Marvel’s Encyclopedia fascinated me growing up. The number of superpowered characters that I’d never heard or seen, details of their first appearances, powers/abilities, and the creators who conjured it all drew me in. I loved how deeply intricate each character’s universe folded within another’s to create the complete comic saga. There was always a layer beneath. I would spend hours in the library peering over the vast lives, adventures, and battles hoping to explore every dimension of these fables. At the time I didn’t understand that Marvel’s multiverse reflects patterns of our universe, and there isn’t a way to be aware of it all. Those gaps of knowledge bring the present of being able to learn something new, the discovery was a joyous experience. Taking on those new schools of thought to expound and alter your current realities.
Blaq Kush, born Alex Pennington, is a prolific poet from Long Island, and has helped me construct a new dimension of my understanding of the growing landscape in New York’s underground hip-hop scene. He reminds me of Marvel’s Reader, an inhuman with literary manifestation powers. Anything he reads he can bring to existence. If he reads the word ‘Rewrite’, in Reader’s own words, “this lets you write a story, and then erase it, and rewrite it from scratch, through your memory”, effectively warping reality. As a poet Kush wields this exact power. While molding his world according to his philosophies, he’s built the soundscape for a universe christened by the slogan, ‘There’s Always Hope’ with 60 tracks over 5 volumes of the artist’s album series. He reminds us on Vol. 5’s “Good Times” “Don’t bury your passion when it’s obviously breathing, right in front of you, when I stop searching is when I start finding the meaning.” Kush’s garden of quotes are to be plucked and inhaled, like a bouquet of self-discovered affirmations. In a galaxy not far off, on Blaq Kush’s latest EP The Infinite Money Glitch, he provides a Kush-craftian directed horror movie about what a world marred in its love for money feels like. Inspired by Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971), and orchestrated by the project’s sole producer Antonym, the first track, “The Sadness on Shudder” presents the contrast to There’s Always Hope with dreary groans and cries echoing in the sample. If you had an infinite money glitch, would life feel more hopeful?
Redesigning the pillars around us Kush raps, “After the robbery, they convince you that it didn’t happen, possibly,” on “inner power” and “Looking for a place where money wasn’t worshipped, only to be reminded how money is worshipped. Breaking cycles of misery, transform the air to infinity, connect like Holy Trinity,” on The Infinite Money Glitch’s titular song. At 8 songs Kush alongside Antonym directs his own cautionary tale of conflating things of true value with the perceived value money brings.
I was able to speak to the man capable of sculpting such realities. We talked about everything from how he once asked, “Why Can’t I be Nas?”, through to his journey as an artist and poet from working on his latest EP, upcoming projects, the things that inspire him, and the many different representations of his artistry. He has consistently been crafting universes for over a decade under Processed Data, cheek guapo mira! mira!, and Blaq Kush, so it was great to hear directly from the prolific source himself.
**Feel free to click any of the links and check out all the work from all these talented artists.**
GSC: I’d love to start by talking about how you began creating music.
BK: I started rapping in 2011-12 right before college, that’s when I put out my first stuff. My dad got me an iPad, so I was recording myself and uploading it to YouTube. When I got to college I bought my own microphone and started recording myself. It’s been a journey trying to figure out how to put songs together, and just record myself properly.
GSC: You mentioned during your interview with Justwoz, that the first song you recorded, “5 subscribers”, was created on that iPad. Was the purpose of your dad giving you the iPad for you to create music?
BK: My dad won that iPad in a raffle at a car dealership, so when he gave it to me, I didn’t really think about making music. I think I did one day because I was just bored. But it was a good start because I started making my own album covers as well. I’ve taken a lot of that music down, but the song “5 subscribers” is still on Youtube. The summer before college I reached out to Tairy Hesticles who used to upload old rap albums like Kool Keith, MF DOOM, and Aesop Rock which started to get taken down because of copyright. Their channel started taking submissions, and I sent them “5 subscribers” and they posted it. It was the first time I got a lot of positive reception from my rapping. That alone encouraged me to keep going and just keep making stuff.
