Where are you living right now?

I’m in LA, I’ve been here a couple of years. I'm originally from northern California. It wasn’t too big of a move but I mean, California is fucking massive. So, it's like a seven, eight-hour drive.

I hear you. I hear you. What’s going on in the background? Sounds like a grinder might be getting cleaned out.

Yeah, I'm grinding up some marijuana because I finished all my jobs for the day. I'm trying to make it so I don't smoke weed until I'm done with all my shit now. That has been really both that help and a weight on my life at the same time in different ways. I find that now I'm physically trying to improve myself while before I was focused on internal improvement.

I realized that drugs served to pull me down because during the day I don't need a boost. If I feel well and I do a drug it might influence that boost or change the course of the rest of my day. But when I'm done with a bunch of shit, like right now I have a feature to record that I already wrote and I'm at the point in the day where I have no more super intensive thinking to do and so I can relax and like smoke a bowl of marijuana.

I also haven't been smoking any blunts, which sucks because I liked them a lot. But, I don't know. I want to try and smoke weed in a healthier way, especially as I hopefully get more popular, make more money. I want to invest in ways to consume it. I want to be the healthiest I can since I’m trying to be the best artist I can be.

Yeah, man, no doubt. I saw you were posting on Twitter, you were trying to get sober. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

No. Yeah. I've been cutting out other drugs as well from my life. I haven't been smoking tobacco at all, which has been mainly what I've been cutting out this week, tobacco and alcohol. I used to consume much more of those things. It's weird to talk about it because it is a very recent part of my life. But I used to smoke two or three blunts to myself in a day. And that's a lot more tobacco than not at all. It is a big life change stopping. You can hear it in my voice. It's weird to talk about, but I know that I'm doing this because my body's cleansing a bunch of fuck shit from it, you know? And I'm just tired of that.

I don't want tobacco to have influenced my life negatively. Also, I stopped drinking liquor. I've had some bad experiences with liquor that makes it so when I smell it, I compulsively throw up. Same with edibles, weed chocolate, essentially I just can't take those things. I can only drink beer. I drank beer for a while then started drinking more and more. I would get to the point wherein one night I have eight beers with the homies, Now, I need to cap out at three and then move down to two and one. So, I literally have been just weaning off of all of that shit and keeping it in the nighttime, not influencing my day.

And I feel a lot more positive about it now. The reason I like it is that it is a big decision. It kind of becomes who you are, when you do it for years, you know? A big part of my art is talking about drug use and shit. So to be here right now, I feel like I'm not a version of myself people are used to seeing. You're interviewing a version of Darkie that's not really gonna be around for a long time. I'm going to be a very different person in six months than I am now. And I was a very different person a couple of months ago than I am now. So the interview will kind of be interesting.

Were you recording on drugs? I mean which ones particularly like you mentioned tobacco and marijuana, but were you dabbling in anything else?

I don't habitually use anything that isn't tobacco, marijuana. Alcohol isn't even as habitual. It’s more of an every three days type thing. I wouldn't make that a big part of my life for the last couple of weeks. It was a little bit worse when spider gang was over obviously cause we were just a bunch of guys getting fucked up, making music. But it's fun. I don't have to actually get high when I record. I have no preference. I find if anything I record better sober because my tongue isn’t dry. When you smoke your tongue gets a little dry or inflates and it makes it harder to maneuver in your mouth. So I prefer to be sober when I record just for the technicality in my voice.

Are you recording like three or four songs at a time and do you throw a lot of songs bunch away?

No. I don't have a whole lot in the vault because everything that I work on I tend to get use. There is some stuff that ends up in the vault, but it's typically not on purpose. Basically, if I write something and I don't know in my head that the part is good or good enough to drop, I won't even do it. I'll try to use it for something else or maybe it will come up later where I need some lyrics and I'll go through and be like, oh, this works really well for this. Thanks passed me.

But I don't make shit that doesn't get used really because I just don't work on something unless I hear it and I know exactly what to do already. That's just kinda how I make music. I can hear a song and just instantly know if it can be something that people will like or not just from my perspective. So I just have to trust that.

You mentioned spider gang. When did it begin and when did you decide to formalize it?

Fosho. So, I don't really think of time very solidly. One thing that I use to think of time more accurately in my life recently has been my Soundcloud account. So, I'm literally just going to go open my Soundcloud and I can like to tell you what happened at the times of each song being released. When I go down to my songs, to the beginning of even before Lil Darkie was even created, obviously spider gang didn't exist at that time. Actually, at that time I was part of a group that I was in before called the NCR with a bunch of people from Sacramento and that area of California, like the bay area shit. This is before I came out to LA or anything. I started Lil Darkie as a departure from my previous rap alias, Brahman, that I started not to really identify with as much anymore, but you can actually see it's on my newest song, Kali Ma featuring Brahman.

