Joshua Virtue + Malci
Chicago Selects is a new series of playlists curated by Chicago’s indie artists. No restrictions, no requirements — artists make a mix then tell me about it.
Joshua Virtue and Malci are rappers/producers and co-founders of the hip-hop label Why? Records, along with Davis and Ruby Watson. The collective has released 11 projects since December 2018, including May’s charity compilation Art Is Love, Vol. 1. Malci and Virtue first rhymed together in 2018 during living room freestyle sessions dubbed Drunken Bars. July’s JV+MALCI EP captures a year’s worth of sessions with that same energy, full of outlandish bars and “pre apocalyptic anxiety.” For the first Chicago Selects, Virtue and Malci prepared a mix of crate diggers and cross-genre singers, including fellow Chicagoans NNAMDI, Freddie Old Soul, and Serengeti. I talked to them from their respective apartments to learn more about their selections.
How did this collab project come together initially?
JV: It was like, “Yo, what are you up to this Thursday? Nothing? Wanna make some rap?” Then Malci would come to my house with a 12-pack, we would drink the whole 12-pack, and write a rap song. Malci wrote most of his verses on the spot. Some of the beats we made together, sometimes we’d just cycle through different beats we had. As time went on, the project started to have its own personality, and we figured out what spaces we needed to fill in.
All four of the Why? Footclan are rarely on the same track together, but you opened the charity compilation with a posse cut. Are you interested in a full group project?
Malci: We’re always playing with the idea of a project, but we also don’t want to make it too regular that you see the Why? Footclan together. I think it has the same mystique that Black Hippy does, you never see all them niggas together in one room or in one rap, when you do it’s like “Fuck, this shit’s crazy!”
Listening to the playlist, I forgot Earl Sweatshirt popped up on that big Quelle Chris posse cut. Were you big into Odd Future when they first came out?
JV: I was very into Odd Future. I don’t really look back on it fondly because when Odd Future first happened all the songs were about crazy horrible shit. But Earl Sweatshirt was a huge influence on me early on. My first push towards rapping came from Black Thought and the Roots, then two point five or three in my list of most inspiring niggas was Earl Sweatshirt. When he’s younger, his shit is so much more intricate, and the older he gets the more off the cuff he gets, and he’s really not trying to impress anybody, he really is just expressing himself. I find that beautiful. You can hear the growth and light in his voice that wasn’t there before. It’s one of the only verses where Earl sounds kind.
Malci: I was a big Odd Future head. I loved the mystique behind them. They had such a long roster of awesome talent. I think the most interesting part about them right now lowkey is the growth. If you listen to the first Earl tape, now you listen to Some Rap Songs, you can hear how much calmer he is, how much he evolved. Same thing with Tyler, Frank Ocean, all these cats, they all sound so drastically different. It’s really beautiful to see their discography grow with them.
JV: Off the top of this playlist is MIKE too, and he really transformed Earl’s style. I think that’s an interesting meeting of minds. They’re playing to a similar school, but like different majors within the same university.
I’m glad you included DOOM too. Is Vaudeville Villain your go-to album? Do you have a favorite DOOM?
Malci: I’ve been waiting for this conversation. [laughs] Vaudeville Villain is fucking psycho, it’s one of his best projects. Literally every DOOM release is fire, but because VV was under Viktor Vaughn, it gets forgotten about like King Geedorah. This particular track just fucks me up. I’ve been really studying DOOM and how he raps with narrative. He puts you in a story. It’s only 16 bars but it’s a whole fucking plot. This song “A Modern Day Mugging” is just about robbing folk. I’m just like “Damn. He’s done such a good job, it’s an entire song about robbing niggas, and it’s really interesting!”
The only song I really know from VV is “Lactose and Lecithin,” the one about time traveling to buy coke from the future. Somebody made the argument that you can’t use DOOM as this nerd rap/conscious rap figurehead, because he was rapping about street shit and people just didn’t realize it.
JV: I feel like that’s part of the allure though. I saw somebody say “Westside Gunn is like the new MF DOOM for street niggas.” He can talk about hard shit in such an interesting way. You can talk about the most obscure street shit as MF DOOM, but it’s accessible to everyone. You don’t gotta be street to get it because you’re also getting fucking Jetsons references, Scooby Doo sample type shit. There’s this thing in rap - it’s actually just being a Black man - where you’re constantly trying to re-validate your intelligence and humanity in the eyes of the rest of America. For DOOM, he really was this street nigga, but at the same time, he likes Hanna-Barbera cartoons and cereal. It’s weird to have to keep re-affirming that in people’s eyes. DOOM was thrown into this closet by the industry, so he started breaking rules and being street without being street, which accidentally appeals to middle class American white kids and shit. It’s a weird dichotomy that happened there.
