Photo credit: Rob Randolph
There’s a track on Racine rapper Rob Hicks’ new EP, Paradise in Hell, so audacious it can’t help but call attention to itself: “Siracha,” an odd (and oddly catchy) tune set to a loopy Mike Regal beat that plays like an old, sun-warped tropicália LP spun on the entirely wrong RPM setting. A fitting playground for Hicks’ speedy, nimble flow, it’s the kind of standout track that a rapper can make a name with.
Hicks isn’t a huge fan of it.
“I don’t really like that track to be honest,” the rapper says. “When I first recorded it and got the mix back, I knew it was going to be the track that a lot of people were going to like. But I just felt like it was missing something.”
It’s not just “Siracha” that doesn’t meet Hicks’ standard. Although Paradise in Hell is an impressive work—a clear labor of love, eight tracks of knotty, modernist hip-hop that recall Kendrick Lamar in both their ambition and their dazzle—Hicks is surprisingly dismissive of it.
“I feel like this whole entire project could have been better,” he says. “I put so much work into it, but I’m really hard on myself when I make music. That’s what keeps me going, just knowing that I could do better. I know that next time I create an album, it’ll be a lot better than this one.”
Hicks isn’t one of those rappers who walks into the studio and rips off an album’s worth of tracks in a few takes. He’s methodical. He studies his own performances, which is why he talks about the EP he’s ostensibly promoting with the cold detachment of a disapproving parent.
“When I listen to myself, I’m listening to be better,” he says. “I’ll hear something I messed up on, even if nobody else notices. Sometimes I might not pronounce a word correctly, for instance, but the emotion is there, so I’ll keep that take because I know I can’t recapture that emotion. But I know that next time I’ve got to be more on point with the way I pronounce that word. ”
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While Hicks himself is critical of Paradise in Hell, the press has been a lot kinder. Hicks has received glowing write-ups from rap websites from around the country, including a few prominent ones like EARMILK. He’s built up enough of a following that it’s probably safe to call him Racine’s most prominent rapper at this point, though he sees that honor as a modest one. He challenges me to name another rapper from Racine. I admit that I can’t.
“There’s really not many household names,” says Hicks, who considers himself as much a part of Milwaukee’s rap scene as Racine’s. “Rappers from Racine, they’ll be hot locally for a year, but then you won’t hear from them after that. I feel like the problem here is that people don’t know how to expand on their music after they’ve uploaded it to SoundCloud. They just keep doing the same thing over and over again, without any progression.
“That’s what I’m trying to break,” Hicks continues. “I’m trying to be the first artist from here who’s done things. You can’t just release music, you have to take that next step, headlining your own tour and playing at Summerfest and all that stuff—you have to keep getting better and keep getting bigger.”
I tell Hicks he strikes me as a good deal more serious than the average rapper, and he pushes back a bit. He’s laid back, he says, explaining that part of the reason he fits in so well with his peers in the Milwaukee rap scene is he can just kick back and play video games with them.
“I go with the flow a lot,” he insists, “but at the same time, I know what I want to achieve and what I want to accomplish, and I’m far from where I want to be.”
