WYS: DC Lyrics

I remember attending last year’s Howard’s Hottest, a competition that brings nine students to the Cramton Auditorium stage to compete for Hottest producer, artist or DJ, and seeing Darius Carter — who raps by the name DC Lyrics — give a very dope performance of his song “Dilemma” which won him the title of Howard’s Hottest Hip-Hop Artist (you can see the clip of his performance — and my lowkey dramatic reaction — here).

Almost a year later, Darius has just released his first album The Death of Me and I had the opportunity to interview him with a new creative approach to “What’s Your Story?” Through this interview, I learned a little bit about his journey as a rap artist, his thoughts on the current state of Hip-Hop and what his life has been like since winning Howard’s Hottest.

What inspired you to get into rapping and music?

I’ve been listening to Hip-Hop and loving Hip-Hop music since about when I could talk, like way before I should’ve been listening to it to be honest. I grew up fascinated with music, my dad listened to a lot of classic Soul- and R&B-type records, my mom would listen to more current stuff.

I always gravitated towards Hip-Hop. I remember I was in third grade one day and we had this poetry assignment and I challenged myself to have better rhymes and better setup than everybody else, better cadences. I just experimented with writing a lot. Growing up listening to Wayne and other rappers like him, I decided why not try it? So by middle school I really started writing and stayed with it.

If you could name one album that has influenced you the most as an artist, what would that be?

The Carter III. Lil Wayne has definitely been an influence. I’m hoping that he gets it all together, but Kanye. Especially in his original trilogy of albums. Recently, Travis Scott, I think Travis Scott’s production is really cool. Kendrick, Cole, Nicki, Nas, Andre 3000…we could go on all day, but the really skilled rappers, people who are technically good with producing, are people that I gravitate towards.

Courtesy of Caliph Riley | WHBC

What was your experience with Howard’s Hottest like and what was the process to prepare for it?

I was oddly really nervous for some reason and I don’t typically get that nervous. I remember I stumbled on something in one song, I don’t even think they noticed but it was a big deal to me. When I ended up winning, I feel like that was a turning point because I was just kind of making music, but I didn’t really know how to put myself out there. I feel like that really gave me a platform to see what I do and know my name. It was definitely a really cool process and I’m very glad I did it.

What is your favorite thing about performing?

It’s that moment where it all becomes real. Not only is someone hearing your music, but you’re also in real time performing it for them and expressing it for them however you see fit. I find myself to be very technical about music and what I want to do on a project. A lot of times, when I’m making a song I’m not thinking about how would this translate into a crowd. But when you ultimately perform and you get that positive response it feels very good.

Can you tell us about your new album — what it’s about and what we can expect?

The album is called “The Death of Me.” It does touch on some very dark subject matter, one of the themes going throughout the album is talking about oppression, specifically Black oppression in the United States.

[Listeners can expect] a lot of rapping. There’s heavy trap, some experimenting with some alternative-type sounds here and there. I got some R&B singers on some tracks. It’s versatile but it’s undeniably a Hip-Hop project.

When trying to explain the concept of the album, he starts off explaining how it talks about themes pertaining to Black oppression as well as how he feels about the music industry. However, instead of continuing to explain it in depth he instead chose to go a different route by seamlessly rapping a verse off of his song “No Time to Waste” which not only impressed me but further showed me how good he is at what he does.

It’s drawing comparisons to how Black people are often treated in society and how big, powerful people in the industry don’t necessarily care about quality, they just care about getting the next hit. I just feel like a lot of the music that has been coming out lately — not all of it — there’s like a real over-saturation of the same type of Hip-Hop and people aren’t really challenging themselves to experiment much, they’re just getting comfortable staying in this bubble and trying to make this one sound. So when I say “The Death of Me,” in a lot of ways I’m saying it’s the death of Hip-Hop as I know it.

After giving the album a listen, standout tracks for me are Afterlife, End of the Line, Life and the titular The Death of Me. There was solid production from 8BallHitz, who in the same year as DC Lyrics won Howard’s Hottest Producer. He also tapped into other Howard talent including Spencer Green (who produces under the name Greenss) for an interlude and R&B vocalist TIYI.

Last year after I dropped my last project, I wanted to work with more people on Howard’s campus. I set out to do this collab — I actually made a beat for it that’s a beat that I used on this project — but it just wasn’t lining up how I wanted it to so I ended up doing my own thing.

Then my friend Willie and Zay Mesah, we laid down this Migos remix for “Walk It Talk It.” We get back to his room in South, and he has this full setup. I don’t have a full setup, I just have my speaker, my headphones and my laptop so I was like let me see what’s going on with this. We left with a melody, nothing else. Then we sat down with it and it ended up being on the song that was called “The Death of Me.” Willie’s also a Howard student and TIYI, she’s a great female vocalist, is on there too.

