“Bas is Sudanese Muslim, born in Paris, lived in Qatar, came to New York, was raised in Queens and went to college in the south — he’s got such a crazy perspective.” J. Cole told me. “Frankly, nobody is like him. He’s a dude who is very unique. The way he raps, the kind of beats he picks, his melodies, flows, tone of voice. Bas just has his own wave.”

Bas never really aspired to be a rapper. He doesn’t remember exactly when he first met Cole, but palling around with his older brothers, they often partied and played basketball together. In 2009, at the New York City release party for The Warm Up, he even handed out Cole’s mixtapes. “Bas was there from the very beginning,” Ibrahim, his older brother, said. “When Cole and I didn’t even really know what we were doing, standing outside of Baseline waiting for Jay-Z in the rain to give him a beat CD, he was just down for whatever. ”

Even still, Bas wasn’t thinking about rap. After the robbery he looked inward — what was he going to do with his life? It was then that mOma passed him an old laptop and asked him to begin opening his DJ gigs. “I was trying to find a niche for him,” mOma said. “Ibrahim was always into hip-hop, like the latest 50 Cent mixtapes on the Ave, while Bas was interested in other stuff, whether it was acid jazz, broken beat, rare grooves, house. He had sharp musical sensibilities.”

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Around the same time, he connected with Derick Okolie, a junior high school friend who was managing NYU’s basketball team. Okolie booked Bas to spin the basketball team’s house parties, and after one pivotal night — in an apartment on 7th Avenue and Bleecker Street they called “The Carter,” because it’s where they started experimenting with a lot of drugs — he was persuaded, for the very first time, to record a rap. Bas played it for friends and, to his surprise, they didn’t hate it. Okolie encouraged Bas to take it seriously, then came on as his manager. Meanwhile, friends from St. John’s, NYU, and elsewhere around the city began pooling around them. The loose collective started to grow and eventually took on the name The Fiends. One day, not long after Bas started rapping, Ibrahim played his music for Cole.

“The first joint he played me, I was like ‘What the fuck?’” Cole recalled. “I could tell right away, the potential. Some of the flows he was using, words he was putting together. He was kind of naturally talented. It’s like basketball. You never played a day in your life, and all of a sudden you get on a court and you're just draining threes. But this was 2010, and you have to remember, I was still knee deep in trying figure out how the fuck do I put out an album.”

Cole’s tenuous position didn’t last long though, and over the next few years, as his own star rose, he kept tabs on what Bas was doing. “Every new batch of songs, I’d see the growth,” Cole said. “The more growth I saw, the more I got to see a vision — Bas can really do this shit. I can give him a platform and be justified because this nigga's fucking good.”

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Cole brought Bas on tours, allowed him to be a fly-on-the-wall in the studio, and quietly coached him on how to build a career. In 2011, he released the mixtape Quarter Water Raised Me Vol. 1. A second volume followed two years later; it featured “Lit,” a hazy ode to good times, which quickly became a fan favorite. The Fiends grew larger. When Interscope came knocking on Cole’s door with a label deal in early 2014, he immediately inked Bas to a contract. Last Winter, his first album, followed that March.