Oblé Reed: Hometown Hero
Photo by Daquan Terrance.
Not a moment passes where it’s unclear how much Oblé Reed loves Seattle.
You don’t have to look any further than his art. It’s in the title of his debut album, LINDENAVE!, pronounced like the street that stretches vertically past Bitter Lake and connects N 130th to N 145th. It’s embedded in the isometric angle of its cover art, where a pack of youths is caught on the road in mid-sprint, Reed in his signature hair buns leading the pack.
The music video for “HOMETOWNHERO.” opens with a shot of the Space Needle before rushing through a related array of iconography, from the bicolor serpent guarding Capitol Hill’s light rail station to the vistas from the tippy top of Queen Anne Avenue. Dangling out the passenger window of a white Range Rover zooming down Broad St., Reed thumbs back to the city’s defining landmark and hits the pressure point: “What you do when the city you love ain’t love you back?”
It’s the same in person. I’m sitting with the rising hip-hop artist at an outdoor table by Retreat, a popular Green Lake cafe where he and his manager Ryker frequently hold court. As we talk, he keeps his hands inside the pockets of his thin black jacket, taking them out only to pull his berry-colored beanie back over his ears. Yet though Reed is dressed for the weather, he’s far from uncomfortable. Today is the kind of bizarrely temperate winter day the PNW occasionally provides, and as he speaks he frequently breaks into a grin, the smile in his brown eyes reflecting the bright blue in the sky above him.
It wasn’t always this way. Back when Reed gave up his college prospects to try and make it in music, he fell into the same traps as his peers. “I wasn't super involved in the scene on my come-up,” he admits. “I was an internet warrior, for sure.”
To be fair, his come-up came during COVID when investing in the scene was a touch more difficult. His first taste of national attention came somewhat as a fluke back when he was writing as Moondrop, and like many viral moments, it didn’t last long.
Now, under his real name, he’s finally finding the kind of success he once so desperately sought. But as he runs down his history, I get the sense that, despite the years of preparation and dedication to his craft, Reed still couldn’t have imagined where his life would be taking him. In his teen years, he approached his chosen art form with the industriousness of a valedictorian; today, a young adult of 22, Reed has flourished into one of the most incendiary rappers to claim Seattle as his home. Last year, LINDENAVE! topped The Seattle Times list of best Washington albums. He currently sits at 120,000 monthly Spotify listeners and rising. He’s been hosting sold-out shows for a while now; just a few days after our talk, he’ll host another one at Barboza. His ascent is certainly more measured than his initial blast of virality, but the climb must feel a lot better.
It’s not just because of his deft flow and dense lyrical rivers, both of which make his debut LP such a resonant listen. It’s the fact that he exemplifies one of hip-hop’s foundational tenets — representing where you’re from, and how it made you who you are — within that music, and within the community he aims to build.
Green Lake commonly teems with life on nice days. The park in the background swarms with people post-work: parents pushing strollers around the perimeter of the lake, older children chasing each other with tag hands, joggers enjoying a brief moment unperturbed by raindrops. On a stretch of grass, a trio tosses a frisbee, their sneakers digging into the soft, wet ground.
Few of these people look quite like Reed, a fact he holds at his core.
“My dad's from West Africa and my mom's from Everett,” he says. “They came together and made me a mixed child. It was hard to find a lot of people that looked like me, who had that same experience. It was a lot of, ‘I’m not Black enough for the Black kids, but I'm not white enough for the white kids.’ I had to do a lot of code-switching.”
Reed, born Reed Oblé Adjibly, first learned how to love music in his hometown of Shoreline, when he discovered contemporary Christian acts TobyMac and Lecrae during a shared bill at the former Key Arena when he was 13. Reed connected with Lecrae in particular, in part because a family friend had gifted his dad a burned CD of his 2006 album After The Music Stops. For weeks after the concert, powered by a karaoke machine gifted to him by his grandmother, he wore out his sister’s patience reenacting the concert’s setlist.
Reed doesn’t mention whether he continues to be a practicing Christian, but it does explain the overall cleanliness of his lyrics. LINDENAVE! doesn’t have an explicit version because no explicit version exists. Even on his features, he strays away from the common suspects — these are songs that your five-year-old could sing in the backseat. In a sense, it forces him to bare his teeth through a sharper pen game, rather than shock value or subject matter. He succeeds; whether it’s the layered metaphor of “SK[I]NCARE,” the recursive homonyms of “WESTON.,” or the cascading repetition on the chorus of “BLACKKIDS.,” LINDENAVE! is full of songs that strike hard on lyrical strength alone.
