Born in the Bronx, New York and raised in Central Florida, Wahid’s brand of confessional rap reports over wisecracking matter-of-fact bars that feel both grounded and heavenly.
If you view the past as prelude, a rapper’s origin story is often shrouded in mythology. One’s foundations inform an artist’s identity. In the case of Wahid however, his story is completely singular. A true original who learned the rules first, just so that he could break them.
“I was in a fucked-up place,” says Wahid behind a sunny demeanour. Declarations like this suggest the Orlando, Florida-native has been making space for some introspection of late; “It’s almost like I was scribing [the ‘feast, by ravens’ EP] as I was living, and now I get to put all the pieces together and take it all in.”
Life is a series of ups, downs, twists, turns and sometimes even a little apocalyptic. There’s an entire industry built around how to cope with trauma and injustice, where the go-to narrative is often centred around a glass-half-empty philosophy – profiting from the notion that the struggles we endure only make us stronger. Much of the history of rap has embodied this.
Wahid spits personal confessions that pull away from that anecdotal tragedy narrative. Relaying his own reflections on themes like depression and vices in exacting but ultimately humanist terms. And it makes sense: it’s our nature to look for ways to understand our suffering. In a sense, it’s the very core of rap itself.
‘feast, by ravens‘, his new EP and ostensive debut, is far and away his most layered work to date. Clocking in at 17 minutes and 29 seconds, ‘FBR’ is a short yet defining oeuvre in Wahid’s career, chronicling the last three or four years of his life. His thematic approach is imbued with a spirituality: inspired by the parable of Elijah in the Book of Kings, the project’s title reflects on adversity. In this biblical story, Wahid resonates with the image of the prophet seeking refuge in the desert, sustained by a feast provided by a flock of ravens. “I related to this at the time of writing because I felt like I was in a bit of a deserted place,” he adds.
Over the last few years, Wahid has been cultivating solo material following the breakup of seeyousoon, a hip-hop supergroup who were poised to cement a spot as one of this generation’s most revered acts. The ensuing grief was a heavy cross to bear, he tells me. The results of which materialise on his recent debut. Like a footballer finally catching his breath after a fierce blitz out on the field, each track echoes the adrenaline of his struggles being transformed into creative reverie. It feels like he’s been here before, you can hear the old soul at work as he spits his wisdom.
This is the kind of project that gets better with every listen, the more you take it in, the more you feel a part of you attach itself to the narrative. Opening with ’50/50′, he barrels through like a man on a mission. “Back and forth/ In the presence of the character that’s on my shoulder/ Trying to kill itself after my mistakes” he raps in his signature confessional tone. The religious intimations of his project titles extend to his music. They play like hymnals in areas.
His music is music to be felt as well as heard. This uneasy alliance of loneliness, fear, aches and pains can be felt by the listener. He has the ability to glide through complex lyrical schemes and intricate scenes—whether introspectively parsing his own origins or depicting a a doomsday 21st-century world—without dropping a bead of sweat. His verses deliver like poetry, each word spilling over onto the next.
Wahid speaks of his favourite music with the depth of a scholar and the refreshing enthusiasm of someone who has no qualms about a bit of nerding out. This same geekdom was the thread on which our conversation hung. The list of thinkers and influential artists who have impacted Wahid is extensive, even his name is a hint to one of hip hop’s greatest, the mighty Mos Def’s track by the same name. “It might have been a conscious influence, it might have been subconscious, but it certainly played a part in landing on this artist name,” he explains. Early touchstones included discovering GZA’s ‘Liquid Swords’ in high school, or the moment he finally grasped Cuban Links heavy lyricism when he was 20, or the thought-provoking rappers like Nas, Lupe Fiasco, and Black Thought, as archetypes for the way he thinks about writing songs.
—
—
In addition to the salient scriptures of 90s boom bap rap slappers, he gives us the investigative reports of his life in Orlando, blended with the wholly distinctive East Coast input from his older brother, whose sonic influence was paramount to his own musical smorgasbord. Entrenched in the sounds of dancehall and reggae dub from early on by his Jamaican DJ father, an integral member of the club music scenes of NYC in the 80s and 90s, playing the “flyest shit ever” beams Wahid. “It’s pretty dope when you’re growing up to have a parent in those kind of spaces.”
