The Confessions of Isaiah Rashad
More than a decade ago, Isaiah Rashad received a two-word review that has followed him ever since. It was 2013, and Rashad was a twenty-two-year-old rapper from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who was just starting to build an audience. The review came from Kendrick Lamar, who was on his way to becoming perhaps the most acclaimed rapper of all time. Even then, Lamar generally avoided public pronouncements, so people paid attention when he posted a brief commendation on his Twitter page. The tweet read, simply, “Raw Talent,” and included a link to “Shot U Down,” a new track by Rashad, which made it clear why Lamar was so excited. The rhymes arrive in a joyful cascade of syllables, muscularly enunciated: “They ain’t popping shot, these niggas is Papa Doc / Fine as the shine, beam me up, and I’m riding Spock.” (In this couplet, “Papa Doc” is the wannabe gangster rapper from “8 Mile,” rather than the former Haitian President.) In the song’s music video, which landed two days after Lamar’s tweet, Rashad prowls and poses his way through a boarded-up housing project in East Chattanooga, looking a lot like an emerging hip-hop star.
In some ways, Rashad has fulfilled that promise. He is signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, known as T.D.E., the record label that nurtured Lamar, and he just released his third or fourth album (the first was officially a demo), which earned admiring reviews and drew a long line of fans to a storefront on Broadway, downtown, where Rashad was selling merchandise. The fans were, of course, thrilled to get a few seconds with a rapper they loved, although many of them had sad stories to share. “It’s always, ‘Somebody died,’ or, ‘My homie passed away and loved your shit, so I’ll buy a CD for him,’ ” Rashad told me. He is grateful for these interactions, and is in no way surprised by them. His new album is called “It’s Been Awful,” and the title seems to refer to the turbulent life he has led in the five years since his previous release. “I’m trying not to be a downer,” he said, a few hours after the meet and greet. He was sitting in a midtown restaurant where a collection of friends and associates had taken over a few tables. Friends call him Zay, and anyone who looked closely at him might have suspected that he was somebody: he had a mouth full of gold teeth, meticulously buffed fingernails, and an oversized Goyard bag that he dropped onto a chair next to him. He was a few days into a busy week of promotion. “Everybody thinks rappers are fucking indestructible, until they kill themselves,” he told me.
Rashad knows that even now, at this late stage in hip-hop’s evolution, rappers are expected to guard their reputations carefully. And so he knows that his reputation was forever changed on the day, in 2022, when a pair of videos appeared online that seemed to show him having sex with men. Contemporary scandals typically involve allegations of wrongdoing, but this one was about a different kind of transgression: there are still very few prominent male rappers who have talked or rhymed explicitly about same-sex attraction. (A notable exception is Tyler, the Creator, who once rapped, “I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004.”) In the aftermath, Rashad sat for an interview with Joe Budden, a rapper turned podcaster, during which he described himself as “sexually fluid,” although he hadn’t said much more since then. On “It’s Been Awful,” the opening stanza includes a pithy summary of a difficult time: “Ask me who I’m fucking / I been fucking up.” It’s a slouchy, moody album with lenient rhyme schemes and boasts that sound more like confessions:
Rashad has always had a confessional streak. His 2014 début, “Cilvia Demo,” included a track called “Heavenly Father,” which chronicled drug abuse, self-harm, and life as a second-generation alcoholic. But it also had a sweet chorus from Rashad’s friend and labelmate SZA, and the clarity of Rashad’s rhymes encouraged listeners to hear strength and wisdom in him—he sounded like someone who had already survived the worst. Nowadays, Rashad is more likely to emphasize uncertainty. He got serious about rapping while attending Middle Tennessee State University, in Murfreesboro, and within three years, he was discovered, on SoundCloud, and then signed by T.D.E. It was an L.A. label known for L.A. hip-hop, and Rashad was an outsider, working hard to keep up. “Being in T.D.E., you either a sponge or brick,” he said, in an interview around the time that “Cilvia Demo” was released. While Kendrick Lamar was conquering the hip-hop world, Rashad was honing an introspective style inspired by Southern hip-hop pioneers like Lil Wayne and OutKast. On Rashad’s 2016 album, “The Sun’s Tirade,” he and Lamar collaborated on a track called “Wat’s Wrong,” which set Rashad’s slightly raspy drawl against Lamar’s precise, pellucid rhymes. “When he put his verse on there, I was like, ‘Oooh, he didn’t really kill me,’ ” Rashad told me, showing a bit of hip-hop bravado. (Lamar recently left T.D.E., but the two have remained friendly.) “Because if he could have, he would have, that’s how I looked at it.” He paused to laugh at himself. “I be talking shit too much—I’ve got to chill.”
Rashad was sitting in a Zaxbys restaurant in Chattanooga, in 2022, when his phone began to vibrate with messages from record executives and his manager about the leaked videos. As the story spread, many people seemed to say that they supported Rashad, or that they didn’t care, though, of course, there were commenters making jokes, and worse. Rashad worried that he had embarrassed his family members, and embarrassed himself. “I shouldn’t have been doing that,” he told me, referring less to the sex than to the fact that he had taped it and then, apparently, sent the footage to someone he couldn’t trust. “I was on meth. I was out of my mind. I was on, like, more drugs than I could count.” The word he uses to describe himself now is “bisexual,” and on his new album, he asks, “What is love, when I don’t trust a boy or a girl?” He is hoping for a trade-off: he is willing to make his sexual orientation public, so long as he can keep his dating life private. He turns thirty-five this weekend, and he is a family man, of a sort. He has three children: two live with their mothers; the third, who is autistic, lives in California with Rashad and his younger brother Timothy Hakeem Vance, known as Keem the Cipher, who helped produce about half the tracks on “It’s Been Awful.”
