Ten Years, Part Four: Turning 36

I am thirty-six and the phrase attached to me is still "up-and-coming." Both halves of that are true and the combination is funny, so I use it on purpose.

Hip hop has an age thing

It is not imaginary. The genre is built around youth in a way most others are not — the lists are called Freshman lists, the praise is often "at only nineteen," and the implied clock is loud.

Rock has sixty-year-olds headlining stadiums. Country treats a long career as proof of something. Hip hop, culturally, has spent a long time treating thirty as a soft ceiling for arrival. Not for continuing — plenty of rappers have long careers — but for arriving. Showing up new at thirty-six is reading the room wrong on purpose.

What thirty-six actually gives you

I would not trade back. Genuinely.

• You know what you sound like. At twenty-four I was doing impressions of people I admired. That takes years to burn off and there is no shortcut.
• You have something to say. Ten years of ordinary adult life — money, work, people leaving, people staying — is material. At twenty-two I had opinions. Different thing.
• You can finish. Finishing is a skill, learned by failing to finish repeatedly.
• You are harder to rattle. A bad night does not end you when you have had ten years of bad nights.

What it costs

I am not going to pretend it is all upside.

Industry attention skews young, and that is a real headwind rather than a feeling. The runway is shorter. People your age have houses and you have a decade of receipts for an album nobody has heard yet. And there is a specific loneliness in being the oldest person in most rooms you walk into for this.

But "too old to start" assumes the point is to be discovered. The point is to make the thing. I am going to make the thing, and I am going to be thirty-seven when it comes out, and both of those are fine.

More on this in Is 36 Too Old to Start Rapping?

Next

Part five: one night, one lion, and why I would rather do one show properly than twenty badly.