The first I heard about CENSORED dialogue through a premiere in Kim's No Bells mix this year, and was intrigued to follow up. I found that I had been sleeping on an incredible rapper and producer, and asked Kim if she wanted to interview CENSORED dialogue for Finals when she released her Pyrex Housecat album. The album is out now and here's the chat. Thank you Kim and thank you CENSORED dialogue!

I first met CENSORED dialogue, aka Jazz, around the time I moved to Texas through a mutual friend of ours, Meridien, aka enfleshed. Born and raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, what she refers to as the “shady 580,” CENSORED dialogue has carved out a lane in the world of alternative hip-hop over the past few years, finding acclaim for her debut LP, Afro Pessimist, and her collaborations with Chloe Hotline, Backxwash, and STKHM, the collective she belongs to.

After attending college in Waco, Jazz moved to Austin, where she’s spent the past few years devising her new album, Pyrex Housecat. Initially conceived in 2019, the release is meant to provide a multi-faceted portrait of the artist, resisting the typecasting she felt in the aftermath of her first LP. The 13 songs here traverse topics such as love, heartbreak, the music industry, grief, crime, fashion, fast cars, and more. I’ve had it on rotation since it dropped and this past weekend, I had the pleasure of chatting with Jazz after seeing her perform at a local venue.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity, and cohesion.

You’ve been working on Pyrex Housecat for like 5-6 years now. How does it feel to have the album out finally?

Good! I guess it’s been 2 years of actually working on this. Some of those songs started in 2019 but they were just ideas. I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” because I couldn’t make beats well at that time. But yeah it feels really good for it to be out there. I feel like every time you put out an album, at least for me, it’s like my baby now out in the world. I feel like probably how real parents feel about their kids like you hope n—-as at school don’t put that n—-a in a swirly (laughs). It’s like damn I hope n—-as treat my kid cool, people like my kid, I hope my kid’s not a fucking dickhead. The reception’s been really cool. It just made me happy to see people talk about the project.

CENSORED dialogue at Hole in the Wall, Austin, 08/30/2024

For the songs that you conceptualized back in 2019, do you feel like your vision changed a lot?

Entirely. For example, the first song that was way back was La Salle, which at the time, I made that first section because I was just tryna experiment with uh… I love that fuzzy auto-tune sound that you heard a lot on what Kanye did on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and this n—-a I knew was like “You can put a fuzz pedal on the pedal board thing in Logic and route that with the auto tune and you’ll get that sound.” So I was putting my voice through guitar pedals basically and just fucking around with the sounds and the newer version of the song is tamed down a lot more but you still hear it a bit.

I was doing that and the drums were not done right because I was just making like, I grew up on like the boom bap rap shit. I liked trap music but that’s not what I was making because that didn’t feel like my lane for a long time. I was kind of a nerd growing up and I was around n—-as doing a lot of shit, but I wasn’t doing a lot of shit until I got older and then it was like, “Well now I gotta start fending for myself so I’m doing the shit.” So that was my first time rapping about the shit I was doing, like 2019 or whatever. But I didn’t know how to make trap drums, I didn’t have any drum packs for trap music, so the shit just was off and so I was like “I’m gonna put this in the vault for later one day,” and then I redid all the drums. I kept all the synths and horns and then the second half where it turns into the r&b section, that was all completely redone like a year ago. I rewrote that whole back section because I always wanted to make a song like Nights by Frank Ocean, where he has the same lyrics in the first half and the second half but because of the way it’s arranged and the production it takes on like two different lives.

Did the lyrics change over time, as well?

La Salle, the lyrics are mostly the same. I tweaked it a decent bit, but a lot of this album is a time capsule of my life from 2019 to 2021, what I was doing then with flashbacks and anecdotes of shit from how I grew up sprinkled in.

The rollout for this album was pretty extensive and I loved all the singles and artwork. Obviously, as an independent musician, that’s a lot of different parts to manage. What was it like navigating that side of things and do you feel like it was a learning experience?

It’s kind of funny. When I did my first album, Afro Pessimist, I did a single every week. I dropped a single the first week, a second single the second week, I dropped a music video for the third single, and then I dropped the album. I had been working on that album for like two years and I was just ready to get it done and my homie Chloe Hotline was like, “We can get this shit done by June.” I was like, “Oh shit, Juneteenth is a Friday, and that’s an industry drop day.” So it was rushed anyways and I was broke as fuck, so I didn’t have money to do any of this shit right.

