Get To Know BBY Kodie

WHILE HE ASPIRES TO BE “HOUSTON’S RESPONSE TO DRAKE,” as he said in an interview about the Toronto rapper who made it big in the Bayou City, BBY Kodie is following the path created by the likes of Kanye West, the late Virgil Abloh, and Westside Gunn. Like them, he’s channeling his vision and creativity to push far past music, and intertwining the worlds of rap, contemporary art, and fashion.

Like a lot of people these days, the “Started This” emcee never received any technical training, but developed his sound and creativity on his own, learning the technical stuff on the internet. Online is also where he got a lot of his inspiration. 

“You had Soundcloud for your sound and Tumblr for your visuals. I’d see things on Tumblr that I thought were cool, gold grills, and stuff like that,” he shares. 

He began to make songs with his friend and collaborator HVN, and their creations would go viral overnight, leading to singles like “Milkshake,” the upbeat interpolation of Kelis’ 2003 hit single.

Once he realized he had an audience, he began to make a song each day and threw free shows in Houston. The small high school audience would transform into a cult following, amplifying tracks like The Godfather-influenced “Korleone,” which would help him to gain recognition from acts like Lil Yachty.

“I was trying to give the fans something that wasn’t too left field,” he says about the sound of his latest album, Emotions Running High, which was released in November. 

Emotions Running High is an album complete with dark, menacing beats, and a confident rhyme style. Kodie incorporated different elements in his production, using hints of autotune for the first time, boom-bap drums, and more ambient melodies. There’s also a hint of jazz music, something he had a distaste for growing up, even though his father played it all the time. On songs like “Survival” and “In The Moment,” the subtleties of trumpets and saxophones come from his father’s taste in music, he says.  

A product of both Texas and Louisiana, Zawon Handy, better known by his stage name BBY Kodie, was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and raised by his aunt. As a young child, he moved to Houston but still traveled between Texas and Louisiana, to be with family.

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