One perk of becoming a semi-famous rapper is that, after many years of anonymity, you’re finally a big enough deal for someone on Genius to transcribe your lyrics.The downside, of course, is that they can f**k them up, too.
Sitting at the edge of a couch in a clandestine Manhattan smokers lounge, Theravada’s face morphs from appreciative amusement to exaggerated disappointment as he examines some freshly mangled lyrics on my iPhone screen. “You can’t make this up! [For] the first word, there’s a question mark?,” he says. “He didn’t hear me say, ‘They bribing us’?” I’m sure it’s annoying. But it’s a fair price to pay for becoming the latest trendy underground New York fave.
Over the last two years, the 34-year-old has transitioned from accomplished, but under-the-radar rapper-producer to If You Know You Know All-Star. Or, at least a Starter With a Lot of Potential. He regularly texts The Alchemist, and he’s gotten direct props from Evidence. He can still remember Roc Marciano making the screwface and telling him to send some beats. He’s produced for everyone from Your Old Droog to Earl Sweatshirt. His work with the latter on Live Laugh Love was another career trophy, with his beats framing Earl’s thoughts in a surrealistic fog that’s simultaneously immersive and disorienting. In September, he punctuated his rush of success with his latest project, The Years We Have. With symbolic songwriting and misty, farm-to-table production, the album is as rich as it is understated, and it propelled him into the spotlight. Or, at the edge of it.
“When I started, I thought it would happen later,” he tells me in a decisive baritone. “But now that it’s actually happening, I'm nothing short of grateful.” “Happening” can mean a lot of things to rap upstarts. In the past, it’s looked like designated “talking underground hip-hop with Theravada” interviews flooding YouTube. “Why can’t it be ‘Talking about tea with Theravada?,’” he laments. On this mild October evening, his level up looks like passerbys giving him props for his beats as he stands outside a Manhattan shoe store he used to call his day job. It was a measure of steadiness in an unpredictable industry. And it prevented him from having to post on IG all the f**ing time. Walking to the invite-only smokers lounge, a friend tells him he’s finally finished that beat he was working on, and Theravada’s visibly impressed. “Little does he know, when I first tried making beats, I looped that same f**king song,” he tells me.
Years before he started making beats, Theravada was born Xenophon Yialias to Greek parents and raised in Long Island. He calls his father a handyman and a “jack of all trades.” “He understood buildings and infrastructures and what they should cost,” he says. While his pops built up physical systems, his mom constructed intellectual ones as a teacher who also exposed Theravada — called Xen by his friends and family — to music like Seal. And Enya. “‘Sail Away’ and ‘March Madness’ might be the two hardest songs for me,” he shares, as a realize I’ve definitely caught a contact high.
We’ve been talking for around two hours, with our series of digressions snowballing into pop culture references and silly little jokes we both have to make time to squeeze in before the next Question and Answer™ exchange. We keep circling back to basketball. I love basketball. One of my editors just told me I use too many bball metaphors in my work. Don’t care. Love ’em. But Theravada really likes basketball. He’s got mixtapes named after ball players. He remembers betting his coach over whether he could grab the rim before ripping it down and forcing his cocky coach to the ground to do pushups just like he promised. He once skipped his team’s first high school basketball practice of the season so he could see Penny Hardaway at a Nets game. His team was upset, but Theravada had a date with destiny. “I got to dap Penny Hardaway,” he scoffs.
So then, it makes sense that some of his earliest musical memories are centered on something related to the hardwood. At around age five or six, he remembers being transfixed by B-Real, Coolio, Method Man, LL Cool J, and Busta Rhymes rapping from the perspective of the Monstars in a song from the Space Jam soundtrack . He still gets excited when he remembers “Ether” for the first time at his cousin’s house. When a basketball camp counselor asked him about his musical taste, he realized his playlist was a bit unconventional for a 10-year-old. “He’s like, ‘What you listening to,’ and I'm like, ‘Yo, I've been listening to Mos Def,' and he was like, ‘What?’,” he recalls. At around the same time, he grew to appreciate the mastery of DJ Premier, namely, his work on MOP’s “Breakin’ the Rules.” “There was a certain level of perfection about it. So I'm like, ‘Damn, it's pleasant, but it's still gangster,’” he says. “By age 10, I was a hip-hop head.”
By age 14, he got Fruity Loops and made his first beats. He wouldn’t have called himself an actual beatmaker at the time. But he was trying. It didn’t click at first. But his cousin Rob Chambers was already pretty good, and he let Theravada put some melodies over the tracks. By his late teens and early 20s, Theravada had copped his own equipment and started DJing. Then he got into Reason. Then he copped an MPC, an SP404, and an sp303. He wasn’t sure about his abilities yet, but after playing some of his beats at local kickbacks, he’d gotten some encouragement. His friends, who he described as “more professed, damn-near child prodigies” were actually impressed by his beats. “Everyone’s in there, and so they keep playing my beats on repeat,” he says. “So from that alone it was like, ‘All right, I guess I'm onto something.”
In 2017, that something materialized into Xen Griffey, the first in a series of mixtapes that would crystallize his knack for piling sports references with wit and surprising economy of movement. 2019 saw him connect with Earl Sweatshirt as the beat stuff really pick up. Folks like Your Old Droog were tapping him for production. Since then it’s been up. Now, it’s even higher, with The Years We Have being crystalline evidence. Checking in at a svelte 28 minutes, the album is the end result of lifelong fandom, sample search spontaneity, and writerly instincts for impressionistic storytelling.
He’d probably reject immediate comparisons, but, like a Navy Blue or even an Earl, his bars are layered in implicit meanings that play out like mid-song micro riddles. The rest of those screwed up lyrics , which are from his The Years We Have cut "Some Things Don't Change," tell a fragmented story of disingenuous industry investment and belated personal growth. “They bribing us for a quick check/It's only good for about a thousand miles/Gets you pretty far, but how you gettin' back around?,” he raps, with a laconic tone that sounds like he didn’t want to get up that morning. Combined with a feathery soul sample, it all plays out like a series of interconnected, drifting thoughts he doesn’t stick around to supply real conclusions to. Ditto for much of the album, which feels like a seamless fusion of aesthetic and technique. Two months after its release, he’s quit his job at Undefeated. His new LP hasn’t made major national waves, but it's earned acclaim from the underground. And it feels like the beginning of something.
“I see this as a Mario kart speeding into the ramp. I'm flying for mad long right now,” he says. “And I'm going to land very soon and I gotta finish the race.”
*Editor’s Note*: Theravada’s favorite tea is a Greek variety called sideritis. He says, “It’s also commonly known as Mountain Tea. It’s the absolute cure of all ailments. No matter where I lived, anyone who came to my crib knew I’d be making that tea at some point. "
