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If you've been paying attention to Chicago's hip-hop scene over the past couple of years, there are likely a few names you're familiar with: Chief Keef, King Louie, Chance the Rapper, and Vic Mensa chief among them. Though he may not yet have the sort of online reach and increasing real world presence of some of his peers, Windy City rapper Alex Wiley has become to carve a path for himself through his ambitious, fun-loving raps and larger than life personality. His most recent mixtape, Club Wiley, serves up a colorful mixture of personal raps, escapist partying, and a healthy touch of humor. It's a different take on Chicago rap, removed from both the bleakness of drill and the world-weariness of Chance's Acid Rap–a reaction to circumstance as well as a style cast in the ever-present shadow of early Kanye (one of Club Wiley's highlights is a sequel College Dropout's "Spaceship").
On the eve of his first east coast mini-tour–spanning New York on 9/25, Washington, D.C. on 9/27, Boston on 9/29, and Atlanta's A3C Festival from 10/2 to 10/6–we spoke to Alex about his influences, his embattled hometown, perfectionism, ADD, and what he has in store for the future. Check out the conversation below and listen to Club Wiley, which features guest appearances by Chance the Rapper, Action Bronson, GLC, Kembe X, and Vic Mensa (embedded at the end of the interview).
So you haven’t done any dates on the East Coast? This is gonna be your first full East Coast leg?
Yeah, these are our first shows on the East Coast ever.
Are you going to have any time to see anything other than like the insides of venues and buses?
I think so. Actually, yeah, the way it works out is we’re getting out there Tuesday morning and I’m gonna be there till Thursday night. And it’s gonna be like that in every city. We’re gonna be in DC an extra day and we’re gonna be in Boston for three or four days or some shit like that. So I’m gonna get to see the cities. I’m really excited for this trip, I think it’s gonna be really, really fun.
What was the first really memorable encounter with rap that you had?
Um, like as a rapper or just in rap?
In rap. In your life: Alex Wiley and rap.
Aw, man. I’m trying to remember like the earliest moment I can remember some rap shit. It might’ve been Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP. That might’ve been like the first rap thing that made an impression on me, something I gave a fuck about.
Was that the first CD that you bought?
No, the first CD I ever had was Get Rich or Die Tryin’. And I had the edited version and it was fucking awesome. It was crazy. My mom bought me that. It was the first CD I ever owned. That was a great first CD to ever own.
You started on a very high note.
Yeah, I thought that’s just what CD’s were for a while but it’s only Get Rich or Die Tryin’. I thought all CD’s were like that. Like you get a CD and every song’s just gonna be awesome, and it just wasn’t like that.
How old were you when that came out?
Um, what year did that come out? Like ‘01 or—
2003.
So I was ten, yeah, listening to 50 Cent when that shit was super hot. That was like the soundtrack of my whole year. I had like a little orange walkman CD player that I was walking around listening to that and then whenever College Dropout came out, that was like really the first CD I ever owned. That was the first CD I ever bought. Pretty much College Dropout came and I swapped out Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
At what point did you figure out, "Alright, I’m going to pick up a pen and start trying to rap?"
I was 17. Kembe [X] decided he wanted to rap earlier that year. Our homie John's cousin lived in this really like hood suburb neighborhood and he had a studio in his closet. And we would go out there, and it was far from where we lived. Kembe’s mom would drop us off and then go back home and we’d just be there like all day. Kembe would have his raps and he’d start rapping like Nas cause he’d just gotten into Illmatic. He was doing his songs and then we still had like three or four hours before Kembe’s mom was gonna come get us and shit. We would start making these joke songs. That was my first time rapping ever. After that, I just kept doing it. It was really fun, and we were putting these songs on Facebook and all our little friends and shit were liking them. And after like three joke songs, I wrote “Electric Relaxation” and that was my first verse that wasn’t really like a joke. After that I just was rapping.
When did you start interacting with other kids in the scene?
When we started making blogs and shit was when people started taking us more seriously, and then all of our friends were kind of progressing at the same time. Like Chance [the Rapper] was coming up, our whole little team was starting up at the same time. Between Chance and Vic [Mensa], these are the people I knew way before rapping. Like I went to high school with Vic, I went to grammar school with Chance. So when I started rapping, it was just natural that we were gonna make stuff together.
I’m from Chicago and I’m always gonna represent for Chicago as hard as possible. I really do feel like there’s no city touching what we’re making right now, and I feel like that’s kind of a fact. If you just lay our best music and the best music out of other cities [next to each other], there’s just really no comparison right now.
Obviously a lot has happened in the past year or so, but do you still feel that sense of a creative community in Chicago?
