Wahid

It was something like purgatory. Wahid had never known a lower point. Only a few months before, the Orlando, Florida rapper possessed seemingly unstoppable momentum. His hip-hop collective had just wrapped their first national tour. Their DMs were flooded with A&Rs offering deals and producers looking to collaborate. One major label president – who had signed some of the biggest artists of the last quarter-century – told them that they were on the path to becoming global superstars. Then the group split up. It was over before it even began.

The ensuing depression was all-consuming. There were days where Wahid didn’t budge from bed, drawing the blinds closed, dealing with false recriminations, and numbing the wounds with bottle after bottle of liquor. Despite his best efforts to salvage the wreckage, none of his attempts yielded anything positive. But through the duress, he discovered his inner resilience and perseverance. The results are manifest on his debut Innovative Leisure EP, feast, by ravens –an artful refusal to submit to negativity and fatalism, and a testimonial to the indomitability of the human spirit.

If you’re looking for comparisons, let’s start with if Black Thought was born two decades later and raised in Central Florida by a Jamaican DJ father who raised his progeny on a booming system of rocksteady, dancehall and reggae dubplates. As a teenager in the late 00s, his older brother exposed him to the classics of hip-hop’s second Golden Age. As Wahid describes it: “Nas made me want to rap, listening to the GZA’s Liquid Swords made me good at it, and Black Thought helped me refine my skills.”

But what makes Wahid sui generis is his gift for merging classic MC traditions with forward-thinking cadences and melodies. In his double-time acrobatic flows, he’s distinctly post-Kendrick Lamar, and Lil Wayne – blessed with a novelist’s eye for minor detail and a virtuoso’s gift for ransacking hidden pockets of a beat. He can turn a warped post-Dilla instrumental to ashes with 16 bars and croon a plaintive falsetto wail on the hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jeremih album.

Beyond stylistic innovation, there is a spirituality and nuance to his thematic approach. The title of the project comes from the parable of Elijah in the Book of Kings. When circumstances were at their most dire, Wahid drew inspiration from the symbol of the biblical prophet taking refuge in the desert and being sustained by ravens – a typically unreliable bird, who nonetheless brought food at the behest of the lord.

In this allegory, Wahid recognized that the work that he had done to get him to this point wasn’t for naught. He still retained a fanbase and working relationships that allowed him to swiftly regain his footing. Even if he wasn’t yet famous outside of the region, his reputation was already locally renowned. And moreover, the tens of thousands of hours spent studying and refining his craft would soon pay paid massive dividends.

Of course, nothing was a given in Orlando, Florida, a city best culturally known for its theme parks and boy bands. Wahid had lived here since the age of five, when his parents relocated the family from the Bronx. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, there were no real local role models for success. He and his best friend would try to find open mics and shows, but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until Wahid attended Florida A&M in Tallahassee when he became fully immersed in a flourishing hip-hop community. And by the time he returned home in the middle years of the last decade, Orlando had finally incubated a diverse scene that encompassed rap, folk, electronic music and indie-slanting guitar rock.

But as soon as Wahid co-founded the nine-person collective See You Soon in 2020, his star really started to ascend. A national tour with the band 99 Neighbors and an imminent major label deal ostensibly had them on the precipice of massive success. But the usual “creative differences” soon brought about their dissolution. Then after a downcast period of self-reflection, Wahid wrote the imaginative and visceral anthems that would eventually comprise feast, by ravens.

There is “Mezcal,” a disorienting party record with a sense of duality. Sounding like a lost fifth member of TDE’s Black Hippy, Wahid prays that the brown liquor saves him, while nonetheless confessing that it’s a prop for his self-esteem. Behind the boards, the producer Vitamnn (who produced five of the EP’s six tracks) creates a banger that mirrors the woozy, charged up feel of a drunken bender. On, “Solstice” Wahid unleashes a pure controlled rage through a rapid-fire barrage of words. It embodies the blurred vision and high speed of a life spiraling out of control. There are dead friends and wounded egos, empty bottles and sonic booms. There is the burning desire to wake up from the nightmare, but the nagging fear that you might be permanently stuck.

On the EP’s opener, “50/50,” Wahid sets the scene of his life at the beginning of recording Daggers are aimed at those speaking ill of him, but with elegance and empathy. Still, the coiled tension and rampant paranoia are omnipresent. You see images of bodies rotting in the dirt and envision games of Russian roulette. Our narrator is unclear whether he’ll even make it to the end of the project. 50/50, flip a coin, live or die. From here, we are witness to his fight, determination, and triumph.

By the time, the two-part finale “Victory?!” arrives, Wahid has taken us on a short but
transformative odyssey. Over a teardrop soul sample that Dilla and Madlib would’ve loved to flip, he takes the perspective of a Christ-like figure. Except in this instance, the accusations don’t stick. Wahid refuses to allow himself to be pinned to a cross. His eyes are open to the betrayers, but none of their plots shall prosper. For a minute, it seems our hero has achieved enlightenment, and learned to love his enemies.

But then the beat switches once again. The aggression takes over. Spitting venom, Wahid’s vocals are strangled with distortion. He’s again embodying the spirit of a higher power, but his time, a demiurge who has returned with his sword sharpened. If he has learned to glide with humbleness and a sense of nobility, now, there is no mistaking what lies behind the curtain. It is the end of the first chapter from a singular talent. We see the panorama now: the serious artist with his head aimed towards the heavens, aware of a higher calling yet all too aware of the snakes lurking in the grass. Grateful for survival, incapable of surprise, ready for what’s next.