Do you feel like you have had expectations placed on your music, in terms of what you can or can’t rap about?
Malci: I feel like none of us at Why? get locked into that. The references are everything: anime, spirituality, paintings, artists. We’re trying to break that dichotomy, like Joshua was saying. I like to challenge it too. I like to bring in shit that I’m specifically not supposed to talk about. I rap about Cy Twombly and all these crazy artists that most hood niggas aren’t gonna know -
JV: I don’t know who that is, type shit. [laughs]
You’re recording your verse and Virtue’s in the back with a notepad like “Artists To Google”.
JV: I have had to Genius y’all niggas, for real. That’s the best thing about it, I really do respect the other artists in here and we all have Rolodexes we get to expose one another to. I have gone down many a Wikipedia hole by chasing down a line on Genius and finding out what it meant. Rap is knowledge.
I’m glad Madlib is in the mix too. When I talked to Davis about a year ago, he made a point that DOOM was a big deal to every “thesaurus rapper.” Do you think Madlib is the equivalent as a producer?
JV: That’s something me and Malci have in common, we’re pretty heavily driven by that school of jazz sampling niggas. Madlib I like a lot because there’s so much shit going on. That’s why I like that Lootpack song so much, it’s like four songs. You can tell he’ll spend an extended amount of time perfecting a couple seconds in a song. If you talk to him he might be like “Oh nah, I did that off the cuff right there.” He makes it look easy.
Malci: He’s like, “I made this on my iPad.” I appreciate Madlib so much. You can tell he just appreciates music so fucking much. He has so many bodies of work, and there’s never a repeat of the same song, or if there is he flipped it in some way you’d never notice. Dude has probably listened to more albums that I can even comprehend. I love his dedication to the craft, really.
JV: Madlib will just make music. He cares, music is a part of that nigga. For us, this shit is like a spiritual thing, grounded in more than some “for the bands” type shit. You can feel that shining through in Madlib’s work. It’s very beautiful.
Glad to see Serengeti on here as well. Did you know him personally before you started doing shows together?
Malci: I’m a Geti stan, I’ve been a Geti stan a long time. I met him three years ago and played a couple shows with him, I keep in touch with him. He’s just a huge inspiration the way our rap friends are, like Rich Jones and Rahim Salaam. He made Ajai and I texted him and he told me his process, and I was like “Fuck, this is so good bro, I can’t believe you’re just someone I talk to.” I regularly revisit his discography and try to pick up game from him. He’s an underrated wordsmith. The way he makes narratives in every project, and they’re full thought-out plots, is insane to me. That’s so hard to do as a rapper, and there’s no one else on his level when it comes to that shit.
I know you’ve both followed R.A.P. Ferreira’s career for a while now. How does Purple Moonlight Pages compare to his other stuff?
JV: The thing that makes milo so fucked up is you can go back to the oldest milo record and just be flabbergasted, like “how are you writing this?” But you can also see him getting better as the years progress. As someone who historically sounds very grounded in his voice, R.A.P. Ferreira is the most grounded in his voice I’ve heard him sound. It’s indicative of his name change too, Rory Allen Philip Ferreira is just his name. Now he’s just himself, and his identity is much clearer.
Malci: We talked about Earl earlier, it’s like that. On Purple Moonlight Pages, he seems really at peace, he knows his purpose, he knows what he’s doing. I like hearing the hunger in his early shit, but this definitely is a high mark in his discography.
Malci has some great verses on ONO’s Red Summer album, and on the charity comp Virtue collabed with NNAMDI and Rich Jones. Are you trying to branch out with your collaborators beyond your own crew?
Malci: I’ve been making more of a conscious effort to reach out to folk we don’t normally fuck with. But everything I’ve done hasn’t been intended to stretch out, I just do what’s natural. If I hear a song and I think Virtue or Rich Jones would sound perfect for this, I’ll get whoever does the job.
JV: One of the weird things about quarantine has been getting bored. You start thinking about different ways to do rap. Part of that is listening to different shit, being inspired by that shit, then reaching out to those people. A lot of people have reached out to me that I was surprised to hear from. I’ve reached out to people asking “Do you want to hop on this?” because I want to see what it feels like. I think just listening to shit has gone a long way. Like that Nappy Nina record. The production style is the kind of shit that I would wanna make. To hear that outside my lane, someone else’s spin on the same wavelength that I’m on, is so inspiring. You wanna start trading that energy with other people and seeing what they do with it.
