INTERVIEW: NEGASHI ARMADA

GOING DEEP WITH THE RAP ICONOCLAST

For those who have been paying attention to leftfield rap over the past two decades, the always-changing music of Negashi Armada has been one constant. Armada spent his teenage years in Atlanta as part of Supreeme, a group whose Dipset-influenced sound ran counter to the rap that defined the city in the early 2000s. Supreeme got a record deal and did a stint on the Warped Tour but ultimately broke up. Then Armada put out a string of releases under the name Blunt Fang, which pushed his music into wilder spaces. The track “Crystal Power,” for example, hit like a synthesis of multiple generations of abstract rap and came with a green screen video that predates similar styles from artists like Yung Lean and Lil Yachty.

Since 2016, Armada has been making music under his government name. On his more recent records, he balances a sustained interest in lyricism with an increasingly adventurous sonic position. Newer releases like Coarse Light Negative Zero and Coarse Light 3 exist in a chasm between Dean Blunt and Cormega. This is a story very much in progress. Last week, I caught up with the rapper—who is based in Los Angeles but has been spending some time in New York—and we chatted about his life in music. Armada is also a great visual artist, but we didn’t have time to get into that. For those interested, I recommend an interview he did in the latest issue of Superstars Only magazine. Our talk is below.

Was Supreeme your entry into rapping, or were you doing that before the group? 

I’ve been rapping pretty much since I was ten years old. I started recording music when I was 13. My friend Shaka, a.k.a. GLDNEYE, who produces a lot of the Fat Tony stuff, his dad and my dad knew each other from the theater community in Atlanta. My dad's a set designer—he did plays when I was a kid but then eventually moved to television and NBA on TNT. Like, when you see the stage and it says NBA on TNT and they're sitting there, Shaq and them, my dad made that shit. My dad's cool with Shaq and shit. 

Union job? 

Yeah, and Shaka's dad was a little bit more of a vagabond rock and roller, who worked at a costume shop—no diss, because I'm probably more that type of person, but my dad used to have to see him when dealing with plays for the Morehouse Spellman players or 14th Street Productions or Jomandi, these Atlanta local theaters. One day we were all at some jazz festival in the park with our dads and we both were like, Oh, you like Wu-Tang? We were gonna start making music. I was kind of a child battle rapper. The very first song I recorded and performed, I was 12 or 13 and it was in front of KRS-One for the prize of winning this rap battle at a kind of new-agey, Afrocentric church in Southwest Atlanta. 

And he was a guest judge? 

He was a guest judge, him and Speech from Arrested Development. I beat all the kids and the prize was to perform an original song—if you had one. And unlike the other kids, Shaka's dad, he was a musician his entire life, always had a studio, and in fact his best friend had an early copy of Fruity Loops, he gave Shaka an early demo and so we were just rolling immediately. And then Sam, the white guy in Supreeme, he had a CD burner, and him and Shaka initially had a fake Goodie Mob, OutKast type group that I wasn't in because they were two years older than me. I thought that shit was just so sick, that kids my age were making CDs.

Yeah.

I'm an old head, quote-unquote old head, but this is pre just putting your shit on Myspace, like I was early in that generation, too, but still we were in Atlanta, foot to pavement going around to stores and then that shit eventually turned into Supreeme. 

That era, the early 2000s, was the last gasp of physical being the primary way to get your shit out there. 

DJ Klever helped me get covers made, you meet an older head who is in the record store community, and you know he's got to get a bunch of bulk shit printed and you've only got like $300 so you're like, All right, let me get a part of your order. It's funny, because even though that shit was a lot of hype and excitement and I got to travel and whatnot, it quote-unquote didn't work out, but I wouldn't even say that. I think a lot of me being able to conduct myself in the world came from that time period, as well as lots of friends and connections that just go beyond. 

For sure.

I'll be hanging out with art world people and then they'll be like, how do you know Trevor McFedries? He started Friends With Benefits, and I know him from when I was in Supreeme, when he was DJ Skeet Skeet, DJing for Shwayze and Katy Perry and shit like that. The more esoteric I become as I get older, I feel like it's just energy and data and information seeking itself and people are like nodes of that information.

What I thought was interesting about Supreeme was that there was such an East Coast influence, such a major Dipset influence. Was that almost contrarian, with you coming from Atlanta? 

Yes. It was pure contrarianism. We didn't want to do what everybody around us was doing. Me and Shaka in particular were always extreme contrarians. I went to Black nationalist private school from kindergarten to 7th grade and then I got sent to public school and I was immediately really rejected by people—I don't even think I was rejected, I think I was just kind of pretentious and musty, and it immediately put me at odds with my peers. Then I met Shaka, he was on the same shit, and I was like, Hell yeah, I don't want to fucking bump “Country Grammar,” it’s not that hot. I want to listen to Dipset, I want to listen to Mobb Deep, and QB's Finest and all that stuff. 