It’s a bit surprising that he was brought up in Florida, sharing a headspace with the likes of Kodak Black’s or the early pioneers of bass music. “I’m from Florida, but I feel like I’m not from Florida,” he shrugs, “I do love Florida though, I love Orlando, it’s my homeland, my community.”Although his sound is not influenced by his surroundings, his local network gave him the motivation to come correct with the vivid self-portrait that was FBR. Here’s an artist from the Sunshine State now plunging head-on into the depths of his own inner turmoil, delivered via moments of calm catharsis: facing down his father’s influence on ‘VICTORY?!’, his demons having a ball on ‘Mezcal’ (ft. AYAANA), or pondering his brush with depression on ‘SOLSTICE’. He claims in his lyrics he’s been here before, and you can hear the old soul at work in his wisdom.
When I talk with Wahid, he returns again and again to his appreciation of the storytellers that came before him. The layered depths of his lyricism are one of his greatest strengths, his projects are the kind you have to return to, and each time, there’s something shiny and new to be discovered. With a simple and powerful taste in production, he gravitates towards woozy drums and piano loops. It only serves to underline the sense that he’s making something bigger than rap.
“In the last decade, we have had the three-headed monster of hip hop: Drake, Kendrick and J.Cole. People have been asking ‘who’s going to take over’ and it’s crazy to me that they’re still holding that kind of claim.” Wahid has a theory on the ‘big 3.’ It all comes down to artist’s being pushed to reconnect with their fan bases directly, he suggests––if the gap between artist and audience continues to widen due to the quantifying of music and money-hungry streaming giants, there really is no other option than for artists to start selling directly to fans and cutting out the middle men. The totally un-Floridian, Floridian rapper has no interest in ceding creative control for popularity either, and he’s got an exciting idea in the works with his brother which addresses this very issue of listener to artist connection.
While his origin story has already become a thing of legend, his worldly focus is of someone with a tonne to get off his chest. Some years after his introduction, Wahid’s future still seems wide open. Whether it’s his introspective flows, simmering cadences, his fanboy-like appreciation for the music that raised him, it’s his impressive work ethic and honourable ethos which informs nearly every move.
Read on for an excerpt from our chat…
—
—
It’s difficult to place yourself on the outside of a story when you’re still in the centre of it unfolding. Would you say ‘feast, by ravens’ marks a point where you can reflect on those last three or four years since you’ve gone solo?
100%. Particularly when I sit back and listen to the record, I realise ‘okay, this is very in the moment.’ I think the songs have a lot of that in there as well, it’s almost like I was scribing as I was living. And then I thought – let me see what happens when I put it all together, and I saw it all come together in a way that really worked, the way it felt was natural. This is how my life was at the time, from songs like, ‘Mezcal’ and ‘SOLSTICE’, and then from the intro [’50/50′], to “ineedacig”, I was in a pretty fucked up place. But it still felt very reflective. That’s why I fuck with it.
I feel like I received an education just by listening to ‘FBR’. I had to get the dictionary out.. the Bible. What would you attribute this appreciation of knowledge and crafting a tale to?
That’s fire. I have to think about this. I think it’s being a student of hip-hop music. My favourite artists are all great storytellers in these very different and creative ways and I think as I was coming up and trying to make music, I thought ‘well, shoot, I wanna be a storyteller too’. At least in my own way. Specifically with this story and the topic of faith, I grew up in a very strong religious household.
I imagine you get the formula for creating a story growing up in religious spaces…
Exactly. And I think, in some ways––in a lot of ways actually––that informs most of my music. Even though there’s a lot of contradictions, but there are jewels that I keep with me. Nas is one of the greatest storytellers ever and I love Lupe Fiasco so much. And he does that too, he’s so dense and layered. It’s like how the fuck do you do that? I think that just being a fan of those kind of artists made me want to do that, or try my hand at really pushing the pen. Trying to find ways to say things or write about things that are big – it’s the root and the core of it – whatever the issue is. It’s like, let me find a way to really mess your head up with this, and when you get it, you think ‘oh, wow, that was right in front of me this whole time.’
These artists, the storytellers of our generation, learned the rules to break them, which seems to me what you’re saying as well – you saw these artists that you look up to, and you had to learn their rules to make your own.
Definitely, that’s the perfect way to put it, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever even thought about it like that. Damn, shout out to you. That’s crazy. We gotta learn first. Facts.
