![g eazy when its dark out houston g eazy when its dark out houston](https://res.cloudinary.com/culturemap-com/image/upload/ar_4:3,c_fill,g_faces:center,w_320/v1513100099/photos/217377_original.jpg)
I knew I wanted to do something, and create something on my own, and become somebody and build a brand and all this."Īh, the B-word. And I've always had this drive, this entrepreneurial spirit inside of me, so music became a vehicle for that. But it was a passion, I was overnight in love with it. "I wasn't like a Mozart, who just sat down, you know, and made The Chronic 2001 the first time I tried to sit in front of a computer. It is an enterprising attitude and one that comes easily to Eazy. Yes, it has sung choruses, but then what doesn't? If anything, G-Eazy's music is the product of a quintessentially hip-hop approach: seeing what's currently popular on the scene and, with the addition of a slight twist, aping it. It is discernibly hip-hop, set to a slow southern rhythm, with trap percussion and woozy synth effects. G-Eazy's music is not like Macklemore's or Iggy Azalea's. G-Eazy: 'I just fell in love with hip-hop.' Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian After all, it was the pop-rap of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis that won the best rap album at this year's Grammys ahead of Drake and Kendrick Lamar, and it's the pop-dance-rap of the Australian Iggy Azalea, particularly her hit Fancy, that dominates the sound of this summer. But while Ice was a one-hit wonder and Eminem an exceptional talent, there is a case for saying things are different now.
![g eazy when its dark out houston g eazy when its dark out houston](https://stitchedsound.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/IMG_7427-620x400.jpg)
That anxiety has been expressed before, when Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby became the first hip-hop song to top the Billboard charts in 1991, or when Eminem became the biggest artist in rap a few years later. "Elvis gone be the face of hip-hop," is how veteran Houston rapper Scarface described it last year, meaning the feeling among the black hip-hop community that, after 30-odd years, their music had become acceptable enough to white America that it could be incorporated completely into the mainstream. But the subject hangs in the air all the same. But he knew that you might look at the way he's dressed, in his black leather biker jacket with slicked-back hair and sharp cheekbones, and think – hang on, this guy looks like James Dean but he's making songs like Drake isn't that a bit weird? It's not weird to him he's a rapper and always has been.
![g eazy when its dark out houston g eazy when its dark out houston](https://66.media.tumblr.com/7eb14c3d63611d38ad7f7287c9339524/tumblr_o83resrANB1vuabr6o1_500.jpg)
I'd been trying not to ask G-Eazy, born Gerald Earl Gillum, directly about white rappers. 'G -Eazy talks about what it's like to be a white rapper again." He says it under his breath, just as the conversation has come to an end, in a tone halfway between exasperation and resignation.