Who Is Dillon Cooper?

We were first introduced to 20-year-old Brooklyn rapper Dillon Cooper with his video for “State of Elevation.” As far as first impressions go, it was a damned good one, we compared him to a cross between Chance The Rapper and Joey Bada$$. It was so good that we immediately checked out his debut mixtape, Cozmik. Our curiosity was again rewarded. The mixtape is a 17 song monster, which features Cooper flexing his venerable lyrical skill. There’s talk of teenage love gone wrong on his excellent spin of “Ms. Jackson,” menacing raps done right on “Kung Fu,” and the palpable likeableness of “State of Elevation.”

But don't get the wrong impression. Cooper isn't just some '90s gear wearing kid running around New York doing throwback raps. While the music and accompanying videos are representative of who he is—Dillon is from New York, was born in the '90s, and both of those things influence his music—they don’t paint the whole picture.

A few months removed from Cozmik’s release, we wanted to know the rest of Cooper’s story. So we had him swing by the office to get to know him better. We talked to us about his serious guitar playing background, what made him want to start rapping, and his relationship with fellow up and coming Brooklyn MCs. Find out, Who Is Dillon Cooper?

As told to by Max Goldberg (@goopygold) 

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Dillon Cooper: “I was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and I’ve lived in the same place ever since. My family all moved there from Barbados when my mom was about 10. We all lived in one apartment. Growing up right by Prospect Park, right by Empire Roller Rink, there was always stuff to do. Getting older, I started branching out of Brooklyn. I went to Catholic school until about 4thgrade. Catholic school was whatever, I didn’t know any different because I was in it since kindergarten, it was what I knew.

“Around 4th grade, I switched to this little school in Greenwich Village named Little Red because my mom wanted a change of scenery for me. She worked in the city and she wanted me to branch out. I was always into different stuff, I was always doing music or acting from a young age so the city just seemed like a better place to broaden my horizons, to not be in Brooklyn all the time.

“Then I went to PPAS, which is the Professional Performing Arts School. That was cool but I got in trouble a lot there, it was just a lot of little shit that turned into big shit for no reason. There was one situation, where I was completely innocent, but I got blamed for the whole thing. They let off stink bombs all throughout the entire school, and it was horrible. It was putrid. And the first person they came to was me and a couple of my friends. They patted us down, opened our lockers, and everything.”

Dillon Cooper: “So I was there until 8thgrade and didn’t get back in for high school. Didn’t get into other schools so I went to Washington Irving. It’s not know as the greatest school ever, people look at Irving like it’s the bottom of the barrel. There’s a lot of gangs and shit going on there. But it was the best experience ever for me and I would not change going to high school at Irving for anything.

“It opened me up to the realness of life, real people and real situations. There were fights all the time, sometimes you’d have to fight because your friends were fighting. That was just the type of mentality the school had. I was always doing different shit, either playing guitar or skating.

"When I went over there, people saw me as different. First day I was over there, I was wearing tight jeans, a big ass backpack, had long ass dreads, and my skates. I already had a different thing about me. I learned to fend for myself a lot more and break into my own. Irving made that. It broke my shell.”

Dillon Cooper: “I went to Berklee College of Music to study guitar performance. To be completely honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to do after high school. I wanted to do music, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. My mom pushed me to go to school. I ended up getting in and I got a partial scholarship from the Sean Carter Foundation, Jay Z’s fund. So there’s my Hov connect, he helped fund my education. [Laughs.]

“Berklee is one of the best music schools in the country, and when I got to there, it was so different. Berklee is basically Berklee School of Guitar, because everybody is a guitar player. You can get really lost in the sauce there, as a guitar player. But when I got there, it opened me up to a whole bunch of stuff.

“I started getting into more Jazz, some Neo-Soul Jazz fusion shit. Berklee has a real distinguished sound and musicians can tell when you’ve gone to Berklee. If you jam with people from the New School or anywhere around the world, they will be able to tell if you’re a Berklee musician. It’s good and bad, because cats from New School will hate on you. The music school beef is real. I’m still playing, I love guitar to death. I didn’t play on Cozmik, we were short time and I didn’t get to add the stuff I wanted to. But very soon, there will be a lot of dope stuff.”

Dillon Cooper: “I’ve always been around music because of my parents. When I was younger, my mom had a reggae show on public access, BCAT. All Brooklyn cats know BCAT. I would be at the studio with her recording her show when I was little. She was the VJ and host for the show, and she’d bring everyone from Shabba Ranks to Shaggy to Lady Saw through to her show and I would just be kicking it. I was real young, sleeping in the studio.

“Growing up, there was music all the time, it was music, music, music. Most of my musical influence comes from my dad. He was always playing everything from Motown to reggae to R&B-Soul in the house, so that’s what I grew up listening to. Because of that, I listened to a lot of reggae when I was younger, like Barrington Levy, Everton Blender, stuff like that.

