Certified Fresh: Bas – The Dreams Of Dreamville’s First At Bat
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After years of putting on for Dreamville, J. Cole finally sits at the helm of a label of his own of the same name at Interscope Records. In fact, Light Skinned Jermaine could harbor another major player in Hip-Hop should the proverbial pendulum swing in the right direction. Some of that relies on Bas, a Sudanese MC who hails from Queens and our latest Certified Fresh feature.
Like his partner in rhyme, the details of Bas’ backstory are both intricate and unique. For one, he’s been rapping for roughly four years (let that marinate for a second). But like age, years put in aren’t a thing but a number in the grand scheme of things. Bas simply worked harder and smarter than most when he found music, and it didn’t hurt that he and Cole had a good relationship for years prior. In that short time, Bas left the street life, and any wages that came with it. He instead took heed of advice from the “Power Trip” rapper and his manager Ibrahim Hammad, who would chronically cite that he was too intelligent to get caught up in criminal activity.
Bas began to develop himself as a MC and he eventually found a sound that he’s comfortable with through his work with Cole and the entire Dreamville family. He’s now set to be the first artist to release an official body of work on the label. As listeners gear up to hear Last Winter, learn more about the man who created it below.
Who: Bas is the first at bat from J. Cole’s newly founded Dreamville records. With only roughly four years of experience as a rapper, the Paris-born, Queens-bred wordsmith’s coming up age story starts in the streets. Fortunately, his older brother and NYC’s own DJ Moma influenced his quirky musical taste, which includes European artists like Jamiroquai, early in life. Bas soon followed in his brother’s footsteps by deejaying and using his college friends as a means of connecting him with the right people in NYC.
As fate would have it, one random night would inspire Bas to quit deejaying to begin rapping. He also happened to know a young Cole, who was attending St. John’s University at the time and had at least yet to release his breakout mixtape The Warm Up yet. Over the years, Bas’ persistence, song presence, and natural rhyming ability would improve as the Roc Nation rapper’s star rose. As you can see, the rest is history.
Credentials: Bas proved that he could stand on his own two via a pair of projects titled Quarter Water Raised Me and Quarter Water Raised Me Vol. II, respectively. It appears that the New Yorker’s most understated skill is his ability to soak up knowledge like a sponge and apply it in a variety of ways. That said, the aforementioned releases and the material he contributed to Dreamville’s free The Revenge of the Dreamers mixtape infers that Last Winter could be ill.
Fun Fact: In his lifetime, Bas has done everything from DJ and rap, while also dabbling in street activity. Don’t expect him to speak on that dirt in great detail, though.
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Photo: Dreamville, Instagram
Hip-Hop Wired: We hear May 27, 2010 was the day you began rapping. How did that happen?
Bas: I was deejaying a lot of local parties in the city at the time. My homie manage NYU’s basketball team – I didn’t go to NYU, but I went to high school with him. So I started getting into their circle and deejaying their parties. Some of friends his friends that I met through him that are a big part of our crew now, they had an apartment down in the West Village on Bleeker St, and we used to call it the Bleeker Street Carter, ‘cause at the time we were super Lil’ Wayne fans and the Carter series was so legit. We would just hang out there – after parties, have pregames there and just come back after parties and just smoke or whatever.
So that night, it was my birthday and I deejayed my own party. At like 5 or 6 in the morning we got back to that apartment on Bleeker and we just started smoking, me and the homies, and then everyone just started passing out. Me and my boy DJ, he always like to rap, like on Garage Band. He would just like to freestyle and we would listen to it to kinda get a kick out of it. That particular night, he just kept nagging at me like ‘Yo, let’s rap, let’s rap’ and I was like ‘Dude, I’m not a rapper.’ It just never seemed like a viable thing to me, something sustainable. Coming from New York, we were just always hustling for whatever way to make a realistic buck. It was really really short-sighted. But finally he convinced me, we did a freestyle on a Kanye West beat, the “Breathe In Breath Out” record from College Dropout and we just did it for kicks. Woke up the next day, played it for the homies and everyone thought it was funny and cool. The next day we did another one. We got on Waka Flocka’s “Oh, Let’s Do It” beat. Throughout that Summer, we just kept messing around and by the time we hit August, I got really focused.
HHW: Dope! Why did you decide to make rapping a profession?