This album, I knew I wanted merch on release day. I knew I wanted a proper roll out with the different covers. I had a certain vision in my head of what I wanted these singles to be and single artwork to look like. As a kid, I would go through my dad’s CD collection and pop them bitches open and read the lyric books while I was listening to the album. I would look at the photography in the booklet and the back of the album, the inside of the tray, the CD itself. I would obsess over how much you could do to bring people into the world of the album. I also think that visuals are really critical. If there’s nothing I know of that drops on a certain week, I’ll go through the new releases on Apple Music and look at cover art, like “I don’t know what this is but the cover art is hard as shit so ima give it a chance.”

And then I wanted to do Afro Pessimist Remastered, and throw on some tracks that we didn’t include in the first version and I wanted to do a merch collection. It went from being a little anniversary thing to, “Actually, this is harder than I thought,” which made it a good test run for the Pyrex roll out. If I can figure out all the moving parts now, I can figure out where I need to schedule them so I can make sure everything comes out when it needs to.

That’s also thanks to Lucia for helping me get the mix in, Marcy for getting the mastering, Meredith for designing the merch, Rosei for the photography. She helped me bring a lot of the shit in my head to reality. I design clothes and I do graphic design and photography and like… I’m not good at mixing and mastering (laughs), but I do a lot of stuff and dabble because I love it. Part of this has been slowly figuring out how to build my quote-unquote “team” and it’s also just been trial and error because I don’t got nobody that’s guiding me or like showing me the ropes.

The live set was super sick. Did it feel different to perform the songs now that they’re officially out?

It was my first show since the album came out and also my first show since SXSW 2023. I haven’t performed since then because I got tired of performing unfinished demos or performing the same songs from AP. I was like, “I need to lock in and finish this album and not show my face for like a year.” So it felt good to do that shit. I was really nervous about the set last night too because that was my first time using live effects so I was praying that my laptop and interface were going to work and there wasn’t going to be too much latency.

That was also my first time rapping with no backing track. I feel like if it’s “real hip-hop,” there’s no backing track. It’s just hard for me being asthmatic and I was going through it yesterday. I’m never wearing a mask to perform again, like at least not fully over my face. I’ve seen rappers perform with the shiesty and they pull it down to at least under their lip. I was like, “Ugh, it won’t look as cool, it’s not the character,” but I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be to breathe.

CENSORED dialogue at Hole in the Wall, Austin, 08/30/2024

You’re a very physical performer and I feel like watching you rap almost feels like you’re acting your bars out. And you were talking on stage about asthma. How does that affect the way you prepare for or pace your sets? Or does it?

Kind of, like I was working out a lot. I would be going for runs and shit trying to make sure my stamina was good before shows. If I need a break, I’ll just sit for a second and breathe and hit my inhaler like I did last night. People rock with it.

It’s part of the ethos.

One time I hit the inhaler on the mic and the crowd went up for that shit. So yeah it works out because the way I record is I do everything in one take usually. The only time I punch in my shit is with singing because if I sing for 16 bars straight, it’s not gonna be pitch perfect the whole time. It’s a lot easier on the back end to go into Melodyne and tweak certain shit when the note is just a little flat or sharp, versus you’re missing the mark now because you’ve been going for 16 bars straight. But when I rap, I do everything one take because I feel like it gets the energy right for the record. So my verses are written in a way where I can stagger my breaths so it works the same way live. Now, this is my shame but I was a choir kid so… (laughs)

That’s awesome. I was in middle school chorus.

I was in the high school choir. I was in the honor choir, so we competed across the state and across Texas too in like large groups, small groups, ensemble, quartet, duets, solo, sight reading, all of that. I was competing in all of it. I learned a lot about breath control and all that shit then, so I carried that into how I perform now. It lets me be a crazy bitch and run around, jump around.

Watching you perform La Salle last night, which is also my favorite song on the album, all of a sudden I was like, “Oh wow, you’re really hitting notes,” so I was wondering if you had any vocal training.

