I’ve gone through the eras. When I first got my introduction into music, like the scene, it was in 2000 when I did a Source “Unsigned Hype” battle; ended up winning that joint, and that’s kinda like my hopping-off-the-porch moment. That was the era of the Jay-Z’s and the majors and super huge labels, and so down here, our music scene was people selling us on “the dream.”

We had home studios. I used to record on a 4-track back in high school, but then we started putting up money to record at The Spot—it was downtown and it was across the street from the homeless shelter. When I first started going there, I had been approached by this street nigga with big money, dawg—my first time being around the type of money where he would go buy rims and then go buy a car to match. He was putting up money for me to go to the studio, like $30-$40 an hour, something like that. People would try to put up money behind an artist, do a song, and then shop it, because they might have a connection somewhere. That was Richmond’s whole hip-hop scene for a while. And then, there were your little open mics here and there.

It felt like things were bubbling and shit was fun then, but there was that little weird section [in the mid-aughts] where Houston was like running the rap game, ATL snap music was running the rap game, and those open mics started fizzling out, and there wasn’t much happening. And Richmond’s hip-hop scene was desolate. We were still doing music, we were recording, but niggas wasn’t getting nowhere with it. Our goal was to go out of town with the shit. Everybody kept saying “I need to get out of here.” That was the narrative.

Richmond is huge for its metal. So Richmond’s hip-hop was looked at like the red-headed stepchild, for a while. But then came the time where the internet really started taking off, and that’s what I refer to as The Great Equalizer. The first Great Equalizer was the gun; before the gun, big niggas ran the world—the biggest and the strongest. But when the gun came along, “Oh, we’re all the same size now muthafucka!” That’s what the internet was like. The internet came along, that’s when location didn’t matter. And all the stuff in the city, where we couldn’t get into certain venues and stuff like that, that didn’t matter anymore. Now we had our outlet.

Around 2009, 2010, rap started bubbling a lot more around here. We had venues that started housing hip-hop events. There were only a few venues that were taking chances with us, The Camel being one of the first ones—a small venue, small stage. They were about building a following that would show up almost regardless of who was on the bill because that was a place where we went for local hip-hop shows. But then you had a place like Strange Matter, which is located on Grace Street downtown near VCU [Virginia Commonwealth University] campus. In the late ’80s, early ’90s that was called “Hell Block.” That was where all the fuck shit went down. So Strange Matter has this really gritty, hole-in-the-wall sort of feel. They’re known for their metal shows still, but they opened up their doors to hip-hop and actually my first sold-out show as a solo artist in 2013 was there.