GSC: I’ve heard you say that you don’t take yourself too seriously, “5 subscribers” is about celebrating the ‘success’ of your beginnings, and it doesn’t feel overly concerned with meeting the technical parameters of a rap song. How did you get so free within your music early on?
Blaq Kush: I was rapping before recording my raps and putting them out, at random cyphers or with my friends and stuff like that. I feel like during that time when I wasn’t recording I was more focused on the technical elements of rap. But by the time I started recording and the landscape of what I was listening to with artists like Danny Brown and Lil B. To some degree I cared more about expressing myself opposed to trying to focus on lyricism, although there are still elements of that I feel.
GSC: What was your process for digging deeper and finding new artists?
BK: I got into hip hop right when the blog era was taking off, NahRight and stuff like that. Literally everyday in highschool on the bus on the way to school I’m just checking to see what new mixtapes are being posted. Anytime I found an artist I really like, even to this day, I try to check out their first project and go through each album to see how the sound evolved. That’s always interesting to me, but just the internet and YouTube. I’ve been on YouTube forever just looking up different things. Two artists that really expanded my vision are Madlib and J Dilla, because I’d look up the artist that they’ve sampled which would send me into a YouTube wormhole where I’m listening to Brazilian music and weird free jazz. Hearing them sample that kind of music made me realize there is no boundary of what music can be inspirational to an artist. That made me get into even more genres of music when I was younger.
GSC: I was wondering how you got into some other genres of music, like your interest in punk rock bands. Did that begin with samples?
BK: Mainly samples for most of the genres, but with punk rock it’s a little different. I don’t own a lot of Supreme, but I used to look at their clothes a lot online. Back in 2011 they came out with a t-shirt by Bad Brains, a Jamaican punk rock group from DC in the 70s and that opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. I didn’t even know Jamaicans were playing punk rock music. What’s crazy is they’re kind of a foundational group, you don’t really get Ska music or bands like Sublime without Bad Brains. They were the first people mixing punk rock with reggae. So from Bad Brains, I looked up the record label they were signed to (ROIR/SST) and seeing the other bands they were playing with got me into punk rock music.
GSC: You have a high IQ for music, Is that something that you’ve fostered on purpose to improve your art, or is it something innate?
BK: Well I started in my spare time as a hobby. But like I said in the JustWoz interview when you find a character in a comic book you want to know where they come from. So you research, sometimes it can be wanting to know more about the illustrator of the comic. I wasn’t always like that with music, until I started learning more about hip-hip, digging into the samples, reading artist interviews, seeing who other artists are influenced by. I almost look at it like anthropology, like the study of a culture. I went to school for psychology, but I talk to my mom about it all the time. I wish I could do something that is more anthropological because it does seem more innate in a way for me to look up stuff and where it comes from.
GSC: I know you’re inspired by John Cage’s “4:33” where he sits in silence and the sounds present in the room make up the performance. Did Cage’s “4:33” allow for more freedom in the music you appreciate and create?
BK: “I would say I do have freedom in the music I listen to, but I wouldn’t say I have that freedom in the music I create. My music is not really experimental, it is lo-fi hip hop or conscious rap to a degree. I don’t think it’s something that exists outside of those terms, but as far as how I write, I do try to draw inspiration from anything. Even that line ‘I’m only laughing because you are’, I came up with that line as I’m writing the song. I just have a bunch of lines that I write down and put together at a later point in time. So maybe that’s a way I incorporate John Cage’s philosophy into my music, because that’s the freeing part when I’m writing down these random lines. Sometimes I hear the beat and I can write it all then and there. Sometimes I’ll have the line before the beat and then try to reshape it to the beat. I used to write poetry in college, so that’s kind of why I write my rap in that way. But when I put it all together and give it structure, that’s just trying to create a singular piece.“
GSC: Did you take any music classes in college?
BK: No, but I did take creative writing classes. I was always doing poetry prior to that but I refined it with creative writing. It also just inspired me to write more. One thing that I didn’t realize is to be a writer, or a poet, or any job that requires you to write, you have to write a lot. To go back to the John Cage thing about freedom in creation, I also picked that up in college, that you can have one line, and that one line can be the start of an entire song and sometimes an entire project. That made me realize if I can get all of that from one line, even if I don’t like the line I still write it down because I don’t know how I may feel about it in the future.