“When I started making my own choices, I started getting into rock probably around 5th or 6th grade. I started listening to ACDC and Van Halen because I was just getting really into guitar. One of my aunts is where a lot of my hip-hop influence came in. I loved Eminem, I loved 50 Cent, I remember loving Cash Money Millionaires, but even more so Slip-n-Slide Records and Trick Daddy.

"Of course, Lil Bow Wow. When I was mad young, kids were on the Bow Wow wave, heavy. When I first saw Lil Bow Wow rap, being a little kid and seeing another little kid rap and hanging out with Snoop, I thought it was so cool. I learned his raps and everything. Even before that, my first real introduction to rap was actually Kriss Kross. That was my first CD. My older brother gave it to me and we also had a VHS tape that had all of their videos on it.

“When 50 came out with Get Rich or Die Tryin' I listened to 50 a lot. Then when The Massace dropped, that was it, I started loving 50. My mom took me to my first rap concert, which was Eminem, 50, Lil Jon, G-Unit, at Madison Square Garden. That was the first time I ever thought, ‘Being a rapper is cool as fuck.’ It didn’t fully process then, because I still wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, but that was the seed.

“I was always into other shit, I wasn’t always really into only rap. I loved rock, I was listening to Trivium, The White Stripes, and Maroon 5. Songs About Jane is one of the best crafted albums ever. I used to listen to a lot of Jimi, a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughn, and that was more me trying to get my guitar chops up. I play by ear, so I would listen to the shit over and over, and then try to play it back. High school opened me up to jazz more. My music teacher was a jazz head and he put me on to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, and I started wrapping my finger around that, trying to see what licks I could take from Jazz to apply to my music.”

Dillon Cooper: “With me, I more so discovered rap as I was getting older. I got introduced to Big L when I was in 10th grade by one of my homies. He put on '95 Freestyle' and I would listen to that and learn the lines. I started researching, getting stuff off LimeWire. I wasn’t getting into it super heavy, it was just another thing to listen to hear and there. My senior year of high school heading towards college is when I started reevaluating all the music that I had.

“It’s funny when people say I’m on '90s shit. I say, ‘Cool.’ Cool that I bring that feeling, but that’s not necessarily what I’m trying to do. I get thrilled when an older head says, ‘He reminds me of this or this gives me that feeling.’

“More than anything, I love the sound of '90s hip-hop. I love the vibe. It’s something that can’t be recreated. I can’t recreate '90s hip-hop because I wasn’t a part of 90s hip-hop, I was mad little. The people who were living then were dealing with a whole bunch of stuff that isn’t happening today, in New York City especially. They were dealing with a whole different city, so you can’t bring that back unless you were there. You can only talk about what you have now.

“I do draw influence from them though: From their infliction, how much umph they had behind their words, how the beat rides. I listen to a lot of Big L, and I fuck with his cadences and how he breaks up words. I study Jay Z's Reasonable Doubt, it’s a blueprint on how to do your shit right. I try to do what the people who I look up to did, but better and in my own way. I wanna do it in a way where I’m making a statement so that people in 30 years will say, ‘Oh, this dude reminds me of Dillon!’”

Dillon Cooper: “I got serious about rapping at Berklee, and it happened in the wierdest way. The reason I got serious about rapping at Berklee was because I got in and I was swarmed into a deep pool of really good guitar players. I felt like I was part of the crowd. When you’re around so many people who are doing the exact same thing as you, 24/7, and everyone is after the same thing it was rough. I don’t like following what everyone is doing, I like being an individual and I felt like at Berklee I was conforming.

“The best thing about Berklee was that there was always music going around, people will just bust out singing and beatboxing and shit so I was always freestyling. Then I met a kid named Mike Balls, and he told me he knew how to record. The first time I had really recorded rap was in Mike Ball’s college dorm at Berklee around 2010. It was a, ‘You know what? I’m going to go in here, lay this down, and see what happens.’ I think we did something over '93 ‘til Infinity,' I laid that down, thought it was cool and started coming back.

“This was around the time Wiz Khalifa became popping and everyone was all [Taylor Gang or Die]. At the time I was working at this store in Boston called Bodega, and while I was there I met Wiz’s DJ, Bonics. I rapped for him and he gave me tickets to Wiz’s show. Wiz came out, started performing, and the energy in the venue was unreal. At that moment I said, ‘Wow. This is what I want to do.’ That was the solidifying moment where I was knew I wanted to do this. The control he had over the audience and seeing the other people in the crowd’s faces and reaction, there was not one person who wasn’t bugging. After that, I wanted to do that shit and I knew I could, so I said to myself, ‘Let me try.’"

