“No days off,” 03 Greedo says firmly as he gets into a car in Philadelphia. He’s almost in the middle of a massive month and a half tour, and I managed to get him on the phone on a non-show day. There’s a lot of noise in the background: the chatter of his team, the low hum of nearby traffic, the beeps of a backup guidance system. “If we don’t have a show, we make videos and stuff. I have a lot of artists, so I don’t waste time. Every day.” When I ask how he maintains that energy, he explains: “I do music for fun. The work is never work.”
Much ink has been spilled about Greedo’s tireless grind, much of it involving the marathon of twelve-hour sessions over each of the past sixty days. the beginning of his prison sentence on June 27, 2018. But Greedo’s productivity predates that rush. A scan through the YouTube page of Greedy Giddy, the name he used until 2016, reveals an already robust collection of mixtapes and loosies. Internet sleuths have attempted to piece together Greedo’s entire oeuvre, but collecting everything he’s released on various streaming platforms and archive sites is a near-impossible task. While serving a 20-year sentence for gun and drug possession, some of the fruits of that outpouring of pre-incarceration creativity—reportedly more than 3,000 songs—emerged at regular intervals.
After his release in January 2023, Greedo immediately returned to the studio, without his creative desire or skill diminishing in the slightest. That year he released four projects, including the 33-song opus Halfway there. He was on course for a slightly quieter 2024, culminating in October Hello Greedya full collaboration with Detroit producer Helluva. The two continued to work Hello Greedy three days in Houston, while Greedo lived in a halfway house after his release, and later completed the record in Detroit. It’s a dazzling album, a dazzling mix of syncopated Michigan drone and Greedo’s purple-tinged, pan-regional approach. Then, a week after our phone conversation, he surprise dropped the staggering 36-song mixtape Crip, I’m sexya sweet Molotov cocktail reminiscent of his anarchic period in late 2010. It solidifies Greedo’s status as a peripatetic author, a highly influential voice capable of bringing any sound into its orbit and recreating it in his own image.
There’s something otherworldly about 03 Greedo’s music, a consistency that feels anointed and supernatural. The fact that he’s potentially thousands of songs deep with vanishingly few duds feels almost impossible, but it’s a testament to how deeply he lives his craft. Greedo seems to find inspiration everywhere, keeping his mind open and available to channel whatever frequencies he encounters. He’s always searching for an ineffable feeling, like a runner’s high or a meditative state, and quickly moves on if what he’s working on doesn’t offer that transcendent quality. Listen to Greedo’s Phil Collins-esque melody on ‘Kill Me’, an early single from Hello Greedyor the beautiful, melancholic crooning on “Empty Pill Bottles & Bottega”. Crip, I’m sexy. Now imagine watching him perform that vocal in just a few minutes, immediately segueing into the raspy, hard-hitting verses of “If I’m Scared” or “Good Timing.” The key to all this, according to Greedo, is to stay in tune with the signals from the universe. “I’ll just wake up and try some things,” he says coolly. “I try to stay involved, and it has been working for a while.”
Are you a spiritual person?
03 GREEDO: I’m definitely religious, but I don’t really like to talk about it because people are weird. I know that I have tapped into the universe in a deeper way than many other people. I wish I could put my finger on exactly what it is and what I’m channeling, but I can’t. But it will be fire! Even when I listen to other people’s music, if I really like the song, I can tell that I do. I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s a feeling you would get if you took drugs.
I’ve read before that you freestyle everything when you get into the booth, and I’m curious how that relates to that feeling. How aware are you when you are freestyling? Are you in a flow state?
03 GREEDO: I don’t play the piano, right? But have you ever seen someone play the piano and say, “What the fuck…?” Someone can walk into the room and be sixty years old and say, “Yes, I used to play piano,” and then just leave. So I think I’ve incorporated so much into my life that it’s automatic. Super, super easy. We were just recording in Atlanta and making six bangers, and the speed at which I was getting the material was much faster than when I first got home. I’ve been gone for two years, and it only takes me about three sessions to make a tape. I don’t literally have millions of songs, but I have millions of songs, you know what I mean? It’s like painting; you just do all kinds of nonsense. Sometimes I freestyle an entire song, and sometimes I slam. You go into the booth, turn off the lights and just go. Everything is an experiment with music.
Do you keep notes? Like voice notes for melodies or bits of verse?
03 GREEDO: Sometimes, but not really. The music won’t be nice if I have something before I record it. When I turn (the beat) on, I have to do it there. That’s why I try to tell people to make videos of songs they make on the day they make them. You are still enthusiastic about it and you still know all the lyrics. Once you get away from it and make so many other songs or do so many other things, there’s not even the same excitement behind it anymore.
People want to see me enjoy myself. They want to see people enjoy my music because that’s how they originally jumped on my shit. (People) saw girls shaking from it, people riding it and just living off it, and that got people hooked on it. And when they saw the video for “Mafia Business,” it seemed like the Grape Street was where they could meet.
Now the superficial stage is over and they no longer care where I come from. It’s like, “We want Greedo the Artist,” so why would I keep talking so negatively about my albums? I still walk up to someone and talk my nonsense about feature films and Drummer Gang albums. But for what I want to make – you know, authentic works of art – why would I do that? I’m not angry; I’m happy as fuck. I can’t even think of crazy things. If it’s not fun, I just put on another beat – and my beat selection is impeccable, so it never takes long to find a new one.
What appeals to you about working with just one producer on a project?
03 GREEDO: That’s what Michael Jackson and all those people did. The only Usher album I really know word for word is Confessions with Jermaine Dupri. (Usher) did the whole thing with Jermaine Dupri, and it’s his biggest thing on the urban charts. He may have something bigger, but I don’t know about it. (Starts singing “OMG”) “Oh, my God” – look, I don’t know anything about that! I know that Confessions. That’s the shit I want to do.
However, I don’t always like collaborative albums because it holds me back. I have so much new music, but because my label already invested in this Helluva album and it takes a process to get everything together, I couldn’t drop my album. shit produced by Cash Cobain, or the shit produced by whoever, you know what I mean?
How did you first come into contact with Helluva?
03 GREEDO: He stopped by my house when I was at the shelter. I had a permit to go to work like everyone else, but luckily my job was signed on paper with Sony and Alamo. So I went to Sugar Hill Studios in Houston, and he just slid down there so we could work. I was only with him in Houston for two or three days. Some time had passed and they were still doing so much paperwork – or whatever they were doing – so I met him again in Detroit to put the finishing touches on the file.
What were those sessions like in Detroit?
03 GREEDO: I’m connected to the world, so when I go to other states, the way it feels inspires me to make different types of music. I make some of my best songs on the road. I went to Detroit to absorb some of that real Michigan energy. Detroit, Flint, Compton, Watts, we were all connected, so it’s a Cali-Michigan convention; we connect because they are all similar environments and attitudes. The way we rap now is inspired by the Detroit (and Flint) sound. So if I was going to add that to my shit, I wanted to be respectful and make an album with one of their biggest producers, and I wanted to put some artists from Detroit and Michigan on there.
Leave a Reply