Wiki on Getting Older, Quitting Drinking, and Downtown Chaos

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Today's installment: Wiki is one of those artists who keeps getting better as he goes, which is insane to consider since he's been doing this for a decade-plus now. His latest album, the just-dropped Ancient History, might just be his best in a catalog that's increasingly full of gems; I was lucky enough to get him on the phone last week to talk through what went into putting this one together and a whole bunch more. We had a great convo and I'm sure you're gonna enjoy reading it, check it out:

You've lived in the Lower East Side for the last six years or so. Talk to me about what you like about living in that area specifically.
I've been hanging out here forever. I'm from the Upper West Side, but I've always come down here when I was growing up. I ended up moving because it was an opportunity at the end of the COVID era, so the rent wasn't so bad. In the past six or seven years, it's changed a lot and got bigger. More people are coming here. At first it was like, "The artists are here." Now, the people that were in Soho five years ago are here now. They're like, "We're here for shopping and everything."

It can be hectic, especially on the weekends—but I don't really go out like that, so it doesn't really bother me too much. Since I don't go out that much to the bars and shit, during the day I get to bump into people and get my socializing in because of the neighborhood I'm in. I like that.

What was COVID like for you? I feel like it was crazy in the city for everybody, and we're back in a spot where people can talk about it again.
Yeah, you're right. There was a period where that was all people talked about in every show and everything, and then it was like everyone kind of forgot about it for a sec. It took a minute. I remember shows being really weird after—and even now, a certain generation, maybe they didn't get to go to the shows, and they're still figuring out how to act.

COVID was an interesting time. I know it was really difficult for a lot of people, and it was a crazy time. But honestly, for me, it was a period I needed at the time. I was getting a little money. It was nice to be able to get the unemployment, because I was used to being freelance and not having consistent money. Everyone, in their own way, that had time to was able to focus a little bit on the art without it being like, "I need to get this out" and da-da-da-da-da. It was like, "Step back, let me rethink everything. What do I want in life?" It was good for me.

Honestly, after COVID, I was doing really well, and then shit picked up again and I got lost in the mix of life and everything. But recently I've been doing a lot better, and I feel like I've come out of that again.

This is your first record in three years. Let's talk about what's been going on for you during that time.
I've definitely been working on this for that amount of time. Some of these songs, or at least parts of them, are even older than that. But the last three years have been good. I would say, three years ago, I was not in the best place. But the last two years, I've been really working on myself and trying to get back. I took my time with this album. I didn't want to force anything. I didn't want to just put something out for the sake of putting something out. I really wanted to feel confident and happy and in my art, so I put it together slowly. But once it started to come together, it started picking up—the whole momentum and excitement for it.

I was going through a lot. I was drinking a lot. This last year, I went to visit in Australia for a minute, and my girlfriend at the time came to visit me, and it was really helpful.I was getting a lot more healthy, and then recently I quit drinking. Things have been really good for me so far. I mean, it's still a process, but things are good. The last three years felt like a coming-out, and it felt like progress.

How long has it been since you quit drinking?
It's coming on like three months now, so not that long.

Congratulations, man. I've got five years and two months on me.
Hell yeah. The people that know, know. It's funny because you asked, because to someone that it's not an issue for, they're like, "Oh, only two months" or whatever. But to someone that gets it, they're like, "Oh, dude, good for you."

Yeah, three months is incredible, man. One day is incredible. For me, when I quit—and this an experience for a lot of other people too—there was definitely this rush of clarity. Talk to me about what that experience has been like for you.
Oh my God, yeah—especially the first month. I've struggled before, this is the longest I've done it. But this time, I wanted it. It wasn't something where something happened and it was like, "I need to do this because my friends are mad at me." It was me doing it, so that felt good. The first few weeks was such a head-clear, just feeling like myself. The start of it was that thing of, you just gotta sit with your emotions. Sometimes you're not gonna feel great, and it's fine. You're not gonna rush to drink, because that just creates the cycle where you never feel good. Even with my career, I started feeling confident in the future and possibilities. I got out of this stuck thing, and, it started making me think of when I was younger, coming up with ideas and being creative. There was less of a block, and also just filling your days because it's like, "Wait, now I can do things because I don't feel like this every day."

Yup, exactly. You're like, "Wow, I have a lot more time on my hands all of a sudden because of all this energy."
Totally. I was shooting music videos, and I was so much less like, "Alright, I gotta do this." I was like, "Oh nice, sick, I'm getting into it." It all felt productive and exciting, and less like I was just going through the motions.

The album artwork is really nice. Talk to me about that coming together.
I have to give credit to the homie Jamie, who animated the "3 Stories" video with his friend Evan. He was the one who I hit up when I was thinking about the art, and it was cool because he's my really good friend. He was like, "I want to help with the art direction. You got to get Esteban," who's his friend, a fine artist and a New York kid. I knew about his art, but once I was looking more into it, it really hit a lot of the themes. He does a lot of old sculptures in New York in old skate spots. It's all about time passing, history, and New York. He's also an amazing painter.

