zayALLCAPS on R&B, Y2K Nostalgia, and Studying the Masters

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I've had zayALLCAPS' "MTV's Pimp My Ride" on repeat since I first heard it, it's an earworm of the highest fashion and quite possibly one of the best pop songs of the year period. (I sent it to a highly discerning friend recently and her response was "It's cute, I'm not mad at it," which is tantamount to a five-mic classic of a review.) I realized Zay and I were mutuals on Twitter so I hit him up about hopping on a call for the newsletter, and the resulting convo was glorious—we got deep into what makes him tick creatively, as well as the general fabric of R&B as he sees it and a host of other topics. Check it out:

First of all, congratulations on having the song of the summer.
I really appreciate that, thank you.

Tell me about how the song came together.
It was my birthday, March 2024—my 25th birthday. I was on a crazy TV Girl kick. Me and my best friend, Brandon, a.k.a. Kwame Adu, we're bumping hella TV Girl. They have a side project, BLOODbath64, and they have this one song on the project that's fucking insane. I started singing the "Pimp My Ride" melody to it in the car, and I was like, "Hmm, I can make something out of this. I can take this somewhere. It's a little demo."

So I ended up producing a whole song around that idea. Then I went to my friend Keem the Cypher's house, and I laid down some chords on his synth—he has a miniKORG. He helped me add a little arpeggio and ran it through his SP-404, and then I just, wrote the verse out later that day. This whole song got made for my birthday. It was such a perfect, surreal experience—very, very spiritual.

The song is about wanting a girl that has a boyfriend and using Pimp My Ride as a metaphor for being a jerk. I'm dirty-macking a little bit. I'm like, "Alright, your ride—your boyfriend—is your life, and I could fix it up.

When I heard the song for the first time, I was like, "How come somebody hasn't done this concept before?"
Man, I'm glad you said that, because that specific feeling is something I'm always looking for in all the shit I do—whether it's writing a song, a joke, a pun, a tweet, or a beat. I always try to chase that feeling—like, "Why this is so clearly obvious?" I also like to make things that have this uncanny sense of familiarity—but not blatant nostalgia. It's a super fine line to tiptoe, and it's really engaging for me to do.

One thing I noticed about this song is, compared to the other music you've put out, it slows the BPM down considerably. Talk to me about that.
I really enjoy R&B that has what I call, a "body roll tempo." You can really hit that slow body roll, but it also works in double time. You can pump your arms to it if you wanted to. It's a good slower mid-tempo R&B jam vibe. I feel like a lot of Jodeci's music is like that.

I'm a huge R&B fan, and I think "Pimp My Ride" is, in my mind, the best representation of what I'm into and what I've always wanted to do. It's a song I never thought I could make, and I finally cracked the code on that one. Honestly, a lot of the music I'm about to put out is most of it singing, so this is a good way to make a splash and be like, "Alright, y'all, I can do this too."

In the interview you did for Finals, you mentioned your early stuff being influenced by early MIKE and 454. As far as 454 is concerned, I can hear a little bit of that in "Pimp My Ride" as well, but I wanted to hear you talk more about influence in general.
The influence that has remained the longest is probably T-Pain. I remember being mesmerized the first time I heard T-Pain—it really blew my mind. Specifically, his harmonies and the aesthetic of his production, in the beginning, is just super different. Back then, I was a kid, so I didn't know that he made the beats. I didn't really know what that even meant yet. I barely knew what harmonies were, either. So it just had me just super shook, and I try to capture that vibe literally in my music.

When I was a teen, I really got into a lot of Soundcloud stuff—whatever Soulelection was putting out, the plugg scene, Odd Future, the Internet, Jet Age of Tomorrow, Matt Martians, Pyramid Vitra. Obviously, the beat scene—FlyLo, Samiam, all those different textures. I'm always someone that tries to pull from what I feel like is a little outside of my range of skill, and "Pimp My Ride" is the culmination of that. Like, "Alright, how much singing can I really do? I really want to write a legit R&B melody, I really want to do these harmonies, I really want to sit down and write a great song that I can sing at a piano and it'll sound good."

In college, I was really trying to educate myself on a bunch of old music, because my parents are music heads, but they're younger. A lot of what they know is '90s, 2000s, '80s too. They're playing mostly Tupac, Biggie, Mac Dre. They're not playing Anita Baker and shit like that. So that's the kind of stuff I started to gravitate towards just to catch up—and "Pimp My Ride" satisfied that itch of fitting into the lexicon of R&B and soul music.

