Bay Area rapper Rexx Life Raj dropped one of the most powerful and emotionally stirring hip-hop albums of the year in The Blue Hour. While it presents Raj as the dexterous, creative lyricist that he is, the album largely deals with the trials and tribulations of Raj’s last few years amid the death of both of his parents, who he cared for in their final days. The album is triumphant in Raj’s perseverance at every turn, and he made an appearance on the Sway’s Universe radio show on SiriusXM this week to talk about it and spit one of the most memorable freestyles you’ll hear this year.
Raj gets deep with Sway and co-host Heather B, talking about his loss, the music that came from it, and questioning his faith in the process. The show took multiple callers who talked about their similar experiences with losing loved ones and dealing with cancer as a family. It’s clear that Sway has an affinity for Raj, as he calls The Blue Hour “one of the most important albums to come out of the Bay in a recent while.” He also lauds it for its honesty. Then Sway drops a beat out of nowhere and puts Raj on the spot for a freestyle — although he also calls him a “singer,” which the rapper must’ve taken personally [insert Jordan meme].
The clip above follows the first two minutes of Rexx Life Raj’s flow and presents the moment where he just snapped, rapping: “N****s try to make this sh*t seem hard when it really ain’t / I watched my Momma take her last few breaths, this sh*t is cake / What’s hard when you still got my brother locked in a cage? / A real first diagnosis is cancer in final stage.”
Raj tipped a cap to his days as an offensive lineman for the Boise State Broncos as well, name-checking former QB (and now Dallas Cowboys offensive coordinator) Kellen Moore. And then might’ve been the first dude to ever slip in Packers tackle David Bakhtiari’s name in a freestyle: “I pray for positivity and optimism / To turn life lessons into gems that I can drop on n****s / Still giving credit to the ones who never did it hardly / ‘Cause do you get an Aaron Rogers without Bakhtiari?”
Sway flies out of his seat when it ends and you probably will too. Watch the snippet of the freestyle above and check out Rexx Life Raj’s full appearance on Sway’s Universe below.
Bay Area’s own Rexx Life Raj is back with his first album in two years. His latest effort, The Blue Hour is his most personal project to date, detailing the harrowing loss of his parents and the process of grieving and maintaining his mental health.
“This album is about transition,” said Rexx in a statement. “This album is about grief. This album is about experiencing every emotion and not running from them. This past year and a half have been so insane that I could make another 20 albums about it. From losing my parents, to moving out of places I grew up in and made me who I am, all while trying to maintain some type of balance and sanity. I tried to be as honest and intentional with this project as possible. Creating it helped me in ways I can’t even explain. I pray it does the same for someone else.”
This fall, Rexx will support The Blue Hour with a 24-date North American tour.
Check out the full list of tour dates below.
09/22 — Dallas, TX @ Cambridge Room @ HOB
09/23 — Houston, TX @ Bronze Peacock @ HOB
09/25 — New Orleans, LA @ Parish @ HOB
09/27 — Atlanta, GA @ Vinyl
09/29 — Washington, DC @ Songbird
09/30 — New York City, NY @ Baby’s All Right
10/01 — Philadelphia, PA @ Milkboy
10/02 — Boston, MA @ Middle East Upstairs
10/03 — Toronto, OH @ Velvet Underground
10/06 — Pittsburgh, PA @ Spirit Hall
10/07 — Columbus, OH @ The Basement
10/09 — Chicago, IL @ Beat Kitchen
10/11 — Denver, CO @ Other Side @ Cervantes
10/12 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Soundwell
10/14 — Vancouver, BC @ Fortune
10/16 — Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile
10/18 — Portland, OR @ Star Theatre
10/20 — Arcata, CA @ Arcata Theatre Lounge
10/23 — Ventura, CA @ Ventura Theatre
10/24 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Roxy
10/25 — San Diego, CA @ VooDoo @ HOB
10/29 — Santa Cruz, CA @ The Catalyst
10/30 — Sacramento, CA @ Ace Of Spades
11/04 — San Francisoco ,CA @ August Hall
The Blue Hour is available now via EMPIRE. Stream it here.