Also, my family's from New York, so that's a big part. I spent kindergarten here, half of 10th grade, every Christmas, every summer, and I got really indoctrinated into New York lyrical formalism. We were kind of coming in on the tail end of New York hitting this crazy crescendo—which it has, you know, it's had other crescendos—but the crescendo of Jay-Z versus Nas versus Dipset, all this crazy mix show… I got sent away to 10th grade because I failed everything in 9th grade and I had to go live in New York and it was 9/11 and I was 13 and it was such an intense time for music. 

It must have been so eye-opening just to hear Hot 97. 

It was like a soap opera, it was like pro wrestling, it was like WWF, but real-ish. 

It’s sort of a theme of this talk, but that was also the last gasp of, like, Okay, New York is indisputably the center of the rap universe. 

Yeah, before really shifted to Atlanta hardcore and then now I wouldn't even say there isn’t a literal center at this point.

I still hear that New York lyrical influence, it's still in your music. 

100 percent. I’m trying to be the bar man. I'm the bar man, for sure, I don't play about that. I wish I got more credit for that and less credit for being avant garde or whatever the fuck. I like that rap in particular has a communal ancestral throughline to the beginning of time. People sitting around just bouncing ideas off of each other. I even like when people get bent out of shape about the lack of originality in different eras or subgenres, because it's kind of egoless music for the community. People don't look to gospel musicians to have originality, they're not like, That song about god sounded just like that other song about god. No, you’re performing a communal function. But also I still am very much influenced by the European, authenticity, literary tradition of creative ownership. 

It seems like you're interested in sorting through artists with big discographies. Is that a goal of yours as an artist, too?

I also have a very short attention span in some regards. I'll think about an artist that I've liked and be like, Wow I never thought to learn anything about them, then I'll be in a wormhole on YouTube and go through everything. Yeah, I like somebody who's got some density. I would hope that if I were in another position and I got to find my own stuff I think it'd be cool. You find some cool song by me that's catchy and then you get to find out that there's all this other stuff and the listenability has a range to it. 

I don't know, I like the treasure aspect. I like digging. I grew up in a time of actually going to record stores and comic book stores. I also spent most of my life pretty poor, going to Value Village, and trying to create beauty and gems out of nothing. Even sampling kind of worked for me that way for a while. I was definitely picking records to sample off of the covers at the store and shit like that. I'm like, Oh, this old eighties gospel country record, this lady looks like she's in a cult or something. I want some of that energy. 

After Supreeme, what was your first solo release? 

The first thing I did was an EP called Cross Burner that was straight to Myspace and then a MediaFire link sent to all of my contacts in an email chain. I was like, Oh, this is so different. I was coming out of the record label experience with Supreeme. I made that all on GarageBand with a keyboard. In Supreeme, I didn't make any of the beats, but I picked a lot of the samples, and I watched Shaka make beats for years. I was listening to a lot of Project Pat and Mac Dre.

When I think about the peak visibility of Blunt Fang, I think about this sort of Tumblr era of rap, for lack of better words. There were a lot of things coexisting at the same time. 

That was really interesting because I had just become a father—I have my only son, Akkoto. And so I was in this weird place. Really young people in their 20s, I was a projection of their insecurity about their fate, people were really trying to age me up to the age I am now, simply by virtue of me having a child. I also think by quitting Supreeme, I felt like a lot of my more industry, rap, focus, vector, streetwear universe friends thought of me as some rogue who's gone off to have a child and make lo-fi music. So it's funny that shortly after that, I kind of was in a cool little space, but I fucked with it. I eventually expanded into a band, I learned so much about music, I learned a lot more about performing and even just myself, I would say, through that experience. 

Yeah.

I was working at this restaurant in Atlanta, which is a cool dead end spot, all the punks and metalheads—it was nothing but band dudes who worked there. All the cooks were Moroccan and Algerian, solid ass older men who had seen it all, were not shocked by anything, but they weren't with the alt shit. And it was just mid soul food and mid pasta and also jerk chicken. The entire city ate there, from the poorest of the poor to the uber-rich. I think I even came up with the name Blunt Fang in there. I feel like I'm being like a podcast person, but pretty much everyone who worked there had to sell drugs, like in the restaurant, including the owner’s son. So we're going to black out the name of the restaurant. 

I feel like working in that place, I got better at drawing. My homie Chase Tail, who's kind of in that really quintessential, like, “keeping punk rock alive,” haircut punks, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Tampa circuit, he can draw his ass off, and we would just competitively draw at this place. Also, when I was in Supreeme, we were on Warped Tour at the same time. We were 18. 

I didn't know you did Warped Tour. That must have been weird. So few rap acts did it. 

There would be underground hip hop people around, but people would literally wear shirts that say, like, rap sucks and flick us off while we would be performing. 

Were you on a big stage?

We were on a small rap stage. We got signed by Murs to this label called Record Collection  that eventually folded and then we got upstreamed to Warner Brothers for like a year. But when we were on Record Collection, they were like, Oh, you guys never been on tour? And Murs being our mentor and also a touring impresario at the time, was touring like 300 out of 365 days a year at this time, he was like, Y'all need to go on Warped Tour, all two and a half months, and just get weathered. So we were in a van with another hip hop group, Brother Reade, and we were so spoiled. We had the full Warped Tour meal plan cards and all the other people on the hip hop stage did not have that shit. So there was already this class striation. We were also babies compared to all of them. 

