In the Bay Area rap scene you can still find glimpses of the genre alive in its purest form. The region’s hip-hop culture is known for its independence and insular spirit born of a combination of pimp culture, Black Panther ideology, and funk music. “There’s no other place in the country where you can make as much noise on an independent level,” said Chris Graham, a co-founder of indie rap label Dogday Records that put out full-lengths by the likes of the Coup and Andre Nickatina, in a 1995 issue of Vibe magazine. “Houston and Atlanta have indie scenes, but the Bay has more than just indie labels—it has indie everything.”
Times have changed. You generally know what happened: the homogeneity of the internet, widespread gentrification, the influence of major labels. Still, every now and then, I come across a Bay Area rapper who captures the deeply local looseness that is ingrained in the greatest music to come out of the area. One of the best of the new generation is East Oakland’s 1100 Himself, a calm lyricist with an ear for top-down cruising Bay Area slap beats and a knack for grounded, slice-of-life storytelling that feels meant for John Singleton and Hughes Brothers movies. “Big bro passed me an AR and said it’s time to shoot,” raps 1100 on 2020’s “The Set Up,” a two-part paranoid and kind of humorous action set piece with like-minded rapper and producer Mitchell. “I hear my uncle voice up in my head sayin’, ‘You should’ve hooped.’”
Outside of “The Set Up,” 1100’s stories are usually small and episodic with a recurring mix of family, friends, and girlfriends. “Do for Love” is the one where he takes a date to Quickly, an Asian fusion takeout spot in Oakland, with the hopes of bringing her back to his crib. “ATL” is when he falls so hard for a girl he met on IG that he ends up getting into it with her current man. He’s playing basketball at Bella Vista Park on “Vinyl,” and kicking himself for stealing from his stepfather on “My Fault 2.” It’s an unglamorous, self-examination of his upbringing and day-to-day that’s never trying too hard to be anything else.
His newest tape, Janky K, is one of his best: The laidback, jazzy beats have the hazy tint of a dream and his pen is sharper, threading together matter-of-fact crime stories and everyday life situations with the “this isn’t funny but it’s also kind of funny” demeanor of a Vince Staples. Here’s a sampling of what he’s up to on Janky K: getting into an argument with his grandmother for forgetting to bring her a Pepsi, playing video games, watching his boy whoop someone’s ass over a pair of shoes, trying to make it in the rap game. But the standout of the project is “RIP Brownsville Ka,” a confessional remix of “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev),” by Ka, the Brooklyn indie rap giant who died last year. “I wish my nigga wasn’t dead because now I’m feelin’ lonely/I used to shoot him gas money so he can pull up on me,” he raps, with the intimacy of a voice memo he’s leaving for himself to listen back to later.
He’s cooking up whatever he wants—whether that’s a spin on a decade-old Wolf track or Bay Area street rap posse cuts—in a way where he doesn’t fit neatly into any specific rap niche. That’s probably why he isn’t quite as marketable as the straightforward drill rap of Northern California (“I walked in Empire, they act like they ain’t never heard of me,” he once rapped on “Final 4,” about being overlooked by the extremely popular San Francisco–based distribution company), but, hey, existing outside of the general rap ecosystem is a Bay Area rite of passage. A few weeks back, I FaceTimed 1100 Himself, not long after he did a show at the Regency in San Francisco. He was at home, in Oakland, playing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his PlayStation 5. We chatted about his writing, rise, and the current Bay Area rap scene.
1100 Himself: Big T-shirts, white Air Forces, Blue Jays hats and shit.
I was just listening to whatever the fuck older people was playin’ around me. We ain’t had no access to change to song, so it was just whatever they was playin’.
Shit. A lot of Lil Wayne. A lot of Lil Boosie. My cousins would be on, like, Ludacris and T-Pain, and my older brother let me use his iPod and that motherfucker had everything from David Banner to Akon. I liked when they played Young Money, especially Lil Twist and Lil Chuckee ’cause they was young like me. I used to live with my grandma, and she used to like stuff with a lot of saxophones, and shit like R. Kelly and Anthony Hamilton. I think that’s where I get my ear from.
