Cam O’bi Steps Into The Spotlight
Whether or not you know Cam O’bi’s name yet, you’ve heard his music before. With his past work for Chance The Rapper and SZA, the signature sound on his beats has never been clearer than in his new solo career. With four singles out so far, and a debut album set to release this year, this GRAMMY winner is one to watch.
We got to chat with Cam O’bi about everything from when he first fell in love with hip hop, his recent single Grammy’s Babies and more…
Let’s rewind it back a bit. When did you first fall in love with hip hop?
Hip hop has been in my life since birth, honestly. But my earliest memory of feeling captivated by it was in the mid 90’s like ’94 I think. As a kid, I remember sitting in front of the TV spellbound, watching the video for “Back in the Day” by Ahmad. Every time that video came on, I was right there in front of the TV watching it and singing along. It became a thing in my house where my family would call me into the living room whenever that video came on. “Cameron! Yo song is on!” I would always come running to catch it before it ended. I don’t remember how old I was then, but I was born in ’89.
Growing up, who were your go-to artists to listen to?
I think the thing I loved listening to the most as a young kid, was Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” on cassette. That shit was like entering into another world for me. Whenever me and my sisters were in the car with my mom, she would put that in the car’s cassette deck and turn it up loud. I remember it being scary as shit too at night. It was exciting, it was creepy, it was funny, just an overall exhilarating experience. There was that and this other audio cassette book called In a Dark, Dark Room. Everyone in our family was sure that our house had ghosts in it, and I don’t know why, but it was strangely fun to listen to scary things in that house. I also loved those Disney sing-a-long movies on VHS. I remember a movie called The Three Caballeros, that I watched over and over again.
As I got older, I got introduced to music via my older sister’s music collection. There was a wide range of music in there like Alanis Morisette, Total, Whitney Houston, Aaliyah, Jay-Z, Lenny Williams to name a few. I remember falling in love with this song on The Dynasty: Roc La Familia called You, Me, Him and Her and I remember one of her boyfriends came over and accidentally left his copy of The Blueprint, which changed my life. A primal musical scene from my childhood was me playing with these glow-in-the-dark Mega Bloks for what seemed like hours while my older sister blasted “When This Feeling” by SWV on repeat the entire time. I later found out that song was produced by The Neptunes, my all-time favorite producers growing up. We had a family computer with America Online dial-up internet and I discovered a lot of rappers from illegally downloading classic episodes of Stretch & Bobbito’s radio show using this p2p program called Morpheus. By the time I was in 8th grade, I had a Top 5 rapper list: Black Thought, Jadakiss, Styles P., Ghostface Killah, and Kanye West.
When did you realize that you wanted to become a producer?
I started making beats in 2001 when I was 11 years old and I pretty much haven’t stopped since then. I learned what a producer was when I was 13 years old, after my mother gifted me with The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. I didn’t even know who he was before reading that. After that, I remember doing a project for one of my classes where I had to write a paper about what I wanted to do when I grow up and present it to the class. I wrote mine about the life and career of Quincy Jones, and the fact that I wanted to be a music producer when I grow up. I was in 7th grade.
How did you land on your name Cam O’bi?
Well Cam came from the fact that everyone already called me that anyway, but I knew it wasn’t very Google-able and also I didn’t want to use my real last name (Osteen) because I never thought it ringed very well with my first name. It just sounds “clunky” to me. So I decided to find a new name that sounded somewhat close to my last name, by giving myself two criteria: it had to begin with the letter ‘O’, with the long “o” sound, and it had to be two syllables long. I randomly found a list of Igbo names in alphabetical orders, I jumped straight to the ‘O’ names and Obi was there. It just jumped out at me. It means “heart” in Igbo. I love it because it sounds both ancient and futuristic at the same time. It also feels a little bit whimsical and magical, even mythical to me.
How would you describe your sound?