GSC: I listened to Del the Funky Homosapien from your Spotify playlist. He has a similar style to you with his unique delivery, what other artists who inspired this style?
BK: MF DOOM is definitely one. A big person for me is Kool Keith, he’s the king of rapping off beat. He’s been doing that since the 80s, he’s one of the first rappers I heard who wouldn’t rhyme sometimes, he’d just have a whole bar with no rhymes in it. Del the Funky Homosapien, Company Flow was really influential to me, Cannibal Ox, specifically this dude Vast Aire from Cannibal Ox, there’s some similarities there. A dude who I take a lot of inspiration from is Saafir (RIP) from Oakland. In terms of the ways he paces his words it’s very similar to the way I pace my words at times.
GSC: I’m interested in your family background as well, your Jamaican roots, the influences your grandmother and parents have on your artistry.
BK: My grandma and grandpa on my Mom’s side are both Jamaican, and my Dad’s side is from Barbados; they all grew up in Brooklyn, in the Bed Stuy area. I was a little more connected with my mom’s family while growing up because Long Island is a little closer to Queens so we wouldn’t go to Brooklyn as much. But my grandmother was an English teacher in Jamaica, and she moved to Hollis, Queens and began working with Pan-Am Airlines. She was big into language, and she was constantly doing crossword puzzles and reading, and all those traits passed down to my mom. She’s almost like a prodigy, she went to college at 16, left high school early to go to college with a scholarship and she became a lawyer. She’s a very interesting person because she reads a lot. I lean more towards poetry or artist essays, I’ll read those all day.”
GSC: In another interview you say you wanted your debut album to be titled, Why Can’t I Be Nas? And you were going to try to aim for 250 songs for it. Did you ever complete that mission?
BK: I don’t think I had half those songs. I probably had like 50 or 60 songs. That was when I was recording on my iPad so all those songs I was talking about were recorded from 18 to 22. I wasn’t recording 50 songs in a year, but I wanted to do that because of the Lil B influence. The title was a line from this rapper who says in his song, ‘Man, I’ll never be Nas’, and I just thought that was such a funny line. So I did it as a joke type thing. Looking back I’m glad I never followed through on releasing that many songs.
GSC: It made me wonder what your writing process is for a cohesive project like The Infinite Money Glitch?
BK: Early on I recorded a lot faster. I would put the lines together a little more haphazardly than what it is now. Back when it was more disorganized I could record 3 or 4 songs in one day. I would say recently I record 2 songs a week. I basically write down these individual lines, I turn on the beat, I try to pair the individual lines into the beat. Once everything is organized into a verse I’ll record myself, and then I’ll take my songs to my engineer, Justwoz, in Hempstead and we’ll mix it.
GSC: Two songs a week is still a lot of work in my opinion.
BK: It’s definitely a challenge, because I do work full time. There’s a lot of days where I’m staying up too late trying to complete a song. What I try to do at least once a day is sit in front of my computer with my microphone. Most of the time nothing happens, but I at least try to put myself in that space to encourage myself to write something at least once everyday. Recording in college was easy, but since working this full time job it’s been harder to balance. With The Infinite Money Glitch that was where I really found the process and got more used to it.
GSC: Do you feel compelled to continue in order to finish what you’ve started, or does your level work ethic come from enjoyment?
BK: It’s a little bit of both, I know what it feels like to have a song that you want to put out on an album, and the next time you look up that song is 5 months old. So I’m compelled to do it in a sense because I’m aware of how fast time moves, but in some sense it is kind of hard because if you try to record everyday there are going to be times where you don’t feel like recording. It’s funny because on those days where I sit in front of my mic and I might not have anything to write, the second I do have something and I start recording it instantly becomes fun. Recording yourself is just a fun thing to do. I would say that I am pushing myself to have that work ethic, because I would say that is the status quo now for artists to be recording so much. Also if I have an opportunity to record with a bigger artist I might have to cook something on the spot so I’m kind of preparing myself for that moment. Honestly, the more I keep myself busy the more I feel good and confident about my music.
