Ezzy in front of his dorm room studio
“It could be a cool story”, Ezzy added, as he offered up his dorm room as the location for our interview. The Cleveland rapper ostensibly chose this out of convenience, to show off the studio that flanked his bed, and to relax in the chair that my inner aesthete declared “cool!” and my writerly senses fixated upon as a metaphor. One of those pitcher’s backstop chairs, ringed in black and internally criss-crossed with taut darkened strips that ricotched one forward as gently as they leaned back; Ezzy remained on the edge of it our whole interview, an image representative of his journey as an artist to date, perpetually ahead of the fall, but with the guarantee to be slung forward as a fall-back
To understand the genesis of this metaphor, we need only to venture less than thirty minutes into our conversation, when he discussed the near-cinematic journey of the current defining moment of a career projected to undergo countless definitional revisions – the Sway freestyle. An event held in Cleveland, the Dealmakers Conference, featured representatives from hallowed names in the industry – Roc Nation, MMG, and Sirius XM, among others – who flew into the 216 to scout a field of invite-only rappers, some, Ezzy divulged, were spending hundreds of dollars to perform. On the billing, though, Ezzy was not. One of the event’s luminaries was Karen Civil, whose self-titled website has shown her incredible prescience in featuring hip-hop’s reigning superstars long before they transcended music and became cultural memes. Finding he wasn’t on the billing, she personally called up the event’s organizers to include him – with her eye for talent, his winning the showcase and a coveted spot on Sway should be an anticlimacting ending to the story. If it was the ending. Missing the initial booking date, Sway called Ezzy while he was studying to reschedule the appearance as well as being added to Sway’s SXSW showcase. The quick turnaround caused him to miss his flight to New York, forcing a substantially-longer drive to and from the studios than he was ever there. But for those few minutes on the air, the dividends severly outweighed the hectic journey. For all artists who’ve gotten their first major break, especially in this hyper-saturated age, the question immediately becomes “What next?”
“Prior to [the Sway appearance],” Ezzy began his first of many surprises, “I had many conversations with TDE…me and Kendrick are, you know, homies…it’s not like everything is happening because of [the Sway freestyle]…what I’m taking from this is the people, the people, the new listeners. … I’m just more appreciative of the fan aspect.” A few more minutes of label and feature spectulation yielded only that, and the extraordinarily rewarding look into the mind of one of hip-hop’s under-the-radar talents began. While Kendrick rapped “I need a better way to take your fans now”, Ezzy proposed a more nuanced perspective, wanting never to remove fans from their respective devotions, but instead hoping to inject his message even where music doesn’t reach. The hallmark of a transcendent artist of any medium is the ability to be recognized for the work, removed from the name, where the message becomes the medium. Though such a level is years away, the mindset he showed was impressive for an artist at any stage
Throughout his spectacularly under-covered Everything Ezzy tape, influences and artist name-drops revealed a reverence for hip-hop’s classic figures of the day: Kanye, Kendrick, and Jay Z as a hallowed trinity. But for his upcoming Ezri release, and as an artist’s direction in general, Ezzy detailed an incredibly different taste –“My goal is to compress all those artists…” - Future, Chief Keef, Young Thug, among others - “…I want to be able to reach the people these artists reach.” This brilliant take will pay dividends not only from a quality of music perspective, but in the business side of the hip-hop. This aspect of Ezzy’s career is still more nascent than the musical development itself, with a possible transition from his mother being the primary manager and adding a new arsenal of producers, specifically shouting-out an eighteen-year-old producer named Mathaius, to his next project and the promotional aspect of it. But at the end of the day, when I asked him about the all-too-known possibility of selling out, he sagely responded, “If I like the music, I’m going to put it out.”
An exceptional talent anchored by an exceptional mind and surrounded by a group of friends who, throughout the interview, flocked to his room and discussed hip-hop and life in Cleveland with us revealing similarly insightful minds wrapped in youthful, fashionable bodies, Ezzy’s shied away from the “savior” title for his city. But in the history of Cleveland hip-hop, no pure rapper has yet to excite mainstream outlets and influential tastemakers in the way that his 2015 has. In our winding discussion about Cleveland post-Tamir Rice, he and his friends revealed the quick turnaround the city had following the horrific shooting. Striking close, as he told of his brother having played at the playground where the tragedy occurred, he spoke with an equal hunger and generosity – “There’s people who don’t even listen to music. How can I still reach these people?”
Even if you turn off your headphones, you’ll be finding out soon
