Amir Mohamed el Khalifa is one of the few Gasparilla Music Festival (GMF) artists flying in and out of Tampa on the same day of his performance. And while the 34-year-old rapper and producer has come a long way from the days of having to ride Greyhound buses between tour stops or getting kicked out of hotels, Khalifa — better known as Oddisee — doesn’t want fans to think that his path has all of a sudden made him into some kind of hip-hop megastar.
“It hasn’t changed that much, man, don’t get it twisted,” Oddisee, chuckling, tells CL. “I don’t do have to do Greyhounds anymore, for sure, but I’m not staying in five-star hotels.”
Oddisee — an alum of the Diamond District and Low Budget Crew who came of age in Maryland’s Prince George’s County — is checking in by phone from his current home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant where he lives with his wife and 19-month old daughter. He’s multitasking by taking a lunch break (leftover Indian from the night before is on the menu), and to catch him during something of a breather was fitting.
In 2017, Oddisee released his latest full-length album, The Iceberg. The 12-track, 48-minute deep dive invited listeners to plunge beneath the surface of why things are the way they are. There were songs about love, politics, religion and money; no topic was off the table, and much like a lot of his material, the lyrics found Oddisee utilizing storytelling and an almost Socratic method to make his point. A world tour followed, but Oddisee took a well-deserved hiatus in 2018 by pumping the brakes on a writing and recording process that’s seen him release 11 studio albums, five EPs and 10 mixtapes since 2005.
“I needed a reset. I was just burned out from music,” Oddisee says of the give and take between artist and the music industry machine. “So I just woke up every day and made music and played with my daughter — and it was a blast.”
The pause made sense, too. While it was easy to pick up on the acknowledgement of topical issues like the Middle East, Brexit and Trump from Iceberg, critics and fans at large missed the whole point of the album by applying their own narratives to reviews or only listening to the verses that applied to their own lives. Oddisee is clear about the fact that he loved everything he did musically on Iceberg. Streams increased and opportunities to bring his ace live band on the road definitely arrived along with the effort — but in many ways, the album was a failure.
“The whole point of the record was a stepping outside of yourself to understand why things are the way they are. There are lyrics and things that talk about thinking you’re the center of the universe, but you’re not,” Oddisee explains. “The message didn’t get absorbed. It was really bothering for me.”
Oddisee is sitting on about 200 tracks after his break, and he’s just exited the production phase of his next album, for which he’ll take a more literal approach to the messaging. “Post-political” might be one way to put it, but there’s never really been anything overtly political about the music that Oddisee — now flanked with with a band of longtime collaborators he’s dubbed Good Compny — has made over the last decade and a half. Yes, he’s from the underground, and yes, Oddisee is conscious, but that doesn’t mean listeners should put him in those boxes. And sure, Oddisee’s black identity is also a part of his music, but lumping him with other artists who are unapologetically black isn’t quite fair, either.
“I’m from a place where it’s a black majority, and the criminal is black, the police officer arresting him is black, the lawyer is black, the judge is black, the bailiff is black — everyone is black,” Oddisee says. “I’m consciously black — it’s embedded in me. That is something that I can’t escape in my music.”
“People will call me a social justice warrior. I’m like, ‘I’m not…’ I’m talking about how these things are affecting me. I’m a half-Arab, African-American Muslim in America,” he adds. “I’m talking about me.”
Tampa fans won’t have to worry about Oddisee trying to hammer any of the message home during his GMF set, however, since early European tours taught him that being onstage meant you had to keep the vibe alive, not kill it.
“They were there for a party, not for me. In fact, I was disrupting that party with my heavy boom-bap beats and lyrical acrobatics,” he says about the days when he and Richard Patterson (aka Unown, who handles the MPC for Good Compny) would romp around Europe in the dead of winter. “I saw that, and I went home and started to make music that was more musically digestible for audiences that just wanted to be entertained — without compromising the lyrical content.”
When fans are at a festival, Oddisee just wants them to have a blast. Diehards at the band’s 2016 Ybor City show can attest that there is, in fact, no moment in the muscular set — all funked-up with kicks, snares, hi-hats and heavy grooves — where Oddisee is worried about the audience not getting what he’s saying. “If you go home and listen to the music and pick up on what it is, then it’s a win-win,” he says.