Well, it changes depending on what I’m working on and it’s not easy to capture using just adjectives. But if I had to describe it as a scene, it would be Mickey Mouse in a blue wizard hat sitting in front of an MPC with an innocent little joint on his lip, at the edge of a forest with the stars shining vividly above him while the sun sets pink in the background. It’s surreal, psychedlic, and ghetto with an underlying sense of wonder and whimsy. It’s the perfect soundtrack to the euphoric come-down phase of one of those life-changing mushroom trips.
Your new track ‘Grammy Babies’ is such a fantastic track, can you tell us a little more into the meaning behind the song?
There’s a lot of layers of meaning in that one. The inspiration to write it came from the death of my grandfather. The first verse is written entirely about him:
“…your old chair when the wood be squeakin’/
your hood was leakin’ Caddy juice on the front of the porch like/
Fo’ hunnit spokes we goin way back…/”
My grandpa loved Cadillacs and had many of them over his lifetime. He’d go from one to another, and when he was done with one, he’d either trade it in or gift it to someone in the family like my grandma or my mom. I grew up surrounded by Cadillacs, and I mean the old ones. The interior of any old Cadillac is extremely visceral for me. I might cry if I ever sat inside one. He had this one early 80’s Sedan Deville that was famous in the family and in the neighborhood that he nicknamed “Thin Booty”. He had it etched in black cursive lettering above the rear bumper on the right, next to the tail light. That’s the name we all used to refer to that car by. It was two-toned: yellow with a brown roof. It disappeared one day when I was a kid and still to this day, no one in my family quite remembers what happened to it. There was a rumor that it was stolen by one of our decadent family members and sold for crack, but who knows? In the cover art for the song, you can see it half-submerged in a lake with a tree growing thru the middle of it. The second verse of the song is my grandfather’s voice speaking directly to me.
Overall, Grammy’s Babies is about life and death and the importance of not taking things like your loved ones, or your ancestors, or the stars for granted, because they’re always there if you just stop for a second and look up. They were there before we were born and they will be there after we die. It’s about my own painful realization that life is not a rehearsal and that in fact, we’re all on stage right now. It’s a reminder to not only embrace and appreciate that reality, but also to do something remarkable with it while you still can.
You’re gearing up for the release of your debut album ‘Grown Ass Kid’ this year. What was the creative process like for the record?
If I had to describe it in one word, it would be “immersive”. The creative process has been all-consuming. It’s left a few bruises and scars on me, and I’m sure that it will do the same for its listeners, so I apologize for that in advance. I made the first few songs from it back in 2013 so it’s been about a 7-year endeavor now. I’ve learned a lot about myself, discovered new talents, shed tears, processed traumas, lost loved ones, slayed dragons, overcame fears, learned to love my enemies and hate my friends, did shit I regret and shit that made me a better person. All of that is in the album in some way or another. I’m proud of it, because with it, I’ve proven to myself how much braver I’ve become.
The details of the process varies from track to track, but I pretty much took my own life story and fictionalized it into a folk tale about these two characters that I call The Grown Ass Kid and The Groove Merchant. It’s been a bizarre experience for me because I’ve found that ever since I wrote that story, it has become more and more real with each passing year and the border between fiction and reality has become more and more obscure. It’s as if the act of fictionalizing my life into a story, and then writing it down and then acting it out, was some sort of sacred ritual or something that sealed my fate. Like the story I wrote became a contract with my own destiny and I signed it by acting it out in real life.
What do you want listeners to take away after listening to the album?
I’m honestly curious to know what listeners will take away from it. A part of me wants to be surprised. But to put it simply, I want listeners to walk away from this album feeling a bit braver. Like how it feels when you get off of a roller coaster. Or how I’d imagine it must feel to finally plant your feet on the earth, alive after a 15,000-foot skydive.
Lastly, what are you most looking forward to this year?
This year, I’m looking forward to falling in love. And dropping ‘Grown Ass Kid.’
Make sure to check out Cam O’bi’s latest single ‘Grammy’s Babies’ below…
