by Dash Lewis (@gardenerjams)
There’s an unmistakable facial expression in the hip hop head vernacular. To the uninitiated, it reads as disgust, as though you’ve just bit into a lemon or caught a whiff of something foul. But to those in the know, it’s a powerful signal of approval. An accompanying “Whoooo!” or a “Goddamn!” acts as a moment of transition, as the wrinkled nose and angry eyebrows melt into a grin of disbelief. “I don’t think you understand,” the look says. “This shit is fire.”
As Defcee, born Adam Levin, pressed play on “Hot Water Tank,” a highlight from Boldy James and The Alchemist’s Super Tecmo Bo, I watched in the Zoom screen as his face went into those familiar contortions. He held his phone speaker near his ear, gleefully explaining to me the ways in which ICECOLDBISHOP’s verse blew his mind. At this point, we were close to an hour into our conversation, a good portion of which found Defcee singing the praises of the rappers he admires. As he finished talking about “Hot Water Tank,” he leaned back, momentarily causing his Zoom background, the cover of Bruiser Wolf’s Dope Game Stupid, to obscure his face.
I’ve encountered very few people who love rap music with the same passion as Defcee. He’s a tireless champion of the artform and its practitioners—especially those from his hometown of Chicago. The past decade or so has seen Levin work to more fully integrate his two careers, rapping and teaching. He’s co-facilitated the Young Chicago Authors Emcee Wreckshop with fellow Chicago wordsmith Add-2. Before his current job as a high school teacher, Levin taught rap fundamentals to incarcerated youth. On Twitter, Levin evangelizes about the records he’s enjoying, explaining how CRASHprez or SolarFive have impeccable discographies.
In November of 2021, Defcee released Trapdoor, a collaboration with Baltimore producer Messiah Musik. Backwoodz Studioz, the current bastion of challenging, forward-thinking rap music released the album, giving Defcee’s already-rising profile a considerable shove. It’s a towering record, full of heavy bag drums and virtuosic rhymes. Defcee simultaneously writes from insular and elevated perspectives, presenting a harrowing personal narrative that speaks to the grander dystopia in which we’re mired. His writing feels both purposeful and effortless, a clear sign of someone absolutely immersed in perfecting their craft.
At the time of this writing, Defcee is prepping another astonishing record, For All Debts Public And Private. Though not as wrenching as Trapdoor, it’s just as exquisitely written. Defcee floats atop producer BoatHouse’s hypnotic production, processing what it is to be an artist trying to stake their claim. It’s a record full of rapping-ass rapping as only Defcee does it: boastful yet nuanced, confident yet winking. As with almost everything he’s released, one imagines Defcee in the studio listening to mixes, tweaking each song until he’s nodding his head, an emphatic “Goddamn!” slipping from his suddenly contorted face.
credit: Michael Salisbury
Dash Lewis: You've had a pretty productive past couple of years and are an incredibly prolific writer. I saw a tweet where you were offering 24-hour turnaround time on guest verses. How do you keep that rate going?
Defcee: I've written raps since I was 11. I got into poetry because it was a way to write raps without saying I was writing raps. At the time that I was doing it, an English teacher might be reluctant to help a kid who's trying to write raps, but might be interested in helping a kid who's writing poetry. I get to high school, join this spoken word club, and start doing these workshops where you'd be given prompts, but only have a limited amount of time to complete them. What that trained me to do was set a timer and just write. Try not to be too precious with the material, just write and then go back, edit, clean things up. What's weird is that I didn't apply that approach to my music until much later. I have a Google Doc that's random bars, miscellaneous stuff. I try to write something every day, even if it's just a line, to stay sharp and in practice.
I wasn't going to do any features until after my daughter turned one, but circumstances here have allowed for me to be able to knock out a handful of guest features. It shakes the rust off and I can get back to the longer term projects. By the time that they've come out, I've been working on [my albums] for a long time. It wasn't really until A Mixtape as God Intended that I had enough music to be able to sit down and say, "This comes out here, this comes out there." I look at Gucci Mane and a lot of rappers from the South—their work rate is crazy. They're pumping out mixtapes on a regular basis and we just gotta keep up with that. It's the era of the 24 hour news cycle. If I'm not a multimillionaire, I can't afford to take two years off between projects.
Lewis: Do you consider guest verses calisthenics?