You got that meal plan because you were on Warner?

Because I was on Record Collection. Record collection was Bob Hurley's gift to Jordan Tapas, one of his favorite surfers. It had John Frusciante, The Walkmen. 

You haven't really had a proper label experience like that since. Did that fuck you up in a way? 

I think so, a little bit. My friend Fit of Body, Ryan Parks, runs Harsh Riddims, and I’ve put out stuff with him. With Ryan, I’ll be like, Do you just cold call people and send them stuff? How do you get so many looks? And he's like, Yeah, I just send people stuff. I could never do that. I'm just like an underground guy over here. Nevermind. But yeah, I think to some degree it did soil it. But also I know that we were very immature and silly, and me and Shaka loved being antagonistic with people. We were young and we got Sam into it, too. We had these managers that were managing Murs and also Snoop Dogg and eventually the Eastern Alliance. And they would send the guy to drive us around and we would act like we were in the Unforgivable skits and mess with him. Because I was fucking 18 years old, you know, I didn't know any better. 

I see such a clear throughline with all of your music, but it seems like there's been a process of gradual abstraction. Is that safe to say? 

I guess so, maybe. It’s a crystallization to some degree—like, Oh, that's what I like to do. But I mean, it's always changing also. 

Do you feel like, with some of these newer records, you’ve hit on a sound you've been trying to find for a long time? 

Yes. I'll go on a binge of listening to a bunch of old stuff of mine and be like, Oh, yeah, I need to do another song like that. When I started doing Blunt Fang, I would read about Burzum and Xasthur, I would learn about how when they first started making black metal, they were just using the worst stuff they could find, and then after a while they got more refined to making choices. It’s not like you eventually switch to using all the best stuff you can find, but just having a little more of a straight line to what you want to do. 

I've always been into this idea—especially when I learned about rap and punk, music where you're just reducing something down—like, you reduce, you take a segment of something and then you repeat that moment or you take a smaller segment, you know, no chord progression, just stick with the same chord, whatever. And then next thing you know, you're manipulating time and you've created a whole new style.

It takes a lot of confidence to realize that the 30 second outro of one of your songs, that's what you need to be focusing on. 

I also think that it's just through me loving other people's music. Talking about that last 30 seconds, I had a phase maybe a year or two ago where I was listening to a lot of rock and roll and reggae songs from the 70s and 60s where they get to this weird moment where the band is just super gelled and maybe even one chord is slightly changed, and they're doing this crescendo rock out, and the engineer is fading it down, but there's this kind of weird afterglow magic that's beginning to happen. I was like, Damn, like how do you make songs like that? And then I started sampling stuff where like, oh, the sample is not even the same volume all the way throughout. So I'm trying to catch that fading glow and then run it back and then run it back and then run it back. You know? 

That's what's great about rap.

Yeah, in an alchemical way, it's like trapping time and the feelings associated with that moment and all of it. Every single aspect of the whole band playing and the air in the room and all that stuff kind of is part of the sample. Sometimes I'll be working with somebody and they'll be like, Find a clean version of the song that you're taking from this movie and I'm like, Nah I want the scene in the movie with even some of the dialogue and stuff like that. 

I think your stuff sometimes hits in that uncanny space that a lot of rap kind of tiptoes around. 

Yeah. Also my seeing my homies like freaking Keke Hunt and Odwalla1221 and seeing a lot of the really freaky music that was out there and me wanting some rap that kind of comes out of the box. That's been a big thing for me. I don't want it to just feel like a musical product trapped in there for you to have a snack and be done with it. I want to actually grab you and pull you into a moment, even if it bothers you a little bit, I'd rather that than you just be like, Oh that was nice, that was a nice bop. I want it to be like, Oh man, this is a problem for me or, like, what is happening. 

Yeah.

I was debating with a friend of mine about this kind of emerging subgenre of trap where the bass is super blown out. It's kind of like post-drill stuff.

Like that Lazer Dim 700 type stuff?

I listen to a lot of that. Even more underground than Lazer Dim, my favorite rapper right now is a new young rapper, this guy Yung Kirk, he's from Stone Mountain, Georgia and he raps on a lot of that type of stuff, but I feel like Lazer Dim is a rapper and Yung Kirk is a person, like a real story. I feel like Lazer Dim might as well be like Tyler The Creator or something. Not that you have to be like committing crimes, you could be just a recluse, I think of Xasthur as a calling and not a musical project. Drake is a musical project, you know what I'm saying? Tupac—that's a calling. 

I like that type of music because it reminds me of this free space that rap had to not be so contaminated by the opinions of people who don't care about it. Like, “This is not music. It's guys just doing poetry over drum noises and samples and stuff.” I'm like, Yeah that's sick—not music. It's more than music, like the Dipset mixtape.

Negashi Armada on Instagram and Bandcamp

(Photo by Laura Brunisholz)