Photo credit: Dario Camarena
Shontrail Scott
There was a time when recording rap music required access to studios that were beyond the reach of all but the most serious artists. Then technology advanced to the point where rappers could record studio-quality music with little more than a laptop. These days, though, you don’t even need a laptop, as Shontrail Scott can attest.
The 20-year-old Milwaukee rapper recorded his debut EP of bleak, soul-bearing hip-hop, Blue Boy, with little more than a phone. It wasn’t even an iPhone. “I just used an app called BandLab and my cracked Samsung,” Scott says. He’d originally intended to rerecord his phone demos on a friend’s MacBook, until he found he was testing the limits of his friend’s generosity.
“I was borrowing it from him too much,” Scott says. “It was causing issues, so he took it back. I was like, ‘Damn, what am I going to now?’ I had all these raw phone demos, but I was getting all these feedback from friends that they were good. Since the project was about rawness and honesty, I just released those phone demos.”
To be clear, this isn’t an ideal recording setup. But the Blue Boy’s bare-bones fidelity matches the mood and subject matter of Scott’s songs, which are more sung than rapped. He recorded the EP earlier this year, during what he describes as a stretch of depression. “I was going through a lot,” he says. “I’d just quit my job, so I was just spending a lot of time alone in my room, and to keep it real I was kind of depressed. I was 19 years old. I had no license. No girl. I was jobless. I’m not worthless, but I felt worthless.”
There are some parallels between Blue Boy’s backstory and that of one of the more prominent Milwaukee rap albums of the last few years, WebsterX’s Daymares, which tackled similar themes of depression and self-worth (albeit with much, much grander production—WebsterX doesn’t borrow his beats from YouTube). Those echoes aren’t entirely a coincidence. Scott is young enough that he listened to WebsterX in high school, and he cites the rapper as his favorite Milwaukee artist. “After discovering him and IshDARR, I just immersed myself in the local scene,” Scott says. “When I discovered them, it was like I saw the light; it was so inspiring that they were getting recognition. And when I heard ‘Lately’ and ‘Doomsday’ I was like, ‘Damn, this is coming out of Milwaukee?”
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But Scott is also tapping into a national zeitgeist. Hip-hop is going through something of a mental-health awareness phase lately, with many of the genre’s biggest names openly confronting depression and anxiety. One of the most influential is also one of the most divisive: XXXTentacion, the 20-year-old who died this summer, leaving behind a catalogue of polarizing music, a legacy of violence and an unresolved debate about how the music industry should handle abusers.
I’m squarely in the “Never XXXTentacion” camp. His success is an affront to victims of domestic violence, and the industry’s embrace of him was a shameful moral dereliction, even by the standards of an industry with a long history of looking the other way. But Scott, who admires the rapper without condoning his behavior, believes that XXXTentacion understood his demons, and that his music shows he was working to become a better person. “He was tapping something real,” Scott says. “It sounded like he made it in his bedroom. It sounded so raw and so pure. His music is real. It’s not fake. It’s 100% him.” Scott says he isn’t even sure if he would have released Blue Boy if XXXTentacion hadn’t died this summer.
And if any good has come from XXXTentacion, this is it: For all the hurt he brought into the world, all the hate, he also helped a generation of young listeners process their own pain, and encouraged artists like Scott to be more open about theirs. As Scott tells it, opening up about his depression helped him overcome it.
“Just the idea of sharing this with someone helped me,” Scott says of Blue Boy. “You know how, when you’re in therapy, you talk to someone, and the fact that they listen to you helps? I released a full project and forced the world to listen to me.”
Shontrail Scott’s Blue Boy EP is streaming at soundcloud.com/shontrailscott.