Defcee: Yeah, yeah. It just clears a lot of stuff out. For example, I'm trying to crack this new Messiah Musik album. We've got a bunch of joints that didn't fit [Trapdoor] that are still fire, so we're putting them towards the next one. Even if they are gonna get re-recorded, they're pretty much done as is. I'm trying to write new material to complement that and I'm in my own head. I'm listening to the feedback Trapdoor's getting—and it's great—but I'm thinking to myself, "If I just make the same album twice, people are going to notice that." For me, it's just about having a reservoir of work that I can pull from and build things around, like the random bars Google Doc. Doing features is a way to get my brain moving again and then that takes me back into album mode because I know like, "Okay, cool, I'm capable of producing something that's quality." I know I have to make something that's worth the money that somebody is paying me. I'm not about to be out here bullshitting with somebody's paycheck, you know?
Lewis: A 24 hour turnaround time seems like it exists in a couple different lanes. On one hand, it's an assertion of confidence and a message to whoever's paying you like, "I will get this done, you won't have to chase me down for it." But at the same time, you talked earlier about setting a timer and just writing. So, are you challenging yourself each time you do that to get better, faster? Does it exist in both of those lanes?
Defcee: Yeah, it definitely does, but the difference is that I don't have to be as hard on myself. I don't have to second guess as much; I can just kind of rhyme. The other cool thing is the feature requests that I have from certain people will require different things for me. At some point in the past, I remember the feature requests were like "Give me your battle raps." But now, since Trapdoor, it's a little bit more varied. There's a guest verse I wrote the other day that didn't have a pocket because the beat was in like 13/4 time signature. I'm not gonna crack my head open to try to come up with a cadence because I know that the writing is going to suffer on the back of that. I tried to find a way to my version of what the cool kids in New York are doing, where they just rhyme super fast. It's not in the pocket, but you could tell that they're rhyming, and you can tell that there's something intentional about what they're doing. And it is in response to the music that they're rhyming over.
I had something else where I was getting into thoughtful social commentary as it relates to teaching. And then the two joints that I knocked out today before we got on the call were more in the punchline bag that I haven't been in in quite some time. It's good to be able to unlock those different chambers because that keeps my versatility fresh. A lot of athletes are breaking down earlier in their careers because they're only playing one sport for most of their lives. You don't have people like Bo Jackson anymore. You don't have kids who are playing multiple sports in high school. It's like, by the time you're in the seventh or eighth grade, "Looks like you're good at basketball, so basketball 12 months a year" as opposed to basketball and running track. You're putting more strain on these specific muscles, so by the time you get to your freshman year of college, you tear your achilles and you're never the same athlete. You know what I mean?
So that's what I'm trying to do, too. I’m also trying to force myself to listen to different styles of rap that I might not have listened to before. I'm a big fan of Young Thug and Future. I've been really into Blah Records over in the UK—Lee Scott, Cult of the Damned, CLBRKS, Sonnyjim. I just try to listen to everything, get inspired, and see what I can learn. I think it's been a minute since I've done a whole lot of listening to just kind of tune out and enjoy shit. I'm listening to enjoy shit, obviously—if I don't enjoy your music, I'm not gonna rock with it—but if I only take a super technical approach to everything I listen to then it's going to take the joy out of it for me. But I'm trying to listen to as many different kinds of music as possible so I can learn from them and apply it to what I do. I can think to myself, "if I get a certain beat from a producer I can maybe take this in a direction people aren't expecting so that they know that my albums are not just retreads of themselves."
Lewis: What's something that you've heard recently that rewired your brain a little bit?
Defcee: I mean greenSLLIME and SolarFive, for real. They'll send me shit and I'll just be like, "Goddamn man, we're supposed to be in this together. Y'all are supposed to keep the bar just a little bit lower so I can meet you where you're at." It really is like, "Damn, I hate these guys." I love these guys, but I also hate these guys because of how talented they are. So every time they send me something or CRASHprez sends me something or Lamon Manuel sends me something—when I get certain rappers music early, even if they're friends of mine, I'm just like, "Fuck! Okay, if this is what's next then I can't slack ever again."
Lewis: That's a great place to be in.
Defcee: Yeah, yeah, it is. The shit that really blew my hair back was ICECOLDBISHOP's verse on this Boldy James album.
Lewis: That shit is vicious.
Defcee: You mind if I play it real quick off my phone?
Lewis: [Laughs] Go for it!
