Artist Profile: Zedikaya
Zedikaya, the NYC-native rapper and producer, has been pursuing hip-hop as a means of personal expression for over half a decade now, crafting subdued, lo-fi inspired tracks that serve to showcase his adept pen and penchant for clever wordplay.
As a child, Zedikaya was surrounded by the music of his father, who grew up in Jamaica, and, as he realized years later, spent the early portions of his life internalizing the rhythms of genres like reggae, dub, and neo-soul. Moreover, his father was also into the drum and bass, trip-hop, and early grime scene, and Zedikaya was exposed to artists such as Skepta and Wiley throughout his youth.
After school, Zedikaya would go to the Boys’ Club in his neighborhood, a place that provided him with a haven to pursue his interests, and, through a percussion class the program offered, he began playing the drums.
The drums clicked with him immediately; the instrument’s unique combination of accessibility and rhythmic freedom enabled him to dive fully into the creative possibilities the drums offered to him.
As he advanced in his craft, he earned the opportunity to study at an art school in New York, where he was classically trained and encountered a bevy of other young artists.
However, in his third year at the school, he had an artistic reckoning, realizing that what he was studying did not necessarily reflect the creative path he had originally envisioned for himself.
“It was kind of fun at times, because I was with my friends, but it [wasn’t fun] to always have to be playing other people's music. And then, when quarantine hit, I was really sitting with myself and I was like, ‘What do I want to do with music?’. Because I knew I didn't want to just be reading sheet music and playing f*cking timpani for the rest of my life.”
Based on his love for the melodies of artists like Rae Sremmurd and Lil Yachty as well as the bubbling rhymes of artists like Navy Blue and Loyle Carner, he decided to begin learning to make hip-hop: an art form that combined his passion for rhythm and his desire for accessibility.
With the added benefit of unwavering free time during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Zedikaya hit the ground running, quickly picking up on the intricacies of crafting songs, bar by bar and verse by verse.
After six months of trial and error, what he arrived upon was a dynamic flow, one that bounded over the tape-saturated production of his tracks, and, with the release of his first project, EYES WIDE, Zedikaya had burst onto the scene as a veritable and talented young artist.
While his sound, in the years since EYES WIDE, has morphed and changed in conjunction with the maturation of the artist behind it, it has maintained its central aspect: the somber, meditative qualities of Zedikaya himself.
“I make music and I listen to music, I think, for two very different reasons. When I'm making music, it's more so because I'm trying to get something off my chest or there’s something internal that's going on that I want to express… and, when I'm listening to music, I'm more so just trying to like hear [something] that's going to make me not think about what's going on in my head, you know? So I think that a lot of music is sometimes just a happy distraction.”
Now, as Zedikaya heads into his final year of study at an arts university in Los Angeles, he plans to create more consistent output, intending to release a song a month beginning with his newest single, “WOW”. The track, which opens to a brief moment of monologue from Zedikaya’s sister, captures the renewed, lyrically-potent energy that the young artist is looking to take into the rest of the year.
Produced and written entirely by Zedikaya, the track is a representation of the converging qualities that make his work special, and the laconic hook, in both its simplicity and sonic effectiveness, showcases the authority that he wields over the mic.
As he continues down the path he has laid for himself, pursuing his passion in sonic and lyrical form, it is certain that Zedikaya will be a name to watch.