I learnt a lot about Florida’s music history while I was researching as well, like the bass music pioneers… Does your upbringing in Florida inform your music in any way?
How can I explain this? I’m from Florida, but I feel like I’m not from Florida, I was born in the Bronx and my dad’s Jamaican. I do love Florida though, I love Orlando, it’s my home, that’s my community. But I was raised in a Jamaican household on dancehall and genres like that. My father was a DJ, it was the flyest shit ever, low key. You get to grow up seeing your dad do the coolest shit, spitting bars off the top of his head, it’s so ill. He’s been toasting since the 80s… but it goes back further even, ever since he was a kid really, so take it back to the 70s. A lot of my hip hop knowledge was East Coast rap also, especially coming from my older brother.
I can feel that, because you do also have this ability to play around with your melodies too, like when Big L was putting Patois in the middle of his tracks and changing the game for people.
Oh man. Something I really love about Big L too was his flow. The way he switched up his cadences and then, the punchlines were simply incredible. I think that really informs me in some way. Being from the South, like you say, in Florida it was a lot of bass music, and crunk era music, a lot of that early 2000s, early trap. So I think yes, I’m influenced by that but not as much as those foundations. Base music is dope though. I never really got into it till I went to college.
That’s interesting, although we get influenced by our surroundings, sometimes we can reject something because we’re surrounded by it, a hyper focused music scene can almost feel limiting. Sometimes I think that might lead to even more curiosity, in spite of…
Yeah I dig it, that’s dope, it’s about finding yourself first, it’s about finding what you like. And, a lot of times too, I just would hear it and it almost feels like you’re being conditioned, you walk outside all you hear is the same thing. And the thing is, a lot of it is fire. That’s the appreciation you can return to later on when you’re like, actually, this is hard, this isn’t just a guilty pleasure I actually like this.
Sometimes my favourite albums didn’t even trigger anything in me the first time round. And then they just get better with every listen.
Word! I swear to you I had this same thing with Lil Wayne’s ‘Carter III’ was everywhere. I just remember thinking, I’m not trying to hear no Lil Wayne. and then, you know, I get a little older, and I probably listen to that album, and now it’s probably one of my top 10 albums. Every time I hear it.
—
—
There is a rich history in Florida, and maybe that’s reflective of the creative community there. Like you said before, you have love for Orlando and the community around you. How do you think that creative community has supported you in becoming an artist?
Quite a lot, you know. I moved to Orlando when I was around four or five years old. Up until I started school and then college. My best friend Lucas and I were really into rap. We’d look around, trying to see what was happening in the scene, but back in 2011, 2012, there wasn’t much going on, at least not that we knew of. Orlando didn’t seem to have much happening at the time. When I went away to college in Tallahassee, about four hours away, and then returned, it felt like suddenly there were all these artists emerging out of nowhere. I remember thinking, ‘Where were you guys when I was around?’
But there were some really talented artists, and when I moved back, I got to connect with them. It was great because I’d been a fan from afar, and suddenly, they were showing me love and support. It was cool to realise I was appreciated too. That’s partly how seeyousoon got started, actually. It was all about the community. I met my friend Iggy and some producers, like Kenny, through mutual connections. It just snowballed from there. Coming back home and getting involved in the local scene has been amazing. I’ve met so many talented people who have introduced me to others, helping me build networks that I still rely on today. It’s all about love, really. Building bridges and connecting with others—it’s a beautiful thing.
That’s amazing, it can be tough to maintain or build connections nowadays, most of us have been through enough to know that we’re resilient on our own, but it is important to have those people around us just to know that they’re there. It seems like we don’t see many groups anymore. Would you say it’s hard to maintain a group these days?
Right? It’s funny because even Wu-Tang has gone through so much but they’re still… they’re still Wu-Tang, you know? They’re still performing together, they’re still, you know, they still do their thing. I know most of them probably don’t have great relationships but I guess, maybe it’s a difference in understanding the reasons for having a group back then. A lot of these groups were coming from nothing, from very scary places in the world… And they were able to persevere and build up the toughness and strength to be like, ‘Yo, whatever it is, we gonna do this thing.’ And I think there might… there’s a lot of that still, you know? That’s why all these other groups are still doing legacy tours or… and they’re still together. Even when I think about supergroups like Brockhampton and how they met on the internet, but to not be in the trenches from the ground up I think has a lot of impact.
