I Asked a Magnolia: An Interview With Quadry

Image via Rayno

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Yoh Phillips is preaching Jugg King Forever.

Some months ago, I was told a story about a woman who was pregnant around the time OutKast made their 1994 debut album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Allegedly, the woman and a girlfriend would hang out at 1907 Lakewood Terrace–known in hip-hop as The Dungeon–whenever they visited Atlanta from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

1907 Lakewood Terrace was not a dungeon by pure definition. It was more of an unfinished basement moonlighting as a recording studio. Musty dime bags, dirty wood floors, Malt liquor 40s, fried chicken baskets, old vinyl records, boiler room pipes, dusty drum machines, composition notebooks, miniature keyboards, sharpened pencils, a table and a few chairs, blunt ashes, and voices rhyming words with empty pockets, courteous manners, and contagious laughs. These conditions would otherwise violate most labor laws, but they created perfect southern rap music.

Because the studio was active at all hours, it is possible, with all the comings and goings, that women arrived at 1907 Lakewood Terrace and went down the rickety basement steps with no songs to sing. I imagine their faces among the many. Quiet, observing, inhaling the same cloudy smoke as André Benjamin and Antwan Patton. Brushing shoulders with Cee-Lo Green and Big Gipp. Nodding their heads beside Khujo Goodie to beats by Organized Noize. Then leaving before the sun could rise or set.

What if such a woman, unknown and unmentioned in retrospectives, was pregnant in the dungeon? Would it be a surprise, then, if that child, who felt the kicks of Rico Wade’s tumbling 808s and absorbed the vibrations of Sleepy Brown’s cosmic chords, came out of the womb with an innate sense of bounce, flow, and rhythm? Maybe that sounds more like a Greek myth than American history.

If such a baby did exist and turned out to be, say, Future, then the backstory would only add to his folklore. But no, the child wasn’t Nayvadius. I was told it was a rapper known best as Quadry. I’ve known Quadry since 2016, since he released the mixtape American, Me. He’s an eclectic guy, off-beat, artistically-minded, and a huge scholar of hip-hop. I’d place him in the early Pigeons & Planes class of underground blog rappers.

When P&P covered him back in 2015, they cited André 3000 as a comparable reference for Quadry’s abstract spoken word. This was ten years ago, when southern rap had tuned less to OutKast and more along the lines of Rae Sremmurd’s SremmLife, Future’s Beast Mode, and Young Thug’s Barter 6. Unlike the lyricists who came out the dungeon, the mid-2010s southern rap trendsetters were mostly chastised as inarticulate mumblers or eccentric hit chasers. I can understand how a verbose, Ginuwine-sampling, concept-driven rapper from Baton Rouge would gain blog recognition for how he invoked southern tradition.

Blogs turned to paper as a record deal worth $100,000 took Quadry from LA. to Los Angeles. He was managed by music industry executive, Brock Korsan, whose roster of beatmakers included Dahi, the Inglewood-born mastermind behind Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees,” Big Sean’s “I Don’t Fuck with You,” 21 Savage’s “a lot,” and Drake’s “Worst Behavior.” Dahi produced “Hot Headed” and “Pirelli” on Quadry’s 2018 album, Malik Ruff. Steve Lacy, before his meteoric success as the solo pop star behind the massive TikTok anthem “Bad Habit,” also contributed two beats to Malik Ruff. Tyler Page, the recording engineer behind mixes for SZA’s CTRL, Rayvn Lenae’s Birds Eye, and all Vince Staples albums, mixed Malik Ruff and all the subsequent Quadry projects that followed.

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Quadry’s focus took a turn towards music around the 11th grade, as told to me by one of his oldest friends, George Sterling. According to George, his house became the epicenter for all of their high school recordings. Freestyling soon developed into serious songwriting. These sessions inspired their small crew to invest in basic recording equipment as funded by the money they made working at McDonald’s.

Picture a modest three-bedroom house. One room features an HP computer, a couch, and a closet where they kept the microphone. Because George’s dad was a truck driver, he’d be gone two to three weeks at a time, giving them ample time to record. Quadry was known as Quad then, releasing Life & Times to some attention at his high school.

“Early Quadry always wanted to rap like Nas,” George told me over the phone. “We were in a time where guys didn’t really rap like that anymore, but Quad, he believed in it, in bars, and still does.” George recalled how, after they graduated, Quadry upgraded from rapping at his house to recording in the “roughest” studios in Baton Rouge. Quadry’s post-graduation advancement carried him out of the sketchy studio slums to sunny California, but like every story where a hero finally achieves their dream, there is also a reality check.

His label didn’t accept his Malik Ruff follow-up album, They Think We Ghetto. They dropped him without releasing it. The management relationship with Korsan also ended. Quadry returned to Louisiana, driving cross country in the BMW bought with his initial record advance.

Without management or major label support, Quadry self-released 2021’s They Think We Ghetto. By the time it dropped that July, YoungBoy Never Broke Again was the undisputed breakout rap star out of Baton Rouge, the heir to Kevin Gates, who had been the heir to Lil Boosie. YoungBoy’s growing catalog conquered YouTube’s algorithm through a consistent release of music filled with intimidating lyrics, pain-spilling poetry, and Autotune musings that successfully captured the hearts of angsty, Call of Duty-playing teens, rap-loving college students, popular Twitch streamers, celebrity rap peers, and professional athletes.

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YoungBoy is the antithesis of a rapper like Quadry. Where the former turns their Louisiana drawl into a threatening growl and a melodic instrument, the latter is more contemplative and veers towards the conceptual.