Dillon Cooper: “At that time, I was still in school. I was on academic probation for the first semester so I had to get my grades up. I buckled down. Second semester, I got academic probation again. Then, some bullshit happened, grades happened, and I got put on academic probation again and I lost all my financial aid. That happened the end of my third semester and I was shit out of luck. Financial aid paid for everything.

"At that point I said to myself, ‘I have this amount of money from my refund check. I see myself getting super upset and depressed, what the fuck am I going to do. Either I’m going to go nuts or I’m going to do something with my life.’ So I said, ‘Fuck it. I’m going to take this rap shit serious.’

“I was going through mad shit because my best friend got killed. That’s who the tape is named after, my boy Brian 'Cozmik' Scott. He got murdered my junior year of high school. I told myself that I really had to turn myself around because I saw myself getting really dark and getting into a bad place, so I said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna put all my feelings onto a track and I’m going to take my last amount of money, find a videographer, shoot a video and put it online. It’s gonna move one way or another.’

“I paid off my rent and had $700 left over. The video cost $800 so I sold sneakers to make up the rest and linked up with John Killner and we shot my first video for 'Shadows.' The video got picked up by Jadakiss’ So Raspy blog, and he tweeted it from his account and the ball started rolling from there. I got to a place where I said, ‘This is do or die, I’m not going to let anybody or anything stop this from happening.’”

Dillon Cooper: “Cozmikwas a long process. When I dropped 'Shadows,' it was the first track I had out. I said, ‘Ok cool, now I have to get material out.’ I started working with different mangers or people saying, ‘I’m gonna manage you’ and all that shit. When that happens, you hit the highs and you hit the lows. I ended up really getting serious when I met my new manager. Everything got solidified to the point where I could say, ‘Ok, this is what I need to do. Here’s the time frame where I want to do it in.’ I needed to put out the project because I had videos and people were starting to notice me from the visuals but I needed to prove to people that I could rap consistently.

“Cozmik was basically the combination of so many different things. I wanted to give people a brief introduction into me. I feel like the tape did what it needed to do in terms of making the impact that it did so people would say, ‘Ok, cool.’ Now, for the next step I want people to say, ‘Ok, damn.’ As an artist, I always feel like I can do better. Even with Cozmik, I had to get it out because if I didn’t I would still be working on it. The way my mind works, I will always want to keep improving stuff. I would have tried to make it exactly what it needed to be.

“From when I knew what all the tracks would be and what I wanted to write, it took about three months to record. But getting to the point where I knew what I was going to record has been since I dropped 'Shadows,' which was early 2012. It’s been a cool journey since then.”

Dillon Cooper: “Beast Coast is real. Issa and AK [of the Underachievers] are the homies. We had a show together recently at Santos Party House and it was incredible. Everybody was there, all Pro Era, Flatbush Zombies, Underachievers. That was my first time with everyone at the same time.

"I met Joey and them a few weeks before at the Under the Influence Tour but when we had the show it was awesome because it just became a Beast Coast show. Everybody was on stage mobbing for everybody’s sets. People were stage diving, blunts were getting passed, it was awesome. Joey and all of Pro Era are mad cool also. I fuck with them, I fuck with their music, I fuck with them as people. They are just like me.

“It’s funny reading stuff on blogs where people put comparisons and try to pit people against each other when at the end of the day everyone is out here trying to do the same thing. We’re young men, all growing up and trying to attain a life. Everybody is just regular people.

“I can’t say too much about working with them, but I definitely look forward to it. I definitely have Beast Coast movement affiliation. The East Coast is the Beast Coast and it has been that forever. So I consider myself apart of the movement, and I’m happy to be part of the new, new of New York and the new, new of the East Coast. It’s a time where hip-hop is coming in really hard and I’m not backing down. I’m coming in all guns blazing.”

Dillon Cooper: “Germany was, wow, Germany was amazing to me. Going to Germany and having people actually recognizing me was insane. Most importantly, I got to chill with Wu-Tang. We were in the club chilling, we smoked up the Wu! I had my show, they had theirs later, and then everybody went to this place called Perkins Park. It’s a big club in Germany, and we were just all chilling. It was wild. We didn’t sleep the entire time. The way Germany parties is valid.

“RZA, Ghostface, Raekwon were all unbelievably cool. Being around them for the short amount of time that I was, was great. I saw what it is that you should strive to attain in terms of being humble, maintaining composure, and not letting fame or your name get to your head. They are regular guys who just do epic shit. Germany was a crazy story.

“The show was the Mixery Hip-Hop Open Festival. My overseas base is big. It’s probably due to an accumulation of a whole bunch of things. When I was there I met a soccer player named Daniel DiDavi, he plays for Stuttgart and he’s pretty big, and he told me he was my 143 Facebook like. That was right when 'Shadows' dropped so that was early.”