He’s the rapper who makes smart people want to turn up.”Īb-Soul and TDE had a minor imbroglio in May, when the rapper, backed by a Twitter campaign of impatient fans, threatened to leak his own record. “He rides the line between fun and intellectual.
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“He doesn’t really have fans he has cult members - people who sit around lighting candles and reciting mantras,” says Dave Free, GM of TDE.
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His most poignant song, “The Book of Soul,” unspools his own personal tragedies: the 2012 suicide of his high school sweetheart and collaborator, Loriana Johnson, and his adolescent battles with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which caused his eye issues and left his skin disfigured and lips blackened. Since 2012’s “Control System,” Ab-Soul, TDE’s self-proclaimed “black sheep running with a pack of wolves,” became a star on his own out-there terms - the rap purist’s choice prone to dizzying rhyme schemes and lyrics about third eyes, chakras and the pineal gland. suburb where he grew up the son of record-store owners, is inked across his abdomen and of course, there’s the logo of TDE, the rap powerhouse label that’s home to Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q and Jay Rock, with whom Ab-Soul forms the Black Hippy supergroup.Īb-Soul’s Timeline: The Rapper’s Life From 5 Years Old to Nowīut unlike Q and Lamar’s last albums, both breakthroughs, “These Days” will be released independently by TDE rather than through its partnership with Interscope. Tattoos tell his life story: his rap name inside a Jesus fish, on his arm below it, the most recent addition, an eye with the words “Don’t Understand Me” written below “Carson,” the middle-class L.A. He slumps deeper into the couch, folding his arms across an Ab-Soul T-shirt. “I do get a lot of comfort from weed,” he admits, when asked about his preferred methods of coping with the rigors of rap life. A fourth syrup bottle looms before Ab-Soul, next to a box of Backwoods Cigars.
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Also known as “lean,” the drug, a sedative, was blamed for the deaths of Southern rap legends Pimp C and DJ Screw Lil Wayne and Mac Miller have also reportedly struggled with it. Other palliatives are in plain sight: Three jugs of promethazine cough syrup are neatly arrayed in his closet next to a box of Chips Ahoy. “You need to put that in the story,” he says, laughing and immediately sparking a leftover blunt idling in his ashtray. But after two minutes, his publicist rouses him. It’s hard to tell - between his opaque sunglasses and general torpor, it initially seems like he’s cautiously deliberating a response. “When you feed a sick dog, you have to mix the medicine in with the food that it likes already.”Īsked about the “medicine” on “These Days,” Ab-Soul dozes off. “I heard this from Danny Brown one time and never forgot it,” says Ab-Soul, explaining his ideas about artistic balance.
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According to the rapper, real name Herbert Stevens IV, 27, he has been under surveillance since publicly indicting the handling of the manhunt of LAPD cop-turned-killer Christopher Dorner in 2013. He mentions several other residencies, but refuses to name locations, citing his inclusion on a government watch list. This gated community home in the hills above Compton, Calif., belongs to the mother of one of his two children. His aesthetic is something like if Bone Thugs-N-Harmony had played the first Woodstock - or as he brands himself: “Lupe Fiasco on drugs.” His tufts of hair are unruly and his eyes shrouded by trademark black sunglasses, worn due to an ocular sensitivity to light that will likely require a corneal transplant one day.