That easygoing approach to the bombastic show Good Compny will pitch at GMF is part of why Oddisee’s career has been such a great journey. In some ways, it mirrors the slow-growth approach that the festival has taken in its own evolution. GMF has outlasted at least two popular Florida festivals at this point (R.I.P. Okeechobee, Wanee). And while fans might not catch everything that Oddisee is saying on Saturday, you can rest assured that he’ll probably back to tell it to you again. And you can bet GMF will return next year, too. It’s been a fantastic voyage, and we’re happy to be along for the ride.
Full disclosure: From 2013-2016, this writer helped coordinate social media efforts for GMF. Read our full Q&A with Oddisee below.
Gasparilla Music Festival w/Oddisee & Good Compny/The Avett Brothers/Gary Clark Jr./Tank and the Bangas/Toro Y Moi/Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real/more. Sat.-Sun. March 9-10. Gates at 11:30 a.m. $30 & up. Curtis Hixon and Kiley Garden, Downtown Tampa. gasparillamusic.com.
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Yo Ray, let me grab my AirPods so I can multitask.
Does multitasking involve working on a rider to tell the festival what kind of double apple shisha needs to be on there?
Haha, double apple shisha is a classic. Right now multitasking is making lunch while doing the interview so I don't get half an hour off the work schedule.
Lunch for your daughter, too? She's almost two-years-old, I think?
She's 19 months, but she's in day care. I make her lunch in the evening, and I pack it with her when I take her to daycare in the morning. Dad's gotta work.
Your dad had this crazy way of getting you to do what he wanted you to do while making you feel like you were making your own choices, have you thought about whether or not that’ll be something you’ll be able to do with your daughter?
I've already started it. I couldn't stress the importance of it enough. It's liberty instead of freedom. We can use those words interchangeably, but we shouldn't, really. My daughter has liberty, but she doesn't have freedom; there's parameters on it. When we go to the playground, I let her walk ahead of me at all time. I let her get to the other edge of the playground, giving her the sense that she's deciding where she goes. But I'm always watching. She has a strong sense of freedom, which bites me in the butt from time to time because she can be strong-minded and opinionated at 19 months — she hit her terrible twos early. Everything is "no, no, no" and "mine, mine, mine" so you have to rationalize with a toddler, which is very difficult to do.
You mentioned that when she cries, she cries in a three note structure.
Yeah, still doing it. She has this new fake cry. We'll be in the stroller, and she [mimics tri-chordal cry] — decaying type of cry that kind of tapers off into this note. It's the most annoying thing ever.
So no way it's getting sampled.
No. It's a phase. She goes through sound phases, I'm sure a lot of kids do. She has different sounds that she discovers, and she becomes preoccupied with them, sometimes weeks at a time. It'll be a scream, or a high note, or a whistle — whatever it is that comes out of her mouth. She'll be preoccupied with it for an extended period of time and then move on to some new sound that she discovered. This is the newest of many to come.
I wasn't planning on ask you too much about your family, but since you're talking about it, I found it really interesting that our dad played the ood after dinner and loved funk music. He recognized Mr. Shider (Diaper Man) from Parliament when he was in your neighborhood growing up. Dad loved Marvin Gaye, Maze — and you’re super close and there’s no BS between you, and he's been open about why he hasn't listened to your music… I guess you can't tell too much now, but is that the kind of thing you want for your daughter? Do you think you'll be into her musical endeavours?
It's funny because history repeats itself. I hope that my daughter wants nothing to do with the music industry. If she does, I'm not gonna stop her, but I'm gonna tell her about what everything is. I'll be very realistic and black and white about what the music industry is, and if she still wants to get into it, then I'll have her in my prayers, and I'll guide her, but I hope that she doesn't want anything to do with the music industry.
And you've said that you'd use your alwasta to connect her with anyone you could. Am I pronouncing that right?
Yeah, "wasta," it's a way of pronouncing it — it doesn't exist in English. "Wasta" is fine — you can say "wasta."