Take Quadry’s music video for “I’m Wrong?” Directed by Hannah Lasure, “I’m Wrong?” portrays Quadry with half his face dyed crimson, while the other half has streaks of white among the red, and several blue stars painted across his forehead. Most of the minute-long clip shows him sprinting down a long suburban street, wearing a black tailored suit while holding a vintage TV. When a pickup truck enters the frame, Quadry freezes, smiles widely, and awkwardly waves at the white male driver before dashing off as if an apparition.

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The visual of Quadry running lingered in my mind for a few days. Without context and after several viewings, I wondered if the character symbolized the Black male’s notion of suburbia in America, characterized by manicured lawns, a fascination with television, and the ever-present gaze of a White neighbor. Or is it a subtle reference to Ahmaud Arbery? Who was jogging through a South Georgia suburb much like the one seen in “I’m Wrong” before he was racially profiled, pursued, and murdered by two White men who chased him down in a pickup truck.

The American flag face paint was repurposed on the cover of Quadry’s third studio album, Ask a Magnolia, released September 25, 2024 on Tierdrop Records. When Beyoncé shared the cover art of Cowboy Carter six months earlier, she received a mountain of comments and criticism around the patriotic album art. Those who approved of her vibrant patriotism did not drown out those who condemned the flag’s inclusion. On Ask a Magnolia, though, instead of holding the flag like Beyoncé did, Quadry wore it on his face and encircled his entire body around it.

I was scheduled to interview Quadry about this album on November 6, one day after the 2024 presidential elections. Donald Trump’s victory as the reelected 47th President of the United States had already been announced when my phone rang. Our conversation began with the first question on my mind:

How did he win?

“Anything that aligns with power and control and getting away with bad behavior, that’s the American outlaw. That’s John Wayne. That’s Elvis Presley. Now bestow all those traits onto Donald Trump,” Quadry answered. His speaking voice is calm, the weight of a feather, that occasionally rises to higher registers, yet, no matter how easygoing or animated he gets, there is no concealing his southern drawl, the trademark of Louisiana. The election discussion went on for 15 minutes before I inquired:

Painting your face the American flag, why?

“Nigga is an American original,” Quadry said. “Nowhere in the world is there a class of people that was brought to a place, forced to build that place up, and then kind of dispersed out into the wilderness to fend for themselves. That is a completely unique experience in world history. So, I painted my face like that because we are the original sin. I’m the sin they have to figure out before any other issue. I’m what has to be spoken to, about, reckoned with and then settled in whatever way we as a people see fit, or the country can’t move forward. That was my thinking behind it.”

“And it really comes from watching…” At his pause, I received a text of a YouTube link to Black History: Lost, Stolen, Or Strayed. “I saw that late at night, like a year or two ago.” Quadry explained how Bill Cosby’s role as the documentary’s narrator ultimately suppressed any desire to watch the video in full, but the thumbnail, which showed an image of a Black face, covered in stars and stripes and the American colors, became integral to the Ask a Magnolia iconography.

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Finally, I asked him to explain the “I’m Wrong” music video. “In 1955,” Quadry began, “my grandad got paid for an odd job and bought a TV set. He wanted to get home as fast as possible, so he ran full sprint with the TV. When he saw a car approaching, he would slow down and walk, to not look like he stole it. That story always stuck with me because he did it the right way, the ‘American Way,’ yet he still had to live by the values of that time and space, no matter how honest he or his work was because he’s a Black man in the 1950s, living in rural Louisiana.”

Although the visual component of “I’m Wrong?” interprets a story from Quadry’s family history, preserving a tale told to him orally, the two rap verses aren’t based on his grandfather’s story but spoken from the perspective of a close friend still living in Baton Rouge on a day that ended in a shooting. “Dahi said I make folk music,” Quadry recalled. “When he said that, I got it instantly. That’s exactly what I do: folk music, stories about real folks. People with real lives.”

“These songs are responses to questions if someone wanted to follow my life from 2015 to now,” Quadry explained. “‘The Ghost of BrandyWine’ is named after the demolished 10950 Brandywine Apartments and is a response to how I grew up and the people I grew up with. ‘I’m Wrong’ is the answer to the question of why I left BR. ‘N***a You Crazy’ is the answer to what L.A. was like. ‘Davonte 2003’ is a metaphor for all the friends I lost who went down the wayward path. The poem at the end of ‘The Ghost of BrandyWine,’ ‘I’m Wrong?’ and ‘How Was The Service (Outro),’ I wrote to explain my adolescence before growing into adulthood. It’s read by Celeste Waite.”

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I asked Quadry if he sees Youngboy as the biggest artist on YouTube, and wonder if he thinks YoungBoy is the model for seeing success coming out of Baton Rouge. “No,” he told me. “One thing about Youngboy: he’s the natural evolution of Baton Rouge rap. He’s the logical conclusion after 20 years of Boosie and Webbie dominance, after Kevin Gates’ emergence, even rappers that didn’t make it big, he carries their influence. He is like an artifact. The last 20 years of Louisiana rap ferment in him.”

“But what I’m trying to be is different,” he continued. “I’m trying to basically do just like I did with George and them, conjure up this whole new idea of what a rapper from Baton Rouge could sound like. It’s like I say at the end of the poem: ‘We grew sun drunk, ripped our roots from the fire, and walked to a new destiny or maybe an old one that we dreamed of while asleep. And now with patience of our own, we find the rivers of our fathers and plant new things to bloom for the next generation.’”

At the mention of “next generation,” I finally saw an opening to ask about 1907 Lakewood Terrace, and his mom spending time at The Dungeon. He laughed and explained, “after graduating from Grambling University, she and her friends would go to Atlanta. In particular, a friend from California was an extrovert, a real people person. They would go out to events, and from what my mom says, this friend used to mess with a rapper. That’s how they started hanging around.”

Is it true that she was pregnant with you while they were making Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik?

He laughed again, before asking me a final question in return: “What’s a rapper without a great mythology?”

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