8BallHitz was the Howard’s Hottest Producer that won the same year I did. I heard [8Ball] in his audition I was like we’re gonna make some fire together. Spencer was my first friend at Howard University, and he makes his own music. We had our own song and I just didn’t know what to do with it, but he had this one part that I thought was really cool so I put it on there regardless. ​

One thing DC repeatedly emphasized was his desire to perfect his writing skills. “Work on your craft, make it look easy” is a line on the song Afterlife, which only illustrates his motivation to continue getting better. The process to perfect that craft, he says, is “different every time.”

Sometimes there’s a trigger — like you hear something in another song that you think is cool and wonder if you can do that, other times you get this catchy melody in your head. Somebody will send you a beat and that’ll trigger something and sometimes you’re just in the shower and you think of a line. A lot of my songs start off with me having a catchy hook or a crazy bar and I’m like I have to put that into something, and then I’ll write around it and try to format it into something.

He took the same approach when conceptualizing The Death of Me, which he started working on about a year ago after putting out his last project Never Enough.

Starting off, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I threw away a lot of rhymes just on some remixes because I didn’t know where to put them, but as I started to really write I noticed I was talking so much about this theme of oppression and appropriation, I decided to format the album around that. Just from watching what was going on in the world, it influenced me to take that direction. ​

​If you had a dream collab, Howard or otherwise, who would it be?

Always Lil Wayne, he’s always on that list. Right now, with how I sound, I would make a really cool song with Travis Scott. If Andre 3000 would come out of his cave I would want to work with him. Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, Lil Uzi I think would be cool for a hook. But the top of my list, Lil Wayne and Travis Scott right now, especially after Tha Carter V.

What has been your favorite experience?

Howard’s Hottest [and] getting to work in Studio 11 in Chicago. They have this engineer that’s been there for 22/23 years, and I think that he really saw what I saw and the songs that he engineered especially speak to my vision. A lot of cool people that I looked up to had passed through there so getting the chance to actually be in Chicago and record there was awesome.

You also got studio time as a part of your Howard’s Hottest prize, right? What was that experience like?

That was when I recorded a lot of the remixes I did earlier this year around March or April. I got a lot of content that I ended up putting on my SoundCloud, but that was before I really started honing in on this project and figuring out what I was going to record and keep for that. That was its own experience because on albums I try to be a little bit more concept-driven, on the remixes I’m just rapping. So it was really free and fun.

That’s one thing that I look for in music that I listen to — it being concept-driven — do you see a lot of that in music today?

I think that there are people that are still concept-driven for sure, but I think that it’s not as much of the goal anymore. People are releasing these HUGE albums. Everybody’s releasing 18 tracks or more on their album, like 25/26- track albums with run times of an hour and forty minutes — I’m fine with Wayne doing that, I’m not fine with everybody doing that.

It’s just become more about getting those streams, those numbers and sales than it is about giving a quality product. That’s part of why this album is so short — it’s only 12 tracks, really 10 — it took me forever to decide what I was keeping and not keeping. It’s not gone, I don’t think that spirit will ever die, I just want to see more of it, of people really honing in on their concepts.

What would you say has been your biggest challenge?

One of them is learning to put myself out there. I feel like you make your best art when you’re completely putting it all out there and really giving people a piece of who you are, so finding that vulnerability within myself. As far as pushing my music, just figuring out how to be savvier with really getting my music to people without being spammy and annoying about it because I definitely don’t want to be that guy, but I want you to listen to me. Trying to find that balance is definitely a challenge.

DC Lyrics outside of Cramton Auditorium, where he won “Howard’s Hottest Hip-Hop Artist in 2017.

What do you hope will be your impact on Hip-Hop?

What I do like about Hip-Hop is that it’s easier for people to put themselves out there. I would say the marquee artists don’t necessarily have as much of a hold on Hip-Hop as they used to. I like playing with sounds and trying new things with production. I would hope that me putting so much time into my pen game and trying so hard to really make great Hip-Hop verses would push a lot of other people to do that too, just to challenge themselves creatively. I feel like a lot of people don’t do it because they don’t feel that they have to. I feel that if there’s more people in the game doing that and that becomes more of the wave then that would push more people to really challenge themselves as rappers. Also just to share my personal story and see how that resonates with people and be a generally positive, influential figure.

What advice would you give to someone looking to get into music or specifically rapping?

1) Never feel as though you know everything. Never feel as though there’s not an experience that can teach you how to do something better, learn how to better hone your craft.

2) Keep learning. Especially if there’s someone who has been doing this longer than you, listen to what they have to say because they can probably give you some tips and tricks.

3) Don’t rush into a final decision of what you’re going to put out because once it’s out, it’s out.

Definitely put some time into it and think about how you’re going to market it, what concepts you’re going to do for it. Just be very careful about everything that you do that’s attached to your name. There’s a lot of high-volume content creators that aren’t as concerned about that but personally, I want to look back 20 years from now and see something I created and say “Yeah, that was really good, I still like that.”

Originally published at www.kesifelton.com.