At first, we were gonna make me a little park gnome, and we were gonna have me be small. Sometimes, you have crazy ideas, and then you draw back on it a bit. So we took photos for it, and after a while we were like, "Yo, let's just do it based off the photo." Once I started seeing the sketches, I was like, "oh man, it looks like I've just been out in the fucking park for years, contemplating on something." It hit the vibe perfectly. Sometimes, it's all timing, and with this record everything clicked together really well.

Obviously, this album draws heavy from your experiences with parks in New York City. Let's get into your general history there.
I grew up on the Upper West Side, so I was in between two of the best parks in the whole city—Riverside and Central. I've always been going to the park. Even when you're in school, where do they take you to play? You go to the park. There's not a fucking playground in every school. The park has also always been this escape, and it's a lucky thing we have in the city because of just how crazy it can be—especially downtown. In the past couple years, I've been in Seward a lot, which is the park I live by. There's a whole community there, the park-dwellers—every type of person from every walk of life.

You've lived in New York City your entire life. Have you ever considered leaving?
Yeah, for sure. I'm not trying to leave forever, but I definitely like the idea of traveling—moving around, living other places at times. When we were shooting the video for "Something New," I was talking to SALIMATA and she'd moved out to France. I was like, "Yo, that's so ill as a New York person, to make that move." In other places, you're like, "Get out." But with New York, you're like, "Wait, I'm in New York. It's where it's at. Why should I leave?" A lot of people—even my friends—are like, "New York, bro, why would I ever leave this?"

This is one of my things I always say these days, but people have traveled when you had to get on a fucking wooden raft and just go for pure curiosity—they went and traveled the world. It's a human thing, and now we have it at our fingertips. We can take a plane and go anywhere, so the idea of not taking advantage of that is silly to me. I definitely want to travel more, and not just because I've toured a lot. That's just playing a show and leaving. I want to go experience more—and New York's not going anywhere. I went to Australia for a month and a half, and then I came back and it was even better, you know what I mean? It felt like I missed it. But that's just a month and a half. I'll see if I could do a couple weeks a year or something—but I'll definitely always make my way back to New York.

Skating came up briefly earlier in this conversation. Do you still skate?
No, I don't be skating. A lot of the homies do, but not since I was younger. I lived at Adam Zhu's house for almost five years when I first moved out of my mom's, and that was a little skate house because it was all his homies. It was literally right by fucking LES, the park underneath the bridge, so there'd always be people around. Even in the park, there's the skating kids over there.Now there's the fixie kids. There's the grass kids. Everyone intermingles.

What are some of your earliest memories of being in the city?
I got such a bad memory, it's hard for me to remember that far back—all those years of drinking. [Laughs] Lowkey, it might be the park. That's where I spent a lot of the time when I was young. I lived right by Riverside Park, and there's a playground for kids called Hippo Park—it's right on 88th or 89th and Riverside. It's just a regular playground, but they have hippos with a water fountain squirting out of them, and you can go in the hippo. That's a core memory, because that's definitely where I spent every day as a kid.

Let's talk about how you feel like you've changed as an artist since the beginning. It's been a minute since the Ratking days.
My main focus has always been rapping and writing. My next goal is to really try to hone in more on the music itself, because I've been such an "in-my-head writing"-type person. Some of the feedback I get is, "He's really good at rapping," and that's where it ends. But it's like, no—I'm developing the writing. On this album, I simplified a lot. Everything I'm saying has some purpose. Sometimes you feel like you're in a place where you're forcing it. Sometimes, inspiration works on its own weird timeline. As much as you have control over, "I'm going to lock in and write every day to hone the craft," sometimes you're just not inspired. Sometimes it just comes to you and you write the craziest shit ever. You don't always have full control over it.

A big thing for me—which I used to do a lot—is trying to get back into going into other people's places and working, not just writing and recording in my space. It's great, because you feel really comfortable, but I want to be able to get out of that comfort zone. I went in the studio the other night with CARTOONS, and I was trying to get the verse together and trying to fit all the words in, and I realized that one of the dopest parts of the process is not knowing and figuring it out. You don't need to be an expert. In the past, I've been like, "I got it. I'm nice to write in verses." But once you master a craft, you want to break it down and fuck with it and just be a student again. Not being in control, not knowing what you're gonna do, freeing yourself—that's what i've been trying to get on recently, and on the record, those are the joints that made the album.