GSC: For The Infinite Money Glitch I wanted to talk about the album in general and some of your favorite parts, your relationship with Antonym, but starting at the top of the album and highlighting lines from each track. On “The Sadness on Shudder” you say, ‘The neural pathway looking like predator in the face’, it gave me the visual of a brain slice.”
BK: “With that line I’m not actually talking about how a neural pathway looks. The title of the song, “The Sadness on Shudder” is from a lowkey extreme horror movie, called Demons (1971). So that line was inspired by greed, it’s a way of saying a neural pathway looks like predator in the face, saying like someone’s thoughts are bleak or predatory.
GSC: Did you watch the film before aligning things for the EP? How did Demons (1971) inspire you?
BK: I’ve been trying to get more into Japanese film for a minute, specifically from the 70s. A lot of insane movies were being made in Japan in the late 60s/70s. I was watching another film by the same director Toshio Matsumoto, which was the complete opposite feel of Demons (1971) but I did watch Demons (1971) before working on The Infinite Money Glitch it was one of those things, where I didn’t realize it was influencing the project. I had two or three songs before coming up with the title, and it came back to me that I had just watched the movie, which shows how greed and money can show the worst sides of people. I wouldn’t say I watched the movie and came up with the idea, but it’s a movie that stayed with me after watching it into the creation process.
GSC: The story was jarring for me because I hadn’t seen that imagery in American films. The consequences it led to for their family in an attempt to get money from Gengobi were brutal.
BK: Billy Woods put out a new album, and there’s a song on there that is similar. The 5th track on Golliwog, “Waterproof Mascara” samples a woman crying and he raps over that. It has this atmosphere that reminds me of the movie Demons (1971) where it’s just very bleak. I also love the way they use lighting, at times you don’t know how big the room is. It confuses your senses with where you’re at within the scene. They also repeat the scene with alternative outcomes, which I haven’t seen in many other films, it was a trippy play on the senses.
GSC: “Lost Poet pt. 3” is interesting because “Lost Poet pt. 1” “and 2” are both on the There’s Always Hope series. But this one makes its way on this EP. I wrote down, ‘I feel like Jean Luc-Godard directing Breathless’, and it made me curious, how often are you consuming international films?
BK: I’m just trying to learn more about films from different places. I haven’t tapped too much into Godard, and the French new wave film thing, but I did watch Breathless for the first time last year. “Lost Poet pt. 3” has more of a story element to it, so I was just saying it felt like I was telling a cinematic story.
GSC: From “Lost Poet pt. 3”, another line that stood out for me was, ‘Cut my hand on the shattered parts of your confidence, retreating to the forest of regrets as a consequence’.
BK: Man, it’s like confidence is a positive thing, but I do feel like there is a toxic delusional confidence that can exist within people. Dealing with that and then retreating to the forest of regrets, it’s not necessarily about a specific situation, I just wanted to express that imagery on that track. It’s one of those special lines I was really proud of that one.
GSC: On “You Are The Money”, you say, ‘Feel like African art in the European museum, they was cleaning blood off the sculptures you’re seeing, the culprit deceiving, that’s creating the puzzle of your perspective and meaning.’
BK: I was just thinking about African art in a museum, and how does some of this art make its way into a museum. Sometimes they get it from collectors, and sometimes the collectors are people that go to Africa and buy the art from the African artists, and sometimes they get this art because it was the product of war. A certain region is overtaken by another region and whoever wins the war sells the art of the people they overtook to a collector. You can have a country that is causing pain and oppression to another country, but this country still displays the art of the country they’re taking from in their museums. You’ll come across an art piece that’ll just say “unknown” with a year next to it. It makes me wonder where did this come from. It happens sometimes in hip-hop too where you’ll have a group of people who appreciate the music but don’t really understand the culture the music represents.
GSC: PakaThePlug, KomixRaps, and LongIslandRap, reposts a lot of your music. You have fans across America and Europe, have you done any performances to see what your fanbase looks like?