Defcee: [Laughs] Alright, yeah. [Presses play on his phone] So I hear this beat and I know Boldy's on it. And then I hear this voice:
OK, back and forth, shell casings scattered 'cross the concrete
Pass the torch, bullet fragments splash across your mom Jeep
Eatin' Chinese inside the hooptie, bitch, we five deep
And right beside me, a semi-automatic nine piece
and then I run it back to the beginning, because I'm like, "Nah, maybe I'm tweaking. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe it's just the novelty of the voice." And then you finally listen to the whole verse because you've run it back three or four times in the middle of it and still haven't gotten to the last bar yet. And the shit just inspires you, it sends a bolt of lightning through you. I listened to that and then I tried to write and was like, "Nah, this shit is trash!" [Laughs] But down the line, when I sit down to write something, maybe I catch a pattern or a flow that I hadn't heard in this beat before, because I never would have expected somebody to take the approach that ICECOLDBISHOP took on "Hot Water Tank."
Lewis: Absolutely, I think that's the standout on that album. What Alchemist does where he changes from a minor key to a major key by adding that sample into the whistling—it's just fucking phenomenal.
Defcee: Yeah! That's the shit I have no training in. I couldn't articulate that, I really just go off the feeling. I think a lot of us feel like we have to be able to explain why something's great 100% of the time in order to call it great. But sometimes it's just the feeling or it's the way that the words are being put together. There's something about it that just hits you in a certain way. You listen to Supreme Clientele, you have no frame of reference for that kind of writing. I didn't have any frame of reference for it when I was 15—I'm there for the beats. And then I keep coming back because I'm trying to figure out what the fuck is going on as far as the rapping is concerned. [Laughs] And then I'm able to eventually realize that [Ghostface] is juxtaposing these different images or these words that we commonly wouldn't associate with one another. He's turning nouns into verbs. He's coining new slang terms that are metaphors for shit. I think that's the instructive part of the craft—the ability to be able to accept that some shit just feels good to say, some shit just feels good to listen to. Sometimes you gotta let the feeling guide you as opposed to the technicality.
Lewis: When I listen to Trapdoor, everything feels so intentional and so cared for. I'm curious about your revision process, if you have one.
Defcee: Oh, I definitely have one. I realized that there was a revision process that I had as far as the page was concerned, but not one for recording. I have a home setup that's like, mic stand, mic, reflection filter, pop filter, Mbox, laptop. Everything that I dropped this year, I recorded at home in the closet. I figured out how to compress my vocals so that the scratch demos were listenable. When I did that, I started to really study what it was I was doing. I started seeing syllables as notes and started to place things a little bit more intentionally. The version of Trapdoor that you have, most of those vocals are my fourth pass. My first pass might have taken me 20 to 25 takes to get it right. I might come back to it and be like "Fuck, nope, this is too rushed. Let's go back."
As far as the writing is concerned, I try to tweak the writing so that there's something special happening in each bar. For example, on the Defprez song, "Tundra," the last three bars are "Chemistry cost me the element of surprise/ Got resentful, started tripping and envy fell into the rhymes/ It was emeralds in my eyes. I'm a chip off the Time Stone/ you can tell 'cause I'm quick to kick a verse you hitting rewind on." So the rhyme scheme that ended bar fourteen began by 15. And then what I try to do is if I'm already addressing envy, "emeralds in my eyes," green-eyed, jealousy, whatever. I'm not just saying I'm a chip off the old block, I'm gonna chip off the Time Stone—I think that stone is green in the Avengers movies. And then I bring it back to some flexing shit, "because I'm quick to kick a verse you hitting rewind on."
I’m just trying to connect all the dots: find ways to be able to connect the bars so that everything sounds intentional. Even if it's a whole bunch of non sequiturs, you're still able to follow the train of thought. I want to do the kind of wordplay that's subtle enough to where people don't notice it until they come back. There might be a bar where I change the verb so that it matches the objects I'm comparing. I might change the verb so it becomes personification, where before it was just an action. Maybe from your side of things as a musician, this is the equivalent of trying to explain some of the more technical aspects of musicianship. I've embedded this so much into my practice that it's hard for me to be able to think of individual moments where that's happened. So, my revision process is to amp up the bars so that every bar counts—there's no filler. And then as far as my vocal revision process, I try to make sure that all of the syllables are in the right place.
Lewis: I read that you'd worked on Trapdoor for seven years before it came out. How did you connect with Messiah Musik?