It’s funny because I can hit some of those notes naturally, it just won’t sound as great. I don’t like the way my falsetto sounds, so specifically on the highest part of that song, I recorded it in my chest voice and then used Little AlterBoy to pitch it up an octave and then tweaked the formant a little bit to sound somewhat realistic. I have a very fragile vocal timbre when I sing and sometimes it works and sometimes I’m like, “Ugh.” When I get this music shit going for real, I want to get a vocal coach to figure out how to refine my register and what works best for how my vocals are naturally predisposed. I also sing different than I did pre transition and I talk different. In choir, I was kind of a bass/baritone. I could hit like G3 or G2. I had a very low range and I talked super fucking deep because puberty hit my voice like a fucking train, it was so bad. Now, I don’t talk that way and I don’t sing that way either, so it’s very different.

A lot of life changes have transpired since Afro Pessimist. A big one, of course, is moving to Austin. How are you feeling about Austin these days and how has that changed since you moved here?

It’s changed a lot, good and bad. Like a year ago, I was a lot more negative about Austin. Once I understood this city for what it was, it’s like, “Alright, whatever.” I think before I moved out here, I had a certain perspective and expectations and any time you have expectations, that puts you in a spot to be disappointed. My sister Lilli, not my blood sister but that’s been my homie since 2013, she moved here in 2018 so I would come visit her all the time. She’s Mexican, so where she lived there would be like Black and brown people, so I thought the city was reasonably diverse. Then I moved here and I was like, “Yo, what the fuck.” I thought this place was gonna be some like trans Mecca or whatever, and then I went to New York and I was like, “Oh, so Austin is not that.” Austin I had to realize is great for trans people or queer people if you’re white and if not, (laughs) okay bro. At one point, I was like, “Fuck this shit,” but I’ve been coming around on it. Shit like Lush, the jungle series they do out here, BPM, Bitches Play Music, that shit I really fuck with, like seeing underground Black and brown queer people coming together for this music shit, dance music is really cool.

That’s another thing about Austin. I didn’t really listen to dance music like that. I was in small town Oklahoma so nobody was like, “N—-a, turn on that Moodyman!” Nobody was like, “Put on that Tim Reaper!” I didn’t know no fuckin’ Drexciya. I moved out here and I was like, “Damn, hip-hop is not really that popping.” I thought it was, but I realized SXSW is different from the rest of Austin, so the hip-hop love is not the same. I’m not going to no psych rock shows, so I was just going to see dance music and I didn’t know a lot about it. I spent a year just chilling with my friends, meeting people, getting behind the decks, watching it be done, stealing track ids, Shazamming shit, finding out what I liked. Right before I moved out here, I was really into eldia, like quinn, dazegxd, gum, so I was listening to that, but that was my only connection to it. When I moved out here, I started piecing things together… I like jungle… I like house… I like these types of things.

Impatient is a song that has breaks and stuff, you could say it has club production. Do you feel like that track was born out of those experiences?

Definitely. After about a year and a half of living out here, I started trying to make my own jungle shit because jungle is hands down my favorite dance music genre. I feel like it shares a lot of the same DNA with hip-hop, just like loving breaks and chopping breaks and it’s a very hip-hop bpm, just double time. I know some people like the ragga jungle shit that’s more like Jamaican dub influenced, but I really love what I call “PS2 Jungle,” that’s really melodic and has lush pads. dazegxd is one of my favorite producers ever because I remember I heard Tell Me years ago before I was really deep into jungle and I was like, “This reminds me of shit I heard as a kid in video games, but way more Black.” It has an r&b vocal that’s sped up and mixed with these breaks and it just feels like that perfect Venn diagram. That’s kind of what inspired Impatient.

Was Impatient one of the songs you had the idea for before you moved to Austin?

Not at all. That was a track that came to me in 2022. I had the melody in my head and I had the hook. I sat down one day in Ableton and just laid that down and kept layering more instruments from Logic and then putting the breakbeat on it and then just layering and layering. I can’t say the game because that company likes to sue, but I took a game from that franchise, some people clocked it, I layered that in and chopped it up a bit to fit the time signature.

That's so sick. Any places you like to go in Austin these days?

Skate park (laughs). I love House Park a lot. There’s a skate park near Manor Rd that’s great when there’s less than 10 people there. I really do not be leaving the house unless it’s to skate or it’s music related for the most part. I don’t drink, so there’s not a lot to do in Austin if you’re not an alcoholic. I picked the greatest city on Earth to try to get sober in honestly (laughs), but yeah I fuck with House Park. I fuck with Mabel Davis.