BK: I haven’t done any performances recently. In terms of meeting my fanbase, I mostly talk to them on instagram but I don’t really know what they look like to be honest. I have had some people tell me that they’re from the Czech Republic and England but I don’t fully know since I haven’t done an actual show yet. I think I’ve been more focused on recording. I feel good about The Infinite Money Glitch, it’s one of the few times where I know a lot of the songs by heart, so in the back of my head I have been thinking about going to perform.
GSC: With “A Dollar Travels” it flew over my head the first few listens that the song is about the voyage of the dollar. How did that song come together?
BK: It was one of the few times where I had the concept before I even wrote any lyrics. That’s not one of the tracks made up of random lines I had in my phone. Originally I was going to use this album cover that’s just this picture of an ATM, so I thought about making a song about a dollar that travels out of that ATM to all of these different places. The inspiration came from the original album cover. I want to do more story tracks like that. It kind of grounds my writing a little bit.
GSC: I was primed to listen to it as one of your songs where it’s more so made up of a composition of lines. When I heard it from the storytelling perspective it was that much more enjoyable. ‘I was last shown on the security camera, reported in Atlanta, the suspect didn’t have a gun, he was literally using a hammer.’
BK: “Even that ties back to the movie Demons (1971) and what greed and the hunger for money can do to people. The first three songs I had for this were “The Sadness on Shudder”, “Lost Poet 3”, and “A Dollar Travels”. when I finished “A Dollar Travels” it came to mind that this all is reminding me of that movie.
GSC: On “The Run Around” you say, ‘The slugs hit a snail had him looking for his next shell’/’Repetition of your misery, programming works, got you rejecting your history, couldn’t trick me, I wrote the manual on wizardry’.
BK: The programming line was dope. I was really happy when I came up with that, but all these lines reminded me, this was another track where I just heard the beat and wrote a lot of those lines on the spot. Over that beat I tried recording two other times, not that verse, but I had two other verses I was trying to lay down over it. I like that beat, it reminds me of some early 2000s NY type shit. Antonym really did his thing.
GSC: How did that relationship start?
BK: He’s friends with another rapper that follows me, and that rapper shared some of my music in 2023. Antonym sent me a beat pack and I used one of them for “anxiety”, and at the end of 2024, he hit me back up asking if I would be down to do a project where he produces the whole thing. So him doing that inspired me to reach out to a few producers I was working with, I have a couple projects like that on the way where I’m just working with one producer. It felt good working on The Infinite Money Glitch and having Antonym to send the song to being able to say, ‘Hey I recorded this, what do you think about it?’ Antonym just hit me up a little while ago and asked if I’ve ever thought about sending it to a record label and having it pressed up, so I might do that with this album. Stones Throw Records accepts demo submissions, so I might as well, I would’ve never had that idea if not for working with Antonym.
GSC: You have a tentatively titled project unregistered.kush with unregistered.user from Chicago, you both have a song already on your YouTube produced by him “EVIL BE GONE”. How did that relationship come about?
BK: While working on the project with Antonym, I realized I should just reach out to producers I have already worked with. There’s another producer from Canada named Red Ben, who produced a few tracks on There’s Always Hope Vol. 5. I’m working on a project with him. There’s another producer named Jaxsen Beats, I want to do a whole project with him. I’m also doing a collaboration project with A1 from Chicago, he’s the rapper who shared my stuff that I think put Antonym onto my music. It’s going to be fully produced by August Fanon.
GSC: Since you uploaded “anxiety” prod by Antonym the video is now over 50 thousand views. The rest of your songs on YouTube are at 2-3k views as well now. How do you feel about “anxiety” and its success?
BK: “I’m really glad, and grateful. I did not think that was going to happen. It shocked me seeing how many people get it and how many people are excited to hear more stuff. That video is actually a year old, I wasn’t planning on putting it out but I just decided to. Justwoz shot the video for it, and I was unsure about it at first. Everything works in time, because it just worked when I did put it out. I had no idea it was going to do well at all. I’ve been doing the VHS thing with an older quality to the videos for a minute. We just did a video for “Time and Space”. It has very clean camera quality, and cinematic shots, but I’m 50-50 on it because I just still prefer the VHS stuff. But with the “anxiety” situation it just let me know I have to do more videos. I was listening to it the other day and I feel like it’s a good introduction to my style. If people like “anxiety” then they should like everything else.