So you’re a direct to fan, indie to the bone — if the internet didn't exist you could’ve been the Too Short of the D.C. scene, selling stuff out of your trunk…
Haha. Yeah, for sure.
Could you talk about what it's like, or what the job is like, to maintain an alwasta or credibility with your fans as the arc of your career has gone on?
Um, I don't know — alwasta with fans works differently. Alwasta is klout. It's calling someone for a favor, and they feel obligated to oblige. I guess you can have it as an artist. I guess I can release an album, and a fan feels obliged to stream or listen to it just because I released it — yeah, I guess it can kind of work the same way, and if you look at it that way, it's a simple equation of a continuation of quality. Where someone knows, without even hearing a record from me, that they're going to get quality. Quality control exists in many ways. For me, it's taking into account what I've done previously. I have to challenge myself to do something different but also have a responsibility to give my listeners something that they know and that they're familiar with.
That makes a formula, a model within itself where every album has to have some sort of resemblance to the previous record, but it has to, in some ways, be modified. If you do this over the course of several albums, the most recent album will sound very different from the first record. But if you listen to them all together, you start to see how they resemble one another. That formula by itself is unconscious for me, at this point. I know that my fans will always like what I'm doing. I always keep them in mind. I always keep myself in mind.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about creative comprises a little later, but staying on this idea of continuation in your music, your songs, lyrically — especially “Gentrification,” “Lifting Shadows,” “American Greed,” “Big Business” or even “I Just Want To Be Happy” — have always been topical. I know that you've been able to have some good conversations with fans, even some with opposing views, but you've been trolled by some right-wingers, too. Have the discussions or the trolling affected your process or public persona at all? Does it make you fear for your safety or that of your family?
Nah, nah. I only had one instance where I had to hire security for a show. It wasn't even someone right wing. It was someone, a white American male, who, from what I can gather, converted to Islam, but also suffered from bipolar schizophrenia. He had something against the festival in his town. He saw himself as my biggest supporter, and he couldn't believe that I was going to do a show at this festival. He warned me on social media outlets that if I did the show there would be consequences since he's my no. 1 fan and they did something wrong to him.
I turned it over to authorities. People that lived in the town knew that there was something wrong with this guy. He had a lot of extreme views that he shared on his social media. That was literally the only time I had to hire security because I feared for my safety. But this, for some context, was right after the Miami shootings and right after the Vegas shooting.
That is crazy.
So I was like, "I am not taking any chances." It was mainly my wife, she was like, "No, not this time." That was it. Other than that, you know how it goes, most of that right wing trolling, those are bots. It's not real people. They literally see words that pop up, send pre-programmed responses to make it seem like there's always a counter opinion. We have a full report coming out on the power of that and the power of bot farming — how it can sway elections. I literally pay it no attention because I know that it's most likely not a real person on the other end.
Gotcha. I like that you're talking about festivals because, I believe it was 2010, and forgive me if I'm wrong, but I feel like you and Richard made this decision to go with the live band, remove profanity from the shows, and that put you in front of all these new crowds — that worked as far as I can tell.
Yup.
Thinking about “Lifting Shadows” — you’re delivering powerful lines about shootings, politics and your view on what it means to love your country — do you ever get to look into festival crowds and see reactions to those lines?
My touring career really started off in Europe in the mid-2000s. Richard and I were going out to Europe with our brother Chuck [unknown] from L.A., and we were performing at hip-hop nights which were already going to be a packed house anyway whether we were there or not. We were being featured as a guests, so that way we ensured that we would always have a crowd.
Mind you, this is the middle of winter. In Europe, in the early 2000s, after fall, it was no more shows, it was just club nights for DJs. That was the perfect time, we decided, to go out and start doing shows. What this did is make me realize that my music wasn't entertaining enough. I had this audience that didn't speak English as its first language, it didn't have the same cultural associations with underground rap that I did. They were there for a party, not for me. In fact, I was disrupting that party with my heavy boom-bap beats and lyrical acrobatics.
I saw that, and I went home and started to make music that was more musically digestible for audiences that just wanted to be entertained — without compromising the lyrical content. Then I went back to to Europe every year to kind of perfect it. What it did was make me understand that I was an entertainer first and an educator second — and that there was nothing wrong with that because music's primary purpose is for entertainment. It's escapism.