Defcee: Messiah was one of those producers I'd heard without realizing I'd heard him. There's a Quelle Chris album [ed. N---as Is Men], that he'd done a few beats on. Then I'm starting to listen to the Armand Hammer stuff, I'm seeing his name in the credits, and he just so happens to be producing my favorite Armand Hammer songs. So, "Cloisters, "Shark Fin Soup," and "The Good Die Mostly Over Bullshit." At the time, I kind of felt like I'd hit a wall with a lot of the producers I'd been working with consistently—or a lot of the people I was working with might not have had the time to put a pack together for me, so I started reaching outside of my circle to try to work with people.
I reached out to Messiah via email and he replied. Initially it was just gonna be a couple beats. Then it turned into an EP. And then it turned into an album. He's somebody who's also incredibly prolific and will send you just packs and packs and packs of shit. He and I are very similar in terms of our approach to conversations—there's always kind of an open line of communication. Definitely that Jewish guilt that comes into play—we're both Jewish, so the little like, "I'm sorry for hitting you out of nowhere. But yadda yadda yadda." [Laughs]
It was dope to be able to have a collaborator who was so invested in the work. I think that was a big thing for me: he clearly liked what we were making. He believed in the music, he believed in the album, and I think he just wanted what we were doing to be successful. So that kind of initial email inquiry turned into something even bigger than we'd imagined.
Lewis: Did you have a concept going into it? Or did it reveal itself over the years?
Defcee: Oh man, it did have a concept. So around the time when I started picking the beats for the album, I had dinner with my parents. My dad is a former journalist. He's written a couple of true crime books. I think his last full time job in journalism was editor of Chicago magazine in the late 80s, early 90s, so he is a vault of information. He's from Connecticut originally, so he was telling me about this renowned mental health facility in Connecticut called The Institute of Living. I was like, "Oh, that would be a fire album title." I wrote the song that is on the album that has that title.
However, I researched The Institute of Living and found out that, like a lot of mental health facilities back in the day, it was on some One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest shit. They were doing electro shock therapy and restraining patients. The main thing was it was a facility where they would send Catholic priests who had been accused of molestation. The Archdiocese of different cities would send people to this facility for treatment, but they wouldn't tell the facility what they were really there for. When I heard that, I was like, "Okay, this title might work for the song, but this isn't the album title." The initial concept was based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from the perspective of somebody like Jack Nicholson's character—somebody who's wrestling with mental illness and eventually is able to come to terms and accept it in order to heal. So it would be like the happy ending version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as opposed to what actually happens.
"Trapdoor" was something that came into my head as I was listening to the songs and reading through the lyrics that made a lot of sense to me. As I was finishing the writing, I noticed that there were certain trends that were coming together. The contradictory nature of that word, "trapdoor," was something that was present in all of the songs. There are attitudes and subjects that could either be traps or they could be doors: they could either allow access to somewhere else or they could keep you in one place. Even the happy songs at the end of the album are like that.
Lewis: The first few times I listened to it without reading the lyrics, a couple things stuck with me. One, it's a pretty heavy listen—it demands your attention. A word that kept coming up for me was "sober." I don't know if you're sober or not, but there's references to substance abuse issues and quitting alcohol. But beyond just the sobriety from substances, it's a very clear eyed assessment of mental health, the socio-economic climate of Chicago, the political climate of America, an understanding of dystopia, and how to navigate through all of that. Does that resonate with you at all?
Defcee: Yeah, I appreciate that. With this album, for whatever reason, I was able to work through a lot of things that I'm always talking and thinking about. I think you learn a lot about humanity when you're a teacher if you're paying attention to the right shit. If all you're paying attention to is pedagogy and your curriculum, you're going to be missing what's in front of you, especially now. This generation of kids needs you to be engaged in them as human beings as opposed to only their engagement with the material.
I try to read a lot. I try to stay informed of what's going on in my immediate surroundings. I try to ask questions. I think I intuited what institutional racism was without understanding what it was as a very young kid. A lot of it came from looking at the newspaper and talking to my dad and questioning things I was seeing. My parents allowed for me to be open minded enough to explore those things. They might not necessarily agree with what it is I had to say, but they would encourage me to seek out more information.
In the spirit of full disclosure, right before the pandemic I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I've had ADHD my whole life, but something I didn't think about—that I knew was true—is that the symptoms of clinical depression exhibit themselves very similarly, if not exactly the same as ADHD symptoms. I think that fully addressing my mental health, having the time to sit down and really process all of these things that I'm thinking and feeling, being able to do a whole bunch of revising, I think all of the right elements cohered at the right time to produce what this album now sounds like.