After a rough two years for Rexx Life Raj, the Berkley native singer and rapper has announced his fifth studio album The Blue Hour. Ahead of its release, Rexx has shared a new single and video for his song, “Save Yourself.”
On the new track, he calls for the listener to fight for themselves, as they only have themselves in the end. “Ain’t nobody gonna come save you,” he sings. “You’ve gotta save yourself.” In the accompanying visual, he is seen in his home, finding solace in his own company. He is later seen outside on a race track, joined by a crew of friends.
Ahead of “Save Yourself,” Rexx released a song called “Balance,” on which he sings of the loss of his parents. The Blue Hour will detail Rexx’s healing process over the events that have taken place over the past nearly two years.
“This album is about transition,” said Raj in a statement. “This album is about grief. This album is about experiencing every emotion and not running from them. This past year and a half have been so insane that I could make another 20 albums about it. From losing my parents, to moving out of places I grew up in and made me who I am, all while trying to maintain some type of balance and sanity. I tried to be as honest and intentional with this project as possible. Creating it helped me in ways I can’t even explain. I pray it does the same for someone else.”
Check out “Save Yourself” above and the album artwork below.
Courtesy of EMPIRE
The Blue Hour is out 7/15 via EMPIRE. Pre-order it here.
Nobody should have to deal with this much loss. In the past year, Bay Area rapper Rexx Life Raj lost both his mother and his father and as he’s picking up the pieces of what the future holds, he’s navigating his grief and emotions in song. “Balance” is the first offering from his upcoming album and it’s an ode to his late mother and a powerful overall meditation on loss.
“We are battling obstacles in life and I know it comes with it’s challenges. But to me what separates the good from great is just the way you choose to handle it,” the rapper says on the hook over an affecting guitar and crisp snare drums. It’s an intense reminder of how music can help heal and find yourself amid insurmountable loss.
“Balance was a concept I’d had in my mind for a while because it was something I had been dealing with,” Raj said in a statement. “Trying to juggle being a caretaker, music, businesses, and relationships were weighing heavy on me. I wrote it as an affirmation to myself and hopefully the listener.”
The video plays out like a memory of spending time with his mother. She reads the boy a story, then he accompanies her to the doctor where she gets bad news. The next cut is outside of her funeral and it’s all spliced with footage of a grieving Raj leaned up against a hillside tree, delivering the song’s lyrics in a somber moment. The end of the clip is a cellphone video of Raj in the car with his parents, smiling together and enjoying life.
This is no doubt an impassioned introduction to the next chapter for Rexx Life Raj.
If you were to say at this time last year, that in less than a year, we’d be able to hold large-scale music festivals that wouldn’t be a COVID-19 super-spreader event, you might’ve sounded like a crazy person. But by and large, as we’ve learned how change our behavior to help stop the spread of COVID-19, festivals like Lollapalooza and Outside Lands were executed remarkably. Requiring proof of vaccination and implementing a system to verify said proof was a major key, and tens of thousands of people have been able to revel in the grandeur of live music outdoors once again.
On Halloween weekend at Outside Lands festival, over 70,000 people a day came out to San Francisco’s sweeping Golden Gate Park, for what was nothing short of one of the best concert weekends of the year. Fans emanated gratitude for the experience just as much as artists did.
The live music industry was hit hard and for artists, it bore a big weight not just on their livelihoods, but on their creativity as well. Things got pretty dark there for a year and a half. And now with live music and music festivals back in action, there’s a welcome freshness from musicians on stage; thriving once again and needed for so many reasons. We caught up with five performers at Outside Lands 2021 — Albert Hammond Jr., Bartees Strange, Mxmtoon, ZHU, and Rexx Life Raj — to talk about what it means to be playing live shows for massive crowds again. Tap in.