Sure.
So when I have these songs with all this heavy content in it — the music, especially with the band, is made to be entertaining. I know a large portion or percentage of that crowd is not really there listening to what the message is. They're actually just enjoying the music and the intensity — how it makes them feel emotionally. That's all by fine design. So there isn't this moment where I'm like, "You guys aren't getting what I'm saying" because when you're at the festival I just want you to have a blast. If you go home and listen to the music and pick up on what it is, then it's a win-win.
And you're talking about the music, so real quick to confirm the band — Richard Patterson’s in it, but I wanted to make sure it would also be Olivier St. Louis, Real Washington, Jon Laine and Dennis Turner?
I don't think Olivier is coming. A lot of times, when we have one off shows like this, where we're just flying in, doing the show and getting out, I won't bring Olivier since he lives in Germany. He's from Maryland, and he went to boarding school in England, and he met his wife then moved to Berlin for a job opportunity. He's lived there with her and his two children ever since. I don't think it was in the cards for him to come out for this set.
So Real, Richard, Jon and Dennis?
Yeah.
Long gone are the days of Greyhound buses and getting kicked out of hotels. You're flying in for one offs.
Yeah, it hasn't changed that much, man, don't get it twisted. I don't do have to do Greyhounds anymore, for sure, but I'm not staying in five-star hotels. I did arrange to fly in and fly out same day for this one.
So you don't have to bring the backpack with the Bluebird microphone anymore.
I actually upgraded to a nicer mic then that now.
Haha, OK. Do you still rock the Apollo duet interface in the backpack?
I still have the Apollo, but I record on a Neumann now.
I think it's so crazy that you bring all your work with you in a backpack. It seems… precarious in a way.
A man's gotta work.
I know that, and you talk about necessity, working at the desk creating so you can live. What happens when the music is just not working? Do you switch to illustration? Go for a walk and take some photos?
I might shoot and take photos, but if the music's not coming out, then I always do something that's productive for me process. I might go through and just catalog drums. I might, for hours, just listen to records and find breaks that have never been used, chop them up and categorize them — kick, snare, hi-hat, hi-fi, lo-fi, jazz, trap, etc. — put them in folders, and then assemble drum patterns that interest me. I save the drum patterns and BPMs in folders and then when the music hits me I have all these drums that I've already laid out, so the process is even faster. And that's no-brainer stuff — I'm not using creativity for that.
Blocking and tackling, I guess, if you want to use a sports analogy.
Yeah. It's stuff that's actually beneficial for me, but not actually using any creative juice. Productive.
So when the music is coming — and I'm thinking about this in the context of Richard at the time when he was your only real ally when you wanted to explore jungle, make drum and bass records. At the time, you weren’t being selfish enough, you were making compromises to appease your friend-creative group…
Yeah, yeah — you know you're shit.
Ha, it's interesting to hear you talk about that stuff. It was kind of like the frog in the boiling pot. Those peers who were judging you were operating in a musical model that would not sustain itself. Do you have to make many more compromises these days in terms of creativity?
Not really. No, no. Maybe, um, I have a lot of unpopular opinions that I leave off my records. Stuff that, since now an artist is their own brand, would be controversial. Like if I shed light on my own personal beliefs on shit. My fans might be like, "What?" So that's a compromise I have to make with myself, but I don't really see it as a compromise. It's not for anyone else — it's for me. I feel like the compromises that we're talking about are when you make music specifically for other people that isn't true to yourself, where, for me, omitting opinion doesn't necessarily mean that what I'm putting out is something that I disagree with.
Right. You ask a lot of questions in your music.
Yeah, exactly. But I never really tell people exactly how I feel about it. That's a lot of the criticism I get from my immediate friends. They say, "I know what you think about, but I don't know how you feel about it."
But it's like you said, it's because they know you. You've also talked about this idea that nobody knows about the music you haven't released. It might be old to you, but you could put it out and have people connect. As far as new music goes, You say you work like a journalist, but you also borrow tactics from comedians. The Iceberg obviously touched on so many topics, including the middle east, Brexit and Trump. What kind of questions are you asking in your lyrics these days?