GSC: Do you mean more with yourself, or just continue producing consistent AMV music videos as well?
BK: Both. The funny thing about “anxiety” is prior to releasing, I was doing one AMV a week, and then at the end I was going to post the whole album as an AMV so it had a visualizer. But creating the AMVs is really time consuming too, so one week I ran out of energy to create an AMV and I posted the “anxiety” music video to give me some time before the next one.
GSC: “My mother took me to museums, gravitating towards the esoteric, I was making collages out of whatever whatever we had around”
BK: Even early on when I got my iPad and I was first recording, that was the first thing I was doing was making album covers and collages. Even the album cover for The Infinite Money Glitch is a collage.
GSC: Back to The infinite Money Glitch, on “inner power” you said ‘‘Role model showed you how to be a contradiction’ / ‘After the robbery, they convince you it didn’t happen, possibly’ / ‘I think I’m the oxygen that makes the flame bigger’/ ‘Your Microsoft Outlook was fatalistic”.
BK: I really like that track, the switch up, the strings in the beat. It’s pretty self explanatory with the title, just trying to find power within yourself instead of outside sources and stuff like that. That’s where the role model teaching you to be a contradiction ties in, it’s a concept I think about a lot.
GSC: “On the project’s title track The Infinite Money Glitch, you say, ‘Looking for a place where money isn’t worshipped, only to be reminded how money is worshipped’.
BK: That was actually a poem. I was thinking about doing a poem for the album, but I wrote the poem and I didn’t like most of it except for those two lines. So I just said those two lines and then freestyled everything else after that.
GSC: On the last song of the project “Time and Space” you say, ‘You had a thought didn’t try it, I’m not complaining, something was off with the climate off of alignment’ / ‘No regrets I learned a lesson from every woman I’ve ever loved, they all dropped from above’.
BK: I learned a lesson from every woman for sure. A lot of lessons, even getting into foreign films, there was a girl who put me onto a lot of that stuff. There was one girl who put me onto meditation and stuff that was really helpful, though I don’t meditate as much anymore. Another thing about “Time and Space” when Antonym sent me the beat it was originally just the first half of the beat and then it stopped at the singing, so I looped the singing myself to make the singing into a continuous chorus.
GSC: A line I connected with more than any other is on “license and registration” from There’s Always Hope Vol. 5, you say ‘My mother is always tired and that worries me’. It just really hit home to hear that line, I relate heavily to the meaning behind it.
BK: That line comes from a real place. I’m currently living with my parents, and I do want to move out, but my parents are getting older. Everytime I come home from work my mom is just like in bed, watching the news. There’s this movie Cooley High, right after Preach is arrested he gets home and his mom is mad because she picked him up from the police station, and she’s also coming home from the late shift. So she tells him to run upstairs to get the belt and by the time he comes back downstairs she’s asleep in the chair because she’s tired. That was a powerful scene to me because that’s a lot of households. I’m really glad to hear you connected with that bar, sometimes with the less lyrical, more personal lines I wonder if people will catch them. On the next album, unregistered.kush, I’m diving a little bit more into my own personal life. I think unregistered.kush is going to be a more personal project compared to The Infinite Money Glitch.
GSC: One of your few adlibs is, ‘‘Long Island’, could you talk about your connection there?
BK: I was born in Queens, and we moved to Long Island when I was in 1st grade. And we stayed in Long Island until my sophomore year of high school. From 1st grade to 6th grade we stayed around the Elmont area, and that was way more diverse. Then we moved when I was in 6th grade to a different part of Long Island that was more segregated. But the thing with Long Island is DOOM is from Long Island, De La Soul, one of my favorite rap groups of all time, they’re from Long Island, even Prodigy from Mobb Deep grew up in Hempstead. One of the reasons I shoutout Long Island is it has this great hip hop history that no one ever really talks about, it gets left out of the conversation most of the time. Even though I ended up moving upstate, my sensibilities and the kind of hip hop that I like, I found all of that in Long Island. I still go back frequently because JustWoz is out there and I have family in Queens.
