What have you and your kids connected over?
Playboi Carti. That first happened probably around the time the self-titled dropped. It was at the time when all the old heads were calling him and Yachty mumble rap, but my son was running “Magnolia” into the ground. I started absorbing it by osmosis.
What did you like about it?
I had to listen to it differently. Carti isn’t motherfuckin’ Inspectah Deck. Give me the baby noises. Make shit that slaps. Use your voice as an instrument.
Even going back to your time as a music critic at Vice reviewing everything from Crystal Castles to Paramore, I feel like you’ve always been pretty open to new music.
Shoutout Drew Millard. He’d send me five random albums, like Surfer Blood, French Montana, and Lady Gaga, and I would roll up a blunt and just start writing about what they made me think. Yo, this shit sound like a bear with aluminum foil around his dick jerking off in the woods or whatever [laughs]. My style of writing was always a gut thing; I wasn’t going to have any cool SAT words. I just wanted to see if the music made me feel something, anything.
It was really raw and out of pocket, I remember one time you said Lady Saw looked like Tony Allen.
Was I wrong [laughs]? But that was the whole thing. I was just talking into the ether and then it resonated with people because they met me and were like, “Oh, that’s really just him.”
Do you miss writing? I feel like you really notice when a writer becomes a podcaster and stops writing, all of their thoughts become a lot more—
Vibe based. Nah, yeah, that’s why I still try to do it. It organizes my thoughts. How else are you supposed to transition from talking about some heavy political shit to a dude getting his wig punched off?
I tend to think writing things out can push your curiosity, too, which isn’t always a common trait in the hip-hop podcasting space.
Everybody’s too fucking cool. I like thinking back to when I was younger on Astor Place when Tower Records was there—it was huge, it felt like a college campus—and they’d have these listening stations that were all over the place. So now I’m listening to drum ’n’ bass, house music, metal, hardcore, EPMD, all in the same day. And then, if you come from graffiti, you know graffiti writers are all over the place.
Did you have graffiti writers that you looked up to?
A lot of them, even though I didn’t know who they were until later on. Dudes in the Bronx I’d just see up all the time. Bester. Since—he was fucking everywhere with these massive stompers. But graffiti is ill ’cause you’ll think it’s all Jamaican and Dominican kids and then you’ll finally meet someone and their white kid from Boston who listens to punk rock. You’ll be in the car letting them play whatever because you’re riding around bombing. What is this? The Offspring? Aight cool.
