A Reasonable, Measured Conversation With Freddie Gibbs In Which He Says “Fuck” Fourteen Times

It almost feels silly writing an introduction to an interview with Freddie Gibbs because there’s no way I can tell his story better than he can. On a technical level, Freddie Gibbs honestly might be the best rapper rapping right now. He’s basically unfuckwithable on an atomic level. He’s a fun dude, too–he walked into our office with a cup full of lean and when I asked him what he was doing in New York, his answer was simply, “Drugs.” We sat down in a conference room and had a long, long talk about the art of rapping, the troubled economic situation in his hometown of Gary, Indiana, which R&B singers he’s trying to have sex with (none), and drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.

Noisey: Walk me through how you write a verse.
Freddie Gibbs: I listen to the beat, first and foremost. I don’t like pre-written raps; I think it makes the song better if you listen to the beat first. In a sense, you have to make a marriage with the beat. I ride the beat, hear the flow of the drums, get the melody of my flow, and then from that point it’s a process of what I want to say. First, I figure out how I want to say it then I want to say. It’s kind of ass-backwards but it’s like, you’re making sounds in your head and then you just have to plug the words in.

Do you like to be high when you write?
I like to be high when I do everything.

How much weed do you smoke?
Probably about seven to fourteen grams a day.

I remember you caught going through airport security with some weed and they wrote “Come on, son” on it.
Yeah! Nigga wrote a note on my weed being like, “Come on, son, you coulda hid your weed better than that!” I was in a rush! I put that shit in my sock…I didn’t think niggas was gonna be going through my goddamn socks, you know? That was that.

Really?
Anything over an ounce they be trying to give you time. It’s a Class D felony and shit, look it up. They ‘bout to legalize that shit everywhere though, man. I don’t give a fuck. I’ll smoke it if they legalize it or not. I’m still gonna travel with it, I’m still gonna smoke it, I’m gonna do whatever I need to do with it. Fuck the Feds, the CIA, the DEA, all the alphabets, all of y’all.

How bad was Gary growing up?
We don’t have things like a movie theater or a mall, nothing of that nature. Walmart won’t even come in that motherfucker. You gotta travel outside of Gary to get simple, everyday retail. That’s not even within the city, so to speak. There’s some but it’s not, you know, always readily available.

How do you think the city can recover from that?
Really, it just starts with implanting business and taking up a lot of that property and using it. You gotta beautify, you gotta make it look good so people will want to live there and work there. But for people to live there you need to create jobs, people need to work to sustain life, you know? There’s not a lot of that.

I feel as though economic decline in a city like Gary is often cyclical. How do you feel crime plays into that?
People gotta get it. You gotta do what you gotta do. When there’s no job available, when there’s no work for you, what can you do? Especially when you’ve got mouths to feed, you’ve got habits, you’ve got expenses–a job’s not always readily available to you, so you’ve gotta take a different route. Nobody gets really deep in that game because they want to be, they just doing it because they have to. That’s when it comes in. People rob, people murder, and people sell drugs–that’ll go on until the end of time until you create a space or an outlet for those people, you know? The other day I was thinking about how it’s always the black side of town or the Latin side of town that’s always the worst in every city I go to. Why do these races have to be associated with that standard of living?

I think that’s the sinister thing about racism in America.
Yeah, all the way through, all economic. You know, with the presidential election, everyone was like, “How can a black man economically run this country?” That was their whole argument against Obama. The only argument.

Have you ever gotten arrested? Tell me about the process of robbing a train. Was there a certain element of living the outlaw lifestyle that you enjoyed in your youth? When did you start drinking syrup? Do you feel like you’re punk rock, in a way? Is there anybody rapping right now that you can’t stand? I heard that R. Kelly is apparently a trained boxer. I think he has a chip on his shoulder because he sings. Alright, which R&B girls are you trying to fuck? Do you drink a lot of syrup? I mean, it’s pretty dangerous. I feel like a lot of people look at getting fucked up like a math problem where people add uppers and downers in so they’re trying to reach a normalization point. You know what I mean? What’s the highest you’ve ever gotten just smoking weed? Did that suck?

Drew Millard is on Twitter and has never smoked laced weed–@drewmillard