I was going to ask you this later in the interview, but it’s fitting kind of with where we’re at. It must be kind of crazy watching Chance.
Oh, undoubtedly. It’s fucking ridiculous.
It’s got to be insanely inspiring at times, but a complete mind fuck because it doesn’t always happen like that.
But it’s not really. It was a surprise to everybody on the outside. But to see his ethic and just to see it happen the entire time, it wasn’t surprising. Because the first show there was nobody, so the second show there was gonna be more people. The third show, there was gonna be more people. It wasn’t surprising when the library filled up. It wasn’t surprising when Reggie’s filled up, because the library was full. Reggie’s is just a couple blocks away and a little more space .It wasn’t surprising when The Metro filled up because Reggie’s had a line around it for two years for every Save Money event. It wasn’t surprising to us because we saw the progression. But from an outside perspective, it had to fuck people’s heads up. It had to make anybody believe that anything is possible in any amount of time. It just seemed so immediate.
Has it changed at all what you think is possible for yourself? What have you gained watching him go through things?
I’ve definitely gained a new perspective of how realistic it is. Anybody that knows me, knows that I didn’t really get serious about music until the last five months, probably around SXSW. It was something that was fun and it was easy, but it was the same thing like – if I could play football on a minor league team and not get paid as much as the NFL players, but I could play, I would play football as a profession cause I like football a lot.
I’ve been listening to music my entire life, so when the opportunity arose, of course I was going to try to participate. But seeing shit like Chance happen, and shit like the Kids (Kids These Days), it definitely adds a new dimension to the possibilities of this being like a career, or at least just a way to become way more financially stable than I am now.
If that’s the case and you took it seriously four months ago, The Purple Tape came out a year ago.
A little bit over a year ago.
What was the purpose of The Purple Tape back then?
I don’t think I’ve ever had to answer this question. Not from right now, but thinking back on my mind state then, I think the main purpose of The Purple Tape was to tell as many people as I possibly could what I do everyday. Because I felt like it was different than what the next person might do everyday, and I just wanted to express what I do everyday. What I’ve been doing everyday for how ever long, what my mental space was. But now I feel like there might be people that actually give a fuck about what I do on the day to day. Instead of just me trying to tell people, ‘yo I’m not that normal, check me out.’ People are asking me, ‘when are you going to do something? You don’t seem too normal.’ There’s a different dynamic now.
On “Champions” you say, ‘think swift my young, live fast die young.’ How much of that embodied your mind state? Was that a part of this previous way of thought?
Not to seem too eerie, and as I get older I think about this concept more, but I never pictured myself old. I’m not saying I pictured myself dying, or I’ve pictured how I’d die, but I’ve never pictured myself old. But it’s also because I’ve never been old, I’ve only been young. I’m not able to picture myself outside of myself. It’s just been difficult. If you don’t have a real grasp of the idea of old age, it’s just easy to shape your opinions around this young mentality. Which is I suppose what that is.
You also have a line on a different song, “Tango In Paris”, ‘my brother was a dope boy, I probably wanted to be him.’
Yeah. I think the next line was, ‘the coppers locked him away, I probably won’t see the key, so I’ll probably have a daughter, he probably won’t meet his niece.’ Meaning without that male role model, without that ‘this is how you be a man, men are most likely to have daughters, scientifically.’ Proof in the pudding, I’m going to have a daughter.
Was it real like in the sense that that’s what you wanted to do?
Yeah. All my life, I didn’t know anybody with money besides my brother and he sold dope. So, if I wanted to have money realistically, all I saw was rappers and athletes and I knew the statistics on that. I was an athlete, and I didn’t rap. And I saw my brother, and there was no statistic for that cause I wasn’t with him in the hood everyday. I didn’t know that everybody around him was broke. I was with him everyday. And he was rich, actually rich.
A lot of lines in that song include ‘probably’.
That was purposeful.
And I think that’s part of the vein of living in the moment. That’s what it was expressing to me.
Yeah, yeah, the uncertainty but the worst/best/and most possible scenarios. But who’s to say? That’s why I did it. I figured that way it speaks to more than just my situation cause it’s my possibility. But my possibilities could be your reality, could be your possibilities, could be your past. It definitely stretches outside of just my current state.
With the music since The Purple Tape – and this goes back to what you said about taking music more seriously – how much of your life is still dealing in “probably”? Do you still think in that term?
Nah. I try not to at all. Of course there’s always probably’s and you have to leave things to the wind. I kind of like doing that, but I don’t like to leave things to probably. I like to leave things to “it will or will not.” I don’t like to think like, ‘it probably will.’ Cause if it will, it will. And if it won’t, it won’t. There’s no teetering on the edge about fact or fiction.
Can you speak to your relationship with III (producer of most of The Purple Tape)?
That’s my motherfucking brother. It’s crazy. Me and III have been through everything. He met the whole squad when we were 14 or 15, freshmen year or the summer after freshmen year. The instant thing was that we were so-called ‘Fresh.’ It was 2007 or 2008, so 15-year-old kids in any type of clothes that fit them in our neighborhood was better dressed than your average kid, you know what I mean.
So the first time I saw III he had on the Levi Jordan 1’s with Levi’s and that was like a $1,500 combination of clothing and we were all shorties so I think the first thing said between us was, ‘where the fuck you get your shoes?’ And it turned out that he had an older brother that worked at a sneaker store and all types of irrelevant shit. But that’s just my brother.
How does he help inform your sound? Are you still working as closely with him on the music side?
Yeah, definitely. We both had to get better. Cause I got way better at rapping and he’s taken the fuck off as far as production and shit. Our sounds were so close in the beginning because our lifestyles were just that close. We would just kick it, walk around, interact with people, smoke weed, and steal all day. And his sounds were reflective of that, and so were mine. It was very chill, but at the same time not boring at all. We could go a whole day, ‘just chilling’ and to an outside person it would be like, ‘fuck, what have we done today?’ To us we were just chilling.
Really enjoyed this, thanks
Purp is low key an essential force to the Save Money crew…