Torae came by the Genius office to discuss his song “The Bubble Chip.” The thought provoking track speaks to the journey of the Brooklyn rapper’s career and the duality between his past and present life. On today’s episode of Verified, the rapper explains why he the best to ever do it and the analogy behind the title of the track.
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MusicTranscript
00:00 I'm not the best. I got two hit radio shows. I've written platinum and gold records,
00:05 number one selling, Billboard chart topping for so many of your favorite artists. I still
00:11 am dead nice. I still get super busy. I moved into television and film. Who else can really
00:17 exist in all of those spaces and excel? I'm unfuckwittable.
00:28 When you look at the bubble chip, and for those that don't know, it's the NBA championship that
00:32 was won during the pandemic. The duality of, well, is the bubble chip a more difficult
00:38 championship or was it a more easy championship? I kind of liken to my path. I made something out
00:45 of nothing. It don't count as a thing. How could you discredit that? How could you discredit the
00:49 bubble chip when they went through all of this adversity to get to it? I told Dot, as soon as
00:56 the ball drop, we back gunning for spots. Even if it's soul sampled, I'm going to make this shit pop.
01:01 Give them kick in the door tall, but still make this shit not. Because any way I set up a session,
01:05 I set up a shop. I do something where I do opposite day in my rhymes. If I say something,
01:11 I'm going to give you the flip of that, and then I'm going to figure out how to tie it together.
01:15 Normally, if you sample a soul record, they don't become the big popular records. Even if it's soul
01:21 sampled, I'm going to make this shit pop. It just was a funny way to tie it all in, give you
01:26 musicality, give you wit, just a bar.
01:30 My very first tour, I'm in Germany. I do my records. I get off the stage in a foreign land
01:48 with a German guy I never saw before, who smells like Benz, slightly knee-braided.
01:54 He says to me, "You didn't do 'Tailor-Made.'" In that moment, I realized that a record that I wrote
02:00 in the back room in the projects had made it all the way to Germany. I was like, "Wow, my music
02:06 has taken me places that I never imagined going." Ain't nobody else doing the shit that I done.
02:12 Blog era, baby, and I've been on a hell of a run. Pen something crazy for an artist to go number one,
02:17 then bring them the series on a promotional run. People always ask me, "Who have you worked with?
02:22 Who have you written for?" That's taboo for me. I'm a purist in every sense, and to never really
02:29 give up the names. It's not always writing a full-out song. Sometimes it's a lot of collaboration.
02:34 Sometimes it's giving them the whole shit, top to bottom. For me, it was a challenge to take
02:40 the skill that I had and refine it, and how to turn that into making different sounding records,
02:46 whether it be a K-pop record, whether it be an R&B record, whether it be a country record,
02:50 whether it be an EDM record. It's beautiful, man, because it gave me a new life in music,
02:55 and a new found energy into something I could do. The dope part is, yeah, we can come to the
03:01 radio station and talk about this incredible number one record, and I'll never mention that
03:06 we were in the studio the night before knocking it out.
03:08 So my publisher get a sync, put that record in the flick, my agency get the auditions,
03:12 I memorize a script, got a million different corners, I hustle to get a flip,
03:16 and when the pod really pop off, that's just another brick, hold up.
03:20 A lot of artists don't understand the importance of a sync license, and how much money that could
03:26 generate. Dug Down hit us and said, "Hey, there's a movie looking for a song that sounds like this."
03:31 Marco Polo and I went in the studio and made the song "Danger." That song went on to be
03:36 synced and licensed 10 times. "Danger" is not a hit record by any means, but it's the biggest
03:44 record off that album, and it's made me a decent amount of money.
03:49 "Don't never get it confused, I paid all of my dues. I never paid for no followers, likes,
03:55 comments, or views. Can't give you no proof of purchase, ain't got nothing to prove.
03:59 In the winner's circle, acting like ain't nothing to lose. Put the product on the website for the
04:04 sake of the fiends. These rappers selling you they storylines, faking they streams.
04:08 So when they post the Spotify numbers, it ain't what it seems. It's like the labels used to buy
04:12 records, it's by any means." I just started to raise an eyebrow to a lot of shit, because numbers
04:17 are very much in your face and on the surface. But what's behind that? Oddly enough, there's
04:23 somebody who continuously hits me about adding views to the bubble chip video. I'm like, "Dawg,
04:30 I literally said, if it's not the organic, true, if it's not the real people, I'm fine. I don't
04:36 want to look like it, I want to live like it. I drop quality themes, elevate mahogany queens,
04:41 turn my purpose into a profit. I'm proud to be king. I made something out of nothing. It don't
04:46 count as a thing. If you got it in the bubble, do it count as a ring?" Elevating mahogany queens is
04:52 part of my purpose. My wife is a black woman, my mom is a black woman, my sister's a black woman,
04:56 my daughter's a black woman. And so those pillars in my own community make me reach out to the rest
05:03 of the community and figure out ways to empower them, because I think that's part of my job as a
05:09 true black king.
05:11 I keep the masters in the safe, keep these rappers in their place, keep a hitter in the field in case I need him catch a case.
05:16 And if I ever blow through the budget, I get it off the waist. Or Mr. Smith said he got me,
05:21 here go get it out the chase. What's up? Mr. Smith could be a person or Mr. Smith could be a theory.
05:28 Mr. Smith said he got me and that's all you need to know. If I ever blow through the budget,
05:33 I'm willing to get it off the waist. And you can take that and interpret it how you want,
05:37 or Mr. Smith will take care of it for me.
05:39 (upbeat music)
05:41 I mean, when you think it's so simple off the top, you think guys like Kanye,
05:46 you think what Just Blaze does, you think what No I.D. does, right? You think of the late great
05:52 Dilla. Commons, it's your world. Oh my God. It still gives me like goosebumps to this day, anytime I hear it.