Despite his affinity for music, Reed spent his childhood absorbed in athletics and relentlessly grinding it out in school. “I graduated with a 4.99 weighted GPA,” he affirms. “I missed one question on my SATs.” His academic diligence kept him from discovering mainstream rap until his junior year of high school. “When I was by myself, I never listened to those songs,” he explains. “I was so clueless, but I would learn the words by association, by writing. I did a lot of backtracking. I had to.”
That backtracking eventually led him to J. Cole, an enormous influence whom he discovered, ironically, through his song “No Role Modelz.” In him, Reed sees not only a talented artist but someone capable of balancing that artistry within the context of his life. “The life that he lived is the epitome of artistic freedom, right?” he reasons. “He gets to be an artist, but then he also gets to live his life on the side behind the scenes and do whatever he wants.”
A dive into the rabbit hole of Soundcloud rap followed shortly after. “I think the first song that I had saved was ‘Catch Me Outside’ by Ski Mask the Slump God,” he recalls. “I think that is the first song that I saved that wasn't Christian.”
Inspired, Reed fashioned a makeshift studio in a backyard treehouse and started sharpening his skills in between homework and track practice. He pored over rap lyrics, studying flow and cadence with the self-discipline of his school habits. Armed with a Rode NT1 plugged into a Scarlett Solo, he’d spit sparks into the condenser mic. “I wasn't taking it seriously, but I would rap the hell out of a song if it came up. All the while he kept his interest in hip-hop on the back burner, preparing instead for a college education in epidemiology.
Fate had other plans. Though his hard work netted him acceptance letters from all his reach schools (including Stanford and USC), there was a caveat: “I didn't have any money to go to any of those places.” Instead, he applied for Seattle Pacific University on a Track and Field scholarship and entered as a freshman in the fall of 2019. His prospects as a track star were immediately stymied when a freak accident during a game of basketball left him with a concussion and a fractured nose that benched him for the rest of the season. Out of shape from lack of practice, he managed one outdoor meet before the COVID pandemic shut down sports indefinitely.
Suddenly Reed was back home with nothing but Zoom classes to distract him from the canceled track meets he had prepared for. A moment of clarity followed. “Everything was telling me that this is not…” He trails off, then reiterates. “It just wasn't my call.”
With his motivations waning, Reed decided to drop out of college and pursue music as a career. “It’s crazy to think about,” he says in retrospect. “All of the stuff that felt like setbacks at the moment were more redirection than anything. I have to keep reminding myself of those past experiences. It may feel like the worst thing in the world, it may feel like I'm missing out on something or I didn't accomplish what I wanted to do, but ultimately it’s all leading to the place where I know I'm going to be.”
The moment I mention Moondrop, Reed physically recoils. Everyone is embarrassed of their past, and his response undoubtedly shows that he’s grown as an artist since that original alias. In truth, a good deal of his Moondrop stuff (the early cut “Tell The World,” for instance) holds up, even if his lyrics have improved significantly. Perhaps that’s because almost all Moondrop songs, like all of the songs on LINDENAVE!, were tracked in that humble treehouse studio.
Still, why the shame? “Moondrop was just me finding myself,” he explains. “And I was doing it under this veil of some random name that didn't mean anything. It allowed me to experiment.” The problem, he says, was that “I felt detached from the art. I could do anything or be anybody, but the art that I was creating didn't necessarily feel “me.” And even when it did feel “me,” it was under this other name.”
His words reveal an ardent belief in representing the self authentically through art. In other interviews, he’s brought up this concept of “romanticized authenticity,” which is essentially a succinct summation of what most artists do: describing their reality within the grandiosity of storytelling.
Actions backed up his words; in November of 2022, he gave up Moondrop for good, changing his rapper name to better reflect his real name. It could have been an SEO nightmare, but the change in feeling was night and day. “It just flipped a switch,” he says. “Everything else fell into line because I was just operating as myself.”
“I’m doing my best to bridge the gap between the North End, Central District, South End, Tacoma, and bring it together so we have one scene…Where Everything is Appreciated.”