By the way, did I see you share a Pretty Ricky couch humping gif on Twitter recently, or am I making that up?
[Laughs] You absolutely did.

Word. When I saw that, I was like, "He is not fucking around when it comes to R&B." Let's talk more about R&B as a genre, walk me through the last ten years of it in your eyes.
Obviously, people online like us always talk about the fragmentation of shit. The best shit isn't gonna be the most popular shit anymore, because we're not all listening to R&B. so there's not a bunch of research and development and marketing going towards putting out the best r&b —so you know you gotta dig. I feel like the spiritual successor of neo-soul is the very jazzy, Alex Isley and Robert Glasper stuff, and I feel like that's been exploding since the 2010s. Out of that, you get the more retro acts like Devin Morrison.

But even within that, it's still innovative. Part of this is probably nostalgia, but I do think the DJ Mustard R&B era was some cool stuff—that's probably analogous to New Jack Swing. Chris Brown, "These hoes ain't loyal," that's our version of, like, fucking Poison or some shit. I think there's just not a place for R&B to be mainstream because every genre, except for hip-hop still, has their moment to be really popular before it just fades away into more niche territory. I think R&B has pretty much experienced that in the last 10 years. There's people who probably would've been great R&B singers, but like they just rap or make country.

A big thing is that like we made room for rap to include melodic shit. Fetty Wap's gonna sing, obviously Drake and Kanye and shit. But where is the line drawn? We've made rap overarching enough to encompass all that shit, so maybe that's another reason why we have less R&B at the forefront.

Obviously, when it comes to Drake, Phonte was the one who really opened the doors when it came to what's regarded as singing in modern rap.
Oh man, Phonte is my fucking goat, bro. He's incredible. Legend.

You mentioned nostalgia before. Let's get into Y2K nostalgia specifically. A lot of it honestly rings false to me usually, but there's things about this song that feels like it could've worked "back then," even as the song itself is quite modern as well.
I was having a conversation with my graphic designer-creative director homie [Faith Xue], and we were talking about rejecting nostalgia as a place to get comfort from. I view it more as something to pull from—like, we don't have to stop doing this thing just because it's outdated.

Maybe nostalgia is a response to how disposable our culture is. If I never stopped using my iPod, I never forgot these songs are in my iPod—they just became part of my daily life. It's not me trying to do some old shit, I just still like this shit. I'm still bumping Pretty Ricky's "Your Body." I never stopped. I never stopped listening to T-Pain's Epiphany. That influences me as much as some cool Thundercat shit I heard five years ago.

We don't got to throw shit away for the sake of it—and when you're throwing shit away and trying to rediscover it or bring it back, you have this cursory, shallow view of it. That's why you fuck up the nostalgia: Because you don't even know what you're doing. You're not well-versed in it. For what I'm doing, the nostalgia it could evoke in someone is more so their response to it versus me specifically trying to do nostalgia.

But I definitely acknowledge that my references, a lot of the time, are older. My fucking my mom's Gen-X, my dad's an older millennial, and I spent a lot of time around adults growing up. My taste is for sure skewed towards that, which is a little different because people usually have older parents.

Certain strains of 2000s nostalgia have been funny to me, because as someone who was a teenager back then, my perspective about that era was that it was redolent of '80s culture at times.
The '80s never went away—all the VH1 I Love the '80s shit, people love talking about the damn '80s. With the creative scene, it seems like a race—how obscure is the reference you're pulling? But that's where people get lazy. "I just pulled an obscure reference—this is a fucking random paparazzi photo of this famous person that you guys didn't see because it wasn't on his Instagram page."

As far as immersion is concerned, I view it as, "Okay, if I listen to enough R&B, I can start to think in R&B." I don't even gotta try to copy. I know exactly what Jodeci would do here—I know what fucking Lloyd might do here—so I'm gonna think about that as I'm doing my own thing.

I liked the karaoke video you put out with "MTV's Pimp My Ride." Your label is also called autotune karaoke. Tell me about what role karaoke plays in your life.
I named my label autotune karaoke because, when I first started doing shows as zayALLCAPS and trying to do autotune live, I described it as feeling like I was onstage doing karaoke to my own songs—and I was like, "These two phrases sound really good together." If somebody fucking spray-painted them, it would look sick. They're harmonious—and there's clearly a juxtaposition, because autotune is robotic but karaoke is supposed to be hella human. It's really about regular people singing—and then [the label name] goes even deeper, because they're both technological advancements. The dude in, I think, Japan made the karaoke machine. Someone had to make autotune. Also, I'm half-Filipino, and a super important part of Filipino culture is karaoke. That's why my DJ name is DJ Swagalog—it's a play on Tagalog.

