REGGIE PR1ME

“I’ve been playing the drums since I was nine. You know, playing the drums in church, being in different bands, many things like that,” says the 25-year-old rapper from Bowie, Maryland.

But before he started rapping, Reggie Pr1me wanted to produce. He listened to a lot of N.E.R.D. growing up and drum-heavy production. The Just Blaze-produced track “Show Me What You Got” by Jay-Z is a personal favorite.

“Pharrell was kind of the first guy in hip-hop who I took a liking to. With Pharrell, you get those that he worked with, and so you get the Jay-Zs, you get the Pusha Ts, you get the Snoop Doggs, and things of that nature, so as I began to pay attention to those different producers, I began to pay attention to the different artists that they worked with.”

His interest in production shines in his 2017 album, Swim, marked by slick beats and choice samples that get deeper and darker as you immerse yourself. That was deliberate. “To make you feel like you’re submerging in water,” he says. “That house sound, mixed with the 808s, kind of capture that.”

A bit like Drake’s More Life, Pr1me says, Swim is a playlist of beats that he and his collaborators had. “So, late nights, we sitting in the car, listening to beats, freestyling, coming up with concepts and most of those turned into songs,” he says of the songwriting process. “How can I make something that is still cinematic but not take away from what I’m actually trying to get you to listen to, and that’s the songs versus the interludes.”

As he continues to make music, Pr1me hopes to use more live instrumentation and put his drum skills to the test. “You can produce and do the MIDI thing, but it’s a totally different atmosphere when you listen to live instruments.”

Naturally, it also meant go-go was an influence, Pr1me says, but it was hard to be a hip-hop musician at the same time. It’s not like there weren’t D.C. rappers before the 2000s—Fat Rodney appeared on go-go stages in the late ‘80s, and Asheru, Kokayi and Black Indian made inroads for the local rap scene in the ‘90s, and Nonchalant gained national recognition for the 1996 hit “5 O’Clock.” While hip-hop spread across the country during this time, its influence in D.C. was largely overshadowed by go-go’s homegrown reign. “A lot of dudes were trying to do rap,” lyricist Black Indian told the Washington City Paper in 2012. “If you were rapping, [folks] were like ‘What, you think you from New York?’”

Pr1me says it was hard to grow up with go-go: “For the better part of our lives, go-go was the law of the land.” As he watches his fellow DMV musicians gain more recognition, he’s hopeful that this interest in D.C.’s music scene isn’t short-lived. But then again, the region has seen this before.

“I definitely don’t think it’s going to be a blip where it’s here but then people take their eyes off it, because for a while, we fought to get that light here in the first place,” he says. “So now that we’re here, you’re starting to see that it’s not just one sound that you get from the DMV. It’s an amalgam of different sounds. So I think that spotlight’s going to be here as long as those different sounds are coming out of here. You’re going to hear more independent artists.”

-Teta Alim - Bandcamp