Albert Hammond Jr. – The Headliner
Adrian Spinelli
The Strokes took a solid victory lap around the festival circuit this year, playing III Points Fest in Miami, Atlanta’s Shaky Knees, and even making a headlining stop at The Forum in Los Angeles before the band’s Friday night closing set at Outside Lands. Albert Hammond Jr. has been behind some of the most iconic riffs of the past 20 years and he most recently put out his fourth solo album, Francis Trouble in 2018. But in San Francisco, he was here to put it down with The Strokes, all while relishing in the launch of his sneaky delightful wine seltzer, Jetway.
“Just gathering with people is very important to being a human being. But even besides me, where my career is playing live music and recording, I can see it in people that they want to be around other people. People want to f*ck, man! [laughs] I’m kidding obviously, but I mean that in how people want to interact… It’s a very human thing. And If we’re just home, things start to fall apart.”
Bartees Strange – A Big Realization
Adrian Spinelli
Washington D.C.-based indie rocker Bartees Strange’s career is on the up. His 2020 album Live Forever proved to be a critically-acclaimed breakout hit and its surging artists like him who relish in the number of people at a music festival who are witnessing him and his music for the first time. He delivered one of the most inspired and positively-charged performances of the weekend on the Sutro Stage, and being back out on stage and playing to big festival crowds helped him re-focus on why he makes music to begin with.
“For the last 15 years, I’ve just been playing music and playing shows. And then all of a sudden it just went away. But I kept writing… but then I kinda forgot why? I was like ‘No one is ever gonna hear this?!’ And then I had to remember that I was always writing for myself anyways. And I found a lot of peace in that. And now that I’ve come back out and I’m playing to bigger crowds, it’s exciting to watch everybody react to the music, and I feel really good about being happy with myself. It’s a beautiful thing to come to realize, at a point where I don’t think I would’ve ever had that realization if things wouldn’t have stopped. So it’s been really amazing to be in front of people and to be perceived, and I feel very solid, which is nice.”
Mxmtoon – From The Bedroom To The Big Stage… Finally
Adrian Spinelli
Mxmtoon not only built her music from her bedroom, but she also built a massive fanbase. The Oakland native has close to a billion Spotify streams across all of her quaint folk-pop songs and is a TikTok sensation with more than 2 million followers. She launched a pop culture-friendly history podcast called 365 days with Mxmtoon, where she’s had guests on like Carly Rae Jepsen, Jon Batiste, and Julien Baker. And this past September, she put out the True Colors EPin conjunction with the Life Is Strange adventure game series. Suffice it to say, the 21-year-old had a lot of material to share on stage and she said that being back at a festival in her backyard means “everything” to her.
“I started making music by myself in my room and I think to have an opportunity to bring the pieces of work that I’ve been making for the last three years really, to a live stage and just play it to an audience that’s so close to my heart in the Bay Area? It’s so cool and something I’ve been waiting to do for years at this point. And I can’t really believe that it’s actually happening, it feels really surreal. I can only hope to keep having experiences like this and hopefully for people to see that there is a light at the tunnel through all of this and that live shows are back and hopefully here to stay.”
Rexx Life Raj – The Hometown Rapper Back Where He Belongs
Philip Cosores
Few people made an entrance at Outside Lands quite like the gregarious and gigantic Rexx Life Raj. On Halloween afternoon, he came out mounting a literal T-Rex, clad in a Jurassic Park-style safari vest that his whole team on stage was also wearing. It was not only a testament to his larger-than-life persona, but also to the team mentality that Bay Area hip-hop is founded on. In true Bay Area fashion, the man knows how to relax, and after his set, sipped an Aperol Spritz (at the branded “Aperol Piazza,” of course) and reflected on not just being back on stage, but doing so to a hometown crowd.
“It literally feels insane, but insane in a good way. I knew I missed it, but I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I was on stage and was like, ‘This is where I’m supposed to be.’ And just being around this many people? I haven’t been around this many people in a year and a half, two years even. it just feels good to be at home here and see friends and family, and just to be able to perform is really tight.”
