One of Arizona's biggest rappers has gone pop-punk: 'Rapping just does not excite me'

It's been 10 years since Futuristic announced his arrival on the hip-hop scene with an album whose title served as something of a mission statement: "Dream Big."

He's spent the years since then steadily growing his brand as one of Arizona's most successful rappers, with more than 800,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, where several of his biggest songs have pulled in more than 40 million streams.

He's released 10 solo albums, two collaborative albums (with Devvon Terrell and Michael Minelli), three EPs and countless singles.

And that's not counting all the CDs he made in his father's basement studio to sell at school as a talent show regular as early as the fifth grade.

In 2015, he appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." Two years later, he spent the summer as the only rapper on the Warped Tour.

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Growing up on rap and pop-punk

Now, Futuristic would like to introduce you to the other side of who he says he's always been — a kid who grew up listening to Blink-182 as much as Ludacris or Eminem — on an album of pop-punk songs he's hoping to release before the year is out titled "Never Too Late."

"I've been rapping for 25 years," he says.

"It just doesn't excite me. It really doesn't. Hopefully, I get that excitement back for rap after I do this. But as of right now, rapping just does not excite me."

The Tempe musician has already shared two singles from "Never Too Late" — an existential pop-punk anthem devoted to making the most of the time you've got called "Highs & Lows" and an effervescent adrenaline-rush called "Gucci."

Both tracks feature raps but those chugging guitars and sugar-coated chorus hooks are straight-up pop-punk.

"I grew up with all sorts of musical influences," Futuristic says.

"I'm one of nine kids. And all my siblings play instruments, sing, whatever. So when I started making music, it was a little bit of everything. I did show choir as a kid."

When Futuristic started playing in Arizona, where his family moved from Illinois when he was 15, it was with a full band.

"The whole point of the band was basically to play every genre," he says. "We did reggae. We did heavy metal. We did rap.

"The only reason that stopped was because I started getting some notoriety and started touring. And it's like, 'There's no way I can take these five guys on tour; I'm getting paid $250, $300 a show.'"

Since 2017, he's done an R&B project and a couple other more experimental efforts.

"I did one album where I made every beat from scratch with household items, basically," he says. "So I've just always messed around with lots of different things."

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'It just felt really good'

When he turned his attentions to making a pop-punk album, he says, "It just felt really good. And it felt right. It felt like this is what I was probably supposed to be doing the whole time."

There's an energy he brings to his performances that fit right in that summer on the Warped Tour.

"I've always had a wild show, from the mosh pits to the crowd surfing," he says.

"I do this thing called the crowd dunk, where my DJ goes in the crowd, they hold him up by his feet, he holds up a basketball hoop, like a nerf hoop, and I jump off stage, dunk it and surf the whole crowd."

His go-to pop-punk inspirations are the sort of acts you'd expect an artist born in 1991 to favor.

"I can't lie and say I was ever, like, a crazy pop-punk fan, as far as diving deep and knowing all the unheard-of bands," he says.

"Just your normal, you know, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Sum 41. Those type of bands are definitely, like, you grew up and you knew all their songs."

That music spoke to him the same as any hip-hop songs in third or fourth grade.

"The attitude and the energy are kind of the same," he says.

"And rappers were like the new rock stars, putting on crazy shows, doing wild stuff, getting known for what they were doing outside of music. Even the subject matter. All music — country, rap, rock — we're all talking about the same things, just in different ways."

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Looking back on his earliest efforts

As Futuristic has grown and matured, the way he talks about those same things has evolved with each release.

"That first record, I don't love it," he says of "Dream Big" 10 years later.

"Some people will say that's their favorite from me. So it is what it is. But I think every album has progressively gotten better, in my opinion. It's just being aware of myself, I think, over time."

"Dream Big" was a step up from the CDs he was selling to his classmates back in fifth grade.

"They are so bad," he says, with a laugh. "My voice doesn't even sound like me. And I'm talking about stuff I knew nothing about because I'm hanging out with all my older brothers and their friends. But that was childhood, I guess, for me."

He was in fifth grade when his parents split, and every time he visited his dad, he and his brother would retire to the basement and record more music.

