Pitchfork: What was Bay Area culture to you growing up?
1100 Himself: Big T-shirts, white Air Forces, Blue Jays hats and shit.
Were you a fan of the local scene?
I was just listening to whatever the fuck older people was playin’ around me. We ain’t had no access to change to song, so it was just whatever they was playin’.
What were they listening to?
Shit. A lot of Lil Wayne. A lot of Lil Boosie. My cousins would be on, like, Ludacris and T-Pain, and my older brother let me use his iPod and that motherfucker had everything from David Banner to Akon. I liked when they played Young Money, especially Lil Twist and Lil Chuckee ’cause they was young like me. I used to live with my grandma, and she used to like stuff with a lot of saxophones, and shit like R. Kelly and Anthony Hamilton. I think that’s where I get my ear from.
How did that influence what you started listening to?
I liked what was pleasant to the ear. That’s how I started gravitating to the Tyler, the Creators, the Earl Sweathshirts, the Joey Bada$$es. I used to like how Tyler used to just be talkin’ on shit on, like, Bastard. He was so organic, and people was likin’ him genuinely being himself. And this was before cancel culture was popular, so he could get away with saying some skeptical shit.
What were they bumping in your high school?
They was listening to hella shit. I went to Oakland Tech so there was just a wide variety of people. But everyone was on Lil Yee from San Francisco heavy at that time. There was point in time I used to like DB tha General a lot, also P-Lo. It was a good time. We had an identity back then; you would hear some music and know it’s some Bay Area shit.
Is it not like that anymore?
Motherfuckers is getting lost on what other people is doing. They see the success of other cities and just try to do that. But we don’t have their unity, we say we want it for ourselves but we can’t.
That feels so out of character because the Bay Area has such a rich history of being able to sustain its own rap scene without needing to pull from out of town.
Yeah, I mean still we got a lot of talent and people take from us all the time, but we don’t have all the proper labels anymore. We only have Empire and Thizzler [on the Roof]. Empire is cool, but, if you from the Bay Area, there’s already 3,000 people on Empire and [a] bunch of them is bigger than you. How are you gonna get the proper push?
Do you feel there is less music being made specifically for the people of the Bay?
The shows are full of less natives. They don’t understand where you coming from. Nine times out of 10, the people that run these labels don’t be from Oakland. It’s just a lot of people coming from other places, so they just listening to music. How do you have a concrete sound when there’s so many new people, doing different shit?
In your music you’ve also criticized the outside perception of modern Bay Area rap. On “Colossus,” you said, “When they talk about the Bay they think we still gettin’ hyphy.” What did you mean by that?
That’s not our identity no more. We no longer doing the big white tees and ghost riding the whip.
How do you contribute to the Bay Area sound?
I don’t know, for real, for real. I got a lot of stories, a lot of shit to rap about.
Where does your storytelling come from?
I remember hearing “Trapped in the Closet.” I always thought it would be cool to do some shit like that one day.
Was that the inspiration for the “Set Up” series?
That just came to me and Mitchell one day. Me and Mitchell been joking and feeding off each other when we rap since I met him. I remember he was doing music before me. He was living in Calabasas at the time and DMed me saying he was coming back down to the Bay to work with me. He really came, played me some beats, and them motherfuckers was tough, so we been going since then. But we tried to make a quick back and forth story at first and people was fucking with it so we ran with it.
What’s the coolest piece of rap storytelling you’ve ever heard?
My uncle used to play this Nas song [“Rewind”] where he told a story backwards. He was telling that motherfucker backwards and it still made sense. I used to like that shit. His pen is impeccable.
