Artist Profile: boybeige
boybeige, the lyrically-disposed rapper raised in Northern California, like many, took a circuitous route into hip-hop and his craft.
Growing up, boybeige had a love for music, playing guitar, piano, and violin at various points throughout his childhood, but these ultimately gave way to the short attention span of a child. Instead, he found his energy being devoted to more organized activities such as choir and musical theater, throughout which his creativity was nurtured and allowed to blossom.
His music taste was formed primarily by his older sister, who studied music and performance arts in college and single-handedly injected alternative tastes into Boybeige’s creative mindset.
“If there's any new music that I ever found, for most of my life up until high school, she was the one who introduced me to it. When Blonde by Frank Ocean dropped, she showed me that just unknowingly, more so being in her car hanging out with her [I was exposed to it].... She really helped me expand like what I consumed. And it was a lot easier to branch out from there after she gave me all this stuff.”
Yet, Boybeige truly encountered rap, as an art form, for the first time in middle school, when his friend showed him a song by Watsky: the Bay Area rapper and spoken word artist. While he now characterizes this as one of the embarrassing phases that are inherent to the middle school experience, at the time, he connected with Watsky’s literary and lyrical approach to hip-hop, which is what ultimately drew him towards the genre.
A fan of Edgar Allan Poe and similar writers, Boybeige’s inclinations are indeed literary-leaning, and this was reflected in his first tentative steps into making his own music.
“[Rap] wasn't necessarily new to me… I just didn't really understand all of it at the time. What I grew to love about rap is that, while I've been singing my whole life, rap just felt like it was the most foreign, and so getting involved in it felt the most exciting. A lot of it was a world I wasn't super familiar with. And the more I listened to it, the more parallels I drew to mine, regardless of how alienated I was from it growing up. I just felt like there was a lot of stuff adjacent to my life.”
Despite boybeige’s relatively late arrival to the art form, his first efforts that he decided to put out into the world were stellar, with “Tidepools”, his first single on Spotify, reaching almost two million streams and gaining him somewhat of an immediate audience.
Yet, like many artists, he ultimately felt dissatisfied with most of his singles from this time; these were his first steps into recording himself and projecting his own sonic image, and, over time, he began to feel as though these did not fully transcend the status of emulations of some of his influences.
After a small break away from music, he began writing songs in his car with more limited resources: partially to fit his craft into his busy schedule and partially for the freedom and spontaneity that such restrictions provide.
Now, boybeige feels creatively revived, working on music that is more authentically true to his own experiences and more centered around the influences that define his taste.
The unreleased tracks for his upcoming first full-length venture utilize experimentation in their arrangements and a more melodic approach to the song’s structure as a whole: a marked step away from what his discography is currently composed of.
As boybeige steps into a new era for himself creatively, he aims for quality: for an authenticity to his own experiences that he has now unlocked through a new creative process.