GSC: What is the origin of the name ‘Blaq Kush’?
BK: So Black is my mom’s maiden name. That was also my nickname growing up. Then when I moved to Albany, I made my Facebook name ‘Alex Kushington’, because there was this really brief trend where people would add ‘-ington’ to the end of words. But people in school just started calling me Kush from my Facebook name. So when I came up with my rap name, I combined it with what people would call me in Long Island to what people would call me upstate.
GSC: What about the development period of your music made during college? I stumbled upon the KUSHANSUNDAZE series of songs on the Outer Galactic Marauder Faction YouTube channel.
BK: Those are songs that would’ve been a part of that 250 song album, all songs from mixtapes that I was dropping around that time. Most of that stuff was influenced by SoundCloud rap. The artist who owns that channel 4DHxH and I were listening to the Awful Records, Playboi Carti’s collective.(Ed. Note: Our own Luke McCanna was the first to book Playboi Carti and the Awful Records collective in NYC at legendary Bronx DIY venue The Meat Shop!) This alternative rap coming out of Atlanta at that time was influencing the visuals of what we were doing back then. I don’t remember how I met 4DHxH, but I was recording on my iPad at the beginning of college, and I met 4DHxH in my sophomore year, and he ended up giving me the first microphone that I started using to record myself. We had a lot of similar tastes for music at the time, and we would sit around on YouTube and just listen to a lot of music. Marauder Faction was an art collective, we had an art show towards the end of senior year. There were two or three other people in it, but out of everyone me and 4D are the only one’s still making music.
GSC: I was digging looking for some songs from that time and I found a project still on your page called, I Don’t Know How to Play Guitar. What inspired your guitar playing?
BK: That was a really random project that I made in 2014. I was staying at my aunt’s house in DC, and she had a guitar. I just picked it up and started playing it, and recording myself. The whole reason I even did that was because I was into this free jazz artist named Derek Bailey, and the way he plays guitar, he’ll play it in a way where it almost doesn’t sound like the instrument that he’s playing.I was listening to a lot of his stuff at the time and that’s how I happened upon that release. There is something freeing and very fun about playing an instrument and having no idea about what you’re doing, and just listening to the sound you’re playing from the instrument. But I should probably take guitar lessons because there are parts in there where it does sound like I know how to play a little.
GSC: I have a few artists I wanted to get your opinion on, particularly any inspiration you’ve gained from their music, starting with PUBLICHOUSINGNYC.
BK: I was listening to BA PACE and PUBLICHOUSINGNYC right before the pandemic, he was on a song with Lungs. He recently reached out to do a song with me. I’m thinking about doing a song with him for the August Fanon project with this rapper A1 out of Chicago. I really like what those guys are doing with PUBLICHOUSINGNYC collective, outside of the music I like what they’re doing with their sense of art direction, it’s really unique to me. It inspires some of my personal visuals. I want to link up with them soon, since they’re also based out of New York.
GSC: Another New York artist, what can you tell me about Xaviersobased and Yo Chill?
BK: Yo Chill, was a part of this group of NY rappers and I always thought he was an interesting character. To go back to college, I was more obsessed with the lyrical side of rap, but there was this resurgence of rap through the internet, and we did listen to a lot of SoundCloud rap. After 2018, it felt like bigger businesses learned how to commodify internet rap, but earlier internet rap didn’t seem as thought out, it was people just making stuff and it just happened to get popular. Now it feels like there’s a formula on how to do everything. YoChill and Xaviersobased music reminds me of that earlier era of internet rap before it was really commodified.
GSC: Two other New York artists KA and Sean Price. Rest in Peace to both of them.
