“My last meal?” Young Nudy asks in a contemplative voice, in response to the question. “It would have to be bacon, pancakes, grits and scrambled eggs with cheese. Ooh!“
“I haven’t had bacon in, like, nine years,” Nudy adds. As a youngster, he renounced pork and pork-derived products, not for religious reasons but because he felt factory farming was culinary malpractice. Young Nudy is not a garrulous fellow — the 30-year-old Atlanta rapper is largely mum on his personal and creative journey — but the topic of food gets him talking like literally no other. His new album, in fact, is titled “Gumbo.”
“I just love food,” Nudy says. That’s probably underselling it. Food zealotry has been a Nudy hallmark since his career’s inception; one of his earliest tunes was “Loaded Baked Potato.” It was the perfect elevator pitch, summating everything there is to like about Nudy in four-odd minutes of midtempo goth rap: his street-wise candor, his luxuriant Southern drawl, his sly but bawdy sense of humor, his deft melodic touch and his vaguely easygoing, vaguely forbidding beats. These beats never impose themselves but are somehow furtively threatening.
Every song on “Gumbo” is named for a favorite entree or snack: “Duck Meat,” “Okra,” “Fish & Chips.” The culinary theme is window dressing, there for ornamental or attention-getting purposes. It’s not as if Nudy raps predominantly about food. “Gumbo” in the main is about family stressors (“I like to pull my mask down and (expletive) rob ’em / My mama always said I need to chill, I got a problem”) and about a punishing way of life. In his cutthroat street talk, Nudy paints a severe portrait of his hometown.
Initially a West Side kid, Nudy, aka Quantavious Tavario Thomas, didn’t move to East Atlanta until later in his youth. The tension of turf wasn’t lost on Nudy, who, like any greenhorn, experienced a mild bout of culture shock. (“The East Side got its own lingo, its own thing going on,” he said.) In time he became a fervent spokesman for the aspirations of a whole ZIP code; it was as if he’d lived in East Atlanta all along. His label, Paradise East Records, is named after the weathered, monolithically beige apartment complex he used to call home. Paradise is quite a big deal, a leading talent incubator for the Atlanta rap scene.
Nudy came of age at a time when Atlanta’s Gucci Mane, rapscallion du jour, was everywhere, bewondering listeners with his enigmatic hilarity. No one else had such a fresh take on the day-to-day slog of drug dealing. But the story, at least concerning Nudy, ends there.
“Gucci was big, but he didn’t influence me,” Nudy says, a little indignant. “Nobody influenced me to rap.” So why did Nudy start rhyming? Why does anyone switch careers? Old-fashioned, smoldering ennui. Nudy’s activities in the underworld were so unfulfilling, he couldn’t do them a minute longer.
“It gets boring, all that street stuff,” he says. Maybe so, but his tales of dope boy woe are as far from boring as gangsta rap gets. He grew before our eyes on the “Slimeball” tapes, his legendary mixtape series. By 2019 Nudy, now signed to RCA Records, enjoyed warm relations with hip hop’s professional elite, including J. Cole and his studious Dreamville collective. Nudy was the leadoff batter on Dreamville’s “Down Bad,” which earned a Grammy nomination.
Nudy’s career is bound up with that of producer Pi’erre Bourne, the little engine that could. In the span of maybe two years, Bourne went from anonymous bedroom producer to superstar; today, his beats are among the highest coveted in hip hop. Bourne brought the goods for “Sli’merre,” his 2019 collaborative album with Nudy, but the production on “Gumbo” was helmed chiefly by Coupe, a mustached keyboard assassin originally from Macon, Georgia. “My brother (rapper PDE Escobar) brought him to the studio. I liked what he was on. I liked his mojo.”
Whether or not “Gumbo” tops his previous work, Nudy can’t say (“I don’t compete with myself”). The album certainly makes a case for less being more. Too many rap records are sunk by outside encroachment. When every other song features one or more guest rappers, things start to feel unduly cramped. But Nudy’s voice — and this is a testament to his unbreachable individuality — always carries the day. There was just one guest on “EA Monster,” his summer 2022 offering. There are two on “Gumbo”: 21 Savage, Nudy’s stylish, slightly older cousin, and Key Glock, a volatile Memphis-born Gen Zer.
Nudy insists that his decluttered environs are not an artistic choice. His peers, he says, keep him at arm’s length. He would make a feature-heavy album if only the rest of hip hop was more keen to work with him. This explanation won’t compute for anyone who caught Nudy’s 2022 Lollapalooza set. He brought the house down. Then again, where would Nudy be without his go-it-alone ethos? Making frightfully generic, off-the-peg music? We shudder at the thought.
And what can we expect from his upcoming return to Chicago? “I’ll have some gumbo for you,” Nudy promises.
SPKRBX & Rolling Loud present: Young Nudy 7 p.m. March 18 at Avondale Music Hall, 3336 N. Milwaukee Ave.; tickets (sold out) at youngnudy.com
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