I've just moved out of the production side. I'm about to start writing. That's a good question. I already know that this record will be less political than the previous record. It's basically gonna be post-political. There's a documentary series on Netflix called The 2000s, produced by CNN. The last episode was called "I Want My MP3," and it talks about, obviously, the MP3 boom, Napster, all of that. Obviously this is where my career was born, in that period of DIY and all that.
It was post-9/11; there was a lot of politically-charged music. After a while that kind of dissipated; people went into what we're kind of in now, which is escapism. All of the music just kind of turned a blind eye. Punk, rock, hip-hop, everything kind of just turned a blind eye towards the war. I mean the Dixie Chicks, "I'm ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas," that was a nail in the coffin. People abandoned it until Green Day came out with American Idiot. I think we're in that situation right now where everything has been so aimed at this administration and its policies and our president that there's almost a negative backlash.
People will call me a social justice warrior. I'm like, "I'm not a social justice warrior. I'm talking about how these things are affecting me. I'm a half-Arab, African-American Muslim in America — I'm talking about me." This isn't a nonprofit that I feel passionate about.
I think, for me, Iceberg was a failure. Not in sales, festivals or opportunities, but the message — it didn't get absorbed. It was really bothering for me. I didn't come out with an album last year. Mainly because of my kid being born, and I needed a reset — I was just burned out from music. The whole premise of The Iceberg was diving beneath the surface to understand why things are the way they are — whether it be love, politics, religion, money, whatever the case may be. Each song was dedicated to a deeper understanding of why things are they way they are. And this record comes out, and it gets reviewed by Noisey, and NPR, HipHopDX, etc….
Everybody.
And everyone said that this record was about me being a struggling underground artist wanting to have more in my career.
Wow.
I called a lot of the journalists. I called the person who wrote about it in HipHopDX and NPR. I said, "Why did you have that perspective?"
Was it Rodney at NPR who reviewed it?
It wasn't Rodney. It was someone else, I can't remember her name right now, she lives in Colorado. Without fail, all of them said, "I love you, and I love your music, and a lot of the stuff that I have to review I don't like. The stuff that gets a lot of spotlight, I wished it was you." So we discovered that people were assigning their narrative to me because they wanted me to be bigger, and they wanted more attention for me — they assumed that that's what I wanted, so that's what they dedicated my record about.
And it's really, really hard to escape these boxes. Yes, I'm an underground rapper. Yes, I'm conscious. Does that mean — without you listening to my record — that that's what every song is going to be about? No. People are lazy, and it's easy to see me and see my opposite — someone on Top 40 — and say, "I don't even have to listen to this record. I already know what it's about." It really did me a disservice to me. I realized that I wasn't in control of my own narrative. There was nothing I could do about it.
Then, the response from talking to people in songs like, "You Grew Up." It's a three-part song. First part is about a white kid who turns into a police officer; second one is about an immigrant who turned into a terrorist; third one is about me. You go to the YouTube comments, and you talk to people at the shows, and the Arab kid comes up to me and says, "I don't like what you said. You make it seem like all Muslims could turn into terrorists." The white guy says, "I don't like what you said, you make it seem like all of us turn into cops who kill people." Now, if you're Arab, or Middle Eastern or Muslim, that means you had to listen to the first verse to get to the second. You had no qualms with the first verse. So that means, that the whole point of the record was a stepping outside of yourself to understand why things are the way they are. There's lyrics and things that talk about thinking you're the center of the universe, but you're not.
That means the only thing that you cared about was what represented you and what you're interested in. That means the record missed the mark. You get what I'm saying?
100-percent. My mind is a little bit baffled right now. I feel like, as someone writing about a record, if you had an impulse to want to help somebody by creating your own narrative goes against the whole idea of criticizing what the art is. You're creating your story instead of being objective about it.
Yeah. That left me in this weird place where I'm thinking, "OK this music has to be way more literal because I can't trust it to be up to the interpretation of journalists, let alone listeners. I can't trust it. It needs to be more literal. I'm gonna step away from anything that allows people to quickly see a buzzword or prime word and say, 'Oh, this is how I categorize it.'" I have to be very calculated about what I write about, the titles of the songs, even, all have to be considered to make it as digestible and understandable as possible because people want to assign their own narrative to me. It's detrimental to my career.
