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Will Schube still can’t believe Larry David got Salman Rushdie to say ‘fatwa sex’ on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
In 2014, Cavalier captivated the vinyl connoisseurs and backpack stalwarts of America. His breakthrough album, Chief, even featured a verse from none other than Raekwon the Chef, the type of co-sign most underground rappers dream about. Cav seemingly had it all, but just a year after that aforementioned breakthrough, he bolted from New York and settled in New Orleans to build his career at his own speed.
New Orleans was where Cavalier and frequent collaborators, Iman Omari and Quelle Chris created seminal albums in their discographies. Everyone else moved around, but Cavalier stayed, even if the Big Easy wasn’t quite the balm he thought it’d be.
Fast forward to 2018’s Private Stock, which many considered a beautiful step forward in his ever growing discography. Questions of ‘what next?’ seemed to drown him. The pandemic followed. He had a kid. Life started to become about more than rap. “It’s like, ‘Yo, the world is ending and I got a baby.’ With all due respect, fuck your beats,” he explains.
Cav still followed his creative impulses, but they emerged in strange ways. His neighbors knew him as the dude who rapped day and night, who spat while wheeling down the garbage cans and greeted the mailman with some bars. “I was still creating, but I would create and wake up and delete 30 takes,” he explains. “I had to figure out why that was happening.” Working out of this slump came from pure persistence. Cav just kept on making and making and making, and eventually, he convinced himself that his perfectionism — Q-Tip syndrome as he calls it — was doing more harm than good.
His new album, and first for backwoodz, is called Different Type Time, and it’s a direct reflection of the philosophy Cav developed to create this body of work. On the atmospheric title track, he asks: “What are we doing all of this for, y’know / Who’re we doing it for?” Cav’s answer? “Me.”