I liked what was pleasant to the ear. That’s how I started gravitating to the Tyler, the Creators, the Earl Sweathshirts, the Joey Bada$$es. I used to like how Tyler used to just be talkin’ on shit on, like, Bastard. He was so organic, and people was likin’ him genuinely being himself. And this was before cancel culture was popular, so he could get away with saying some skeptical shit.
They was listening to hella shit. I went to Oakland Tech so there was just a wide variety of people. But everyone was on Lil Yee from San Francisco heavy at that time. There was point in time I used to like DB tha General a lot, also P-Lo. It was a good time. We had an identity back then; you would hear some music and know it’s some Bay Area shit.
Motherfuckers is getting lost on what other people is doing. They see the success of other cities and just try to do that. But we don’t have their unity, we say we want it for ourselves but we can’t.
Yeah, I mean still we got a lot of talent and people take from us all the time, but we don’t have all the proper labels anymore. We only have Empire and Thizzler [on the Roof]. Empire is cool, but, if you from the Bay Area, there’s already 3,000 people on Empire and [a] bunch of them is bigger than you. How are you gonna get the proper push?
The shows are full of less natives. They don’t understand where you coming from. Nine times out of 10, the people that run these labels don’t be from Oakland. It’s just a lot of people coming from other places, so they just listening to music. How do you have a concrete sound when there’s so many new people, doing different shit?
That’s not our identity no more. We no longer doing the big white tees and ghost riding the whip.
I don’t know, for real, for real. I got a lot of stories, a lot of shit to rap about.
I remember hearing “Trapped in the Closet.” I always thought it would be cool to do some shit like that one day.
That just came to me and Mitchell one day. Me and Mitchell been joking and feeding off each other when we rap since I met him. I remember he was doing music before me. He was living in Calabasas at the time and DMed me saying he was coming back down to the Bay to work with me. He really came, played me some beats, and them motherfuckers was tough, so we been going since then. But we tried to make a quick back and forth story at first and people was fucking with it so we ran with it.
My uncle used to play this Nas song [“Rewind”] where he told a story backwards. He was telling that motherfucker backwards and it still made sense. I used to like that shit. His pen is impeccable.
I mean, I didn’t have no videos at first and was just dropping shit on SoundCloud. I had to figure out how to make you picture that shit in your head without that.
Just the normal hood movies. Watchin’ hella Baby Boy, Paid in Full, Menace II Society. Me and my cousin used to watch Bloodline; it was about two brothers: one was a cop, the other was in the streets.
I just be going through shit at different times, so however I feel in the moment is what I’m writing about.
My partner Chephewww hit me telling me he was tryna’ cook and shit. I been going down to San Jose to chill with him and he was just always cooking hella extravagant shit, like Caesar salad dips and croissant cookies. He get crazy. Shit blew my mind so much I needed to say some shit about it in the music.
She just hella funny and relatable, so stories about her just be coming off the top of my head.
My partner showed me the song and I was fucking with the song hella much. He was telling a story from three different perspectives and I could just really relate to the shit. After that I was fucking with him for a minute and then I heard he passed and was like, “Damn, this song got me through hella shit.” I had to get the beat and see what I could do with it. His pen was impeccable.
It’s cool to do shit for the hood, but that shit ain’t gonna get you nowhere. I’m just tryna expand my horizons, show people that I can do other genres and see if that pays off in the end.
Some people like it; some people don’t. They don’t really like it in Oakland, but when I go other places they love it.
They want it more rugged. Something they can relate to more, but I’m not on that type of shit no more so I can’t rap about it all the time.
For sure. Even now, there’s a couple people in Oakland that got it with that now, like Ovrkast. and Demahjiae. You wouldn’t even know they was from Oakland if they didn’t tell you. I feel like I’m like that, too.
[Laughs] Well, I’m trying to bridge the gap between Fredobagz and Ovrkast. Carve out my own lane in this rap shit.
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