If fate slapped down his academic prospects at every turn, it seemed to hand him nothing but good fortune the moment he committed to music. A sole Moondrop track exists in the public consciousness: “Loose Change,” released at the tail end of 2020. “I made that song in 30 minutes,” he claims. “I put it out immediately — didn't do any marketing, didn't do anything, just put it out — and then the next day, I called my videographer friend and said, ‘Bro, we gotta film a video today, people seem to like it.’”
The resulting video exploded on TikTok, and a few days later, Reed received an email from a Soundcloud A&R representative: Pharrell’s team was interested in the song and wanted to hop on a Zoom call, ostensibly to talk about adding the track to the second volume of his collaborative mixtape, i am OTHER. Pharrell aimed for the mixtape series to focus on conscious-oriented rap by underground artists across the globe, and “Loose Change” fit the bill perfectly. It’s arguably the sharpest of Reed’s early work, wrapping an extended metaphor about panhandling around a call for racial justice. (“Do you got some change for an artist/Just an artist tryna see a little change” he flips cleverly on the chorus.)
Here, out of nowhere, was a chance to introduce himself on the world stage as a rapper. How did he take the news?
“I wasn't prepared. Not one bit,” says Reed. “It low-key made me go a little crazy.”
As the track racked up hundreds of thousands of plays, Reed naturally felt immense pressure to follow up on his surprise success. The tracks he released afterward, “Low Mileage” and “Senior Year,” both failed to replicate the trajectory of “Loose Change.” Crushed with anxiety about losing what could have been his only shot at a music career, he spent the next four months off of social media and out of the studio. During that time, he licked his wounds and reassessed his goals.
Looking back now, Reed notes the positives. For one, it forced him to cope with the reality that he had a lot of maturing to do, both artistically and emotionally: “It made me realize that I wasn’t ready.” For another, he believes that the sudden dose of virality inoculated him from the addictive impulse to chase it, a behavior he observes in tons of hungry up-and-comers.
If nothing else, he feels heartened that, of all his songs, “Loose Change” was the one that went viral. “That was the first song that I use my real voice: no autotune, no anything,” he says. “I engineered the whole thing by myself. Even the record that’s on the project, nobody touched that.”
The vinyl mock-up of the mixtape that Pharrell sent to Reed is still hanging on the walls of Fibonacci Production Studios. Sometimes when he’s there, he picks it up and holds it in his hands. It reminds him of his potential, and of what matters most in a rap song.
“The mix is not even that good, but the words resonated with people,” he says. “It showed me that authenticity, realness, is more important to anybody than the quality of the sound.”
Still, Reed knew the mix could be better. He also knew it rested on his shoulders to maximize his value. “If all I'm worth, or all I can contribute in a creative space, is a 16 on a track, then I'm gonna miss out on so many rooms that I could be in,” he reasons.
In his search for production experience, he found a gig at Fibonacci, a secluded recording spot tucked into the U Village. Once again, fate smiled upon him; during a preliminary studio walkthrough, he discovered that the owner of the studio was his senior-year tutor in high school. After a week of interning, he had the job.
It wasn’t just skill Reed hoped to accrue at Fibonacci; it was also connection. With internet viral success exposed for all its hollowness, Reed craved the kind of community he felt Seattle’s hip-hop scene lacked. “Complex has a ‘Blueprint’ series, and [Scooter Braun] was talking about how if you don't see anything happening that you want to see, go and make it yourself,” says Reed.
So, every Friday, he and the Fibonacci team would hold “Open Sessions” where they would open up the studio and host any creative who wanted to stop by. “Engineers were on payroll, they got paid,” Reed explains. “Any artist could pull up. We had networking going on, we had a lounge area.” It started small — only a few people attended the first session — but after months, at least 40 people were popping in and out of the studio every Friday. They started churning out songs with verses, each supplied by the day’s participants.
“People were recording with artists at all different levels. We had people that were recording for the first time, and people who had been doing this for ten years. That was what I wanted to see in the scene.”
Even more than before, the Sessions opened Reed’s eyes to the power of local investment. To him, at a baseline, gathering all those people together benefitted the craft. “Iron sharpens iron,” he says. “A song isn't gonna have seven verses on it, so your verse better be good enough for it to be one of the ones that's gonna end up on there.”
