Hot Press meets Joey Bada$$

Joey Bada$$ sits in the Ecko Unltd. office on the seventh floor of a building on Manhattan’s west side, laughing. Having just hung up his cell-phone, he points outside to the glass door leading to the roof, where he’s spraypainted ‘Pro Era’ – the name of the hip-hop collective he started with a few friends in high-school. The group has grown into a full-scale movement. And yet the Ecko team is not pleased. “She said, ‘Joey – did you spray-paint the roof?’” he says, still laughing. “She said, ‘Joe. You gotta cut this shit out!’”

The Brooklyn-based rapper is leaving his mark all over these days on the strength of his 1999 mixtape released last June, which won critical praise from all corners and earned the 18-year-old a BET Award nomination alongside the likes of heavyweights Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa, A$AP Rocky and Meek Mill.
“People started picking up after that,” he notes, “which was like a dream come true. Everything else was just seamless falling into place.”
It’s been a quick rise for Joey and his crew of fellow rappers, producers, and graphic artists. He uploaded his first video, ‘Survival Tactics’ featuring Capital STEEZ (who committed suicide last Christmas Eve and whom I’m politely asked not to talk about), to YouTube last February, and it recently passed two million views. The track made the hip-hop community stand up and take notice, and put Joey and Pro Era on the map. The group released a collaborative mixtape, titled PEEP: The aPROcalypse in December, and are now readying an American tour called Beast Coast this March with Flatbush Zombies and The Underachievers, all of whom grew up in the same Brooklyn ‘hood.
He’s said he hates when people call the crew ‘Joey Bada$$ and Pro Era’, but at this point he’s the undisputed star of the show. After a video of him freestyling at the age of 15 made it to WorldStarHipHop.com in 2010, he caught the eye of Cinematic Music Group president Jonny Shipes, who signed him to his indie label (later signing the rest of Pro Era as well), became his manager, and put him on the Smoker’s Club tour with Juicy J, Smoke DZA, and others. He also hooked him up with Ecko, who recently made Joey their Creative Director, where he’ll design his own Pro Era brand of clothing and help curate their clothing lines.
“He got the opportunity with Ecko last year and just brought me on board,” Joey explains. “It was basically like, one person opens a door, next person comes in, opens another door.”
But it started with the music, and what sets Bada$$ apart from the slew of rappers oozing from the new New York scene is his dedication to the type of old-school hip hop that made New York such a hotbed of talent in the first place in the early to mid ‘90s. It’s almost like a rebirth, or a celebration of the past with a fresh twist, and he’s been working with producers such as Pete Rock, the Alchemist and DJ Premier (who produced the recently-released track ‘Unorthodox’) and getting the type of sound crystallised on masterpieces such as Nas’ Illmatic. The Pro Era crew, the Beast Coast conglomerate, the Ecko clothing line (revitalising itself recently after its heyday a decade ago) – all of it bleeds into this old-school aesthetic that he’s promoting through his music and other exploits. It could be referred to as a ‘movement’, a word he likes to use, particularly when discussing Beast Coast, the loose band of hip-hop crews he helped form with his soon-to-be-tourmates.
“I call it the present-day Native Tongues in a way, because it’s like the new New York,” he enthuses. “About a year-and-a-half ago, the West [Coast] was just having a rise and shit, people were talking about the West, the West, the West is on the rise. And New York was just floating these shitty club records. So we decided to form the Beast Coast movement.”
With the type of buzz that Joey’s been cultivating over the past year, it was inevitable that major labels would come calling, especially in an age where A$AP Rocky rode a wave of Tumblr support to a reported $3 million deal with RCA Records and Trinidad James snagged a deal with Def Jam two months after uploading his video for ‘All Gold Everything’ to YouTube despite only rapping for less than a year. Joey even made reference to the chatter in ‘Unorthodox’, rapping, “Won’t sign to no major if no wager/Less than a $3 million offer off the top,” and referred to meetings with Jay-Z and Roc Nation in his verse on Rocky’s ‘1Train’ from his RCA debut, Long.Live.A$AP. But he’s managed to resist the majors so far, and he’s not planning on going down that road any time soon, either.
“I’m loving it independent. I just love the way it’s been. We got here independently,” he says, before musing on the major label game with a wisdom that belies his years.
“The thing is, you just gotta really tell these people what you want. At the end of the day, these people want you. They want to be a part of your money and shit like that. You gotta tell ‘em you’re willing to work with them, and that’s when they start talking to you. So now they’re talkin’ to me, but I don’t know yet.”

'Unorthodox' is out now.