I don’t know how much actual crate digging you were doing previously. Especially during the pandemic, how are you looking for samples?
Malci: I was relying on record stores but when that went out the window, I’ve learned to follow my heart on Spotify and Youtube, and end up in the most obscure Italian discography of soundtracks. [laughs] It’s been more of a challenge to find cool sounds from places I wouldn’t normally go to. Asian and European artists that I have no idea who they are.
Right, languages you aren’t understanding as they sing.
Malci: Not at all, but I’m like yo, keep playing that fucking bass though. He’s slapping that shit. [laughs]
JV: I’ve been mostly on the Youtube hole, but I’ve been trying to switch that up. I just got my hands on an SP-404 finally so I can do hands-on sampling myself. I borrowed a giant crate of records from my brother. That’s my new plan now - and I’ma hit you up for this soon Malci once I get through this crate here - since I can’t go to the record store, I’ll just swap out for someone else’s connection. Like I went to the record store and just picked up a random stack.
You guys haven’t really made beats together, right? You usually make beats separately and come together to rap.
Malci: On this one, we made “Bobby Buschet” sitting down. I was Youtubeing off my phone into the SP just making beats on the spot.
JV: That one was a really weird song too. There’s two samples in that from different songs that didn’t make sense together, but we made it work. That was the first spark of magic for the project.
Malci: It’s weird making beats in person because a lot of it is the boring part. You gotta sit down and listen to ten songs that suck to find the one song, then play it four times to find the part you really fuck with. Me and Virtue done it, but it’s hard to wanna be around that most of the time when you’re like “I wanna rap, I’m tryna get these bars off.”
How often do you hear a song that sounds great but you just can’t get a good chop out of it?
JV: All the time. You have these ideas like this is gonna be the sickest sample ever, and once you get it into your DAW or sampler, you thought it was gonna be more interesting than it was. Or you just can’t find the right sequence. There’s also the impostor syndrome thing where if you look at a piece for too long it starts to distort, so you don’t even know if it’s good anymore. But a lot of the best instrumentals I’ve made were because I didn’t give up on this shit, kept evolving and distorting it and changing it and shifting it around and slowing it down and pitching it again and trying different BPMs. It just goes on and on and all of a sudden you hit the golden point, you know it’s good. Then you immediately start writing.
That’s when you get on the phone, like “Bring a case over.”
JV: Not always, but sometimes you’re like “Alright, alright, I’ve got it.”
What are you working on now as you continue to socially distance?
Malci: I’m personally working pretty hard on some stuff. I got something in the chamber, but I wouldn’t say it’s even 75% done. I take it day by day with all this shit too. Some days I wake up so inspired, other days it’s like anxious because you might not have funding. The world is in a very chaotic state.
JV: It’s really surreal right now, making music. You ever seen that movie The Pianist with Adrian Brody? Everything’s fucking exploding and he’s covered in dust playing the piano still. That’s kinda how I feel, making stuff. It hasn’t really stopped and I don’t know when I won’t be able to do it anymore. It’s hard to move about in the world as a Black person without thinking like “Maybe this is the last year I’ll be alive, who fucking knows.” In a weird way, you spend a lot of time thinking of ways to help push the culture forward, or what you can leave the culture behind. Because that’s what art is, it’s a catalog of time on earth by humanity. I’ve definitely been making a lot, I don’t know what’s gonna come out and when it’s gonna come out, but the good thing now is that there’s literally no rules to the music industry any more, you can just put stuff out whenever the fuck you feel like it.
Malci: I’m getting the endorphin rush from just releasing it right now. After all the social distancing, even though I would love to play a show again, it would be fucking overwhelming as fuck. So this is lit for me right now.
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Coat of Many Colors - MIKE
Loopdigga - Lootpack
Bubba Chuck - Westside Gunn, Stove God Cooks
A Modern Day Mugging - Viktor Vaughn
Modestly - Nappy Nina, maassai
Bullseye - NNAMDI
Folie Imposse - Yves Tumor
Leopards - Armand Hammer, Nosaj
053210 - NAPPYNAPPA
Get It Together - Akai Solo
MESSAGE - Lord Narf, Ripparachie
Eat Your Veggies - Big $ilky
The Thrill - Serengeti
War Stories - Armand Hammer
Mirage - Chris Keys, Quelle Chris, Earl Sweatshirt, Denmark Vessey, Merrill Garbus, Big Sen
Voodoo - Freddie Old Soul
WORLDS OF PRESSURE - Cities Aviv
GOLDEN SARDINE - R.A.P. Ferreira
Always, Be Together - Thanya Iyer