At the same time, it built up Reed as a reputable fosterer of community, committed to hosting a space that allowed fellow hip-hop artists — rappers and beatmakers alike — to join forces. The relationship was symbiotic. “It was always dope knowing that I could look forward to Friday and I’d be surrounded by people who are trying to do the same thing that I am. Knowing that every time I'm gonna go there — whether it was the same people I saw last week or new people — I was gonna grow in some sense.”
From the Sessions, Reed forged a series of connections: with engineer Evan George, who co-produced LINDENAVE!; with rap peer Yonny, another bright talent who guests on “SK[I]NCARE” and shares bills with him frequently; and with videographer Nash Pearson, whose direction and editing made “HOMETOWNHERO.” one of the most electrifying music videos of last year.
Most importantly, it introduced him to the mononymic Ryker, a tireless champion of acts like Spokane’s Jang The Goon (formerly Jango) and Seattle’s TeZaTalks. After first catching her ear through an early version of “BLACKKIDS.,” Reed spent the next shift at his overnight job watching hours of her interviews, taking notes. Then he invited her to a 30-minute meeting over dinner that lasted 3 hours. The two have been working together ever since.
The Sessions only lasted briefly; when the studio closed for renovations, they fell by the wayside. “I hope to build something like that sometime soon,” says Reed about the return of that kind of open forum. “There’re a lot of people that I'm trying to bring in on that project, but when it happens, it's gonna be the right moment.”
Until that happens, it’ll always remain a happy memory in Reed’s mind. “When they do a documentary of Seattle music,” he predicts, grinning, “I think that place is gonna be a moment in history.”
Few genres are as allegiant to regionality as rap. In Emerald City: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle, University of Washington professor Daudi Abe notes that “at its core, rap music has always been about telling who you are and what it’s like where you’re from.” Recently, Heems of the defunct act Das Racist further explicated: “Rap is identity music. It’s like folk music — you’re talking about yourself, what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with. You explore identity through the subconscious, at least if you’re not sitting there and rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.”
As a Shoreline kid, Reed reps Seattle’s North End. He understands the atypicality of his perspective. “People in the city, when they think of Seattle music, they think of the South End,” he says. “Seattle hip hop is a thing of the south.”
He’s not wrong. After Seattle’s second Black resident, hotel owner William Grose, moved to 23rd and E Madison in 1889, a community of Black middle-class residents sprung up around him. Though the city remained absent of some of America’s more blatant racist policies across the 20th century, factors such as de facto school segregation (the phenomenon of schools being segregated due to racial isolation rather than formal laws) and “redlining” (the practice of discouraging loans to residents of targeted areas) kept Seattle’s Black population either in the Central District or south of it.
Consequently, when hip-hop hit the West Coast in the early 1980s, it landed in Seattle’s Black community first. South Seattle clubs like Lateef’s (host to one of the city’s first rap open mics) and all-ages spaces like The Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club in Columbia City provided loam for the area’s nascent hip-hop scene to take root. When formative local acts like the Emerald Street Boys and Sir Mix-A-Lot took to the mic, it was to rep their origins in the CD — or, in the case of acts like the influential DJ Whiz Kid, in Tacoma. Back then, rap rarely reached north of the river.
If Reed is ever self-conscious about representing himself authentically, it stems from knowing he grew up with a certain level of privilege. “I just didn't grow up in that culture,” he says in honesty. “I had different struggles. I didn't have to worry about some of the things that those people had to worry about, what that community had to worry about.”
At some point, anxiety festered about how his peers would view him. “With that being at the forefront of Seattle hip-hop…it's like, are there people listening out here that are going to relate to what I'm saying?”
“Showcasing the beauty that we have up here, as well as the talent…we have all the pieces. We just needed a couple of us to really dig deep and be like, “trust the process. And I won't hold a grudge against y'all for not seeing the vision right now.”
Judgment from the locals is one thing. On the national stage, there’s another obstacle to clear, and that’s Seattle’s reputation as a tepid pool of talent.
No one says it openly, but you’ll see it wherever people are granted anonymity; there’s a certain assumption about the caliber of rap that bubbles out of this area, which is that it’s a tough sell relative to what emerges from the country’s supposed dens. That’s been the case since Billboard first wrote about Seattle’s scene in 1986, declaring the city “that hip-hop hotbed” in a tone dripping with sarcasm. Decades later, in the intro to his book, Abe anecdotally recalls the blurb provided by a cable music channel as “Same Love” blared out of his TV speakers: “Macklemore grew up in the spoken word community due to Seattle’s barely-there hip-hop scene.”
