Tuesday Q&A: Yak Ballz

Queens is hardcoded into Yak Ballz's DNA. Growing up in Flushing, the rapper dipped between neighborhoods like Corona and Fresh Meadows with friends and classmates. He'd smoke weed with Despot's crew over by Halsey Junior High School in Rego Park, take two buses each way to attend St. Francis Prep, and kill time around the Bay Terrace shopping center. All the while, he naturally absorbed what makes this deeply diverse boro such a special place in New York City.

"It's crazy how Queens is a world unto itself," he remarks from his current home in Los Angeles. "Because it's so big, especially when you're a teenager or even younger than that, you can venture out to another part of Queens and it's like another planet almost."

Yak Ballz, by way of the transitive property, is also inextricably part of the city's hip-hop tradition. Even before his seminal vinyl releases for Definitive Jux and Fondle 'Em Records, Yashar Zadeh was a teenage upstart emcee catching the ear of local luminaries like Bobbito Garcia and El-P. He battled Pumpkinhead onstage at Braggin' Rights, became a founding member of The Weathermen at Cage's invitation, and appeared on Garcia's post-Stretch radio show CM Famalam at Columbia University's WKCR. All of that groundwork led to his first album My Claim, released on Eastern Conference back in 2004, after which he featured on Cage's Hell's Winter and the Tame One-infused Leak Bros full-length Waterworld. And though he never stopped creating, his output soon slowed and became intermittent.

"It was a weird time in my life and I went through a lot of shit," he says, looking back without the proverbial rose-colored glasses. "I always had a little bit of a bitter taste in my mouth about the whole thing." 

Still, if there was ever a time for Yak Ballz to mount a return, now seems like the right moment. In recent months, Eastern Conference's own The High & Mighty announced their first album in nearly two decades, Sound Of Market, teasing out advance singles with the likes of O.C. and Chubb Rock. Scarcely weeks ago, the Call Out Culture podcast–co-hosted by former Def Jukie and Atoms Family member Alaska–dedicated its 300th episode to interviews with Company Flow and their Indelible MCs cohorts Breeze Brewin and J-Treds. Not long after that dropped, his fellow co-host Curly Castro introduced a live Juggaknots reunion as surprise openers for billy woods and Kenny Segal's Hiding Places 5th anniversary tour stop at Warsaw in Brooklyn.

Nostalgia assuredly has some allure for Yak Ballz, now 42, as evidenced by the release of Young Yashar. Devised as a digital 12", the three song EP re-teams him with Mondee, the same producer behind his debut 12" from 2000, HomePiss. This time, they worked remotely, the emcee and the beatmaker trading files between L.A. and Berlin, though in practice it proved more convenient than when they both lived in the tri-state area. "We didn't even have cell phones in the beginning, so we just saw each other when we just saw each other," he recalls of the old days. "We recorded a lot of stuff off My Claim at his mom's apartment."

If nothing else, the increased interest in this particular period of New York's underground hip-hop history offers him and his peers an opportunity for some long overdue credit. "A lot of publications are writing about the Nuyorican [Poets Café] and that era, but I know nobody was there," he says, citing MF DOOM's passing on Halloween 2020 as a catalyst of sorts. "Only then was that scene highlighted, and, to me, there are so many others that came from that scene, including myself, that didn't ever really got the love from the media in that way. But in his death, you understood via all of these articles how important that scene really was to hip-hop. Not just New York hip-hop, but to hip-hop at large."

CABBAGES: Throughout Young Yashar, you're rapping about your youth and the early years. From a creative perspective, what drew you back to this time period in your life to make something new that speaks to your past? 

Yak Ballz: To me, there's a void in rap. I work at a major record label and oftentimes the rap that I hear that is supposed to be in the lineage of the rap that I made, or we made collectively, sounds like a caricature of it. I don't want to be disparaging toward new rap, so to speak. But a lot of those people, they died off, figuratively and quite literally. And that was me too, more than 10 years removed from officially putting out Yak Ballz music. But as far as getting back to real rap, that still feels relevant. It is an homage to that time, but also this can sound modern and can live up to today's standards. So that was kind of the impetus for it.

People's tastes have changed, but the more time that passed by, the more I thought it's getting too far away from what we did. We're getting further and further away and there's only so many people that are making rap at a certain level again, in that same ilk. Everybody throws out Griselda, and even Ka–rest in peace, Ka. It still exists out there; you do have to go find it. But I do think a lot of it is, to me, just sort of a carbon copy and not as authentic as it was. And I don't want to sound like a guy that's washed up or anything like that, but that's probably what drove me. That was the motivation behind it. I still can do this really well, people.