When you started to get a lot of press attention in the mid-2010s with Ratking, it was a very different time in terms of buzz. You were able to survive that stuff—which, career-wise, tends to leave a lot of casualties in its wake.
For sure. For years, it felt like that was the moment.There was hype, and then it was like, "What now?" The blog era, that's what they call it—all the publications like Fader, everything was popping off from everywhere. It was a good time, because people were putting on for underground music. Now, it's this internet weird...I don't even fully understand it. But I'm lucky enough just by being consistent enough, even though I'm not the most consistent for artists these days. A lot of artists are dropping multiple a year, and I'm trying to get more consistent, just because I've been so clear-headed these days. There was a period where I was forcing it a bit or pushing myself, but now it feels like I just want to keep making music. I don't know, what do you think?

It's tough. The way I view it at this point is the same that I always have, which is that if you're working on your craft and you're extremely real and honest as a person and an artist, more often than not you're going to look good in the end. The problem is, the ecosystem right now—I don't even know if it actually rewards the opposite approach, but it likes to pretend that it does, so that's been really confusing for a lot of people making music right now. But I do feel like the people who are actually serious and straight-up about things, they're the ones that stick around regardless of what's going on.
That's a good point. As much as it sounds clichéd, it's something that I would say when people are like, "What advice would you give to a younger artist?" I would say, "Stick to yourself, stick to your guns." At one time, I was like, "Is that even the best advice?" But maybe this project taught me that I do believe that, because that's what I was doing, and it's paying off a little bit. Over time, the real people that get it will be drawn to that the real shit. There's new trends, and people are like, "I gotta do this, I gotta do that." I'm all about experimenting, I'm all about loving new music, and I want to go get on all types of beats. But there's a fine line between forcing it you and being influenced by something while still holding on to some part of yourself, too.

Over time, do you feel like you've faced any misconceptions as an artist?
I mean, I think rap in general has this thing where it's a little bit overlooked as an artform sometimes, you know what I mean? It's always like, "He's this grimy New York rapper." It's not something I think about too much, but it's like what I said before: A lot of the time, the conversation ends at "He's great at rapping" and that's it—not for me, not for anyone. I want to get the perspective of someone that's reading literature or poetry, Because, for me, I'm like, "Damn, I'm good at rapping, but this shit's way deeper in this subtle way." It's not something where you could just be like, "He barred up on that." It's deeper than that, but it's subtle. It's something you have to really think about.

You gestured there towards how people talk about New York City rappers, which can always make for some strange conversation as well. Sometimes the strangeness of the conversation is happening in New York itself! The expectations those conversations bring are always really fascinating to me. I'm always kind of like, "What are people actually expecting?"
Yeah, you're right. New York rappers, bro. We can't just be fully fucking weird. We have to be like, "You can throw on a fucking instrumental and I'm going to go crazy." There's a lot of new artists that aren't thinking about that too much coming out of New York, which is cool. They're not putting on this thing where it's like, "I'm a New York MC," which was such a thing. If you were going to be a New York MC, you had to be on this level—which was dope. I grew up in that. That's what I wanted when I was young, you know? But once I got a little bit older, I was like, "Wait, there's more to it than that." An artist like Yasiin Bey, he's a New York MC, no question—but he's an artist. They're going to always experiment. Their identity isn't just "I'm a New York rapper," even though that is part of their identity.

You popped up in Marty Supreme. Tell me about how that came together.
I've known Josh Safdie for a minute. He actually shot Ratking's "Piece of Shit video. Ari Marcopoulos directed it, but Josh worked with him at the time, so he shot it. He'd told me when he was writing [Marty Supreme]. He didn't tell me exactly what it was, but he was like, "I'm writing this thing about ping-pong hustlers in the in the '40s and '50s. You know, you got that old look and the voice—maybe down the line, whatever." This is maybe six years ago.

Then, I seen that they were in my neighborhood doing the sets and shit, and I was putting it together in my head like, "Oh, this is this movie." So I hit him up and I was like, "What's good, bro? How you been?" Because it was so long ago, I doubt he even remembered talking to me. But he was like, "Oh shit, what's good? We got to get you in as something." I was like, "Dude, I'll do whatever." For me, I'm mostly trying to experiment in the acting a little bit, see what's going on. It's fun, and I also love an old New York movie—I love history and everything. So I was like, "Hell yeah. I'll do anything. I'll be an extra or whatever." So he got me to be an extra, and then i got the little mini-line the day of. My mom was really hype, and then she went to the theater and totally missed me. [Laughs] But it was still a cool experience just to be on the set and everything.

What movies have you seen lately that you like?
Not to be a fucking pretentious film guy, but I just saw this Japanese movie Cure. That shit was crazy.

Incredible movie.
It was sick. Our homie is always trying to put us on movies, and my roommate's always kind of fucking with him like, "Nah, we're not going to watch this. It's too long. I don't want to read the subtitles." There's always something. That one he put on, we all watched it and at the end we were like, "That shit was fire. That was crazy." If you have any suggestions, let me know, because I'm always trying to watch some shit.

I'll tell you something: The guy who directed Cure, a lot of his other movies are also excellent. You should watch Pulse next.
Alright, sick. I'll tap into that.