Mabel Davis is chill.

I fuck with Empire because the Lush jungle night is there. I like a lot of food spots. Shout out to Titaya’s. Shout out to Pad Thai Cuisine off 51st street. Taqueria Arandinas on Riverside, I’d die for that bitch. Rosita’s Al Pastor on Riverside, I’d die for that bitch. I like Counter Cafe, but it’s so expensive I don’t go no more. And Hole in the Wall! I hadn’t been to Hole in the Wall until the first time some weeks ago to see some homies perform.

It was my first time there last night.

When I got booked there I was like, “Fuck yeah, I’m down.” And they were really nice. The sound dude last night was like, “We need more queer hip-hop shit out here and I want to see more of it at Hole in the Wall.” I’ve never had venue workers just be like, “We need more of you in this space,” so that was really cool.

What sort of music were you listening to at home growing up? What was the music you were listening to as you came into your own musical identity?

I came up in a really musical family. My mom’s side of the family is all from Oklahoma. My family had a church that got burned down in the Tulsa massacre and they rebuilt it and my great-great-grandpa was like the minister of the church, and then my great-grandpa was leading it too, and then my grandma, she was a teacher and a principal, but she was involved in the church and the ministry. My great-grandma played the organ, my grandma played piano, my momma played piano in the church, my uncle played saxophone, my cousins play like sax, French horn, my sister plays clarinet, my brother plays sax, so I grew up playing drums. One of my aunties, she sang backup for Diddy on tour. That didn’t last long. They’re Seventh Day Adventist so I doubt that… (laughs) my auntie was like, “Yeah, I’m at the Diddy party!”

CENSORED dialogue at Hole in the Wall, Austin, 08/30/2024

My dad is from Buffalo and he grew up rapping. He was in the 70’s as a teenager rapping when that was becoming a thing. So he was like the OG, like the proto rapper type shit, and then he went into college. I don’t know if it’s true but he says he helped DJ Clue learn how to DJ. I was like, “Man, why the fuck you aint do this!” He was like, “I grew up in poverty. I was trying to get the fuck out and we thought that shit was a trend.” So I always give him shit like, “I coulda been a nepo baby!”

So yeah, my dad’s a huge hip-hop head. All the time, it was like Jay, Nas, Eminem. Then, I would have Ludacris CDs, Lil Wayne CDs. Kanye was the thing that changed my life as a kid. My dad would play The College Dropout when it came out and then I remember when Late Registration came out I was like 8. I heard We Major in the car and I was like, “I don’t know what they’re talking about,” but I just heard the (sings melody) like that shit was crazy, the horns, the synth, the Jon Brian arrangement, the Warryn Campbell with Ye and like the (sings beat). I was like, “What the fuck is this!” and then it cuts out and he’s like, “Can I talk my shit again?” and then that horn. I said, “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know what the fuck they sayin’, but this is what I wanna do with my life. I don’t know how they made this shit but my life purpose is figuring out how.”

I would burn everything I liked to CDs when I was in like 2nd, 3rd grade and I would draw on them or make my own little cover arts and I would take the tracks I like, like a 50 Cent track, or a Kanye track, or a Ludacris track, or like a Jill Scott track, I was taking the shit I liked and sequencing it like an album. I would put my shit in a little Koss CD player and walk around at school. Kids would be like “What are you listening to?” and I would be listening to like Drive Slow off Late Registration. I’d play it for them like, “He said, ‘Ridin’ something candy coated, crawling like a caterpillar!’” and kids would be like, “What the fuck are you talking about?” They would not get it and I’d be like whatever, y’all are lame.

Kid Cudi I heard on Pandora on my iPod touch and that changed my brain because I didn’t know you could rap about being sad. I found like, Missed Calls by Mac Miller, someone showed me that shit on YouTube in like 5th grade. I was getting into Eminem heavy. Then, I was going through my dad’s CD case. I would just periodically do that shit when I was bored. I found like Hybrid Theory by Linkin Park and that shit changed my life. I was like 10 or 11. I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck this is. This don’t look like none of the other albums my dad has in this CD case.” It was a bunch of white dudes with tattoos and piercings and dyed hair and shit and the cover art was crazy, all of the illustrations and shit were crazy. I remember when I put that bitch in I was like, “Yo, n—-as is rapping but it’s like metal and it’s fire.” Guitar Hero was out so I was looking up all the bands I found on Guitar Hero and I got really into Linkin Park and I started getting into metal and grunge heavy.