BK: Rest in Peace to Sean Price and KA. I’ll start with KA, I knew about him for years from finding him on blogs back in the day. The more I got into Roc Marciano the more I found out about KA. The first time I linked up with August Fanon, we were at KA’s meet and greet, so I got to cop an album from him and dap him up. I didn’t realize that literally anyone who is into underground hip hop pops out to support KA, so I saw a bunch of people I listen to. The dopest part of the experience was seeing the love August Fanon was getting as he walked through the venue, it was inspirational. RIP KA, I wish we could have worked together and definitely feel like we would’ve somehow. Everything about the pop-up was very DIY, and it made me see this is what I want to do as opposed to on a super star level, the average person garners enough attention, they can do a pop-up just like KA. There were people who flew in from different countries just to show love to KA. It was one of the biggest inspirational moments I’ve had recently because you don’t get to see that in real time.
GSC: Some other of the producers you’ve worked with recently, red Ben, csupreme, SOO DO KOO, raymond jermaine, clockwork clockwork, no kief, informal education. How does the relationship start with these producers?
BK: “It’s different every time, with supreme and raymond jermaine I reached out to them. Just hearing them on YouTube, and thinking they’re really talented, I reached out to them and copped some beats from them. I want to do solo projects with both of them going forward, maybe not this year but for next year.
(Screenshot from Blaq Kush’s instagram)
GSC: Is that the idea going forward, Blaq Kush with a solo producer?
BK: Yeah, it’s honestly just a lot easier, it can become a headache when you have a bunch of different producers on your tape, and right before you realize you’re trying to get in contact with all the producers you worked with. But when you have one person it’s easier to keep track of and it helps add a feel or mood to the music. Speaking of August Fanon, he’s the one who introduced me to SOO DO KOO, he’s an artist out of Albany, he makes hundreds of beats, I don’t even know how he does it. He makes a lot of beats and a lot of songs, he inspires me with his work ethic. We met in person around the time of MIKE’s Young World IV, and he’s a really dope rapper and producer.
GSC: How many projects are you currently working on?
BK: “Right now I would say two, unregistered.user, and I have another project from a producer out in New Jersey called pages, the pages project might be shorter, 6-7 songs. The unregistered.user project I’m finishing that up, we just need a few more songs and that should be done. I did a bunch of album artwork too that’s already finished for it.”
GSC: How important is visual art to you? You mention creating that with your iPad alongside music, and I saw your ‘jumpman alphabet’ collection, which you did use in the Temperature Rising video.
BK: The ‘jumpman alphabet collection’, is actually from that Marauder Faction art show back in college. I would say I make a lot more visual art than I post. I’m always making collages and stuff, and I just downloaded CapCut which lets you isolate images so it makes creating collages way easier. I’ve been doing that a lot but even before that I would cut things up on my phone and paste them to create a collage. You know, visual art is very important for me, even when I was doing poetry in college I would make visual poems and play around with how the word is on the page.
GSC: It seems like you’re always developing some part of your self creation and expression, through what you’re writing or consuming or just trying to evolve your approach.
BK: Even with the AMVs (There’s Always Hope Vol.4) I make, I’ve just went through an evolution with that. Going back to August Fanon, he reached out to me to make some videos for an album he made with blackchai. So I made a bunch of videos for their album, and during that process I started borrowing from other types of media outside of anime, and it created this collage of different mediums. While looking up other visual artists, it made me realize what I’m doing with these AMVs exists with video art. There’s a video artist named Harry Smith, who does something similar with video collages, another dude Joseph Cornell, a lot of lo-fi beat producers borrow footage from those two artists. But instead of taking videos from those artists, I wanted my AMVs to be on the same level as their art, making my own collages that are reminiscent of theirs. I do think about trying to create something visually appealing.
Check out this list of goodies from Blaq Kush:
Artists that everyone should check out:
SOO DO KOO’s album MEALS ON WHEELS
Shemar’s album emerge ‘n’ see
Yung K’s album Renaissance Rap
Josh Alias’ album Faith
4DHxH and Kidd Process’ album Fade into Depths, Pathfinders’ (Blackchai and illohim) album Perfect Union
A Book everyone should check out:
Raw: My Journey into the Wu-Tang by Lamont “U-God” Hawkins
Movies everyone should check out: Cooley High, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. Branded to Kill, This is the Life by Ava DuVernay (documentary)
Stream: The Infinite Money Glitch, There’s Always Hope series and follow Blaq Kush on instagram @blaqkushmusic