Why be so harsh? Since the birth of the culture, plenty of Seattle hip-hop artists have made waves. Non-comprehensively, that includes Ishmael Butler, of the NY-based Digable Planets and currently of Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces; the legendary producer Vitamin D and his protegé Jake One; Travis Thompson from Burien; Gifted Gab and Nacho Picasso and Sneakguapo and the rest of the Moor Gang collective; femme duo THEESatisfaction before they split in 2016; current rising star Sol. The list goes on and on.
But, in all fairness, you can count the number of inarguably seismic Seattle rappers on two fingers. Oblé Reed, like his peers, shares a similarity with them both. He proudly reps the city the way Sir Mix-a-Lot did, not just with his breakout hit, 1987’s “Posse on Broadway,” but openly in interviews. (“There is so much talent in Seattle,” he summarized in response to Billboard’s 1986 snark, providing a model for all the city’s rappers since.)
Reed’s focus on conscious lyrics, meanwhile, lines him up with Macklemore and his intentions as an artist, with a few differences; the former’s songs tend to be cleaner, and far less corny, than the latter’s. Indeed, to Reed, words are what define our style of hip-hop. “The storytelling aspect of music is what you see here, super big,” he argues. “Whether it’s the pop side of hip hop down to the trap type of music, it's storytelling. The pen game up here is crazy. People are super locked in with the lyrics.”
From a purely identity-based standpoint, Reed’s closest comparison might be Lil Mosey, another mixed-race man of 22 raised in Seattle’s North End (Mountlake Terrace, specifically) who also went viral once and dropped out of school to chase a music career. Artistically, however, the two couldn’t be more different, and not just because of Mosey’s lyrical explicitness. Mosey might have repped 50th Ave on his debut LP, 2018’s Northsbest, but its pointed title and the Needle on its cover was more lip service than anything. He found fame through 2018’s “Pull Up,” a song that achieved so much virality that it allowed him to bypass a grassroots path to success. So in an interview with Respect My Region’s Mitch Pfeifer, Mosey had no qualms echoing longstanding disparagements of Seattle hip-hop: “If you want the smoke, come to Seattle…that’s the only thing Seattle is really good for.”
Reed thinks differently. “So many people feel like they don't need Seattle to make it,” he says at one point, not naming names. “Point me to one person who has longevity that didn't have the city backing them. You can't. There's nobody, there is literally nobody. Everybody that had their moment but abandoned the city, where are they at? They're nowhere.” (In August 2021, Mosey was accused of second-degree rape and fought the charge until he was acquitted in December 2023. He hasn’t released a record since 2019.)
Reed is aware of the perception others have about his region’s rap, but he insists the issue is rooted precisely in a lack of local pride. “I think it's a lack of culture and a lack of community investment,” he outlines, getting more animated as he speaks. “Because we do have so many talented people, but we also have all of these tech bros coming in and just being like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna be here for Amazon.’ They don't want to go to that local show, obviously not. If a big artist is touring through, they're like, ‘Oh, I love this artist, I'm gonna go there.’
“We don't have what L.A. has, or what Atlanta has, or New York, where people are ride-or-die for the artists they have in their city. I think that’s made our artists jaded, so when they do get a little buzz, they're like, “Bye, I'm out of here. Y'all didn't believe in me, da da da da da.” It's like bro, nobody believed in you before this!”
Clearly, he’s landed on the idea that local support, both in the giving and the receiving of it, is the way forward. That’ll be his focus for as long as he strives to attain national stardom — and, we can only hope, even afterward. It means losing his mind in the front row of a show and getting the crowdgoers around him to do the same. It means cajoling another fellow rapper to drive five hours east to Spokane for a life-changing opportunity. It means finding the people standing alone by the fridge at a party, like he used to when he was unknown, and making them feel appreciated.
Even in the moments before we part ways, he’s urging me to check out people like Yonny and TeZa, and Lazā, and CHRVNS, and Nobi, and The Rhetorician with his over-the-top visual inventiveness. Grand efforts only go so far; it’s the small things — the things that anybody can do — that effect the most change.
“I’m doing my best to bridge the gap between the North End, Central District, South End, Tacoma, and bring it together so we have one scene,” he summarizes. “A scene where everybody can make a different style of music, but everything is Seattle and everything is accepted. We're lifting everybody up.”
He stares at me as he speaks, his eyes wide open.
