Artist Profile: Grixxly
Grixxly, the Eswatini-born rapper, utilizes his cultural influences to create hip-hop tracks that transcend both his Western influences and his Swati roots, fusing sounds of both places into a enmeshed sonic experience.
Growing up, he was surrounded by the music of his mother, which was mostly jazz and classical, as well as the music of his brothers, who listened mostly to local music being made in Southern Africa. Yet, on the radio, he was constantly exposed to the work of American rappers, and he quickly gravitated to the likes of T-Pain and Lil Wayne as musical models.
“I just started being fascinated by this thing called music… hip-hop, the rhyme schemes, the melodies, I started listening to T-Pain around 2008… and it had an effect on me in a way where I was learning about melodies now, and with Tha Carter 3 now I'm learning about punchlines, and then with Eminem now I'm learning about flows and those type of things. So I'm just learning a different myriad of skills within the music space.”
His rap career began, unofficially, in primary school, when a group of his friends performed a song called “Move”, in which Grixxly based his verse off “Snap Ya Fingers” by T-Pain. From this moment, a love for hip-hop had been implanted in Grixxly’s brain.
Over time, his scribbled verses and online instrumentals evolved into a genuine desire to enter the studio, resulting in his first EP on streaming, “As The Fruit Ripens”, which he characterizes as very openly bearing his influences on its sleeve.
Yet, in the process of writing and recording, he was exploring the foundations of what would later distinguish his sound: his ability to seamlessly interweave the fabrics of the sounds on which he was raised.
“I feel like my experience helps me; it kind of gives me the best of both worlds now where I could fuse two worlds together to come up with my very own sound. Even in the project that I recently dropped, Bear With Me, there's a whole lot of African elements in the project merged with hip-hop, the Western culture hip-hop, in the sense where there's also African chants or African ad-libs and also just the merging of the Swati language…and it's just a different, refreshing thing for people who are hearing it for the first time around the world.”
His newest project, Bear With Me, speaks towards the four-year gap between this project and his last. In the interval of time between, Grixxly developed his flow and the unique qualities of his sound, and the album’s title is both a play on his name and a message to those around him, both artistically and personally, to have patience as grows in his craft and in his life.
He feels as though, currently, he is the most free he has ever been artistically; he has found a solid group of collaborators in Eswatini and a sound that simultaneously is his own and still engages with the larger hip-hop scene in Southern Africa. Moreover, Bear With Me highlights Grixxly’s range as an artist within the sound he has created. Since he does almost all of his own production, he was able to venture into boom-bap instrumentals, hard-hitting trap sounds, and even his nu-jazz influences throughout the course of the project’s 25-minute run time.