Listening back to those earlier releases, if you ever do, what do you think? Like Hell is Hot for example.
I think about what Earl Sweatshirt mentioned in his Zane Lowe interview for the 10-year anniversary of ‘Doris’. He talked about how much he hated listening to his old stuff because he felt like he was insane back then. And I relate to that so much because when we’re young and just learning the art of rap, we’re focused on putting together the coolest words and flows without much substance. Writing rhymes at 18, what did I really know about the world? But now, at 30, I’m a better writer and I’ve experienced more of life, so I can tap into that emotion and really feel the music.
When we’re younger, we’re not thinking about consequences because we haven’t faced as much responsibility yet. We experiment, take risks, express opinions on things we haven’t experienced. Would you say you can still channel some of that youthful arrogance now if you need to take risks or experiment?
I think I’m trying to. I mean, more recently, I’ve been trying to. But it’s a lot more difficult now that I’m a better rapper. I feel like it would be a lot more impactful in the writing, just picking up a pen and writing for the sake of writing. I haven’t been doing that a lot recently, you know, everything feels like it’s centred towards some greater purpose, but I have been trying to get back into a place where there’s always going to be that feeling of betterment.
It’s like you have to strike this balance between resolute, humble, realness and then slight touch of delusion.
Ha, definitely. I agree. For sure. I think the delusion helps you puts the blinders on too. Just a little bit, not too much. Because a lot of people out here are very delusional and like, yo bro, I hate to break it to you, but this is whack. I’m about to write rhymes and make millions, or whatever your goal is, if it’s not money, whatever it is, a certain acclaim or getting recognition; that’s not easy. I do believe in manifestation, especially if you’re really dope and overall good human.
With ‘SOLSTICE’ you had two producers on… Any anecdotes from the creative process there?
Funny SOLSTICE was the oldest song on there actually, it was written back in 2020, just before the pandemic. When I made that song, I thought, man this song is going to be 50 years old and it’s still going to be fire.
—
—
There’s something to it. It’s got gravity.
Yeah facts. Gravity is the best word. I remember showing my boy Danny and he was ‘yo what the fuck is this!?’ I remember I was working on an album at the time that never came out and that song was going to be a part of it. Funny enough, that album was going to be called ‘Wahid.’ I was just going by my birth name, Joshua, so when it didn’t come out I just kind of adopted the name. ‘Mezcal’ is having a good time, ‘SOLSTICE’ is the aftermath, it’s like Mezcal on steroids to me. It’s the one that comes after a binge, after like 15 shots. So even when it switches up, it gets very intense and I thought that was cool. I think I just wanted to make a song that was something far more creative, playing with new styles. I wanted to be a bit aggro on this one. There was an album we were doing with seeyousoon at the time called ‘Hurts Like Hell’. It was all very intense. So I wanted to see how I could translate that into my own work – so that’s how that came about.
If that track is four years old now, I’m excited to see what you’ve got coming in four years time. When did you figure out how to identify the pockets in a beat and play around with your cadence etc?
Hmm, I think watching my pops do it, see how he would flow on rhythms. My best friend at the time, Alex – he taught me how to write bars and understand the start and end points of writing, the finite details you know? I mean, I used to suck! Shout out Alex and my boys who encouraged me. Then I played around and after some time, actually got good. People were really cheering me on. Then I just had a moment where I realised I could really do this. That was the seed.
You mentioned you used to watch your dad craft his own music, were you looking to him a lot during that timer guidance or were you trying to carve out your own identity at this point?
I’d say I was going out on my own, I didn’t tell my dad about it till about a year and a half in. He’s my biggest fan though. He’s like ’wow! That’s my son, nobody can rap like you…’ He’s real happy about it all. But I remember at the time I just wanted it to be my thing. I would see him going to the studio, he would go out and record, or experiment at home. He wasn’t really performing as much when I was a kid. Me and my brother thought we were going to be ballers, NBA players, we were heavy into basketball. It took time to figure out my own taste, what I really wanted to do and loved. It took time to appreciate music for real, it took me coming out from under my parents wing to find my own taste. My pops hadn’t really been performing since we left NY. So as child, my only insight was really him showing us his mixes. So I’d see it happen in real time in that way.
—
—
‘feast, by ravens’ EP is out now.
Words: Sophia Hill
Photo Credit: Cody Salas
—