Wow. so necessity aside, do you think, in hindsight, that you wished you wouldn't have put the album out or at least in the form that it is? Now I hear the live album and almost think of it as a kiss-off or closing of a chapter or farewell for that period of your discography.
Nah, the music is till going to be in the same vein. It's what I like to make. The next record is going to have some boom-bap ass shit because I've been in that mood these days. It's actually going to sound like a lot of my earlier shit, but it's also gonna have some upbeat funk fusion. It's gonna have some trap because I saw that people had no problems with me rapping like that when I put out "Like Really." I'm gonna push the envelope a little further in that direction. It's just gonna be a fusion of everything that I listen to and that I'm interested in, but the subject matter will be less political, man. I'm still gonna ask questions, but it will be less political than the last record.
I like The Iceberg, I really do. I like what I did musically on it. I really enjoyed it. I'm at a point in my career where I'm building a catalog for myself and for my live performance. It's bigger than the album for me. I needed The Iceberg to have those tempos and those sounds so when I do my live show I have that type of music to pull from. Every record, I go along and try to fill the pieces of what I think my live show is missing.
The next record is definitely like, "Oh, man. I don't have any straight up rappity-rap left. I've gone so musical. I'd live to revisit that era of my career where it was all about, basically beats and rhymes." I'm very anti-beats-and-rhymes. I like songs. But it's missing, and I do come from that. So, for old time's sake let's go with some good old-fashioned beats and rhymes for this next record.
So on every record, I go along and try to fill the blanks of the live show. Every year the industry and what fans listen to changes. There's a lot of chill-hop, lo-fi movement going on. There's a lot of rappers jumping on that sound. I've had entire albums of mine now re-classified as lo-fi, so the streaming numbers are booming on Spotify. And I'm watching this, I'm listening, and I'm like, "Oh, shit, Rock Creek Park is lo-fi now?"
Haha. That cover definitely has that feel. You could swap it out for any indie or emo band and be like, "Oh, look at this dude, man. Glasses, black guy, he practices Islam, and he's emo, man."
Haha. Yeah, so I'm like, "Oh you guys like this shit again? Let's throw that back onto the live set." We're always having fun with it. We're always sourcing data and always looking backwards to look forwards and enjoying it.
And real quick since we're running out of time. I get that traveling with your friends is great, but you’re on the road for about six months a year, that’s grueling and the romance of it is gone.
Gone, gone, gone.
Yeah, the schedule only gives you three months to write, record, mix and produce an album. How do you squeeze family in there?
Well, the first time I didn't come out with an album was when I had a daughter. That's literally what that was from. I came home from tour, and Mello Music was like, "Great. Now we can have an album." And APA, my booking agency was like, "When's the album done? Cause we need it to promote and get you more shows." My manager is like, "Come on…" And the publicist is like, "We can't work if we have nothing to work," and this is what the cycle has been like for the past six or seven years, and it's like, "You know what? I can't do this anymore. It's killing me."
So I didn't have a balance when my daughter was born. I couldn't do it. So I said, "You know what? All you motherfuckers didn't understand The Iceberg anyway. And everyone is waiting for me and my creativity so that their machines can work, and no one is considering me, so I just pulled the plug. I made enough money in touring, licensing and royalties that I don't need to work for years, so I'm just going to stay home.
So that's what happened. I stayed home, and I had fun making music again. It wasn't for a record. I just woke up every day and made music and played with my daughter — and it was a blast. I'm sitting on, like, 200 tracks now, which I am about to start picking for different projects. Get the ball rolling again.
I don't want to make the assumption, but is it safe to say that you'll take a new approach to booking tours? What's the time on the road or time away from home — the breaks — what's that look like?
