Inbox Intro: Sacredd919
Emailing with the 21-year-old Durham native about his city, his message, and making the choice to finally embrace rap.
As any serious person would, I listen to an artist's music before I send them questions about it. That listening might range from devouring multiple albums, to, if I'm in a pinch, just jumping between a few songs, but one thing it hardly ever means is consuming a whole discography — there's simply not enough time in the day.
Except, it turns out, in the case of 21-year-old Durham rapper Sacredd919, whose catalog can be digested in an hour or less on account of the fact that he only started releasing material (on DSPs, at least) less than two years ago. To date, his cumulative presence on Apple Music consists of seven (7) singles, a handful of feature verses, and one 12-minute EP — dirty room tape, with Raleigh producer Professor Payne — released earlier this year.
In the age of the algorithm and viral content, it's not unusual for artists with a wafer thin track record to end up on our feeds, in media interviews or on freestyle cyphers, seemingly overnight, with audiences being encouraged to invest emotionally in the career of an artist who may not even be committed to it themselves. But from the small sample of work he's released so far to his mindful answers to these emailed questions, it's clear that characterization doesn't fit with Sacredd.
For starters, his is hardly the kind of meteoric, mind-boggling speedrun that elicits questions of industry plant status: the most-viewed video on his YouTube account ("Lone Isle Cabana," shared below) currently sits at fewer than 700 views. What that number and his few years of experience belie is a penchant for writing resonant, wholly novel lines and delivering them with unflinching earnestness — work that, even at this early stage, can hold its own within the world of post-expressionist rap (artists like MIKE, Mavi, billy woods and more) that clearly inspires it.