Thanks to Deezy Wee The Reaper, the slogan “Beyobe made this shit the other night” is as popular a tag in the Tampa Bay hip-hop community as “If Young Metro don’t trust you” is in the genre at large — and that was the Bay area rapper’s plan all along.
Deezy Wee The Reaper was born and raised here. When slapped against signature basslines from Tampa producer Beyobe’s 808 drum machine/sampler — like it is on a new EP, Pickled Oranges — Deezy Wee’s flair for whimsically narrating life in his hometown makes for an infectious sound that could score the muggiest of Tampa nights.
“The name, the content, all of it is just us having fun,” Deezy Wee told CL. While the title Pickled Oranges does bring a certain level of childlike curiosity to mind, the EP holds a deeper meaning to The Reaper, and this project sparked a plan within the rapper to outdo his past work as a musician. After releasing an initial single “Jetro” in the spring of this year, Deezy Wee decided to halt all other projects to devote enough time to the EP. Pickled Oranges instantly became a two-week cabin fever-like recording session between Beyobe and The Reaper.
“The EP happened quickly. I would be in the studio making a beat, He’d walk in and just start writing. We might be in the studio for 12 hours at a time between him writing and me doing post-production stuff,” Beyobe added.
“Pickled Oranges became a personal artist experiment between Beyobe and me,” said Deezy Wee. “We were trying to build something bigger than money. We were building relationships that will last.”
A wordsmith by trade and artist by nature, The Reaper was a drawn to an empty canvas at an early age. He hasn’t been able to stop drawing since he could first hold a crayon, but music made its way into his life later. “I have my drawings from first grade at my mom’s house. I kept everything. I kept homework if I doodled on it. I’m a hoarder when it comes to art,” he chuckled.
In the sixth grade, The Reaper’s relationship with music evolved into a knack for crafting wicked phrases, which led to freestyling and then finally to writing along with music. After experiencing the joy of making the sounds in his mind come alive, Deezy Wee knew he wanted to pursue music seriously. His focus has been slinging rhymes for the past eight years, and while inspiration is everywhere, finding a balance between music and art has proved difficult.
“I never like doing the same thing for too long,” he said, adding that the drive has to come from within. “I try different things that challenge me because there isn’t anybody else there to do that.”
He spent the summer dropping teasers from the EP on social media, and on October 1, The Reaper released his second single from Pickled Oranges, “Pop Rocks.” The track features high-energy production laced with pinging piano keys; Deezy Wee’s southern diction and descriptive wordplay lead the way. The full EP hits streaming platforms on Halloween, an appropriate holiday to mark the end of The Reaper’s trippy journey.
“Being focused is what’s trippy because people often stray away from their plan,” he said. “I stuck to mine and that was make Pickled Oranges and do it right.”
This article appears in Oct 12-19, 2017.
