Polymath Of Rap, IDK, Applies Both Sides Of His Brain

IDK’s creative acumen, his savvy for business, and his thoughtful airs pierce. His inner seas are oceans of song, direction, and rhymes of personal revolution. IDK is a polymath. He performs as musician and manager alike, handling the economics of his artistry, negotiating his deals firsthand. It’s as unusual as it is laudable and difficult.

He’s collaborated with The Neighborhood, Saba, KAYTRANADA, Domo Genesis, Young Thug, A$AP Ferg, Denzel Curry, and Bas.

Dancing with his right brain, he turns silence into capturing sound. Balancing his left brain, he confers with the powers of bureaucracy, law, and record labels.

“Most artists that I meet are focused on the right brain. They tend to struggle a lot. They feel restricted. And there’s a tendency to rely on their team or their manager. It’s good to have people like that, but dependence could affect your livelihood because you can’t control anyone else,” said IDK. “The balance is important. I love both. I love doing business as much as I love making music. I think 50/50 is the right number, the right way to treat those hemispheres.”

To work with Nike and Credit Karma, to profess at Harvard, and to stay an experimentalist of terrific commercial success in modern music where 100,000 songs are added to the canon a day, it’s a testament to the strength of the human heart to shine through all matters and strife alike. “The work of creating great art is getting smaller and simpler,” he told Forbes.

His songs touch on grief, structural inequalities, and the slow pruning of progress. Listening to his work and observing his life, it’s as if creativity is a sunset, whose particular beauty will pass but once. It’s like a tornado whose path and power are of one long and terrible night. His action sing against the occasionally drab canvas of life, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Life doesn’t come easy to any, but it comes hard boiled for some and scrambled sunny side up for others. To make a masterpiece of personal disasters is our highest calling and something only to be answered inside oneself.

“Growing up in a certain way – immigrant parents, living in America, trying to figure out how I fit in this world, and then growing up middle class, but going to jail, being the first in my family to go to jail, dealing with struggles with prison, coming back home to now deal with the struggles of trying to make something of myself in the music industry, and then my mother passed away,” said IDK. “My dad passed away a year later. I think all those things showed me that the first half of my life is complete struggle. And the fruits of my labor opened the door. It also makes it so I don’t worry too much.”

Prison, he says, taught him long-term patience, the kind a river has in the making of a canyon or a soul has in the making of a man. “Nike was five years in the making. But I’ve been patient all the way through,” said IDK. “Sometimes when you’re dealing with a large corporation, someone may want to do things for you. But because there’s so much red tape and at the end of the day they have a job, it may not result in them being able to do those things for you as much as they may want to. And I had to learn that too.”

Music is the gift of the muses of the spirit. Its rhythm is an unseen hand wiping sand away from the tablet that describes all of time’s patience and all of time’s conspiring. And to reach into music and pull forth something not just great or grand but inspiring, one must be in tune with all of time’s rhythms without being consumed by the tune. It’s a tricky and exhilarating balance.

“People dismiss spirituality. Oftentimes it is associated with being uneducated or not as smart. But I’ve realized our journey is understanding technology and going from discovering fire to the iPhone,” said IDK. “I think at the end of the day, we continue to unlock what’s new and what’s next. It’s trying to figure out how we were created, which will end up bringing us back to the beginning.”

“I think the more we focus on technology and social media posts and that aspect of things, we lose touch of the thing that animals still have, which is that true spiritual connection that guides them through life and lets them know what’s important,” said the popular poet. “We have an addiction for convenience as human beings. And I think that addiction for convenience is, honestly, what’s killing us.”

“I thank God for a lot of the things that I’ve done and accomplished in my life. Prayer is an expression of gratitude,” he said. “Gratitude is the antidote for me. Spirituality, whatever that divine energy is, guides me. Be it my mom or the caring void, it chases anything that doesn’t need to be in my life away. And I let that do its job. I never get in the way of it or interfere.”

Off the lot rolled patiently his new Lamborghini. Its proprietor, the artist and the manager, said, “I can’t believe I have a Lamborghini, bro. This is a dream car. As a kid I’d dream about it. F***ing this is not a normal day.” Fresh Los Angeles air for the first time hit the Lambo’s grill under the steering of its caretaker, a dreamer in his dream.