Well, I always kind of kept to myself more anyway so I don’t really know. I was never super a part of that community thing, like I kind of keep to myself with my music. I like to just make it by myself cause it’s kind of my thing, you know? I still will collaborate, but generally I keep to myself with my music. There’s still really good people here. Like Chance just came out and blew up and I think Vic is about to come out and blow up. Really it’s like Chance, Vic, and me that I look at as this new opposite lane to GBE. There’s a lot of really dope people here, it’s just a matter of getting out of this city cause there’s only so much you can do in Chicago.
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Do you think that when do you get out of Chicago, there’s an obligation to kind of represent Chicago. Like any city you go to or any feature you get on that’s with a non-Chicago artist, there’s a burden on you to sort of put on for the city?
Yeah, I think so. Well, I’m representing myself first and foremost, but I’m from Chicago and I’m always gonna represent for Chicago as hard as possible. I really do feel like there’s no city touching what we’re making right now, and I feel like that’s kind of a fact. If you just lay our best music and the best music out of other cities [next to each other], there’s just really no comparison right now. So I feel like it’s our obligation to kind of just keep shitting on people, like the obligation is to the music. The obligation is to make the best shit you possibly can at all times. And if our best shit is always gonna be better than other cities’ best shit, then Chicago’s always gonna be on. I still wanna put on for my city because I feel like people don’t really understand that we’re really, really taking off right now, like we’re really making some amazing shit over here.
Do you think there’s another level of obligation just because of all that’s going on in Chicago. It’s pretty well publicized–though it probably could be better publicized–that the homicide rate continues to be astronomical. Do you ever feel like you need to speak on what’s happening in the city?
Sometimes I feel like that. It’s just so frustrating, you know? At the end of the day I am aware that rap is only so valuable. I can rap about it all I want and I know that it’s not gonna do much, and that’s what is so frustrating about it. We can’t watch the news here, we can’t. It’s just fucking crazy depressing. There’s areas you just literally can’t go, there’s shit you can’t do, people you can’t go hang out with. It’s literally crazy here. But every time I think about it and think I wanna rap about it, I almost feel like "What the fuck for? What is that gonna do?" It’s really, really frustrating. You’re fucking rapping about it, but there’s people’s real life out here dying. I almost feel stupid rapping about it. I’m fucking standing in front of a microphone rhyming words about people in my city getting killed; it feels weird to me, personally.
That’s interesting because that’s such a shift from the way rap started out. On the one hand, you’ve always had party music, but on the other hand there was this element of reporting on stories that weren’t being told.
Well my approach to music is more from a comedic standpoint. I’m trying to make the foolish sounding—I wanna make my music sound really unique and bring something new to music more so than the social commentary aspect of it. It doesn’t really feel natural to me to talk about those kinds of things. I don’t really wanna depress my listeners, ever. For me, music is an escape. It just speaks to my personality too. I don’t really watch sad movies or horror movies or shit like that. When I wanna be entertained, I wanna feel better. I don’t really wanna be brought down by anything that I’m watching. There’s enough real life shit that can bring you down, I don’t really want my music to also do that. I guess it’s kind of my outlook on it, but at the same time Chance went in a different direction and really talked about it and did it extremely well. So it can be done, it’s just not what I’m trying to do.
So is that sort of the idea behind Club Wiley?
Yeah, it was really me just trying to be as creative as possible with my music more so than me reporting on something that has a specific message. I’m kind of emulating Outkast and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Kanye; I’m trying to be as creative as humanly possible. That’s basically my goal: make shit that just doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard.
What’s the kind of stuff that influences you now? There’s a lot of rock influence on the tape, and I thought that was interesting and wanted to see where that came from.
Basically my dad grew up when black music was disco, and he hated disco. So this black dude with an afro was going into this super suburban high school, and he ended up listening to Led Zeppelin and shit like that. So then I grew up on Led Zeppelin and AC/DC and Alice in Chains and lots of ‘90s shit. Just like classic, original metal. I liked a lot of Black Sabbath, Rush is one of my favorite bands. I really like Rush. I liked Aerosmith, kind of the standard stuff, and then within the past few months I really got into Cage the Elephant. I like the Arctic Monkeys and bands like Little Dragon and Mars Volta. I really like that type of music. I see that as being like a higher form of music than rap and I’m really trying to touch that level with my rap music. It’s difficult to make rap that’s that well put together, so that’s kind of what I’m trying to do.
Bands like Mars Volta, those are guys experimenting with time signatures and the length of songs. Is that the sort of thing that you’re interested in or would you more just wanna bring straight rapping to the picture and build around what they do?