Rashad also refers to Vance as his “sober buddy,” and he says that sobriety—or, at least, a cannabis-friendly version of it—has become central to his life. “Never been sober, but I’m trying / Last time that I told ya that I was, I was lying,” Rashad raps, on the new album, and he told me that this is the first time he has completed a record without feeling compelled to celebrate by getting wasted. “At my worst, I’m a junkie, so I knew where to find drugs,” he said. He would drive to Long Beach and find himself smoking crystal methamphetamine, or he would go through his iPhone backups until he found an archived version of his contacts that included a number for a cocaine dealer. He crashed multiple cars, sometimes in an attempt to end his life. At times, the people at T.D.E. basically put him on suspension, saying that he couldn’t resume his career until he got help. Like many people in recovery, he has resolved to be more honest, and not to present himself as less damaged than he really is. “Being an addict sucks so bad,” he said. “And knowing that I have to work on myself every day, it’s tiresome.” His new album is introverted and often insular, but it also includes a pair of high-profile collaborations. One, “Cameras,” features Dominic Fike, a popular young singer and actor (he currently appears in “Euphoria”) who has talked about being inspired by the way Rashad raps. The other is “Boy in Red,” with SZA, a kind of indie-rock love song that Rashad has said was influenced by the Norwegian singer-songwriter known as girl in red, and also by “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” by Prince. “See, maybe stay the night, then I could be your boyfriend / And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll just be your girlfriend,” Rashad sings, and it doesn’t sound awful at all.
Rashad seemed somewhat out of step with the hip-hop mainstream when he first surfaced, and the gap has only grown in the years since then. Those OutKast albums he loves are about as old today as the Beatles’ albums were when OutKast was recording. Rashad’s previous release, “The House Is Burning,” had some tracks that tried to channel the rowdy energy of Generation Z hip-hop, but “It’s Been Awful” is more engrossing, partly because it seems to more carefully reflect the climate inside Rashad’s brain. Anthony (Moosa) Tiffith, Jr., is the president of T.D.E., and when I asked him to describe Rashad’s fan base, he said, “vibers,” though he conceded that this term might be a euphemism for stoners. To promote the album, Rashad’s team scheduled events not only in Los Angeles and New York but also in Dallas and San Diego—not traditionally strong hip-hop markets, but places where Rashad does especially well. Rashad told me that he knows the people at T.D.E. are particularly enthusiastic about his more aggressive, syllabically dense tracks, and Tiffith confirmed it. “I mean, we are a rap label,” Tiffith said. “He’s got this laid-back thing that he’s been doing real heavy, but we still want to hear him rap.”
On the day after the event on Broadway, Rashad and his team made their way out to Elsewhere, a night club in Bushwick, where he was performing a couple of free sets to celebrate the album. The crowd was enthusiastic and somewhat glassy-eyed, and people lined up patiently to buy records and merchandise, and to get a chance to meet Rashad. Selling music in person is generally not a great way to make money, but it’s a good way to make an impression on Billboard, which weighs physical album sales much more heavily than streams. In the end, “It’s Been Awful” made its début at No. 18 on the Billboard chart—a respectable number, but also a decline relative to its predecessor, which arrived at No. 7. For a successful but not world-conquering rapper like Rashad, making a living relies on making sure that fans continue to feel connected to him. More than one person at Elsewhere reminded him of a rainy concert at Pier 17, in 2021, when SZA showed up. SZA and Rashad were signed to T.D.E. around the same time. Their careers have lately diverged, though, as SZA has emerged as probably the best and most important R. & B. singer of her generation. On this night, as Rashad posed for pictures in Bushwick, SZA was a few miles away in Manhattan, walking the red carpet at the Met Gala. Tiffith told me that he was hoping “Boy in Red” could be a breakthrough for Rashad—the label had made accommodations to make sure that SZA had time to record her part. But he said that he wanted to be patient, and to encourage Rashad to be patient, too. “I think he’s got as much time as he needs,” Tiffith said.
Rashad seems happy, for now, to be working his way toward a sustainable life, and perhaps a sustainable career. Later this year, he is planning to go on tour, and he told me that, in order to make sure his lungs are at full strength, he plans to stop smoking cannabis. At Elsewhere, though, this prohibition was definitely not yet in effect, and he seemed to be in a good mood, despite the arduous promotional schedule, and despite the rather uncheerful tenor of the album he was promoting. After nearly an hour of signing and posing, he headed upstairs to the roof deck, where the sun was setting, and fans were waiting. A hip-hop show is almost invariably a celebration, no matter the subject matter of the rhymes, and Rashad seemed energized by the sight of a packed audience, ready to rap along. Halfway through, he performed “M.O.M.,” from the new album, which has bleak lyrics about something resembling cocaine psychosis, matched to a suitably frantic beat. “I know y’all ain’t got a lot of room, but if you can find it, and you feel like it, dance,” he said. People started moving, and near the end of the song, Rashad retreated to the d.j. booth to watch them, and for a moment he looked satisfied. ♦