07 / The story
He came from a city that had never sent anybody up.
Riverside, California. An hour east of Los Angeles and, by his own account, a place no big rap artist had ever come out of. He started throwing house parties and putting out videos while he was still working out what he wanted to be.
In his senior year of college he lost his basketball scholarship. Music had already taken the front seat. What he did next is the part people skip past: instead of chasing beats online, he sat down and spent more than five hours a day, for roughly two years, learning to make them himself.
“I don’t know anybody in the industry, so a lot of things I do are from trial and error.”
He has never signed a deal, and he crossed a million plays on Apple Music without a single editorial playlist behind him. The music has stayed on the smooth end of the West Coast the whole way through. Warm drums, clean bass, and bars about the business he is actually running. No borrowed menace, no invented backstory. Just a man who works, told plainly, over something you would happily drive to.