How many people in your current music industry career understand where you exist in this underground hip-hop scene? 

I don't ever talk about it. It comes as a surprise to a lot of people that I run into that find out, even journalists. Just last week, a journalist we both know was like, yo man, that's fucking crazy that I just found that out. And [that's] somebody I've been talking to for as long as I've been a publicist. So that part of me is still very prevalent, never ever went away. I do feel that music of a certain era is still very important. It's important to uphold the legacy, not just for myself, but for all the people that are really gone. 

You're back with Mondee, which to me is a real testament to that. What was it like working with him 20-plus years ago versus how you two collaborated for this EP?

Strangely, to me, the same. It was a pleasant surprise when we got back into it. I've worked with many different producers and even relying on producers has always been something that I don't like. Being let down is something that artists go through in their career, especially if you're reliant on somebody else to get it done. So with this project, I did it all. Mondee gets the credit, but I definitely produced a lot of it myself with Mondee. We just speak the same language. I think we have the same taste. And then sometimes the decisions that he makes and the arrangements he makes are ones that I would've never even thought of. It just goes through his filter and then it happens in a way that I could never have done. His drums just sound like hip-hop drums, like real rap drums on any of your favorite classic albums from Pete Rock. 

Working remotely with somebody that lives in Germany was strangely just a natural process for us. I think he also gained maybe a new respect for me because all this time that we haven't talked, I taught myself how to produce. When Camu [Tao] passed away, I inherited all his equipment and took it upon myself to teach myself how to use it. We came together in a way that was actually even stronger than it ever was. 

There are several nods to rap classics on Young Yashar, to Schoolly D, to Jeru The Damaja. How and why did these old school and Golden Age artists inform the way you were writing here?

I mean, because it's fucking good. It's still good. If you heard Playboi Carti doing it, the kids would think it would be the hottest shit out. So to me, it holds up. Like, The Sun Rises In The East, first of all, an amazing album name, so poetic. In the context of "Young Blood"–my daughter sleeps in the west, my sun rises in the east–it means so many things to me. Obviously Jeru, but my daughter does in fact sleep in the west, you know what I mean? And my sun, where I grew up, rises in the east, in Queens. So there's a lot of those references that aren't just face value rap references, they mean more.

In terms of Schoolly D, that shit is just fire. You could put "P.S.K" on right now and that shit's fucking going to ring off. I remember listening to it during the pandemic and being like, man, I gotta sample this. And that was basically me sampling it, interpolating it myself and reinterpreting it, but also giving it an autographic bent. TCK, we making that green, T is for two face who can't understand, how young Yak Ballz became a man. Whenever I hear Schoolly D even say that line, how one homeboy became a man, it really moves me. I wanted to replicate that feeling because that's a real thing. You might not understand that when you're a kid, but when you become a man it resonates. 

Talking about legacy, when I talk to artists like yourself, there are always holes in the discography because of the nature of things today. Both HomePiss and The Freak Show, they're out of print; they're not streaming on anything. Have you given any thought to getting those records back out into the world, physically or digitally? 

For the longest time I thought that it would be cooler to not have this stuff out, to have people actually discover it and find it. To me, that's like contemporary digging, if you will, how we found stuff back in the day digging for records. It's such a wild concept, but it wasn't wild to us at the time. We used to just go to the record store and buy 12-inches off the wall at Fat Beats. People have bought my shit off the wall who never heard a word I uttered before that. Or [they] never heard a song and bought it on the strength of where it was placed, what the album cover looked like, or who they heard of it from. There is this charm in that sort of discovery.

But now that Young Yashar is on streaming, I'm trying to get all of my streaming stuff sorted. I put it off for a long time because, like I said, I had such a bad taste in my mouth about all of what happened in the past. I even reference the Dark Ages on one of the songs like, the future couldn't hold a candle to the Dark Ages. I always reference some of those times as the Dark Ages. Where I'm at now is a lot better place, in my life or even a better head space.

My Claim is actually mapped to Y-at-symbol-k. I was successful in doing it at Apple Music and now working on mapping My Claim to just Yak Ballz at Spotify. It feels like my mission now to get everything sorted, get everything in its right place, Radiohead reference, but really just put that music up and allow people to continue to immerse themselves in this music. So the long answer is yes, I do want to get that stuff up. Hopefully the sample gods will allow for it to happen. 

