Graphic via POW
Drew Millard wants to know if anyone’s seen the remote.
Philly rapper Skrilla has amassed a cult following for his vivid, raw depictions of life in Kensington. With a viral hit under his belt, Skrilla’s music echoes the pain and perseverance of his city. We spent the day with him to talk success, survival, and what’s next.
Interview by Drew Millard
Shot + Edited by Kenneth Borders
A POW Mag / Nuirdek! Production
There is a thing you need to know about hanging out with Skrilla, something you will not learn from his music, which sounds like how doing whippits in Hell must feel (compliment). You won’t understand it from the innumerable TikToks riffing on his viral hit “Doot Doot (6 7),” or even any number of YouTube clips in which he takes a dazed-seeming vlogger around Philadelphia’s notorious Kensington neighborhood while nonchalantly dapping up users and dealers alike. That thing is he kind of looks and acts exactly like Jack Sparrow.
It’s all there — the bulging eyes, the thicket of haphazard dreads tangled up in a headscarf, the flamboyant designer duds accompanied by an elaborate assortment of rings and beads and visibly fly belts. The 25-year-old rapper is tall, a former AAU basketball player, and walks with a pirate’s uneasy lilt to his gait, occasionally fanning his arms out for balance. It’s uncanny.
“This is the white people part of the mall,” Skrilla tells me, vaguely gesturing towards a nearby Pottery Barn, or maybe leaning on an unseen force for support. We’re in the white people part of the King of Prussia Mall, to be exact, which Wikipedia tells me is the fourth-largest in the nation and which my eyeballs tell me has emerged from the late-2010s mall apocalypse miraculously unscathed and unbesmirched by vacant storefronts and vape shops. I’m here with him, his brother Von who also serves as his manager, my photographer, and my photographer’s friend, a college fashion designer who just came through to hang out. We’re accompanying Skrilla as he shops for a new Hermes scarf, which is a thing he needs because he’s going to LA the next day and his old Hermes scarf is old.
We’re not even to the escalator when I notice a couple following us. They stop when we stop and gawk at Skrilla when they think he’s not looking. Soon enough, people start flagging him down for photos and Skrilla gamely agrees, sometimes upping the ante by suggesting they do a video instead. I’m usually conscripted into taking the flick so his fans can be in it with him. Time and again, I watch Skrilla and his fans go “six seven” together while moving their hands up and down in a sort of gesture of faux-uncertainty.
“Doot Doot (6 7)” is one of the grimier singles to reach escape velocity thanks to the perpetual Zoomer talent show that is TikTok. It crossed over due to the wholly idiosyncratic way in which Skrilla says the words “six seven” throughout the track, less a hook or a motif and more of an incantation.
Though Skrilla tells me the phrase is a way of honoring the section of his native Kensington, “where all my young buls, my little crashouts come from,” thanks to TikTok, it has entered into the brainrot canon. A lot of the “Six Seven” TikToks are also set to clips of Lamelo Ball highlights, but that’s likely just a function of LaMelo Ball being the most popular six-foot-seven basketball player in the universe among Zoomers.
“I’ve already adapted to it,” Skrilla says when I ask how he’s taken to being recognized. “This is what I asked God for. So I got what I wanted. I was making a lot of money when I was in the streets, but then I had kids. I was like, ‘Damn, what the fuck I’m gonna do? How can I be a dad and all I do is sell drugs and sit in the fuckin’ crib all day?’ I couldn’t be a father like that.”
And so, Skrilla began spending every day in the studio, developing a dark, rugged style rooted in Future’s burnt-brained freakouts, Kodak Black’s witchdoctor croak, Chief Keef and Young Thug’s psychedelic rhythmic sensibilities, Wayne’s sense of the wonders of language, and Gucci’s stream-of-consciousness absurdism. He drove a stolen car to his first meeting with his new label. “I took everything I wanted out of that shit and left it there.” Then, he got a ride home from his new benefactors, and never looked back.
His influences aren’t necessarily surprising: these guys are the latter-day street rap canon. The unusual thing is Skrilla claims to have barely listened to anyone besides those dudes (with the exception of artists he works with, select Tyler, the Creator songs, and Tierra Whack). “I don’t listen to music like that,” he says. By this, he means that he does not have the same listening habits that you and I do. “If I find a song I like, I listen to that same song for a week straight, nothing else.”
This is not dissimilar to his creative process, which involves going to the studio, poring through beats, often courtesy of the Rome (as in Italy)-based producer Mvmbo, finding one he likes, then stepping in the booth and seeing if he can knock out a great first line: “If I don’t feel like it’s coming from my soul,” he starts over.
His process has resulted in one of the more unified and unsettling discographies in recent memory. Skrilla lurches between rapping on-beat and off, woozily invoking Fear of God and Chrome Hearts in ways that imply immense spiritual power. He extols the benefits of both using and dealing drugs in equal measure, and at times just makes weird sounds for the hell of it.
The samples, keys, and strings loop back on themselves; the hi-hats patter like the footsteps of an approaching op. His music waltzes between the sacred and profane, offering no hope of retribution but perhaps the possibility of acceptance. He makes songs for standing on the corner in a cold rain with no coat, or maybe the feeling of passing out after getting in a drunken brawl with a stranger.
