Ghostface Killah Just Wants To Paint

For over 30 years now, Ghostface Killah has rapped each whirlwind verse like a bomb was ticking down and he needed to empty his cranium of all transgressive thoughts before gloriously exploding into a thousand pieces at the end of the song.

Whether threatening to piss in your apple juice, or boasting about being so strong that “Primatene mist is afraid of my lungs,” there’s a race-against-time, last-stand energy to Ghost’s muscular storytelling raps that will always sound totally unique. Take “Nutmeg” (produced by Black Moes-Art), where Ghost weaves in and out of a complex, hiccupping bassline and swaggering Blaxploitation-era strings.

Here the Staten Island emcee transitions from exchanging back-hand swings with tennis star John McEnroe to dancing with the cast of The Golden Girls, eating exotic “seasoned giraffe ribs” and, finally, triumphantly wearing a gold hat he just stole from the mummified corpse of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Despite these audacious lyrics wildly gliding back and forth like a lost kite caught up in a hurricane, Ghost somehow finds a way to reign it all in, meaning his whining prose has more in common with deliberately freeform authors like Aldous Huxley and James Joyce than any rap peers.

Since threatening to blow up the spot like Waco cult leader David Koresh back on explosive 1993 smash “Bring Da Ruckus,” the opening song of the Wu-Tang Clan’s classic rap game introduction, Enter The 36 Chambers, and then forming a shivery, Columbian necktie-administering alliance with coke rap roaddog Raekwon via 1995’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (a.k.a The Purple Tape), Ghostface hasn’t really stopped innovating, revealing more layers to his artistry as the years have progressed.

With 1996’s “All That I Got Is You” he made the first rap song ever capable of making me cry, poignantly conversing with wailing strings and reminiscing about being one of 15 bodies squeezed into a tiny three bedroom apartment: a place where you’d be forced to “pluck roaches out cereal boxes” and sleep next to little Jon-Jon who “peed the bed.” This duet with Mary J. Blige, a highlight from Ghost’s classic debut album, Ironman, remains as grimly vivid a look at class inequality as any Ken Loach film.

The “Tony Starks” alter-ego, meanwhile, perfected converging vibrant comic book hyperactivity with blunted street raps years before the character of MF DOOM (who later became a friend and collaborator) was even a thing. You could make a convincing argument that Ghost’s 2000 surrealist masterpiece, Supreme Clientele, with all its absurdist rage and non-linear tales, is pretty much the Naked Lunch of hip-hop.

Ghost has also duetted with J Dilla, Amy Winehouse, Kendrick Lamar, Miley Cyrus, BADBADNOTGOOD, and even popped up for a cameo in the best-ever parody of cheesy Hollywood music biopics, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. He proved that rap’s biggest eccentrics could make transcendent gospel records, too, with 2004’s glowing “Love” (which featured Musiq Soulchild and K. Fox) the type of healing, career-best empowerment anthem that shows the humility (“I love my last album, though the joint went wood”) behind a gold eagle bracelet-wearing, larger-than-life rap ego.

From Kanye West to Roc Marciano and Westside Gunn, practically every movement-forming emcee has taken something from Ghostface’s artistry, making this 54-year-old the very essence of a living legend. Yes, his patchy but solid R&B-fuelled 2024 album, Set The Tone (Guns & Roses), probably won’t go down as Ghost’s finest ever body of work. Even if new song and its lovesick highlight “Plan B” does include the hilarious bar: “I don’t need no more babies, n***a.”

[Embed All That I Got Is You music video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAvQW_-s_f0]

However, at this point in his career, Ghost could release a collaborative project with Mini Vanilli and his legacy would still be iron-clad. The reason I am granted an interview with Ghostface Killah at all actually has nothing to do with music, but rather coffee. Ghostface has released six blends – Marvelous Medium Roast, Marble Cake, Vanilla Milkshake, Supreme Dark Roast, Shaolin Cannoli and Chocolate Chip Mint – of his Killah Koffee brand in partnership with Keurig coffee machines. He believes they can all become best-selling pods.

This might sound like the most random link-up ever, but Ghost has in fact always had a cup of joe close to his thoughts, with the thugged-out cartoon visuals of “Daytona 500” referencing trips to the Philippines to “pick herbal beans” and the Wu’s gully “The M.G.M” featuring a bar about ordering hot coffee with a Danish. Caffeine, Ghost tells me, was something that kept the artist’s pre-fame mind energized during those exhausting “night shifts” hustling in the Stapleton Houses projects.

“I think I rapped those “Daytona 500″ rhymes way back in 1996, so it’s crazy that it took me until 2024 to finally have my own coffee range,” laughed Ghostface Killah (real name Dennis Coles). “That’s almost 30 years! It’s all about the flavors!”

I’m supposed to stick to only asking Ghostface about his coffee-blending skills, but because this is Stereogum and a safe space for music nerds, I try my luck, opting instead to quiz Ghostface Killah about his pioneering approach to songwriting. Thankfully, he didn’t mind too much. The subsequent conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

I know you’re a real student of Teddy Pendergrass, whose song “Can’t We Try” was something you sampled on “Camay.” I always think of “I Miss You” by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, where Teddy P sings about crying and sitting “in a lonely room, filled with gloom. Without you baby there ain’t no future!” Even though he’s sharing his pain, he never sounds weak. As a songwriter, Ghostface Killah achieves that too. You’re not afraid to show us your scars, whether that’s revealing your brothers had muscular dystrophy or even talking about your girl cheating on you. Would you say you learned that vulnerability through artists like Teddy?