At least My Claim is already live on these platforms. And if I'm not mistaken, this year marked the 20th anniversary of that album. 

It does. Thank you for acknowledging that, by the way. It actually meant a lot to me because I kind of swept it under the rug. I just thought about it and I never said anything or put it up on social media or anything like that. 

Have you gone back and listened to that record?

About material? I haven't gone back as a listener in an intentional way. Maybe I listened to 10 seconds of a song to understand how I came in somewhere, or somebody posted it and tagged me on social with the song. I've maybe had a love-hate relationship with that time or that album, and now I think the love has taken over more than the hate.

It was supposed to be my Illmatic, my version of what I would've done if I was to make Illmatic. It was a lot of thoughts and ideas that I had as a child and as a kid that learned to rap and was on a path. It was underground, but it was also ambitious at the time. There were big choruses; there were songs on there that sounded like I was really going for it, and that's what I wanted at the time. I felt like underground rap wasn't doing that to some degree, and I was trying to make my best version of an underground album that could also be mainstream. So now, when people tag it and post on social media how much it means to them, I can't discount it or diminish it myself. Because that would be diminishing art that means so much to somebody. It may have gotten them through something.

I'm getting a lot of messages because of Young Yashar about the past. Somebody just was like, yo, man, you got me through a heroin addiction. That's wild for me. I hear these kinds of stories with artists I work with all the time, but for somebody to say it to me–there's multiple instances of things like that, maybe not as extreme–I have to deem it important, because it's actually important. It's a real contribution that I made, and at the end of the day, I'm proud of it. I have to be proud of it. I looked at it for so long with disdain. But again, after seeing over the years how much it means to people, and even my peers that I greatly respect that love that shit, there a point in time that they loved it more than I did. When somebody kind of relays that information to you, you take it with a grain of salt, but at the same time it's like, maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Maybe I should give myself a little bit of credit.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Bad Tofu, Affordable Luxuries

(buy it / stream it)

At some point this year, I noticed Milc cropping up in The Smoker's Club video content. Someone once sang that everything can change in a New York Minute, and sure enough his litany of singles for Jonny Shipes' 420-friendly label that began in late spring indicated that the quick-witted Portland rapper had suddenly swapped coasts. By the time autumn arrived, he'd publicly partnered with erstwhile Pro Era beatsmith and current Lex Records signee Chuck Strangers as something called Bad Tofu. Collecting a trio of pre-release singles, including the silky and swaggering "Earl The Pearl Monroe," while adding another nine collaborative cuts, Affordable Luxuries grants the duo a proper introduction. With Milc handling mic duties and Chuck behind the boards, we get distinct glimmers of greatness from both on the shiny, sobering "Jollibees" and the bottoming-out blues number "Leche's Lullaby." Self-improvement seems to be on the horizon for the relocated rapper, while his proclivity for sports metaphors persists unabated. Over the muted bass n' brass of "Vegetarian Mezza," he slips between both themes with the quickness, educating listeners on a particularly vulgar term as he sets his future fitness goals.

Dex & Small Professor, A Long Absence

(buy it / stream it)

As other members of the Philly-headquartered Wrecking Crew broaden their catalogs with out-of-town producers like Controller 7 and Chong Wizard, in-house producer Small Professor has built beyond the hip-hop collective's confines as well. Following dedicated projects with Rob Cave and Vince Spencer, respectively, as well as a noteworthy number of solo instrumental sets, his latest full-length team-up connects him with rapper Dex. Not to be confused with Famous Dex of "Hoes Mad" fame, this decidedly more lyrical artist spits with a charmingly semi-strained delivery over the Golden Age-inspired beatmaker's extra tasty crispy new bap. An early standout off A Long Absence, the third-eye examination "Darth (S)Maul Prayer Wheel" sounds like DITC filtered through WordSound and The Wu–high praise around these parts. That moody-to-gloomy rhythmic swing suits Dex's breathy, world weary flow on "THE CROSSING" and "Spurious Praise," as does the rather jazzy suite "Nothing To Be." The guest list is disgustingly good too, packed with serious microphone talents like CRASHprez, Jesse The Tree, and Skyzoo, along with dope WC familiars like Curly Castro and Zilla Rocca.

Three new tracks to snack on...

Shabaka, "Timepieces (feat. billy woods)"

TRAPMAT SAVIOR, "Scraping"

DJ Rude One, "Ain't It Great (feat. YNOT DUSABLE)"