I was also thinking more globally because when you have a pandemic, what have we been raised to believe our entire lives? It's that the government's going to do the right thing. The only other comparison—and I don't mean to be frivolous about this at all—is 9/11. 9/11 happens, thousands of people are affected by it, and then suddenly everything is a bipartisan issue—or at least that's how it's presented to us. We're going to war; it's vengeance day. And then this happened and what we wound up realizing was that the government doesn't give a fuck about us. The people to whom it kowtows don't give a fuck about anything but their power, influence, and money. They won't let you take one of those things away from them, let alone all three. So the gaps that were already there started widening.
I started seeing my students totally disengage because remote teaching is the least ideal way to learn, but it's the only way if you want to keep everybody safe. What's happened since they've sent everybody back in the last few weeks, hella kids at my job have gotten COVID. I've gotten COVID. The sensible thing is shut everything down, wait until the vaccination rate hits a certain benchmark, open shit back up. While things are shut down, the government—which always seems to find trillions of dollars it allegedly does not have when it's time to buy a new nuclear warhead—can then suddenly find that money to keep everybody afloat for a while. It's a pandemic, we're not going to politicize a public health crisis. And then it all fell to shit. All of the worst case scenarios came to be.
I think there are certain things that don't require nuance anymore. People keep trying to treat global warming and climate change with nuance and there is no gray area. If we don't get our shit together, it's a wrap—it probably already is. So it's just a matter of—[pause] wow, I can't believe I said that out loud—it's just a matter of when. Do we want our kids to be able to live long, healthy, happy lives? We gotta change what it is we're doing. And we can't keep making it seem like individual responsibility is the reason why we have these issues. Yeah, it plays a role, but it's a small percentage in comparison to these multinational conglomerates that are polluting the shit out of everything, taking up all of these natural resources, and burning forests down. That's where the problem is, but we're not talking about that, because those are the people who will have the most power and influence over the government.
Now we're all fucked because of it. Climate change is like a scientific fact. It's not up for dispute—shit is happening. So, [Laughs] in taking all of that into account, I think I figured out a way to put it on the page in a way that wasn't super pedantic. I tried to approach it less like, "This is my politically conscious music" and more like, "If we look around the world, this is what's happening." So I'm thinking about this stuff all the time. I don't think I always knew how to put it on the page. I never want to make music that somebody is going to be able to easily tune out. I want to make music that's honest about everything.
Lewis: I was gonna ask if there's writing from characters that you create on the record, but it sounds like it's mostly you.
Defcee: I learned from DOOM. I remember there was a poster that had come with one of DOOM's releases. It was like "DOOM's Rules For Writing." One of them was that writing battle raps in the second person is corny—don't do that. And then revisiting DOOM's catalog and thinking, "It would be interesting to find ways to talk about myself in the third person. It would be interesting to find ways to talk about wack ass rappers without using the second person." Around the time I was graduating from college, I started reading noir novels. I read [James Ellroy’s] American Tabloid for the first time and that technique of narration where a section is clearly written from the perspective of a character, but in the third person, was something I thought was interesting and kind of changed how I thought about approaching a lot of that in my own music. I've always admired people who have the mental capacity to worldbuild like that in their music. I am not one of those people, so I think a lot of it is just kind of dealing with the real world and dealing with life experiences. Just trying to find ways to make music that speaks to reality and keeps me sane.
Lewis: I thought about DOOM when you said you have a Google Doc with a couple bars here and there, and how he would write couplets down and arrange it on a music stand before he rapped.
Defcee: I've done that. I've also done the Eminem/Lupe thing where you think of a phrase and you try to think of words that rhyme with each syllable of that phrase. You're just really writing down pairings of phrases that rhyme and then you go back and you try to fill them in. I've basically tried every writing approach possible because as I've learned over the years, writing keeps me sane. This is how I've learned to process what I'm going through. And even if I'm poking fun of myself or doing some battle rap stuff, it's a way of processing. Maybe I'm angry or annoyed by something and instead of going on Twitter and complaining about some shit that don't nobody care about, if I say it in a song, maybe people will find it funny. Maybe this is a wittier way to say it. Or maybe the fact that I care about this thing is something that I can turn around to make fun of myself so that people know that I don't really take myself so seriously all the time. Somebody like DOOM, somebody like Sean Price, those were guys who took their craft seriously but never took themselves too seriously. I have to write raps. I have to write them. Any way that I'm able to keep that inspiration flowing and keep the pen moving, I'm gonna do that.