"I performed at all the talent shows," he says. "That was my hustle as a kid.

"And being a 7-year-old rapper, I was definitely gonna get first, second or third no matter what. So that was my grind. Then after I performed, I'd walk the crowd and sell CDs. As a fifth grader, I would do a show and literally make 500 or 600 bucks."

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'It's been a business to me from the jump'

Those formative experiences shaped the way he's always looked at his career.

"It's been a business to me from the jump," he says.

When iTunes came along, he figured out how he could sell the most on iTunes. As he learned what blogs were, he was targeting specific records to specific blogs.

"What I realized was that every song needs its own platform," he says. "If I'm making a song that sounds a certain way, it's always 'How do I get this song to that demographic?' That's how I just thought about everything."

If he made a track that had more of a rock feel, he says, "I thought, 'OK, I need to get this on the rock blogs.' And I need to then open a show for a rapper that has a rock influence. I need to open for Machine Gun Kelly. Or Yelawolf."

If he wrote a fast rap, he'd reach out to Tech N9ne or Hopsin to get them on the track.

"My whole career has been based on kind of using different platforms to catapult me," he says. "Now I've become the platform."

It's a strategy that's helped him grow his fan base through the years.

"My thing is, you're gonna snatch fans from every little pocket and some of those fans will stay and some of them will only like that song," he says. "But you've just got to snatch here, there and everywhere. That kind of makes your melting pot of fans."

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Taking time to 'get them acclimated'

He realizes that melting pot includes some fans who may not want to hear him do a pop-punk record. That's part of the reason he's been rolling out the music one song at a time.

"I'm gonna drop the album in December because I know it's gonna take some time to get them acclimated," he says. "So far it's been, I'd say, 65, 35. Sixty-five percent of them are receiving it well and 35 percent are like, 'What the hell are you doing? Please stop.'"

The way he sees it, he's been losing a certain percentage of fans this whole time, yet his fan base just keeps getting bigger.

"I guess the reason why I wasn't tripping too much is I ask my fans at every show, 'Who here it's their first time seeing me?'" he says.

"And 50 percent of the crowd, at least, it's their first time. No matter how many times I've been to a market, how many times I've sold out the same place, it's never the same 500 people as the last time I played Utah."

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What the future holds for Futuristic

He's hoping to roll out his new pop-punk era in those markets in two stages.

"Ideally, I would want to open for a bigger rock tour in the spring and probably drop another project midsummer, maybe, of next year, and do my headline tour next fall," he says.

And that next project will be punk-pop.

"I think I'd be doing myself a disservice to just put out one and then go back to rapping," he says. "No offense to my rap roots. I feel like I write much better songs in this lane. I say half the words but say more at the same time."

Recording with This Modern

"Never Too Late" was produced by local pop-punk band This Modern in their home recording studio with guest appearances by FigureItOut and the Color 8 guitarist Kal.

"We made three songs the first day and I was like, 'Yo, I haven't felt this good making music since maybe forever," Futuristic says.

"And then, the concepts just flowed out of me for two weeks, every day, making two or three songs. And that was the whole project. It was liberating."

He found himself addressing aspects of his life in ways he'd never rapped about those feelings.

"I've been rapping for 25 years, and I don't have a song about me and my dad's relationship like this, or me and my ex, or me and my girl or me and my cousin," he says.

"I don't know why or how, but the music itself brought new things out of me that I didn't know were in there."

He's quick to credit This Modern for helping him tap into that energy.

"They've just been been helping me the whole time," he says. "Even the lead singer,  there's no reason for him to be there. But he's there at every session. And it's really, really dope. I've made great friendships with those guys."

'It's never too late for anything'

There is a chance he'll come up with a different title by the time the album drops, but at the moment, he feels pretty good about "Never Too Late" and what it says about the essence of this record.

"I just think in life, it's never too late for anything," he says.

"Like for me and this album. It's never too late to make the switch. It's never too late to do something you love. It's never too late to move in a new direction. It's never too late to follow your dreams."

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: One of Arizona's biggest rappers explains why he's gone pop-punk