In 2004, Marcus Hopson dropped out of high school in Los Angeles, determined to become a rapper. With an ‘eight dollar microphone from Wal-Mart,’ do-it-yourself beat-making software and a pair of white contact lenses, he took to his parents’ basement to start a rap career from scratch. Eight years, two albums, and a nationwide tour later, having ditched his record deal to go it alone, the self-styled ‘rap maniac with the hooligan eyes’ is finally on the brink of superstardom. ‘It’s going really good,’ Hopsin tells me, in his first UK interview. ‘In my particular situation, it’s probably going as good as it could get, you know. Everything’s nice right now.’
It reads like the classic hip-hop rags-to-riches story. Notably absent from the narrative, however, are the usually (assumed to be) attendant tropes of glorified violence, gang allegiance and drug-taking, Marcus eschewing the violent glamour of South Central LA for the subterranean home comforts of his basement laboratory. Given the location of his early career, it is perhaps appropriate that, on a cold Christmas vacation night, I am calling California from my bedroom in my parents’ house. ‘How was your interview with the rapper?’ my mother will ask me later.
Despite a certain witty bravado, Hopsin’s lyrics are far from the self-hagiography that has come to be endemic in modern rap music. While not shy about proclaiming himself the ‘saviour’ of hip-hop, the self-promotion seems limited to a fairly undeniable musical talent. On an autobiographical level his songs tell the tale of ‘the Special Ed kid at lunchtime the bitches wouldn’t stand around with’, masturbating at his parents’ house or ‘sitting alone with my Capri Sun and raisins’ in the playground. While not necessarily in the way his teachers might have hoped, Hopsin’s schooldays were certainly formative years.
‘I was in high school and I didn’t really do too much work,’ he explains, ‘but it wasn’t because I was lazy. It was just because it wasn’t what I really wanted to do in my heart. I wanted to skateboard, I wanted to draw and I wanted to make music. I saw other people who made livings off of those so I thought, ‘Why can’t I?’ This is what I want to do and school has nothing for me.’
At times, the 26-year-old Hopsin seems to channel the 16 year old Marcus, and a natural switch to present tense in recalling his past fosters the called-to-principal’s-office dynamic: ‘It’s not that I’m lazy and I wanna be rebellious but they don’t have nothing for me, so fuck it! They have me here for nothing so I’m gonna throw tantrums in class ‘cos I don’t care!’
Growing up, both in terms of pushing past negative experiences at school, and overcoming restricting cultural pigeonholes, was important. ‘I was brainwashed,’ he says, when asked about the pressure to conform to a stereotypical West-Coast ‘thug’ or ‘gangsta’ image. ‘I was thinking in the box, thinking West-Coast rappers had to be West-Coast rappers and East-Coast rappers had to be East-Coast rappers. But then as you get older, and you start to find yourself as a man, that doesn’t matter. I am me, and I know how to rap, and if people like my music they’re just gonna like it. It doesn’t matter where I’m from. So that thankfully got eliminated once I started becoming a real adult.’
The West-Coast streets that raised Marcus were not those of Long Beach or Compton, but those of Panorama City, known less for its hip-hop credentials than for being the filming location of The Office. It is also, according to Wikipedia, ‘known as the San Fernando Valley’s first planned community,’ and this is perhaps an appropriate location for the start of a career in which it seems that from day one, nothing has left been to chance.
‘Everything that I’m doing is planned,’ he insists, ‘There’s not really any accidents.’ Always autonomous in the production of his music, and now, after an acrimonious split from Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records in 2009, the head of his own label, Hopsin’s outlook is fiercely independent. ‘People think that I’m just a rapper, and they assume that most rappers don’t do everything, but I do everything,’ he stresses.
‘From the beats to the videos to working on my image to doing my choruses, everything is planned out. I know the majority of rappers don’t do that ‘cos I see rappers every freakin’ night damn near when I’m at a show, and I know what they do and they don’t do.
‘A rapper may feel like they can beat me in a battle or competition, which realistically they could. I’m not the best rapper. But there’s not many full packages out there in the world.’
Searching for a metaphor, the teenage Marcus once again resurfaces. ‘It’s kind of like the Dragonballs in Dragonball Z. There’s only seven of them in the world,’ he explains with an endearingly goofy, Comic-Con chuckle, ‘Those Dragonballs – that’s how I feel good, high quality artists are in general: there’s not many of them. There’s a lot of rappers, but those super full packages, there’s not a lot of them.’