High school, I was deep into TDE, the whole Beast Coast, like Pro Era, A$ap Mob, The Underachievers. I loved Flatbush Zombies. I loved Action Bronson. The thing that changed my life forever was Odd Future. I loved every member. I started getting into The Internet and that got me into like neo-soul, funky kind of shit. I grew up hearing those records and that made me start going back to like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, and shit. Also Death Grips I got into in high school and started getting into like industrial and shit too. I was the kid who was like annoyingly into Death Grips. I would be using class assignments to write about Death Grips songs.

I think my biggest artist as an adult, there’s not a lot of shit that’s made me change my view on shit in hip-hop. Dance music is all new to me so I’m still malleable and learning and finding shit I fuck with. But JPEGMAFIA changed a lot for me. When Cornballs came out, that was a really big inspiration for this album.

CENSORED dialogue at Hole in the Wall, Austin, 08/30/2024

Do you have any big influences as a performer?

Tyler the Creator. I’ve seen that n—-a on tour like four, five times from the Cherry Bomb tour to now. The Cherry Bomb tour was one of the first concerts I been to where it wasn’t like… you see Drake on stage or something and that’s cool, but it’s a stadium show and Drake’s not running around that much. I saw Beyonce on the Mrs. Carter tour and that’s Beyonce, like she’s flying through the arena. But to see a n—-a off the strength of just a microphone, maybe a couple homies behind him, like command everything, that was crazy.

I remember when n—-as hated Cherry Bomb and that’s still my favorite Tyler album to this day. I was like 17 when it came out, so that album was about this like independence time for me. It deviated from what he was doing and from what rap sounded like at the time. This is a rap album where n—-as is screaming and shit, like distorted and blown the fuck out, like the title track, and then you’ve got Find Your Wings with Roy Ayers, you’ve got the chords on Buffalo… all those things fit together in this way that was cacophonous but beautiful, to me at least. So when I saw that shit on tour, and I heard Pilot live, I was like, “Yo, there’s a way to do this shit.”

Then to see him from there to the Flower Boy tour, like, the set design is crazy now, he’s got the budget to push this shit. That’s how I always felt, like I saw a vision behind me when I’m on stage and when I get touring and I’m big enough to have someone who’s like a stage designer, I have these other visions. It’s funny looking back because I feel like that n—-a was in the same mindset, like he was seeing the shit then, and now he has it.

Teezo Touchdown, I saw that n—-a on his most recent tour in May here at Emo’s… Whew… That n—-a is a performer down. I was so inspired seeing him because I’m just a really big fan of what he’s doing right now. Also it was the first time I’ve been to a show post-COVID where the crowd was well-behaved and nice to each other. I left there proud to be a Teezo fan because I was like if this is the community of people as a hardcore Teezo fan, then I’m happy to be a part of that. JPEG, amazing performer, opposite crowd (laughs). The white boys don’t know how to act!

I didn’t mention but Danny Brown was a really big inspiration for me in high school. My parents were really strict so I would get grounded all the time for shit. When I was grounded, I would just be on the internet all day, like reading blogs and like on reddit and like hip-hop boards and forums, just trying to find new shit to check out. Blog era shit where you could get like a Chiddy Bang/Q Tip collab, like that shit would never happen today! Breakfast is still one of my favorite albums, I love Chiddy Bang. But Danny Brown is one of my favorite things to come out of the blog era. XXX and Old both have like high energy in the beginning and then the real shit at the end, which is how I sequenced Pyrex.

Oh and Childish Gambino! I don’t know how I didn’t mention that. That’s where STKHM comes from is that song, Zealots of Stockholm. I love Because The Internet. I was listening to his early shit like, Break All The Lights, the Adele remix he did, the really cringey like Asian girl bars, my cardigan from Rag and Bone, I thought that was the hardest shit I ever heard… When the YouTube app was built into the iPod Touch, if you played the song through once before you left the house, it was still cached, so I would always have one Gambino song I would keep running back all day.

