Watsky to aspiring rappers: You can do this, too

Marco della Cava | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Rapper Watsky may not be blowing up like Psy, but he's definitely reaching a boil.

For starters, he's gone from poetry-slam events in unknown bars to a performance here at the iconic Fillmore Auditorium, a musical shrine that 26-year-old Bay Area native George Watsky knew only as an audience member.

"I saw Ludacris perform here in 2001, so for me to be playing the Fillmore is just crazy," says Watsky, sporting a San Francisco Giants baseball cap. The rest of his outfit has a Pacific Northwest vibe, flannel and faded. "I wanted to be a rapper before I was a poet."

He may well wind up being more than both.

Beyond making headway as a musician — his current tour supports the album Cardboard Castles, whose viral-hit videos have helped push his YouTube views to 200 million — he's made an acting turn in Netflix's return to Arrested Development (the 15-episode season is available for streaming May 26) and is in talks with a cable network about starring in a sketch-comedy series.

"My parents taught me to always be honest about who am I, so I'm just following that path," Watsky says by way of explaining his growing popularity. "People often say that I'm speaking to their experience."

Watsky is the first to acknowledge that his was not a Boyz n the Hood childhood: precocious teen from a stable Summer of Love-steeped home becomes a city poetry-slam champ in high school, heads to Boston's Emerson College, where he studies screenwriting and acting, and starts morphing his poetry into rap.

His speed (as evidenced in his 2011 video Pale Kid Raps Fast, 24 million views to date) and his humor (in 4AM Monday, he describes himself as Mos Def meets Woody Allen) are his calling cards. While the self-described nerd admires Eminem, Watsky feels he is part of a new white rapper tradition that's just taking shape.

Rapper Watsky: Record labels should be shaking in their boots Rapper and poet, George Watsky, says that the new music landscape of independent artists should leave record labels shaking in their boots.

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White rap is in its third phase, with the first being Vanilla Ice, who made it as a novelty, and the second being Eminem, whose tough life story was similar to other African-American rappers," he says earnestly, as if laying out a college thesis.

"In this third phase, the consumer of that past rap is becoming the creator," says Watsky. "People like me and Macklemore (who with Ryan Lewis is behind the hit Thrift Shop) are telling our own stories for an audience that may not have a context for the founding fathers of rap."

So while childhood hardships may not be grist for his rapping mill, other universal experiences are, he says. Those include "being crushed, personally and professionally," and losing friends to suicide. On a far more mundane level, the rapper says his average looks ("I'm not some chiseled, good-looking dude") also make him more approachable to fans.

"Watsky is a reflection of the common-man rapper movement," says Jermaine Hall, editor of Vibe. "There's a quirky relatability that resonates with kids in the suburbs. What's interesting with (Watsky) is that he has the ability to craft these layered rhymes that can touch on political hot buttons and then do more light records where he isn't taking himself that seriously."

Hall says the Web has made the march of self-made rappers such as Mac Miller and Macklemore inevitable. "(Their success) is directly attributed to being able to build a digital core that buys into their brand before a label does anything. There's no need to wait to be discovered by a label. If your music is good, the audience will find you."

Watsky says rap is perfectly suited to him as a "politically and socially conscious kid" who uses music like a Trojan horse to deliver lectures through rhyme.

"I've always been political, but nobody wants to have that forced on them, so I try and use humor to subvert the message so I can go in deeper," he says.

Cardboard Castles makes his point. Drawn from his own childhood making medieval castles from whatever scraps were lying around the house, the song and accompanying video serve as an ode to our better angels and the optimistic notion that perseverance in the face of skepticism pays off.

"My message is just use what you have at your disposal," he says with a shrug. "And we have so much these days. I can have an idea, record it, shoot a video and get it up online in a day. The power is ours."

Watsky plans to keep it that way. So far, he's turned down offers to join a label ("They want to keep the masters, which is an issue"), and instead keeps the presses rolling by making money through touring, and in turn pouring those gains back into new songs and videos.

He didn't think twice when turning down a lucrative offer a few years ago from T-Mobile to riff on their new phones.

"With rap, the expectation your audience has of you is honesty," he says. "When a corporation hijacks your voice, you're dead in the water."

If ever a venue's walls have heard those lines before, it's the Fillmore, birthplace of a counterculture revolution that continues thanks to a pale smart kid from the neighborhood.