GHOSTFACE KILLAH: Definitely. We’ve all got different outlets for exorcizing our demons. But for me, personally, you can only manifest joy by letting go of your pain! As a man, you have to be able to handle the game, always, and stand up strong. You could just get weaker by staying in the same spot forever, but it’s always going to be more inspiring [to the people] when you can somehow find a way to get stronger from a loss.

I want to take you back to those family get-togethers as a kid and the first times you were really exposed to music. Sound Of Sexy Cool by the Delfonics was spinning on the turntable, the herb was blazing, Jamaican rum was being poured, and you were just this “snotty nosed kid sitting on [your] aunt’s lap” taking it all in. Were those the moments when you first fell in love with music?

GHOSTFACE: I always used to get kicked out of our living room, because I was too small to be around the grown-ups partying. But yes, I was exposed to that music way before I heard of hip-hop. That funk and the soul music just sounded so beautiful to me. The more you heard those records, the more they stuck with you, lasting right up until these times now. All those songs from the 1960s and 1970s carried a wisdom. When my generation is dead and gone, that musical heritage is going to be gone too. That’s sad! Because what are the kids today going to have that’s even close to what we had back then? What are these kids gonna have as their good memory songs? Chris Brown? Trey Songz, and all these other guys? It’s going to be a lot different that’s for sure.

On a Ghost song, eating cold cuts or drinking 50-cent soda are a badge of honor. It feels like you are always speaking up for the people with little in their pockets. Do you believe that type of underdog storytelling ability is missing from a lot of the more capitalistic contemporary hip-hop?

GHOSTFACE: In my era you talked about the things that were right in your face. I don’t stand on the block anymore, sure, but that doesn’t mean my responsibility [to the people living that street life] has ended. The rappers right now, they just don’t think as much as we did. Today’s rap scene is much more obsessed with money, you know what I mean?

When we were 25-year-olds, we had to have the minds of 50-year-olds! We grew up a lot more quickly, because of all the bad things that we saw. But we always found a way to own it: I videotaped it all in my mind and turned it into art. We were surviving on eating cold cuts and drinking 50-cent sodas. Nowadays it’s like the rappers are too stuck on jewelry, cars, and girls. It’s like the subject matter is really limited for this new generation. They limit themselves from properly using their imagination, but times are going to change and nothing’s ever going to stay the same.

“The Forest” is an all timer of a song to me. You spit about Droopy becoming a Muslim in jail; Goofy selling kilos of cocaine; and Pippy Long Stocking dancing in a strip club for tips. I felt that song was your way of showing that while the kids from the suburbs got to enjoy a certain level of childhood innocence, in the inner city, well, your heroes were more tainted and things worked out very differently.

GHOSTFACE: That’s simply my imagination talking. “The Forest” is an example of when you tap into something deep inside and your creativity just lets it fly out of you. I was making a movie! That’s one thing I do with a lot of my raps: I make movies. My mind is like a living, breathing Martin Scorsese world, you know? I want the listener to hear the words and my shit to make them feel like it’s pure cinema. High Definition visuals. I want you to see the bars like you’re looking through an 80mm lens. Whatever the beat calls for, I’m just gonna put it down.

What’s the biggest thing you learned from briefly living in Benin and Western Africa in the late 1990s? Because I imagine that must have been a transformational experience.

GHOSTFACE: Being an African is my first race. I might be born in America, but that’s not my true origin, you know what I mean? White people came and stole us from our homeland in their slave ships. Then we wound up a million miles away in some other country. It wasn’t really the plan for me to end up in America. In many ways, I’m more like a foreigner here. It was important to go back to my roots and to be able to analyze everything properly. I really stayed in the slums out there [in Benin]; you’ve got your little thieves in Benin just like you do back in New York City.

Would you say then that living in Africa taught you how to live more humbly?

GHOSTFACE: 100%. It’s just different out there, man. Real different.

“Hold up, we at the opera / Queen Elizabeth rub on my leg / had ketchup on her dress from a whopper.” Can you remember what inspired that line from “The Grain”? And, why is having such a surreal sense of humor so important to Ghostface Killah?

GHOSTFACE: In the Wu-Tang Clan we all love to laugh. We are all some funny brothers, right? But it’s also reality. Like back when I did the song “Maxine” on Ironman, it was about the bad kids on my block going crazy and literally throwing people out of windows. I just like to paint, man. Sometimes it’s dark and serious, but other times you need those lighter strokes, so you tell a joke.

It’s crazy you say that, because I’ve always had this theory that when you spit, you’re more like an expressionist painter. You’re throwing conflicting textures and colors at the canvas, creating this beautiful kind of chaos and, yet, it all comes together somehow. It’s like a hood Jackson Pollock or Emil Nolde, so to speak. Rapping has to be this pure stream of consciousness, right?

GHOSTFACE: Yeah, exactly that. I am a painter. I see it in my mind, I find a way to grasp it, and then I’ve got to lay it down without holding anything back. If my words and my songs feel more like paintings or movies then I definitely did my job correctly.