For a while in 2007 it looked like Freddie Gibbs might become a rap star. He had a development deal with Interscope and a recording budget big enough to buy beats from proven hit makers like Polow da Don, Just Blaze, and the Alchemist. Raised in Gary, Indiana, he’d moved to LA to take his shot, and at 22, Gibbs was by all appearances living every young rapper’s dream.
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By the end of the year, his $30,000 advance running out, Gibbs was reduced to couch surfing in LA. In the past, he says, he’d been a drug dealer and a pimp, and he’d been involved in what he’s called “felonious activity” while playing football for Ball State, which helped get him kicked out of school. After his major-label hopes collapsed, he says, “I went through some pitfalls in the street that caused me to not want to rhyme and not want to fuck with the industry anymore. But I had to get past that and get back in the lab, you know?” He still owned the beats his record-company money had bought him, and he couldn’t let them go to waste. “I wasn’t gonna squander my opportunity. I had to make the most of what I had.”
Gibbs’s story isn’t unusual—declining sales have forced roster reductions at all the major labels—except for the fact that most artists who sink into a slump after getting dropped never come out of it. It may have helped that at the beginning he fell into rap rather than seeking it out—he says he frequently sold drugs to producers and musicians, and that those connections presented an alternative to what he calls “boredom” with the streets. “I’m just tired, you know, of the same old things,” he says. “Lot of my homies bein’ murdered every day. A lot of my homies going to jail every day. I kinda wanted to break that cycle, you know what I mean? I really didn’t want that for myself, so I needed something to exert that extra energy and that extra tension that I was dealing with. A lot of those circumstances I made on my own, I made ’em myself. And this is all about growin’ up and bumpin’ your head and learnin’ better, you know?”
The music business has been so completely upended over the past decade that the traditional path to success—the one Gibbs set foot on when he signed to Interscope—only barely exists anymore. The new rules say that to break out an artist needs a strong social-media presence and a constant stream of releases, so as not to fall victim to the listening public’s presumably infinitesimal attention span. Gibbs doesn’t play that game. When he feels like he has something worth putting out—the title of Str8 Killa No Filla, a mix-tape companion to his new EP that he’s releasing via XXL magazine on July 29, could be his professional credo—he puts it out. He might be the only rapper on the verge of mass popularity right now who’s gotten there on the strength of his talent alone. He’s not asking for your attention. His music demands it.
Freddie Gibbs Sat 7/17, 7:40 PM, Balance Stage, Pitchfork Music Festival (see page 44), Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, pitchforkmusicfestival.com, $40.