However insular, even paranoid and punishing, his music might seem upon first listen, don’t get it twisted: Skrilla is a motherfucking star.
The kids call it aura, but what we’re really talking about is the sort of ineffable quality that some people possess that draws strangers into their orbit—his vibe is so all-encompassing, when he gets a high-profile guest like Lil Baby or Lil Uzi Vert on one of his tracks, it is unmistakable that all parties involved are making a Skrilla song. It’s also the kind of moxie that compels entertainment industry suits to throw money at them and figure out what they’ll actually do later. Drake has it. Post Malone, much to our collective chagrin, clearly has it. I’ve met Kevin Gates twice, and even though he spent a large part of our second conversation trying to convince me he was a vampire, he definitely had it. And so does Skrilla.
To wit: When we finally get to the Hermes store, the security guard seeks him out, shakes his hand, and proceeds to lock the shop down like Skrilla’s the Duke de Orleans. No one told him to do this, he just did. Later, at the Carolina Herrera store, I’ll watch him rizz up a sales associate so effectively that, as he purchases a scarf from her, she goes from not knowing who he is to liking him so much that she gives him both her phone number and a thousand dollars worth of candles. (Not to brag, but part of his charm offensive involved claiming that I was a “famous journalist doing a journal on me.”)
In between him being treated like a visiting dignitary at Hermes and inadvertently solving the budgetary crisis at the heart of that one @dril tweet at Carolina Herrera, I should also mention that Skrilla accidentally wanders away from his brother/manager, brazenly shoplifts a faux-leather jacket from Zara (despite already wearing a real leather jacket), and proceeds to take us in a big circle up and down the escalators of the mall for seemingly no reason. Then he leads us into the Under Armour store, where he asks to be shown “that underwear with pockets y’all have.” Unsatisfied with what’s on offer, he boosts a pair of tube socks for the hell of it. After accidentally knocking some sign outside of a store down, he asks me, “You’re getting some good shit for this, aren’t you?”
“You got me at a good time. I just woke up, I’m chillin’ right now,” Skrilla tells me back at his place earlier that day (it’s 3 p.m.). “If you couldn’t see me until later you’d be like, ‘Oh shit, this n—ga drunk.’” He lives in a location I have been asked to characterize as “undisclosed” due to concerns over his personal safety and privacy (he was shot a few months back while visiting Chicago).
To give you a sense of his space, I’ll say the following: His kitchen contains a Mac desktop sitting on the bar. His living room contains a gigantic L-shaped couch with movie theater-style seats whose cupholders double as ashtrays, a big-ass TV on the wall, some paintings sitting on the floor, and not much else. He owns a few paintings, but most of them are just sitting against the walls — one of the only ones he’s hung up is of his late friend and collaborator, the Philly rapper Ybcdul. He sleeps on an air mattress, though he assures me he has a bed in storage and is just too lazy to haul it out. Besides, he’s on the road too much these days to care.
“I was a regular kid,” Skrilla tells me when I ask him about his childhood. He and his brother bounced back and forth between his dad and his mom, who were separated. He played sports — soccer, football, basketball — and applied himself in school at the urging of his dad. “He was strict on me, like ‘Play sports, don’t get in the streets, don’t fall into this, da da da da da.’ You know how dads are.”
He describes his mom during his youth as “kinda homeless” and perhaps as a result, a lot more lenient. “She was like, ‘You’re a big boy, you do you, I love you.’” Given her economic circumstances — not to mention her proximity to Kensington — it’s no surprise that Skrilla fell into dealing in order to make ends meet. “I did it so long that I got caught so many times,” he says. “I spent two years on house arrest fighting those cases. I did good in school, so the school[‘s representative] would come to my court dates and stick up for me.” The cases, he tells me, were later expunged from his record. But Kensington won.
As far as major cities go, Philadelphia is a deeply strange one. It’s defined by economic stratification, which is quite normal, yet there is also a sense of solidarity. Perhaps it’s forged by the fact that the Philly metro area has a population approximately the size of Atlanta’s, Miami’s, or D.C.’s, but is considered a tier below such cities in the highly-scientific category of “shit people think about.” Or maybe that’s just a myth that the city’s residents tell themselves to give themselves a chip on their shoulder.
It’s a place where a noise musician can become a local hero by publicly eating a rotisserie chicken. Every New Year’s Day, there’s a parade where everyone gets drunk and wears costumes and symbolically reenacts a centuries-old tradition of shaking down rich people for money. It is comically hard to buy alcohol after 10 p.m. here, yet there are bars, fun ones, where you can still smoke. Our sports fans celebrate championships by storming Broad Street en masse and drunkenly climbing poles, destroying property, and generally forming a writhing mass of intoxicated humanity that, if you squint hard enough, approaches something akin to true unity. Yet they go so hard with such regularity that our football stadium used to have a whole-ass branch of the court system inside it, including a jail. The city has an intractable feral cat problem, the accents and slang are linguistically implausible, and one of the most popular drinks here is Twisted Tea. Three nights after I meet up with Skrilla, my partner and I see a man in an Elmo suit dancing down the street, flanked by five live drummers. Dream logic abounds.
