Denzel Curry: The Rage, Hustle and Vision of Hip-Hop's "Black Metal Terrorist"

PT KONTAK PERKASA - Denzel Curry wasn't even out of high school when he got his first taste of the big time. He was invited by warehouse party promoter Adam Weiss to play one of his Ham on Everything throwdowns in Los Angeles. He was flown out from his hometown, Miami ("I never been on a flight. Spirit sucked, by the way"), was paid $500 and had an audience of people who knew his music from the internet.

PT KONTAK PERKASA - "It was rare for me to get laid at this time. I got laid that night," Curry recalls. "And what's fucked up was [my friend] let me borrow his pants. And I got jizz stains and, like, her stains all over me and shit. So when I came back home, he was like, 'Those were my favorite pants. Keep 'em.'"

Today, the money, flights, audiences and adventures all presumably come a lot easier. Only 24, Curry's already an established pioneer in Florida hip-hop's murky, gnashing, depressive underground — a lo-fi sound that's been streaming into the mainstream — but he left his home state about two years ago, going into "self-exile" in Los Angeles due to what he says was a combination of ex-girlfriend troubles, a falling out with his brother and depression. In his time in L.A., he wrote and recorded his third LP, TA13OO, hit No. 28 on the Billboard album chart, racked up 55 million views for his imagery-rich "Clout Cobain" video, headlined a tour and appeared on the soundtrack to Oscar-winning film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Today, though, he's just got a pair of interviews and some shopping with his new stylist. "I conquered everything else. Just not fashion," he says. "'Cause I didn't give a fuck about it. Now I'm just like, Damn, I wanna be seen. And in order to be seen, you gotta be, in [the] book 48 Laws of Power, you gotta be the loudest one in the room — by the way you dress."

Curry's loudness recently went viral thanks to a bonkers, stage-ready performance of Rage Against the Machine's "Bulls on Parade" during a session for Australian radio station Triple J. "That song was like my anthem," he says, munching on some beet chips in a listening room at the headquarters of Loma Vista Records, which released TA13OO. His manager suggested "Bulls" for Triple J's in-studio cover series Like a Version. "And it was just like, man, this is my shit right here. This literally is my shit. Like, I could do this word-for-word, bar-for-bar, for real," says Curry. "I know how to do metal vocals. I hung around a lot of metalheads and I hang around a lot of metal bands, you know."

Curry embraced rock music at a young age, saying that he and his brother would flip through Miami-area stations on the radio between their twin beds — hip-hop station 99 JAMZ while they were on punishment and couldn't watch TV, and often the rock station when they went to sleep. A lot of his faves are a little heavier than standard radio fare — Pantera's "10's," Bad Brains' "I Against I," Metallica's Ride the Lightning, Slayer's South of Heaven — and you can hear this influence explode outwards on the screamier back third of TA13OO. At shows, he's even been known to conduct the "wall of death" — the 300-style mosh collision popularized by Lamb of God.

Video of Denzel Curry covers Rage Against The Machine 'Bulls On Parade' for Like A Version

 

But before Curry was screaming through the SoundCloud underground, he was a highly driven rapper in Carol City Senior High School, the same attended by both Rick Ross and Trayvon Martin. Curry's dad turned him onto Public Enemy, his mom played Tupac on road trips, and older brothers had hipped him to the rap made in Dirty South hotspots like New Orleans, Atlanta and, of course, Miami. Armed with an internet connection and energized by the emerging sounds of local ominous soundsmith SpaceGhostPurrp, Curry started delving deep into bleaker territory — the slowed screw music of Houston and the sinister tape hiss and death-obsessed horror-flick imagery of vintage Memphis rappers like Three 6 Mafia.

Curry began making music on free software like Audacity, and Purrp encouraged him to flood the internet with mixtapes. Curry filtered the harsh realities of his hometown with the harsh noise of cassette-traded Nineties rap that he discovered on YouTube.

"We looked at the rap game like [Miami rappers] Ice Berg, Ball Greezy, Trick Daddy, Trina, Rick Ross, Gunplay. And they was talking about dark shit. But they was doing it in a gangster way. I'm far from a gangster. My brothers, they was on that shit. I wasn't on that shit," says Curry. His voice rises to explain. "That's basically what Ross and them was talking about: It was evil shit on good-sounding beats. Like murdering somebody isn't cool. That shit's fucking evil. Drug dealing isn't cool. That shit evil as fuck. But we're from there, so we had to really show them the dark side of shit."

Like Kendrick Lamar, Curry gave unblinking reportage of his surroundings, but in his hands the sonics matched the violence of the visuals. "It was just like the area where I was in," says Curry, whose brother Treon died in 2014 after being tasered by local police. "All the fucked-up shit that was happening. Niggas trying to break in my house. Seeing somebody get shot. Like, I was around the fuck shit and I had something to talk about."

Source : revolvermag.com