“Of course, I think they racism and capitalism go hand in hand. The lines are so blurred. Today, I went to this dealership to get a Lamborghini. And they were looking at me a kind of way. But it wasn’t bad. The Black guy was showing me love, and he introduced me to this white guy. And the white guy showed me the car. And then the leasing company wanted to just do some sh** with it, because they wanted to make sure everything was good because exotic cars are expensive to fix. And at that moment, he started treating me a different way,” said IDK. “And he’s like, I’m not doing anything until this gets done. And it’s like, you know, I’m a good customer, and I will get this car. I mean, I have 804 credit. I’m good. But of course, he’s probably not used to someone that looks like me, my age, that’s Black, dressed how I’m dressed. His whole mood switched up. And he started acting different. And I just said, you know what, I’ll be back. But hopefully when this gets approved, you’ll treat me better. And you know what he said? He’s like, yeah, I will.”

IDK saw another dealership on his way home. He made a U-turn. And by serendipity’s hand, it was Black-owned.

“When you think about racial profiling, there’s an algorithm in your mind. That’s why when someone like me who’s been in prison or jail four times and has a high school diploma that he paid $200 for, creates a course at Harvard, it changes that profiling in your mind; it adds other variables and probabilities to that calculator,” said IDK. “I just threw a monkey wrench in your ability to profile. That’s why I love juxtaposition.”

Music is the stuff of dreams. And selling dreams is the work of marketers and auctioneers. Popular appeal wanes with the shifting moons as the Earth spins slowly around the sun again and again. And history is full of examples showing that the masses both leave and laude great art.

“I describe capitalism as covetous. There’s a lake. And then there’s a stream. And then there’s a village that that stream supplies water for the people. Capitalism is a group of people who have enough money to get upstream and take giant buckets, take all the water, dam it up. There’s some water trickling down to the village. But before it gets to the village they take as much as they can,” said IDK. “The more water you have, the better you feel about yourself. And at the end of the day, that lake is going to run out.”

“Money will always provide difficulties as an artist because commercialization is concerned with getting as many people to see something, or hear something as possible, in order to justify the funds that took that it took to make this thing,” said the professor and poet. “So, you’re always battling with that when you decide to sign a record deal or going to business with people – because at the end of the day there’s music, and there’s the music business. You have to know that.”

He joins a chorus of artists capable of criticizing American materialism and capital’s constraint. Pop’s metal ruler, Ashnikko said capitalism instills a sense of malnourishment. Poet and pioneer, Vic Mensa said he’s fundamentally opposed to the system because of how its roots intertwine with slavery and exploitation. And master of ballads of the simplest and most hidden parts of the soul, Jessie Reyez said capitalism is straight up whack. There’s purpose, and there’s defense. One must move forward even as they are pulled back.

“I always look at everything in life like the ocean. When the waves are blowing and the wind is blowing the waves a certain way, the worst thing you can do is try to go against it,” said IDK. “It’ll never work. So, the wave is the inevitable. If this is in my mind, this is how I move. I try to cope with it and know how to learn, how to use it towards my benefit.”

“I think my biggest purpose in life is to have a family, reproduce, raise them in the morals and principles that I’m developing now. And hopefully, they follow them. And maybe they won’t, but hopefully they do. And hopefully, they carry on what’s important to me. That’s specifically the progression of Black people in America. I know that I can’t change that, or the direction of that in enough in my lifetime,” said IDK. “So, I know that having a family and a strong army of people to carry that on will be what, at the end of the day, leads to the progression of Black people.”

And his words in the wake of his ripe thoughts are followed by action. IDK will wear a custom race suit designed in collaboration with legendary affiliates of Formula 1 in his upcoming performance at Coachella. He’s flying out fans VIP free to see the show – changing lives through art and proaction.

It’s impossible to know anyone’s heart, for the house of knowing is not where the highest matters are settled. Some say people are like clouds, perfect because they are natural. Others say they are like sunsets and can’t be critiqued – only marveled upon. And it is true that people are like trees; their gnarls make their character, contribute to their identity – which is at the heart of play. Though people in moments act, and actions can and must be judged. Though actions dissipate like mist, and their ripples fade like scars too. Art is beyond that. And all art is nonviolent. Therefore, it is innocent, and in innocence – grace grows like beauty. IDK’s music comes from the best stretches of the human heart which holds fields of amber grain nations aspire towards. Death – its personality and its earthly everywhere-ness, are expressed in IDK’s music as only one with inspiration and a rich history of all types of poverty can do, which is to say he does it extremely personally. The whole finds it greatest champion in the individual.

“I don’t agree with cancel culture,” said IDK. “I think that we all deserve redemption. I’m a product of redemption. If Harvard said, get out you went to prison. There’s no way we can let you do this. That would deprive a form of redemption.”

You can broaden your life with the latest IDK, merch, music, music videos, and concerts, here, on his website. And you can listen to his latest single “850” featuring Rich The Kid, here. Watch the music video, here. His next album – which plays like children play, with abandon and bounce – F65 arrives this spring.