Skrilla, like Philly itself, has found virality through leaning into his innate eccentricities. He holds up chickens menacingly in his music videos and made an entire album, Underworld, dedicated to his Orishas, because he practices Santeria, which is an insanely interesting fact about him that I am only going to mention here because this is somehow one of the more quotidian Skrilla facts.
Oh yeah, and then there’s all the drug stuff. Skrilla looks like he’s on drugs, acts like he’s on drugs, raps like he’s on drugs, and puts people who are clearly on drugs—namely, members of Kensington’s unhouse population—in his music videos. He initially started doing this simply because he needed to find people to be in his videos with him, but the sight of Skrilla holding court amid the fiends has become one of his visual signatures. “I fuck with all of them though,” he says. “Fiends are just like us. They’re just going through a bad fuckin’ part of their life. It can happen to anybody.”
While there’s certainly a discussion to be had about the line between representation and exploitation in such circumstances, or even if the former is even possible without the latter, I would argue that, within the specific context of Philly, Skrilla’s move is a political act. For all its national notoriety as home to one of the largest open-air drug markets in America, Kensington is a black hole locally, ignored by City Hall, who have demonstrated an abominable lack of care for its residents, and salivated over by developers, who take advantage of the fact that that lack of care has rendered its property values tantalizingly low.
Fishtown, the neighborhood that fulfills the Williamsburg/Silverlake role of “Live-In Resort for Moneyed Youth” here in the city, is ever-expanding, absorbing the working-class blocks to its north, and one day may very well fully consume Kensington proper. In the meantime, the city has made it abundantly clear that it views the neighborhood’s community of drug users not as evidence of a massive public health crisis but as a PR problem. Far too often, these people are viewed as having dropped out of society by rendering their bodies incapable of producing capital, depersoned beings who have become a nuisance to be shuffled around, ignored, or simply left to die. “They treat them like dogshit,” Skrilla tells me. It brings a new meaning to Kensington’s nickname: Zombieland.
Skrilla doesn’t see things this way, and he’s not afraid of shoving this perspective in people’s faces. “Before me, nobody would claim Kensington,” he says. “In Kensington, there’s life. Everybody’s just having fun, even most of the people on drugs and shit. Come down there in the summertime one day. Cookouts on the block, everybody outside, it’s a family, for real. Most of the people that’s down there been there for a while. We all know each other. I’ll jump out the car, no security, sit out there, and just chill.”
It’s now evening, and we’re back at Skrilla’s spot. We’re testing out one of his new extremely expensive candles, the ones he charmed the Carolina Herrera saleswoman into giving him, and he’s explaining that the way to tell a candle’s quality isn’t to smell it while it’s burning. It’s to blow it out, then sniff the wick. Only in the flame’s absence can you appreciate its entire essence.
At his kitchen computer, Skrilla and his brother show us some unreleased videos he has coming down the pipe, including one that involves him rapping while sitting in the back of a moving Cybertruck (I genuinely do not think there are any political implications there; as loaded with Elon’s baggage as they are, they do just objectively look cool as fuck in a rap video). He’s working on a new album, tentatively titled Z. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into that project,” he says. He’s also working on a label, Rich Sinners, and he and his brother have discussed plans to lend their YouTube channel to a Kensington local for a non-sensationalizing show documenting life in the neighborhood.
Virality has treated Skrilla nicely. His streams have gone up, and so has his feature price. He’s always been interested in fashion, and now he has a chance to put a line together featuring his original designs. It’s also made it harder for him to go outside. “We could go to the fuckin’ hospital right now, and the old people would be like, ‘Yo, that’s Skrilla!’,” he says. Part of him wants to leave the city. But he hates L.A., the place where so many of his peers in the entertainment industry end up. “Everybody’s a con artist in LA,” he says. Besides, he has trouble sleeping on the road. “I don’t know why. I just miss home.”
He’s about to head down to Kensington for the evening, and, for boring reasons involving traffic tickets, needs to bum a ride from my photographer. As he pops in the shower — he says it’s only going to be five minutes, but it ends up being 25 — I think back to something he said earlier, when I asked him if there was anything he thought people didn’t understand about him. “I think they understand everything I want them to understand,” he told me.
And indeed, when you look at Skrilla, you see a person who has their “things,” elements that don’t necessarily tell you a ton about someone on their own, but when taken together, add up to something deeply arresting, even iconic. For him it’s drugs, Kensington, friendships with the fiends, fashion, Santeria and the Orishas, the influence of a handful of other artists, saying the phrase “six seven” in casual conversation, dropping “rockstarlifestylemightnotmakeit” into his lyrics almost as a verbal pause, and, apparently, candles. He is who he is, and is self-aware enough to be in complete control of his public perception even as he foments chaos around him like it’s a bodily function. The candle might go out some day, but not tonight.
We rely on your support to keep POW alive. Please take a second to donate on Patreon!
Related
Drew Millard used to live in New York and was the Features Editor for Noisey. Now he is California Drew and an Associate Editor at Vice. He does mad dishes.