I used to be known as Brahman and my character was blue and represented Indian gods. And then I discovered through like an acid trip and researching my gods the Indian gods are supposed to be depicted as black. And in the scripture, they're said to be black as midnight. But then people depicted them as blue. Why? I researched it and it's because just shit over time, people started depicting them as blue because they're more “appealing”. If you look at some of the pictures of the Indian gods depicted as black, they're kind of terrifying and you don't want to have a faith of fear. So, sometimes they make them blue so that you could see their facial features better or they look less like “barbaric”.

And I suspect that art, more modern art has been depicted that way. In a lot of the old scriptures, there's a lot of black Indian gods, and when I see that’s how I feel inside. And so then I decided to like draw a character that was the same as my old one but then was just more black and therefore more deviant. When you see the Indian gods and stories like they're depicted as like ms gvs and almost like just playful, like just like people aren't but almost like children. And I feel like I identified with that in a different way than I identified with like having to be like a wise Brahman.

I used to be known as promise and my character was blue and represented Indian gods. And then I discovered that, you know, through like an acid trip and then through researching my gods, I realize, oh, the Indian gods are supposed to be depicted as black. And in the scripture they're, they're said to be black as midnight. But then like people depict them as blue. Why? And I researched it and it's because people started depicting them as blue because they're more appealing. If you look at some of the pictures of the Indian gods depicted as black, they're kind of terrifying and you don't want to have a faith of fear. So, sometimes they make them blue so that you could see their facial features better or they look less like barbaric.

Tell me about spider gang.

We were just kinda like saying it cause it's like, “oh spiders, let's be like spiders” and let shit come to us in our webs rather than searching for it and wendigo was the one who brought that idea to the table. I've been named the founder of spider gang by people before. After that, essentially we just kinda started identifying with it. I tattooed the spider on my own leg. It's my only tattoo at this moment. I did it myself and it's a spider on the web for spider gang. And then Wendigo has my drawing of a spider with an AK on his chest. And basically as we kept music making it just became a real thing. And then we kind of had a falling out with the original people that were in New York, not falling out with everyone, but everyone went and did their separate shit and you can't have a spider gang when like n****s are doing other shit.

Initially, spider gang was just me, Wendigo, cubensis, Bruhmane, Black and then Solsa who I met and became a big part of this second project that we released and then basically after I dropped “drain the swamp” spider game became way more solid because we all just were kind of making shit just us for a fat ass minute. And then around the time that, right after my newest project came out, then A-14 became a part of it.

And then eventually we linked up at my house. This happened recently. This is why spider gang has becomes what it is today. Over the last month, we all ended up in LA for two fucking weeks. Like n****s literally were just crashing at my house, flying in and out. Literally, this happened 17 days ago, it hasn't even been that long a time. Probably only a month. And then we met Johnnascus and Half Metal Kaiba, we added them to spider game cause they kinda just inspired us as people. We don't add people to spider game because we see it as a way to get clout.

They just bring this unique and dynamic energy of being the most normal N***a out of any of us. He's just the most refreshing person to be around. And then John is just an insane person on some experimental death grips. He makes some weird but unique shit, you know? And yeah, we all just resonate with each other. And that's essentially what spider gang is. Just a bunch of n****s that like seeing each other as the realist humans that we've met so far.

Part 2 of the Lil Darkie interview on Countere now: https://countere.com/home/lildarkie.

If you’ve made it this far to the interview, I’ll save you the trouble clicking on the “Part 2” link above. It’l take you to Countere, a site I was once involved with. My first or second article on Countere (I can’t remember) was about Lil Darkie, but it doesn’t contain more of our interview.

I actually haven’t even spoken to Lil Darkie since this day, and I don’t know when I’d contribute to Countere again. I do, however, plan to continue writing, and I’ll make good on this by trying to remember more of what I and Lil Darkie spoke about.

I remember - off the record - we had a long discussion about the nature of punk. Darkie’s position, which was one I agree with, was that there were a lot of people in late trying to appear “punk” aesthetically, but musically their music wasn’t different or innovative. I don’t want to speak for him of course, but at the time it felt like everyone was trying to look like the Sex Pistols, even down to the guitar riffs.

But it’s not punk to repeat what’s been done before. Being punk is about being different, daring to oppose the status quo and present a new vision. And that’s how Lil Darkie separated himself from that scene, and created his own. His music and brand are defined by more than the shock value of his name and logo. The music itself pushed the boundaries (and still does) of “SoundCloud rap”.

As far as where he sits in the pantheon of SoundCloud as a genre, I’d say he’s left his mark. And the rest of Spider Gang has as well. Top 5? Honestly, maybe. For now I’d say, in no particular order:

• Lil Peep

• Xxxtentacion

• Juice Wrld

• 6ix9ine

Why not Lil Darkie? He makes sense in that conversation.