Artist Profile: Stav

Stav, the rapper from Brooklyn, NY, has spent years carving out his sound and learning to carry his voice in a way that serves as a personal embodiment of his authentic creative intention, and, with the release of his debut tape, limp like fred, he has triumphantly announced his arrival to the rap scene, setting forth a sonic venture that carries great promise.

As a child, Stav grew up around not only the reggae and Caribbean music played in his community but also the eclectic jazz tastes of his father, who was born and raised in the Bay Area. While his dad loved the manic energy of hard bop records, Stav grew to love the expressive tenets of artists like Sun Ra: a fact that is reflected in his own sound today.

Yet, what truly led Stav into rap was initially a love for reading and writing. As he first learned to express himself through poems and short stories, it was only later that his love for lyrically-propelled artists such as Mick Jenkins, Joey Bada$$, MIKE, and Earl Sweatshirt pushed him closer towards rap as an avenue of this same sort of expression.

As he entered college, he found a group of like-minded artists who helped him hone his freestyling skills, and, while in Zoom classes, he would sit with his mic muted and his camera off, rapping over Youtube beats and ignoring his professors. Yet, even as he gained confidence in his pen and his ability to rhyme off the dome, he discovered that recording, and reaching the level of authenticity he hoped to achieve, was a different beast entirely.

“Once I started recording, I recognized that it was a completely different type of expression and completely different medium. It kind of went from freestyling [to learning] that I could use my voice and my throat as an instrument… and then just becoming pretty obsessed with that sh*t …figuring out different ways to get the sound that you want across.”

Yet, with the release of his first song, “Roof on Fire”, Stav still felt as though his delivery and his flow were not yet wholly genuine to himself and his lyrical intentions. Over his next few singles, he focused his energy entirely into becoming more comfortable behind the mic, pushing himself to utilize his voice both as an instrument and as a means of expression.

Therefore, by the time he graduated college, he didn’t immediately intend to formulate an album, but, as he kept working on tracks, his voice and lyricism came together in such a cohesive manner that, ultimately, the forming of a narrative was unavoidable. Thus, limp like fred was born.

“[Once I] got out of college I wasn't really planning on making an album for real off rip; I was like ‘Let me just experiment with music’. And then I was processing a bunch of sh*t, naturally that was happening in life, and also in the world… Once I was maybe four or five tracks in, I was like, ‘This is a narrative that low-key is kind of aligned with sh*t that I was doing and sh*t that I've been experiencing and shit that the world's been experiencing’.”

What resulted was a collection of 19 tracks centered around the idea of revolt and our current turbulent political system: what it means to revolt and what society looks like following such radical action. Ranging from grimy, lyrically-driven tracks such as “kevin garnett flow” to jazz-inspired manifestos such as “fern’s testament”, Stav’s debut displays both a remarkable societal consciousness and a definite intention of style.

Moreover, as Stav gears up to work on his next project, he aims to stay heavily involved in his community, keeping his eyes and ears open to the needs of the people around him in order to best tailor his art to our current social climate.

“I think I'm going to try to try to engage myself more concretely with the community… I love most of the music coming out now, but our sh*t is always going to be a product of how we're living. I think a lot of our sh*t isn't concrete right now because we're forced to be alienated. So [I’m] just trying my best to intentionally not alienate myself, run myself through whatever that means, and hopefully that will result in something truthful, something that's true to me…”