Something that really blew me away was when you sampled Björk on "Boy (V)." Sampling Björk is one of those things where it does not always work—but you made it work!
I felt like I hadn't heard anyone sample her, or at least that song, in that way. Once again, it felt like one of those moments where it was like, "Damn, this is so obvious. How have I not fucking heard this in a really big rap song? How come Lil Wayne hasn't done this? Once I chopped it up, I realized I could just spam the sample on some Cam'ron shit. It was really fun, and the beat my homie Kobe already made like just played into it well because it was hella bass with nice little textures underneath. I like my music to be a little busy, so he did the correct producer thing as far as letting there be room for my voice to breathe on the track.

With Björk, in my mind I have a mental queue of artists I should listen to. It's mostly legends—like, "Oh damn, I haven't listened to the Cure yet, I know they got some shit. I haven't listened to fucking Ray Charles." Björk was one of those artists, so on a whim I was like, "Let me just check her out." I was in the grocery store one time and I just remembered that, so I went to the greatest hits and I recognized the title "Venus As a Boy" because I'd seen people post the song—and I was hooked, bro. I couldn't stop listening to that song for days. It fucked me up. It blew my mind—the production, her voice, the lyrics. Then I saw the video and I was just hella hooked. I really was stuck on that one song for a minute, and then eventually I went and listened to Vespertine and some of the other albums and I enjoyed them, but "Venus As a Boy" is for sure my favorite one.

Do you have the thing as a listener where you hear something from an artist that's so good that you're almost afraid to check out their other stuff, for fear of being disappointed?
Yep, absolutely. I feel that way about billy woods. I'm super duper stuck on Maps. I haven't stopped listening to it since I heard it. I know all that shit's fire, I'm sure it's all really good, I heard a few other songs, he's obviously very technically proficient and a great writer—but Maps is, like, magical to me. There's so much to unpack, and I'm just not done yet.

Let's talk more about the art of sampling in general.
I pretty much started off my music journey sampling a lot. My parents are real rap nerds—and when I say rap nerds, they like everything. They had a real mid-2000s underground kick—Def Jux, Little Brother, fucking Hieroglyphics, et cetera, all that shit. When I was a kid making beats, my first favorite producer was 9th Wonder, so all I was doing was making fake-ass 9th Wonder beats for a few years. Then I got into Madlib, then I got into Dilla.

Sampling is something that I can do in my sleep, and it's been nice to incorporate that into the music I make now that's significantly more composed. It'll be, like, 80% composed, and I might throw some little samples in there for texture. The Björk thing, that was easy and fun—that didn't feel like work. I really have a deep love and appreciation for sampling. That shit takes me back to being a kid.

Talk to me more about the Los Angeles scene as it stands for you right now.
The beat scene is very much healthy and alive in L.A. A lot of people that are the architects of the community reach out and organize other shit—like fucking Dibiase, who's been a legend for a minute. He sets up events worldwide. He'll do streams so, like, Japan can join in, and he'll go set up events in Sacramento and other cities, like 404 Day. Some of the companies have been pretty involved, like Serato and shit. I'll say that it feels nice to go to a beat community event. It's like, "Damn, my algorithm didn't bring me here." It's just real, raw creativity.

It seems like the L.A. jazz and neo-soul shit is thriving. I know fucking Minaret Records is doing a lot of stuff. I have this friend Tita who throws a jazz night every fucking month, and it seems like there's always different people pulling up to that shit. This other guy named Bobby, I don't know his last name, but he has a jazz thing monthly in Highland Park. There's a bunch of shows all the time—like, fucking Leimert Park, there's always rapping and spoken-word shows and jazz shit over there. There's even people that still fuck with SoundCloud rap—that never left, there's events for that shit going on every month.

It's pretty deep, and what's cool is that, since I DJ, I've been able to pretty consistently find places where I can play my eclectic music, and people are into that shit.

There is something to be said for a community that's putting stuff together. The media focuses on different types of regionalism sometimes, but it's something that is always happening even when they're not focusing on it.
No doubt. I'm pretty happy and satisfied when shit doesn't blow up. I want people to like eat and be successful, but I do appreciate not always scaling shit up.