Artist Profile: Rhys Langston
Rhys Langston, the literary-minded, enigmatic abstract rapper from Los Angeles, has been calibrating his pen and creative approach since he was a child, but, since his full-faced discovery of music as a creative outlet as an adult, has become one of the most intriguing rappers on the scene, and with his latest project, Pale Black Negative, has cemented himself as a visionary in hip-hop.
As a child, Rhys was exposed to all sorts of music, including the wide array of niche hits from the ‘90s, through his parents, but music, as it was presented to him throughout his childhood, never quite resonated with him as a means of artistic expression.
Instead, Rhys turned towards creative writing and the visual arts, both of which he has practiced seriously throughout his life, as means of exploring and expanding his personal world.
In his last two years of high school, he wrote a completed manuscript for a novel, and, when the time for college came, Rhys chose to study visual arts: the most natural path for an insatiably creative mind.
Yet, throughout this time, a seed had already been planted. As he expanded his music taste, and discovered a love for alternative rap acts such as Digable Planets, The Pharcyde, and, most influentially, Saul Williams, he began to explore music as another means of artistic expression, utilizing his love for poetry and word-arrangement to his advantage.
Because of its cultural relevancy and immediacy to Rhys’s surroundings, rap seemed like the most natural genre for him to pursue, and, as he experimented with the art of song-writing, he felt a unique sort of satisfaction in the simultaneous immediacy and difficulty of making music.
A skilled and practiced poet, Rhys’s first challenge was carving out a sound that maintained his layered interests and expressions while still sonically resonating with an audience.
“I think there was a window of time, perhaps, where I was trying to fit things into a form and being very conscious of [the fact that the lyrics] should be able to be read as poetry but have the form and sound of a rap bar. And, for a while, it was almost writing poetry with the meter of a rap verse and trying to give it some swag and some feel… Those were deliberate experiments. Then, over time, it just became way more natural to be like, ‘Alright, well, the flow is what the flow is going to be. I write a certain way that's going to be a given. I don't have to try as hard to be as I have a poetic sensibility because it's just going to be there.”
This challenge, coupled with the immediacy of the feedback and vindication he could receive for his work, drew Rhys even further into music, and, when he became disenchanted with his initial course of study in college, he made the bold decision to dive fully into rap.
Now, a whopping twenty projects later, Rhys has developed his ear for production and his literary-minded writing style into a formulated output that is undeniably unique, channeling the rhythm-mindedness of acts like A Tribe Called Quest while doling out poetic metaphors and abstract thoughts as deftly as the most high-minded wordsmiths of our generation.
Yet, as he has expanded his repertoire, working with other legends of the abstract scene such as Open Mike Eagle, Fatboi Sharif, and Steel Tipped Dove, it is still the unique challenge that music presents to his artistic sensibilities that continues to draw him in.
“[Music] is the most difficult art form for me. I kind of don't understand what's going on, and therefore everything I make feels like a minor miracle… I'm very process-based and I like a challenge. I don't like things to be easy. So, especially nowadays when there's a lot of tools to make things easier, I feel like a bit of an anachronism, honestly, because I don't want things to be streamlined. And music is really just the epitome of that for me, because it's guesswork.”