Making full use of the internet, turning makeshift home videos into YouTube sensations and gathering Facebook fans at an exponential rate, Hopsin is a living lesson in the creative opportunities available to young people doing it on their own.
‘That’s the message that I wanna give to everybody. I want them to stop being lazy, stop depending on people, stop saying ‘Oh I need a manager! Oh I don’t have anybody to make my beats.’ I didn’t have that either. I was the king of not having that. I didn’t have anything at all. I had to get up and learn how to do everything that I didn’t want to learn! I didn’t wanna make beats! I didn’t wanna learn how to do videos! I didn’t wanna learn how to mix stuff! But if I didn’t learn that then I’d be 26 years old right now just chilling here being a bum, and probably have a kid and be hating my life. You gotta get up and do something.’
It was on YouTube that Hopsin first started to turn British heads this summer with the final instalment of his ‘Ill Mind of Hopsin’ video series, part State of the Union address, part manifesto for the future of rap. In a whirlwind tour of what’s wrong with the rap industry, the ‘wack beats and gap teeth’ of Tyler, the Creator, at the time the Biggest Thing in Rap, were singled out for special scrutiny. I suggest he’s not afraid to speak his mind about other rappers.
‘No I don’t have a problem with speaking my mind at all,’ he retorts. ‘I hear hundreds of people say crap about all these other rappers, and I’m one of those people too, who talk crap about rappers, about the garbage that’s on the radio and this and that, but I rap so I can actually voice my opinion on a song.’
It’s clearly a battleground that he relishes.
‘There’s people who give their opinions about me as well: people saying, ‘Hopsin’s wack, he bites Eminem, his contacts are ugly…’ But a lot of people who say those things don’t rap, and if they did rap they could diss me as well and do the same thing to me.’
As the head of his own label, Funk Volume, Hopsin is well placed to discuss rap as a business, as well as an art form, and behind the contacts, there is always an eye to the industry as a whole. As well as the digs at individual rappers and their music, the standard model of the ‘hip-hop lifestyle’ – the women, the drugs, and ‘all these songs about cash’ – is comprehensively contested.
‘I can’t knock somebody for making money,’ he clarifies, ‘That’s a good thing. They can support themselves financially and that’s good. It’s the way that they promote it. These rappers promote money, they promote drinking, they promote smoking, they promote strippers and all that stuff; all these things that don’t really play any real serious part in really, really actually living and finding happiness. These are things that only contribute to you being older and thinking, ‘Why the hell did I do that? What the hell was I thinking? Oh my God, I’m such an idiot.’
It’s a standpoint that you might argue is easy to take when such luxuries are out of financial reach. But even now that Hopsin is making ‘pretty good money’ – although ‘not a millionaire or nothing’ – he has so far not been overcome by temptation.
‘I walk in the mall and I’m like, ‘What do I want?’ None of that stuff is really going to make me happy. When I finally made enough money to buy a new car I was like, ‘I don’t even want it!’ It was like, ‘Why am I gonna get this shit?’ You start breaking things down like, ‘Why?’
‘If I buy this new car, what am I really buying it for? Am I buying it to impress girls? I already have a girlfriend. Am I buying it to impress my friends? Who cares about them, they know me for who I really am, what is this gonna really do?
‘Anybody who portrays money to be that way, is putting off false advertisement, and any rapper or any artist who has power to control minds, they need to know their responsibilities.
Again, Hopsin finds his metaphor in the comic-book drawer. ‘It’s like in Spider-Man, Aunt May says with great power comes great responsibility… No, no, that could have been the uncle in Spider-Man. I forgot who said it but it was in Spider-Man… With great power comes great responsibility. So anybody who has the power to capture minds, they need to know that they have a responsibility and they can’t mislead people in the wrong direction. If they wanna do that, fuck it, go ahead, but I personally don’t feel that that’s right and I’m gonna fight for that.’
Does he feel he’s fighting alone?
‘I know there are others out there like me, but I don’t meet too many rappers like me, to be honest. I kind of do feel like I’m alone, but I don’t feel like I’m weak. It’s like I’m a one man army, but I have nuclear bombs in my backpack.’