Bas: Well, I was a college dropout. Six months prior I had a huge wake up call, like on some street shit, where I thought ‘Man, this isn’t worth it.’ A friend of mine got shot over some stuff we were doing. I had a good talk with my family, where the people around me, like my older brothers – even Cole – pointed out that I just wasn’t meeting my potential at all. And I’m lucky. A lot of people don’t have that support system and they go right back to what they were doing. But I had a lot of support in place, so when I hit rock bottom, I really didn’t have nothing else. My brother gave me his Macbook, because he deejays all over the city. He’s got a lot of big gigs and had me open up for him. So I spent like six months doing that, just deejaying. When I caught the rap bug, I just couldn’t stop doing it.
HHW: And now you’re a part of Dreamville records. Has J. Cole mentored you in any way?
Bas: Cole took me out on the road in 2011 and I didn’t start performing with him ’til this past June, ya know? It was such a huge developmental process. It was like being in the minor leagues and they just kinda prepping you. You know, going on the road, you learn so much about how you want to write songs to get that crowd participation, and you meet all these other artists and producers and songwriters. So I got to spend a good two years just really developing as an artist and that kinda goes hand in hand. And yea, we’re pretty much just here now.
HHW: Dreamville’s roster has some talent. How does it feel that you’ll be the first the world will hear?
Bas: Man, it’s amazing. It’s really vindicating for all the work we’ve put in. Being a new artist, there’s a lot of patience involved. You really have to be patient and trust the system, trust the things, trust the people around you. There were a couple situations that came up early last year, like before Cole put out Born Sinner. It wasn’t necessarily a Dreamville situation, but there were labels that wanted to do a bi-situation, you know what I mean? So just like how they [Dreamville] had faith in me all that time, it was only right that I put that faith back in the team and we just rode it out and waited ‘til we could do a Dreamville situation. Once Cole put out Born Sinner, it was a lot more heads turning. He was a certified hit-maker as an artist and a producer, so that helped us out a lot, his name carried a lot of weight.
I didn’t want to go into any situation where I was kinda forced on it, as the guy that came along, but Joie [Manda], and everyone else I was meeting at Interscope, were genuinely excited. Everyone who had heard the music, was genuinely excited to have me and that meant a lot to me. Because I’d rather stay independent than be looked at like the tag along, like just the homie. And Cole tells me all the time that he has friends who’ve been rapping way longer than me, that have been rapping way longer than me, but he just really believed in what I was doing. He wanted to really put it out. I’m grateful and really excited.
HHW: A little known fact is that you moved from Queens after living in Paris and Qutar for your first eight years. How did that foreign experience shape your music?
Bas: My brother, who’s a DJ Moma, he’s my senior of like 10 years. So he lived in Paris ‘til we were 18. We actually moved here because when it was time for him to go to college, my pops really wanted us to come to the state cause he just saw better opportunities in the future as far as schools and employment and the things that could be achieved here. So my brother’s sound is very Eurocentric. He’s put me onto all the weird shit that I listen to. Like the music that I used to get teased for listening to in high school, by my homies. It’s amazing , because now it’s the most influential part of my sound. There’s a certain progressive vibe that I incorporate into the music and that just comes from my brother DJ [name]. Ever since we were young, he would like just call me into his room and be like ‘check out this new CD I got’ ‘or check out this new record I got.’ So yea, he’s always been probably like number one as far as musical influences. So it’s only natural when he asked me to start deejaying. He knew too, because he knew my ear from just knowing me as a brother and always had a lot of faith that I would be a good DJ. When it came time to make music, even on my first mixtape, the intro is a track from this UK band called [name] . I just took an instrumental track off their album and rapped over it. That was all stuff my brother used to put me unto. So I definitely appreciate that, because it’s helped me paint my own sonic landscape.
HHW: It’s almost time to release your Interscope debut, Last Winter. Is this project as personal as the Quarter Water Raised Me series?
Bas: Last Winter is more of a time piece. A lot of my work is current. I think it really exemplifies this past year, because the concept was developed between me and a longtime collaborator of mine named Cedric Brown. He produced about four or five records on it. He’s one of Cole’s friends.We were kind of living parallel lives, just doing dumb street sh*t. We were friends with Cole, and then Cole brought us out on the road. We linked up on the road and started working together. We cliqued instantly because we have kind of similar personalities.
The first tour we came back from like early 2012, and this was kind of when Dreamville was loosely forming. Cedric lived in Alabama at the time, and we all got back to NY. I was like, ‘Man just stay in NY. You can stay in my parents crib.’
We’d be working in my basement and it’s just brick a$$ cold, and we’re both broke. When we would make a hot record, we had this rallying call. We would look at each other and be like “last winter.” This is our last winter. We not going to be living like this no more, we’re gonna put in this work, and we’re going to elevate our situation. That was always the concept, but as the year progressed, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy in a sense.
