Photos Courtesy of Wesson Desir Instagram
Conducted by Millan Verma, Introduction by Hunter Craighill
Wesson Desir, the Atlanta based rapper, is quickly transitioning from his SoundCloud roots and establishing himself as person of interest in the Southeast hip-hop world. Wesson only began uploading songs to major streaming platforms this May, and now, just over a month later, he has already racked up 102,000 monthly listeners for his two singles “.22” (previously on SoundCloud) and “Zeus” (released June 10 of this year). The Nuance Magazine team was able to sit down for an interview with him last week.
Growing up, who were the first artists to make a serious impact on you?
It came in different waves, to be honest, some overlapped but the earliest ones were Wayne, Gambino, Ye, Kendrick, Cudi, and I got a lot of repressed pop influences from like 2007-2012. I was basically a fan of early 2010s rap. 2012-2013 was like the best era.
Agreed. I feel like that 2012-2013 era was the perfect medium between old head and new wave rap. When did you first decide to try to make a career out of music?
I think around 6th grade is when I started to show interest in actually doing it, but my older brother was a rapper and I didn’t wanna feel like I was copying him, so I held off. Then I had a friend in eighth grade who convinced me to try it, so he gave me Earl’s verse on “Couch” and played the instrumental then told me to rap it. I didn’t know it was a pre-existing song at the time, but yeah, he [his friend] passed later that year, so I started writing but didn’t record an actual song until around 2013. I got serious in 2015-2016.
Did you ever doubt your potential when you started to take it seriously?
Of course, I’m an over thinker and a pessimist so I still doubt myself today. I could probably have 10 million followers and sell out arenas and still think like that.
Over the past 2 years, you gained a decent amount of attention by releasing songs on Soundcloud. The norm is to translate Soundcloud momentum into streaming momentum as quickly as possible, but you didn’t do that. Instead, you went quiet for almost a year after your Soundcloud buzz was building and released your first songs onto streaming platforms this summer. How come?
Streaming platforms were always industry to me, so I started on Soundcloud and built a little community there. Plus that free music hits different [Laughs].
Why’d you decide that this summer was the right time to take the next step?
Because it’s 2020 and demand is going up. And people were attacking me via dms.
Something that separates you is how sporadic and shifty your lyricism and flows are. Could you walk us through your writing process?
Thank you, I want to accredit that to my shitty attention span and my over thinking. Multiple ideas come in at once, so I usually record ideas onto my phone and write words to whatever I documented. I usually imagine a music video or some type of visual when writing.
Do you feel as if your role as an artist has changed since the BLM movement’s resurgence?
Not necessarily, I’ve always incorporated my experience as a black man in America into my music. I don’t have a big platform right now, but I do understand the influence music has on the masses, so I’ll always keep that in mind, and I don’t necessarily have a choice [Laughing].
What can we expect from you moving forward? Now that you’ve made the shift from SoundCloud to Spotify (which has proved successful so far), should we be on the lookout for more releases this summer?
Definitely flooding 2020, despite the chaos, every era needs theme music. My first step will be to get the Soundcloud songs on streaming so everyone can enjoy them, then I’ll probably start working on another project and more visuals.