When I started to prepare for this weeks’ post, my first thoughts were about the significance of names. Artists in the entertainment industry many times will adopt a name instead of their birth name. They normally have a good reason for choosing the alternative identification. Perhaps the name is another family name, or a name of someone the artists may love and/or respect. The hip hop artist might choose a name that describes them or gives them marketable recognition. Our featured artist this week chose the name Future. He chose a noun, but a word that describes a period of time. Time regarded as still to come. Great for marketing, but his choice does leave a lot for us to think about. Maybe a look at his life and career might help us understand more about Future, and his choice of name.
I thought it was appropriate to use part of a well-known quote as a title for this post. It reads, “The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.”Powerful words from an unknown writer. However, they might be very appropriate when speaking about the hip hop star.
Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn was born on November 20, 1983 in Atlanta, Georgia. He began using his stage name while performing as one of the members of the musical collective The Dungeon Family, where he was nicknamed “The Future”. His first cousin, record producer, and Dungeon Family member Rico Wade, encouraged him to sharpen his writing skills and pursue a career as a rapper.
Rico Wade has legendary status in the Atlanta hip hop community. The Dungeon Family is a hip hop/R&B/soul musical collective, based in Atlanta, Georgia. The group derives its name from “The Dungeon”, the name given to record producer Rico Wade’s studio, located in the basement of his mother’s house, where many of the early members of the collective did their first recordings. Rico Wade, Ray Murray, and Sleepy Brown join the production/songwriting team Organized Noize, who have produced hits for the main popular Dungeon Family groups Outkast and Goodie Mob.
Before Future started working in music, his life was clouded by illegal activity. He seemed destined to live a life quite different from that of a hip hop music star. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Future explained that he is not one who looks behind him. For him, everything is about the present and yes, the future. “When I was in the streets, I ain’t never think about that, man, f**k tomorrow, nigga, let’s do this shit today,” he says. “I’m a f**king rock star, dogg. I’m enjoying this shit, I ain’t trying to remember yesterday.” Nevertheless, there are parts of his young life that will remain with him indefinitely. Future’s dad left when he was 10, and his mom, who worked as a 911 operator, would often leave him at his great-aunt’s – which happened to be a dope house. “I had multiple aunties, I had multiple uncles, that was on drugs,” he says. “When you grow up in something, you don’t even know if it’s bad or good. You just know that’s how it is.”
It was Future’s cousin Rico Wade that exposed a different life. He would come to understand that there was a possibility that stood in contrast to what he saw and what surrounded him. When Future was around 17 or 18 years old, he was able to see Rico at work. “I got to see Big Boi walk into the studio,” he recalled. “Just always looking for a new Outkast album, being a fan and always being behind the scenes and seeing what it took and seeing the process of making records, and it was all just fascinating to me.”
What Future saw was far different from the gangsters, drug dealers and others that were in his family and circle of influence. Thus the young teen with a questionable future, was on his way to something a lot better. He just needed to put in the work.
Future voices his praise of Rico Wade’s musical influence and instruction, calling him the “mastermind” behind his sound.] He soon came under the wing of Atlanta’s own Rocko who signed him to his label A-1 Recordings. Since then his work ethic has driven him to his success. He would release a series of mix tapes from 2010 to 2011 that established him as a rapper with ability to reach a large audience beyond his wildest dreams.
Future signed a major label recording contract with Epic Records in September 2011, days before the release of his next mix tape, Streetz Calling. A Pitchfork review remarked that on the mix tape Future comes “as close as anyone to perfecting this thread of ringtone pop, where singing and rapping are practically the same thing, and conversing 100% through Auto-Tune doesn’t mean you still can’t talk about how you used to sell drugs. It would almost feel antiquated if Future weren’t amassing hits, or if he weren’t bringing some subtle new dimensions to the micro-genre.”Yes, at this early point in his career, Future was considered an innovator within the walls of hip hop. It was around this time that I first became aware of the young and rising rapper. I found his style intriguing.
His dĂ©but album Pluto, originally planned for January, was eventually released on April 13, 2012. It included remixes of “Tony Montana” featuring Drake and “Magic” featuring T.I.. According to Future, “‘Magic’ was the first record T.I. jumped on when he came outta jail. Like, he was out of jail a day and he jumped straight on the ‘Magic’ record without me even knowing about it.” The track became Future’s first single to enter the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Other collaborators on the album include Trae Tha Truth, R. Kelly and Snoop Dogg. Future left no doubt; he was now a star.
Last year Future released studio albums number 5 and 6, Future and Hndrxx. Both albums went number one consecutively, which made Future the first artist to dĂ©but two albums at number one at the same time on the Billboard 200 and Canadian Albums Chart. I recently went back and listened to much of Hndrxx. Future has always been a fascinating lyricist as he lays much of his personal life out to the public like a confessional. Mosi Reeves of Rolling Stone said, “Like its predecessor, it’s an hour-plus data dump of quotidian creativity with a slight thematic focus, not a tightly sequenced tour de force. But Future wouldn’t be Future if he wasn’t unburdening himself, no matter how messy and polarizing the results might be. And for the most part, he’s at his most appealing here.”
Now a huge international music star, Future is in major demand and is featured on so many hit songs today it’s mind-boggling. Can his future be any brighter than his career today? I guess it is possible.