I definitely don’t wanna bring straight rapping to the picture. And I know that kind of sounds bad because I’m a rapper and I’m supposed to really love rapping all the time, but I don’t. Time signature is something I definitely wanna mess with, it’s just a little bit over my head right now but I’m gonna get there. But I don’t really understand that shit yet as far as implementing it in my own songs and messing around with the time signatures. Song length is a different thing, I like my songs to be in between like the 3:00 and 3:45 range. I don’t really like my songs longer than four minutes ever. I kind of have aggressive ADD, so all this stuff is made for me to play my own music and enjoy it. But, yeah, the Mars Volta are awesome; they’re top three for me right now.
How can you have aggressive ADD and listen to a band that writes like 15-minute songs?
Because the songs are so intricate, you know, it’s like hella different from—and a lot of times I kind of do just zone out and I’ll just come back, I’ll snap back into the zone minutes later. I’ll be like, "Oh shit, back to this."
Do you find yourself more inspired by stuff like that more than rap?
Yeah, I haven’t been inspired by any rap in a really long time. And when I do, it’s because they did something that I would’ve done, like they implemented some other form of music. That’s really the only time rap ever inspires me is when it’s more than rap. I rap and I think I’m good at rapping, but that’s not really where I see myself thriving. I want to blend each genre together. That’s how I’m making shit and I think it’s coming out really cool. My new stuff is way better than Club Wiley, which I’m really excited about.
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What are you working on right now?
It’s not really a project yet, it’s kind of just a bunch of songs but they’re all like really fucking good. Just like sonically, it’s way better than Club Wiley and I’m really excited because I wasn’t sure it was gonna be.
Who are you working with?
Basically it’s been me and Odd Couple, the dudes that did the “Thug Angel” song on Club Wiley. We’ve just been making some newer sounding music. Like when you hear it, you’ll definitely to be able to tell that it’s new, that all of these songs have been made recently.
Are you going to perform any of that stuff on the East Coast dates?
Well, one song. There’s one that I made that I’m gonna do at all the shows cause it’s really the only one that’s close to finished. All the other songs are just like a hook and a verse and then a little bridge or something. There’s only one song that’s ready to be played for people right now. It’s really cool though, it’s like super high energy.
When you record, do you think more of the live environment more than just the listener at home?
Not more, but I do take that into account. And there’ll be like a certain thing in the song that I’ll add for the show. I do think about it, like it’s a part of the process when I make a song but I am more focused on the listener cause we can adapt a song and make it better live. When I’m recording something, it’s for the listener. And then when we start putting our show together and rehearsing and shit, then we’ll like adapt the song or even just adapt the energy of it. We have songs that sound really light and pretty, and then when we do it live, they’re just not that. So we kind of approach it as two separate things.
Do you spend a lot of time working on the live show?
Yeah, kind of. We rehearse like four times a week. I do it just to get that sound like second nature and know how I’m gonna perform all the songs. But I’m still not like a fucking jumping around ass rapper. I wanna sound good and put on good shows.
Do you think most rappers your age are practicing that much?
Probably not but, another thing, Chance came out before me so I had that to kind of live up to, you know? Like I’ve watched what Chance did up close and personal, that work ethic and that attention to detail. All the people closest around me like Chance, Vic, and Kembe, we’re all like perfectionists out here; we want everything to be as good as it possibly can be. I don’t feel like I’m doing some other shit or being rebellious or some shit like that. This is what it is over here; we all have to elevate. Like Vic's tape is about to come out and it’s about to be really dope, and after that I’m gonna have something to prove cause I’ll be damned if I’m just gonna accept that he came out and overshadowed me.
So when you first came out, was the attention more from the people around you in Chicago or was it more from blogs?
I think what was cool about it was it was kind of a nice mix. When I first came out, we weren’t making a lot of blogs. We were making Fake Shore Drive and Ruby Hornet. And also I had just started rapping so all my friends were like, ‘Oh damn, you rap now?’ and they were hearing it and it was good. So it’s just a nice mix of local people, like I would be just walking around and people would be like ‘Hey man, I heard your song, that shit was good.’ And the blogs—they both were like growing at the same rate. Like there’s a lot of blog rappers, they get a lot of blog love cause real people don’t give a fuck. But I’m also not one of these rappers that 100% without blogs I’d still just blow up; my music does need that outlet. But at the same time, I do have like a real grassroots thing in Chicago. I like where I’m at.
Is there a target date for another project or are you just recording until you get something you’re happy with?
Yeah, we’re just recording right now but I’m gonna be dropping a lot of really cool videos for Club Wiley in the next month or two, maybe even three months. Cause I don’t really wanna put out any new music until I know what I’m doing with it. I don’t really like putting out music just cause; I like it to all be as good as it possibly can be. So we’ll be putting out videos and we’ll probably have songs where it’s like other artists featuring me with like a verse or something, but I don’t wanna put out any music that’s like my music until I really know what the fuck I‘m doing with it. So basically videos are what’s coming soon. We really made Club Wiley as a very visual project, like we were planning on making videos for damn near every song.
