In downtown Los Angeles early March, EBK Young Joc premiered his latest project Hotboiiz:4L in the popular clothing store Asaali. An intimate crowd gathered around Cypress Moreno’s DJ set before premiering the Stockton rapper’s new music. In that crowd were hip hop teams: the EBK group, the Stinc Team, and a group of friends from Santa Ana. In the Santa Ana friends group I met Kapri, a 23-year old rapper making music seriously for the last 5 years. At the time, Kapri had collaborations with Laudiano, AzChike, and MoneySign Suede. We introduced ourselves over the busy atmosphere of traffic-music and smoke. He mentioned Cypress and himself had a track coming out soon. I later found out, Cypress premiered their song “What Happened” during his DJ set at the listening party, and Kapri got writer’s block during their session together.
In late April, Kapri and I met again in Montebello to go more in depth in his musical journey. He brought with him the group of friends from March. Each with a creative role in the journey, and creating a lane for themselves in photography, clothing, and music. During our conversation the Orange County artist explains, “I see myself doing tours, putting on for my homies. I have a lot of homies around me that are creative. I know if they pop, they’re gonna bring me. It’s just a loyalty thing that we all kind of just grew up on.” This morality is one rooted in Santa Ana, which the Latino rapper explained as a city that can have three taco stands in the same street and still support each other with no greed.
When Kapri explains the love for his city, his eyes hold a reflection of a complicated history. The rapper mentions his older brother’s passing in Santa Ana with police involvement, and the burden that comes with the institutional aftermath. Yet that experience does not hold more weight than the lessons he gained from his older brother, Mase.
Mase is one of the main reasons Kapri became so close to music. “My brother put me on as a kid bro. We used to have one of those CD Walkmans, and he would pop one [CD] in. Something he had burned on the computer, a computer at school.”
[The following is an edited excerpt from the There Radio Interview with Kapri]
Tony: It’s interesting you say that even with this event of your brother’s passing, you still have that relationship with Santa Ana.
Kapri: It just goes back to how he looked at it. Raising his kids there. Taking them to school, and taking them to the parks. Always raising them to be like… yea we’re not in a great place like Newport Beach or Laguna Beach, but you could make it a great place. Not everyone from Santa Ana is bad. How he raised his kids to be, he raised me because we were 15 years apart. When I was a kid, he was already in high school. How he looked at the city bro, to me, that kind of stuck with me. I always tell myself, it doesn’t matter where I came from. I can come from the gutter… I can come from hell, but you can always make your story good. It doesn’t have to be bad. He always had that picture, you can turn it around.
T: Do you feel like you do that through your music?
K: Honestly bro, from here on out I feel like I’m going to do it. Because I’ve just been on a whole different level. I’ve been tapping into me. I’m not talking about things that we did or could have done… the homies doing dumb stuff. The music I’m doing from here on out, is just us. From here on out, I’ll say, yea.
T: It kind of reminds me of what you said earlier. The way you got into music, and the way your brother gave you that walkman. Do you feel like one of the main reasons you got into music is to continue that legacy?
K: Hell yea. Always. When I have my kids, I don’t want to be a “has been”. I don’t want to be like “I used to do music”. Na, I want to sit there and say, I got a record deal off of music. You’re in this house because of music. Music is good. All types of music is good. I like all types of music. You know… implementing that into my kids is gonna be huge.
I feel like I’m continuing that legacy of my brother.
K: To me bro, we were poor there. We came up there. We made money there. My brother passed there. My nieces and nephews were born there, Santa Ana is us. It’s a part of me, it’s a part of my family.
Listen to the full interview here. Kapri speaks on the music business, working with Cypress Moreno, and his goals with music.