My tours aren't consecutively six months — they never have been. At the most, it's been six weeks. Six weeks is a long time, but in order to make it worth it as a mid-level artist such as myself, I can't come home. If I'm in Asia, and it's a six-week tour, I can't come home three weeks in and then go back to Asia. It just doesn't work that way. I can do it a bit easier in America. I went on tour with Evidence, and that tour as four or five weeks, but it was literally only three or four shows a week, so we went home for four days and we came back out — he has a kid, too. You can do that here, but when I'm out I can't really do that.
But I have a very unique situation, and I'm very fortunate. My wife is Moroccan, and she was born and raised in Paris. She works from home. She does operations for a company, I won't put her business out there, and she can work from home. So if I say that I'm going to Europe to tour for four or five weeks, then she and my daughter will just go to Paris and stay with mom and dad. And whenever I have an off day, I'll take a quick Euro-flight to see them, which every four or five days, I have a day off on tour in Europe. So she'll just go to Europe and work from France, so I can still see my family. When I'm done we all fly home together. My touring schedule doesn't really affect my family life all that much.
Gotcha, and just so I don't have to quote something in a different interview. I always liked that you talk about how patriotism in America comes in many forms. You mentioned that your new album won't be political, but all of your music has been deeply American in a way. It's your own American experience. I just like your take on that.
A hundred percent. My music is so black. It's so back. It's unconsciously black. There's this catchphrase I see a lot of people say: "I'm unapologetically black." I'm not unapologetically black. I'm consciously black — it's embedded in me. That is something that I can't escape in my music. Where my mother's side of the family is Southern Baptist from rural Maryland. They moved to Washington, D.C.. They all play instruments, they're all in church. I'm next door neighbors with Gary Shider, and I grew up with his sons. I come from a city that invented its own genre of music, go-go. We hold an importance of being a live band over electronic music, to this day. My father plays a musical instrument. I was born in an era of hip-hop. I am around the nation's capital and politics. It's one of the only areas of American with a black majority, one of the wealthiest classes of black people in the country.
My black identity is so a part of my music. It's political in so many ways, and socially political, whether I want it to be or not. If I'm talking about corner stores, or drug problems, or violence, and what I see growing up, then someone is going to call it political. What I won't do is talk about our president any longer. I'm not talking about policy. I'm going back to talking about things on a ground level.
I didn't realize that you still live next to Diaper Man.
Not anymore. That's where I was raised. He passed away.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Nah, it's all good. I did a show with his son who took his place in the band. I did a gig with Parliament in San Francisco, and that was an amazing experience. To see his son onstage, I'm there, and that started in his basement. It was dope. But I don't think I can escape my music having some sort of a message, I guess. That's one of of those things — to go back to the unpopular opinion — I struggle living in Brooklyn. I'm from a place where it's a black majority, and the criminal is black, the police officer arresting him is black, the lawyer is black, the judge is black, the bailiff is black — everyone is black.
So you don't really grow up with this chip on your shoulder in Prince George's County, Maryland. "The system is against me, and it's the white man.” I don't look at the cops and say, "white cops." I just look at them and say, "cop." That's where I was raised. And you get a lot of people who come from a place where black people are marginalized, they make up, like, one to three percent of the population, and their identity being displayed externally is far more important to them then it is to me because it's all I've ever known. So it's not a statement to me — it's just the reality, so I don't necessarily always align with the ways that people want to fight for equality in black activism because it's not what I come from.
These are things, I mean anything I say beyond what I just said to you right now, I lose half my fanbase.
Right.
It's one of those things, and me and my friends from P.G. County, we talk about it all the time. Like, "There's no need for a hashtag. We're just black by default. We're very black and very proud of what we are." We're on something else right now. That's not something that a lot of my brethren in the country can associate with. When you don't know something, you're scared of it. You fear it. We'll get there. I hope one day that black communities across America can grow up with the level security and comfort in their identity that I had growing up where I was raised, you know?
For sure. Cool, well I don't want to keep you from your lunch. What'd you end up making?
Leftovers. Indian from last night. I'm gonna jump into this, get back to work and then I'm going to pick up baby from daycare at 4:30.
Well thanks, man. What part of town are you in by the way, so I can place you.
Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. That's where I live.
Cool. Looking forward to seeing you next weekend.
See you in a bit, take care.
This article appears in Mar 7-14, 2019.