from one artist. We’re trained to go to McDonald’s and get a burger and fries, you know? We’re not trained to go to McDonald’s and get Chinese food. A lot of people consume music the same way and that’s only because a lot of artists aren’t very diverse in their sound. I believe I can do it well and it comes from an authentic place. And so I don’t fear making things that can be considered different. I think the main thing that glues everything together is my story and what’s authentic about it, and my voice – being able to tell that story. It’s me working on my ability to be diverse in what I make, and it’s most importantly training the audience to accept diversity within an artist, because there are going to be people who come up after me and they are going to have to not be put in a box.
How do you ensure you are in the right frame of mind to do your best when you go in the studio?
It’s how you feel, and [then] how you feel when things come out. If it doesn’t feel right, no matter what people are telling you, then it is time to let it go. There are so many songs that I have started with one or two or three lyrics and I just have to let them go. If I do something on a beat I don’t like, that beat goes to waste. You have to be patient and know that you are going to have more bad ideas than good. But the good ones make up for the bad ones, and that is how I work. I was talking to Tyler, The Creator, and I was saying that I haven’t been making that much music off of thinking, I have just been feeling, and he said hat’s how you do it every time – you feel it.
Is collaborating ever intimidating – just pouring your heart out in front of somebody?
I’ve learned to abandon the feeling of being afraid of letting people know my truth. I say things in my music that most people would not talk about themselves and I think that is what makes me me. And I am OK with that and that is the strongest ability any artist has. An artist can be therapy for people – that is what we really are. I was talking to a Harvard professor and we discussed how artists are so important, that we need to make sure the arts are taken just as seriously as science.
We have the ability to change people’s mind and feelings. I was just in the studio with Pharrell [Williams] and Chad [Hugo] and that was a collaboration that was kind of different for me, because I went into that room saying: “These are the gods; whatever they tell me to do, I am going to do.” Nobody writes my shit, no one tells me what to do – I do a lot of things myself – but if Pharrell told me to make a song about poop, I would probably just do it to see how it turned out. I would trust him.
How was it in the studio with a legend?
I was mentally prepared before it even happened. But let’s just say on the morning that I turned up to the studio I was definitely nervous. But I was ready because this was going to be one of many. When I came in, I think we were meant to meet at 9am or 10am, and so I turned up early and so did he. I walked into the studio and the first person I see is Pharrell and I was like, “Oh, my bad. I’m sorry I came early. I wanted to make sure I was in the right place.” So we just talked a little, had some conversation and then I told him what I wanted and we made five songs.
What happens when you leave the studio after making music with someone like Pharrell? Can you just go home and watch TV? Or have you got to work on the next song?
It happens and then I think about it time and time again and then I say: “Damn, I got this song with Pharrell,” and then I listen to it again and I’m like, “Damn, I did that.” This was what I had been dreaming about. I used to listen to these guys in my room and I did that. I do it with Kanye [West] all the time, with Pharrell, with a bunch of people. You know, I can pick up my phone and just call a bunch of people and they care what I have to say and so for me it’s more like I want those people to be proud, so I want to continue to grow and get better.
Do you find that being honest liberates other parts of your life?
If I didn’t have music, I would not be able to cope with some of the things I have coped with. It’s a form of therapy – all of these thoughts and feelings and songs. It’s self-reflection a lot of the time and when things come out, I think, “Oh, wow, that’s wild. This happened to me at that age and now I am this way because of it.” It makes sense. It’s the things that a therapist would usually tell you, but I am learning them through my music and through being authentic in my music.
With that being said, now I am in a place where I think, “That is what we have accomplished; that is where we are going with this.” I need to continue to express myself in this music because, for now, it is keeping me kind of sane before I take the time out to find someone who I can talk to about this stuff, about some of these traumatic things that happened to me.
You have been very open in interviews and in your music about your life. The song “Julia” on your album is about your mum’s passing and you have spoken about your time in jail. I have seen YouTube videos in which you said that going to jail was the best thing that ever happened to you...
Jail was the best thing that happened to me because it created a level of maturity that would not have come from anywhere else. You guys are all talking about quarantine and I am here laughing that this is nothing. It ain't shit. I have been blessed to be able to go to jail in the way that I did. I have been to jail three times and prison once. But rarely at a young age do you go to prison long enough to gain the lessons that come with prison.
Jail is where you go if you are awaiting trial and prison is where you go when you have five, ten, 15 years [to serve]. I have been to jail with people who have been in there for pretty much their whole life. All of these things that I was there for were for seven months. I was meant to be there for a year but I parolled out after seven months. I learnt some valuable lessons and one of them was patience. Another was maturity because I was in there with Bloods, Crips, Aryan Brothers – there’s all kinds of different gangs.
I was never in a gang; I was able to survive without doing that. I was cool with everybody and everybody was cool with me. I learned how to carry myself as a man, but in a way where nobody could predict what my next move would be. No one knew who I was fully and that kept people on edge enough to not try certain things and also getting really cool with some of the people who had a lot of power there but didn’t want me to get involved.
Actually, I messaged one of my friends the other day, who is still in federal prison. I was there eight years ago and he was there five years prior to me. He thinks he is going to be there for another eight years at least.
He is the person I talk to online every now and again and he is a higher-ranking member of a gang. He was the person in jail who told me I needed to rap. He was like a guardian angel for me because he was the reason why a lot of things never really happened and I never had to join a gang.
This is the craziest part: we connected through GQ magazine when we were in jail. We were both into fashion and that’s how we knew what was going to be hot. We would read every GQ magazine that came into jail. I have a notebook where I wrote down every brand that I found in GQ and I thought, “When I get home I am going to be killing it with this shit because nobody is going to know what this is.”
I told him recently that I was doing this cover for GQ Style and he flipped out. Imagine one day meeting someone in prison and them saying, “Yo, I think you could be a big rapper, you should pursue this,” and then they’re reading this magazine. It’s come full circle and now I’m on the cover of it. It’s a crazy, crazy story.
Do you believe in fate because of this?
Yes. There is that thing people say about us as human beings and it’s that we are so smart that we are stupid – that we know nothing. We say science says this and that this is really a coincidence, but if you look at the earth and you want to talk about science, you want to talk about engineering, this world was engineered so perfectly.
We break down the anatomy of a leaf all of the way to the anatomy of a human being and whoever put that all together that’s not coincidence where it just happened. There is something that is engineering this – the smartest, most genius engineer in the world. Some people call them an engineer, some people call them God, but there’s a whole other part of this engineering that has to do with spirituality and with putting the right people in the right place at the right time and creating certain things that happen within those people. It’s not a coincidence. How is it a coincidence that we were reading GQ [in prison]? He’s telling me that I need to rap and then years later I am on the cover of GQ Style.
When is the new album coming out?
It’s looking like 2021.
How does it feel pouring so much of yourself into a project and then letting everyone hear it? How do you know when it’s finished?
I don’t think there’s a way of being able to say something is finished, with art. You get to a point where you like it so much that you don’t want to fuck it up, so you leave it alone. Trust your abilities; it’s just like a level of satisfaction. That’s how I know when it’s finished. There is always more I can do and I can always change it, but I have now shifted my ideas out of the creative of the music and more into the creative of the rollout and other things.
I am currently working on this curriculum with a few offices at Harvard University and we are doing this whole music business programme for next year, which is going to be pretty cool. So I have been occupied with that and with the lesson plan. My mind is now shifting out of music and into the other things around it.
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