How did you go from being someone who’s really into music to someone who makes music?

It’s a very long progression, honestly. I started writing my first raps in like 3rd grade. It was about, like, God and homework and video games. I was just trying to figure out how to put words together. But then my cousin, Leland, wanted to be a rapper too. He’s like 5 or 6 years older than me. They lived up by Oklahoma City where my grandma lives and so anytime I went to Oklahoma City, I would be there with my cousins.

When we were at my grandma’s house, she had a computer. We weren’t allowed on it, so me and him would sneak on because he got me really into Common and Lupe Fiasco and we both loved Kanye. We would pull up the instrumental for like Go by Common or Drive Slow or my cousin would find random instrumentals, a lot of Houston shit, Paul Wall, Mike Jones. We would pull up the Sitting Sideways beat and we would rap and he would challenge me like, “Let’s see who can write the better verse in 30 minutes,” or we’d have to battle each other. We would write these verses and then make our cousins pick who had the better verse. I always act like I’m not, but I’m actually like really competitive about shit. There’s the video of Diddy where he’s in the studio coked out of his mind and he’s like, “N—-a, you throw me in the jungle, I’m coming out with minks!” And I get that way about certain shit. I feel that way about rapping, I’m like, “N—-as not touching my beats! N—-as not touching my bars! I’m Ethering n—-as! N—-as don’t want the smoke!” Even though I love this art form and everyting, I love my friends, as soon as I get on the mic I’m like, “Fuck you n—-as!”

It’s important, you gotta keep it to business right?

I think that was part of it. I was like, “Okay, I gotta be the best.” I was tryna outrap my cousin, and he’s got like 6 years on me. I would go home from the summer just filling up notebooks. I remember the first time I wrote a good bar was in 5th grade and I sent it to my cousin. He was like, “This is actual wordplay, what the fuck!”

The first glimpse of CENSORED dialogue came at like 13/14 years old. I went from writing cool bars to trying to get into storytelling and emotional shit. In 9th grade, my homie had a little drum machine and he always had organs and guitars and shit so we would just dick around. He had an iMac and we got GarageBand on that bitch. My grandma would give me her old records she didn’t use anymore so I would put them on his turntable and we’d track them into the computer. We didn’t even know what chopping was. We just thought it would be funny to loop certain pieces or make them stutter and shit. We would be looping shit or cutting and splicing stuff and then taking loops that were already in GarageBand and layering them and then we would start fucking up the loops and cutting up the loops so we were just fucking around. We made this little three track EP that’s lost to time.

Then, I got the bug. My dad bought me an Akai MPD. He didn’t tell me he was doing it. It’s weird, my parents wanted me to be a doctor, but my dad also has this secret side that wants to encourage me to do music, but not directly though, because that’s not correct, right? But he bought me the MPD and it came with the free trial of Ableton. I had a Windows XP laptop with like two gigs of RAM, so if you opened more than two tracks in Live 9 Lite, it would just blue screen. So I was like, “Okay, I guess I’ll just make GarageBand beats at my friend’s house.” Then, at 17 years old, I got a new laptop. It was a decent joint and I could get like Reaper and Ableton working on that. I started trying to understand how to record in a DAW, like vocals and shit.

Then, in college, there was a free recording studio on campus, in the basement of the library, but it was not for making music. There were these little portable recording booth things and they had podcast mics. It was designed for like, if you have a video project, you can record your audio. The thing is me and the homies, we were kind of punk with the shit in the way Black kids usually are. We would just be in the studio all day. When someone wasn’t in class, they was in the studio and then n—-as would get out of class and go straight to the studio and we’d all post up there.

That’s how I made my first mixtape when I was like 18, 19. I ended up taking that down but some of the singles are still out. I started getting this buzz throughout Texas where if I ever went to a concert in Austin or Dallas, people would run up to me. So I had this little buzz going, and I was like, “Cool, this is lit.” Then in 2018, I came out as trans and I watched, in real life and with the music shit, like basically 50% of people were just like, “Oh nah, good night, like peace.” I was done with everything, music completely on hold. At that point, I didn’t know any trans people who were rapping at all, so I was just like, “Who the fuck wants to hear this shit?”

