‘There’s this theory,” says Joey Bada$$, stretching out on a chesterfield sofa at the celebrity hangout Beauty & Essex on the lower east side of Manhattan. “A-students end up working for C-students. It’s because A-students are the best at following instruction and direction, while the C-students just do what they’ve got to get done and are like, ‘Fuck this shit, I’m going to be my own boss.’ Essentially that’s what I am.”  While his theory is never likely to pass muster with a school board, in his case, it is hard to argue.  At the age of 20, the Brooklyn rapper (real name Jo-Vaughn Virginie Scott) has become one of the hottest properties in hip-hop, and he has done it all in his own, autodidactic way. He grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Flatbush in Brooklyn, with his St Lucian parents, and claims to remember listening at the age of two to Bed-Stuy’s most famous hip-hop export, Notorious BIG.  From an early age, he was exposed to poets such as Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr Seuss (whom he calls a genius). He attended poetry slams and became interested in acting, which eventually led him to apply for a position at LaGuardia, the performance arts high school that produced Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. He didn’t get in, but did land a spot at Edward R Murrow high school in Brooklyn, named after the CBS broadcaster and staunch critic of Joseph McCarthy, whose alumni include director Darren Aronofsky, artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and rappers Lil Mama and the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch. It was there that he decided to focus on rapping, rather than treading the boards.  “I got in there for theatre and acting, but by the time I got there and I felt the environment and the energy, it was like: ‘Holy shit! I can’t leave music alone.’ That school would just breathe it.”  While he was still at school he met the future members of his rap collective Pro Era. He began creating songs using a PlayStation 2 and an MP3 player, and eventually uploaded a freestyle on YouTube that was reposted on the World Star Hip-Hop site. That exposure led to an approach by manager Jonny Shipes (who has worked with Harlem rapper Smoke DZA, Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T. and, somewhat incongruously, R&B crooner Sean Kingston) and 18 months later his first mixtape, 1999 – a reference to the last year of hip-hop’s golden era – was released. On it, he used beats by masked hip-hop outlier Doom and New York legend Lord Finesse, and singled himself out as a young artist with an understanding of the footsteps he was walking in.  “I represent hip-hop in its form that you have to be very gifted with words on the microphone to be considered a fucking MC. Just to even get that title is an honour. You have to be really on your shit,” he says. “I was raised on a high standard. The people who were considered great in my household were people like Jay Z, Tupac and Nas. These are all great MCs who are very smart and that was always the level of what was considered great.”  To some, he is hip-hop’s great hope: an artist who references 90s greats, and who is true to “real hip-hop”. As with other younger New York MCs such as Bishop Nehru, the emphasis is on flow, vocal delivery and lyrical dexterity, rather than the call-and-response tracks that dominate radio playlists. He is depicted as the opposite of the gauche, materialistic and bellicose artists who rap about designer brands, guns and strippers, instead writing tracks that attack Wall Street. He is a throwback to rap’s glorious past, the chosen one. That’s the theory at least. But it is anathema to Bada$$, who sees the whole thing as an oversimplification.  “I ignore all that shit. I ignore expectations that people have for me,” he says. “I’m not going to do boom-bap shit for my whole career. That would be pointless. That would be no progression. No evolution. What good is an artist without growing?”  Growth and development are themes he brings up often. His debut album B4.DA.$$ (pronounced Before the Money) definitely sounds like progress. It boasts more than its fair share of boom-bap producers, with beats by DJ Premier and J Dilla getting a workover, but British audiences got their first large dose of Bada$$ when Zane Lowe debuted bonus track Teach Me, featuring pop maven Kiesza, which has shades of Rudimental’s upbeat pop.  Dipping his toes into the mainstream isn’t something he is concerned about (“I toured the whole world without having a charting song. I just need a good body of work”). Instead, he talks about the need to read voraciously and how he is always on the look out for music outside the parameters of hip-hop. He listens to neo-soul (“Erykah Badu-type vibes”), reads about spirituality (he has been known to quote Indian spiritualist Sri Chinmoy as well as Abraham Lincoln), consumes self-help books, and is well aware that he is – whether he likes it or not – a role model.  “It’s a crazy world that we live in and hip-hop being the culture that’s looked at by younger people in a higher light,” he says. “I feel responsible for a whole bunch of kids. So if Joey says it’s cool, then it’s cool. I could be talking about drugs and shit, and if I’m doing it and it’s cool, then they’re going to be affected by it. They’re going to start doing it.”  That higher profile means increased scrutiny of everything he does, good or bad. While on tour in Australia earlier this month, he was charged with assault after allegedly punching a security guard in the face. A separate controversy erupted the next day, when the Pro Era Instagram account posted what appeared to be a picture of Malia Obama wearing one of their official T-shirts, prompting certain rightwing media outlets in the US to brand the rapper a racist Marxist, seemingly because of tracks such as Survival Tactics, which took aim at the banking system and the police.  “I’ve seen recent articles where they were calling me a Marxist and anti-white gangster rapper,” he laughs. “These outlets depict me as a really bad person for whatever reason and it’s just like: ‘Wow, these people don’t know anything about me.’”  He is quick to dismiss the attempt to define him.  “They’re just trying to box me in and shit. They haven’t boxed me in, they’ve boxed people’s perceptions of me in. To me, though, there’s no box,” he says. “There never was a box.”  B4.DA.$$ is out now on Sony.
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