Live From Wikis New York, With Love – Pitchfork

Fresh out of the barbers chair from the Dominican shop around the corner, Wiki moseys down Forsyth Street on a weekday afternoon in Chinatown. Rocking an orange Avirex jacket, its easy to spot him from a block away. To many born and raised in the five boroughs, the jacket brings back memories of mid-2000s Jim Jones DVD shoots, days in the city that are gone but not forgotten. Wiki is proud of it. This is not a nostalgic New York costume to me, says the 28-year-old. I come from that era of Dipset. I know the history.

Born Patrick Morales, Wiki was raised in the Upper West Side, but Lower Manhattan is where he roamed free. As a latchkey teenager, he rode the 1 train south on Broadway and kicked it downtown, wasting hours walking from Greenwich Village to Soho to the Lower East Side to Chinatown before heading back home. For years now, the unofficial border between Chinatown and the Lower East Side has been Wikis home base, even as the area has undergone extreme gentrification. On weekends, specifically, it turns into a playground for transplants, usually college students or twentysomethings, to get piss-drunk and scream up and down the sidewalks. Shit gets me hot, he says as he pulls out a grinder outside of Spicy Village. But I cant leave. Someone needs to be there. Not to regulate or anything, but just to keep a piece of real New York there. The pockets still exist, but theyre getting smaller and smaller.

This past October, Wiki put out Half God, produced entirely by Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn-based Navy Blue. Its his best solo album to date. Over Navys wide array of beats, which range from loops smokier than a barbeque pit to head-boppers perfect for frozen subway rides, Wiki narrates coming-of-age stories of living in a city that means everything to him but is constantly scrubbing away its past. This theme of erasure isnt always overt. Sometimes, its happening in the background, and other times hes addressing it head-on. You got it twisted, this aint yours just cause this is where you buy/You the gentrifier, terrorizer, not the terrorized, he raps on The Business, sounding like hes at a breaking point. The song is directed at a generation of out-of-towners who badly want to claim New York culture but dont want that culture to interfere with their utopia.

For Wiki, Half God marks a restart. He was once the teenage phenom frontman of Ratking, a trio that cemented a legacy in the city behind their DIY shows and the 2014 album So It Goes. That impact was both good and bad. The good: Who wouldnt want to be a part of a significant hip-hop crew in underground New York rap lore? The bad: Every solid solo tape he has released since 2015s Lil Me had to compete with Ratking nostalgia.

Next, Wiki had to overcome a personal rut. Ive been in the game 10 years. It starts to feel like a job, he says. I was feeling stagnant, in a relationship and in my music, and I was drinking a lot. During the pandemic, he began to piece together Half God with Navy Blue. He was like, I want to produce your record, this is your story, Wiki recalls. The process was reinvigorating. Through a smile big enough that I can see the golds in his mouth, he remembers drinking non-alcoholic Heinekens at L.A. sessions with Navy, Earl Sweatshirt, and the Alchemist that left him particularly inspired. It meant a lot to me to be around my peers, and they were showing so much love.

Half God is a Wiki albumnot a Wiki, formerly of Ratking, album. Theres no twist to it; just inspired raps over beats that provide the perfect canvas for them. Its intimacy and detail expand outward so that nearly any native New Yorker could identify with many of the anecdotes: the homey feeling of posting up on your block; the simple pleasure of the go-to sandwich at your favorite corner store; the rush of catching feelings amid a bustling city of more than 8 million and suddenly feeling like theres only one other person who matters.

Its great hip-hop, and thats more than enough. Im sometimes around indie producers, and theyre like, You dont have to prove yourself as a rapper anymore, but what they dont get is that every time I rap, Im proving myself, says Wiki. It doesnt need to be more complex, it doesnt need to be a mix of genres or experimental just for the sake of it. Dont belittle my craft. I can expand within it without sacrificing one bar.

From Forsyth Street, Wiki leads me east to a bench surrounded by plants in Seward Park, where he sometimes sits in the mornings with a coffee to write. In this spot, you can watch longtime residents and new neighborhood invaders exist without acknowledging each other. Just outside the park, the newcomers, in their Instagram-ready outfits, drift in and out of the hip coffee shops and restaurants. Inside the park, local teenagers run pickup basketball games, and older women gather around a table to play mahjong. Its the perfect scene for a Wiki song.

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Live From Wikis New York, With Love - Pitchfork