ZHU – The Electronic Music Heavyweight
Wilson Lee
Living in the shadows has always been a part of ZHU’s persona. The electronic producer and multi-instrumentalist initially came up as a mystical figure in EDM with an unknown identity. He’s since stepped out from behind the curtain to become one of the most crucial voices for Asian-Americans in electronic music, and released the excellent Dreamland 2021 this year. A San Francisco native, he headlined the Twin Peaks Stage on Saturday night following his fellow SF-er 24KGoldn’s performance. The pair would perform their hit “I Admit It” together at the festival and for someone who plays electronic festivals all over the world, a return to the normalcy of being back on the road and on stage was beginning to set in.
“I think that it was a transitional period for all of us. For me, it really didn’t hit until even last week when I was in Miami playing to 10,000+ kids and for the first time, I had the realization that we’re really back. It’s not a minimal capacity. People were ready and it’s great for the culture.”
Rexx Life Raj is back with another new entry into his weekly music releases, this time with the easygoing video for “Red Lobster Biscuits.” Opening with a cheeky disclaimer that the “the Runtz chain that Raj is wearing isn’t actually his,” the video sees Raj trying to “feel more like a real rapper” by wearing “shiny things that sparkle and glisten in the sun.” Shot at a recording session in the Hollywood Hills, the video is laid-back, while Raj’s lyrics reflect his business-first outlook and critique rapper with misleading images.
Rexx Life Raj recently said he hadn’t been able to make much new music during the pandemic, but what music he has released since then has been stellar. Of course, there were songs like “Tesla In A Pandemic,” celebrating his recent financial come-ups, and the California Poppy 2 EP that doubled down on the success of its predecessor, and more recently, the Untitled EP, which held meditative songs that helped give him peace in tumultuous times. But today, he’s back to boasting, releasing the swaggering yet contemplative “Lockheed Martin.”
Complete with an accompanying video of Raj rapping at the port, “Lockheed Martin” positions the burgeoning Bay Area star as both a grizzled sage and a hedonistic money-making machine, switching from bars about turning “a square b*tch into something off of Pornhub” to mocking “grown men infatuated with gangsta rappers.” He flexes but also advocates fiscal responsibility, rhyming, “If I can’t cop it three times, then I am not coppin’.” Then he lays out his plays for the future, involving investments, farming, and therapy, as well as continuing to keep it real and make sure his friends and family stay paid and all his dreams get accomplished, “shootin’ for the stars like I’m Lockheed Martin.”
Watch Rexx Life Raj’s “Lockheed Martin” video above.
The past year has been rough on all of us and while some were able to use the extended economic shutdown to be productive, others were less inspired, finding whatever they could hold onto to help them survive. Bay Area rapper/singer Rexx Life Raj falls partially into the latter category, according to a tweet thread he shared earlier this week. “Over these past months, I haven’t been able to make a lot of music,” he admitted. “But of the few I made these have been on repeat, helping me through these times.” As a gesture of appreciation to fans for their continued love and support, he released the three songs as an untitled EP.
over these past months i haven’t been able to make a lot of music. but of the few i made these have been on repeat, helping me through these times.
3 new songs out now. truly appreciate all the love and support. means the world fareal. thank you.
— solange stan account (@RexxLifeRaj) May 27, 2021
The three tracks include “Silver Linings,” on which he nods to his flaws, but resolutely holds to his virtues and reminds listeners to “check on your strong friends” over a groovy beat. On “Made A Man,” Raj recalls the struggles that have built him up and “forced me to learn to stand on my own” over an acoustic guitar sample and spacey synthesizers. Finally, on “Make It Shake,” he again uses a guitar loop to accompany another motivational anthem on which he prays “for better days, then outside and make it shake.” And despite not making much new music over the past few months, what he has made has been similarly inspirational, including “Bounty” and the encouraging “Bounce Back.”
Listen to “Made A Man,” “Make It Shake,” and “Silver Linings” above.
