A prison interview with EBK Jaaybo

Image via Ramal Brown

Show your love for the game by subscribing to Passion of the Weiss on Patreon so we can continue publishing interviews with legendary producers, showcasing the game's best up-and-coming rap talent, and gifting you the only worthwhile playlists left in this streaming hellscape.

Steven Louis will not migrate Slack to Teams, he has no idea what these words mean.

California's hottest breakout rap act is in jail once again. It's the first time EBK Jaaybo has been charged as an adult. And it's also the first time he's been sent to prison with a chart-topping single. But everything else is numbingly and perversely normal.

The arrests began when he was 14. A series of gun and burglary offenses initially sent him to ruin, punishment for a kid mired in poverty and struggling with the murder of his father. At 21, Jaymani Gorman is now serving his seventh prison sentence. He has developed a routine, self-described “dance moves,” to cope with confinement. Once again, song lyrics and stills from videos are in the investigative files of a California rapper. Jaymani has grappled with California’s gang-enhancing penal code so many times that he can recite it word for word. To paraphrase another historically great rapper caught in the state’s cycles of bloodlust and jealousy: It’s normal, but definitely not.

EBK Jaaybo is the consummate artist for a country riven by violence and whose society is hungry for unvarnished truth. Hailing from Stockton, once the city with the highest foreclosure rate in the country and still the city with the most bankruptcies in the U.S., he's the human incarnation of Omar Little in the courtroom, making a shotgun and a briefcase functionally indistinguishable. He's one of the sharpest and most exciting rappers working today, yet unlike most of his caliber, he rarely raps about his own rhyming skills. Syllables are drawn out with snide enunciation before collapsing into coldness and exaggerated bass.

On “Apocalypse,” one of his first hits, Jaaybo connects “Glock Lifter,” “Shot Sender,” and “Mob Member” with the alert aggressiveness of a crime boss trying to give stage directions. The patterns are tripled with careful density before being unceremoniously dropped for a new, equally convoluted rhyme. It's harsh and chaotic, AAA/B cadences that feel like Steve Francis at his best, contorting himself to complete an alley oop over the opposing center.

His breakthrough hit “Boogieman” is a unique viral music oddity, one of the most unlikely social media hits of this generation. The punchy bass almost shakes a phone screen and syncs up to the downbeat with borderline arrhythmic key hammering. It’s an ugly, jet-black anti-pop, a gladiator theme for the year 2100, with Jaaybo “Once again, bring out hits without hooks”. Somehow it has reached the “hot women perform choreographed dances” part of TikTok.

Jaaybo's soaring popularity belies the music's cruelty and spite. The opponents are not faceless; in fact, entire songs like “Fly Exterminator” and “Had Enough” are grinning, blood-soaked dedications to a Stockton rival. Some songs, like the blistering emo anthem “Do Not Disturb,” are compression chambers for pain and trauma. Others, like the Beabadoobee-sampling “Death Bedz,” feel like the reconciliation of broken pride – “They say I'm valuable, but they act like I'm not worth a penny.”. Every repetition hurts.

The latest project, a 21-track collection called The Grim Reaperis mostly what he describes as “plain street stuff.” He's aware that this energy is working counterclockwise to his rehabilitation efforts, but he seems content to let his listeners sort out the contradictions and the troubling overlaps. The motifs are strange and unique, if not frighteningly hyperspecific. Jaaybo loves firearm switches and vector clip magazines, he spins like a tornado and eliminates rivals with a fly swatter. The ski masks are still on the ground. Conspicuous silences in the middle of verses still create gaps for things to go unsaid. There are no specifics here, just raw and unforgiving menace.

We caught up with Jaaybo from the San Joaquin County Jail, where he gave his first official interview since being reincarcerated in January for illegal gun possession. On the eve of his 21st birthday, Jaaybo spoke with genuine defiance and a hardened familiarity with loneliness. Again, no part of the prison experience is new to him. But Jaaybo shares a clear and motivated vision of what his future holds. Jaaybo sees a mansion for his children to grow up in, far away from Stockton; they will never know what their father's Nightingale pad looks like or what it feels like to constantly turn their heads.

He reveals he will be back home in four months, with plans for a tour and new music. He says he misses his fallen soldiers and his father Rary, but no longer believes physical presence is the measure of companionship. In his view, he will never “die by the gun,” but he doesn't think he's alive afterward, either.

(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)