Then like 2019, my homie Waylin was like, “Yo, we should make a fuckin collab album,” and they just kept pushing, sending me tracks and sending me beats. I would rap on some of them. It got to a point where we had fun with it and we lost track of how many things we did, because the files were not organized at all. We were like, “Let’s just start from scratch and keep this momentum going,” and so that’s all I had.

And then Christmas 2019, I was about to turn 22, my mom was like, “What do you want for Christmas?” That was rare because once I turned 16, my parents were like “If it’s not for school, we’re not paying for it.” So it was rare for my mom to be like, “Oh, what do you want?” I was like, “Yo, the $99 version of Ableton.”

So I got that bitch and I hit the ground running. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I just kept learning and watching YouTube tutorials. I knew a little about music theory from being in choir and playing drums. I was at that point where I was like, “Tyler produces his own shit, Earl produces his own shit, Mac Miller produces his own shit.” I was getting into JPEG and he makes his own beats. Kanye, obviously. Also, I was broke as fuck and I was tired of paying money for beats. It just kept going from there.

Five years later, it feels a lot more earned in a lot of ways. I’m kind of glad because I think if I had actually managed to blow up at 19/20 years old, I would have been so fucked up. I had a bad drug addiction. I didn’t know shit about fuck. I was really bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, eager, thinking the best of people. All that shit would’ve had me cooked. I would’ve been… yeah, no.

What’s next for CENSORED dialogue?

My first next plan is to put coilovers on my car (laughs). I got this set of coilovers on Facebook Marketplace for cheap and they’ve been sitting on my porch for months. They got cobwebs on them and shit so I gotta clean those bitches off and make sure all the measurements are right and finally mount those bitches to the car and get the car aligned. There’s a drift event coming up in 3 weeks that I wanna make, so that’s my immediate plan.

I want to do the videos for the project. That’s really one of my main priorities. And then Xochitl aka Locuust/YoursTruuly, whose album show it was last night, that’s my little sister. Me and her have been flirting with the idea of doing a collaboration project for a minute. She’s only 20, that’s the crazy part. She’s so brilliant the way she’s improved as a rapper from last year and the year before is exponential and her production has always been cold. Even though she’s my little sister, I look up to her as an artist in so many ways because she’s just so talented. I’ve been wanting to do something with her because our energies are very different, but our approach to music is very similar. I kind of want it to be like a dual collab, like production and then me, her, and our homie Blakchyl as the rappers. I’m tryna feature a lot of the homies out here that rap like Khxnid, Kardinal from last night, Chucky from last night, the homie Free Hamze, the homie Ben Buck, I think my homegirl Hellcat! out here, also my homegirl Seina. I feel like Austin hip-hop is better than a lot of hip-hop out here right now. Texas or otherwise, we outrapping n—-as, n—-as is not barring out like us, plain and simple. Austin is doing some different shit and n—-as is sleep because everyone thinks it’s about the fucking rock music that’s going on out here.

CENSORED dialogue and Locuust/YoursTruuly at Hole in the Wall, Austin, 08/30/2024

I wanna do an Austin ass project before I move to New York because I feel like that’s just the perfect send off. I’m very grateful… This is the first time I’m living in a big city. It’s a lot of adjustment, but I’m really grateful for a lot of the experiences and the people I was fortunate enough to come across in this time.

I didn’t drop at all except like one single between Pyrex and AP and I don’t wanna do that again. Now that I’m in a better headspace and I understand a lot more about the game, I want to be showing my face consistently and putting shit out. I made 32 songs for Pyrex and only dropped 13. I’m probably gonna put out like EPs or little singles or something. I really appreciate the love and the feedback so I wanna keep y’all fed, but also I take the album shit serious. The solo album to me is the moment and I have a lot of ideas for that shit, but some of this shit I haven’t seen done before, so it takes time to go from a concept to a listenable thing.

And then whoever’s reading this, the big thing I really wanna do is put together a little east coast mini tour for sometime in the fall. People have been hitting me up like come to New York, come to Philly, come to DC… I’m trying to put out feelers for people because I’ve booked a tour for myself before, a mini tour through Texas, and that was the most stressful shit ever. So I’m like, who’s booking shows that wants to book me? I have ideas for line ups, but I want to find resources and find people who do that shit. So if anybody’s reading this that knows somebody or is doing the shit, any help would be appreciated!