Episode 37: “KIM JONG TRILL” feat. Ezra Marcus *PREVIEW — FULL EP ON PATREON*

You are listening to the free version of CloudForm. For the full episode said to Pat Rayon. Swear down, lads. Why is it always the Honkies who are persecuted? The, like, guy who won the slop wars. He's the king of slop and he makes so much money off of it. I used to get called Spastic. I got to make Watford great again. A kind of awesome moment, Paige Crandall. I think you broke him. Yo, how would you like to book Migos? And I'm like, wearing Call of Duty pants, probably. Are you part of reading culture at all? Reading culture? I feel like Lerman is how E40 would say it. I did DJ Nate at his first New York show. You put an unintentionally sociopathic prank on that. Okay, Ezra Marcus. What's up, guys? The plucky millennial journalist speaking truth to power. Am I? I don't know. Is that an accurate characterization? I don't know. Power might be a bit of a reach, but millennial is accurate. Millennial is undeniable. How do you explain what you do to the people that you accost in social scenarios? I guess I'd just say I'm a freelance reporter. If I really want to sound fancy, I'd say investigative reporter. But what even is that? I don't know. I feel like at this point you are probably more widely recognized for your, like, quote, serious kind of journalistic work. But at least when I first came across you, it would have been like a good seven or eight years ago when you were on the music writing beat. Can you tell us a little bit about the work you were doing back then? Yeah, I mean, I...

Honestly got into the media and what I do now via music. I was, you know, in college and before that I just always wanted to be a music writer, you know, blog, late 2000s blog era, all of that. And I was like, yeah, the height of what I could achieve one day would be to like write, you know, blurbs and like a pitchfork, best of SoundCloud list or something like that. And in college I was... I interned at Vice for Noisy, their RIP. Was it like peak era Vice? It was like when they were still at the North Williamsburg office, not the South Williamsburg one, which was really a different time. I was sort of there. I think I got the last little gasp of the sort of psychotic era before it went really corporate. My first year there was like... we went to it was a christmas party and they just handed out envelopes with fifteen hundred dollars in cash to everyone which i'd never seen anything like that before i was like 20 i was like that's fucking go the media is awesome yeah um but and the best part is that lasted it lasted it's still like that yes correct but with more cash but and you were just doing like listicles at this point yeah i mean i was like right i was you know i was like interviewing artists whatever writing like stupid blog posts about this or that uh it was i don't know i was i it was like i feel like a kind of awesome moment i mean it was like 2012 i guess so it was like right when i don't know a certain kind of rap music and electronic music was like all happening and i was like on the ground felt like i was on the ground floor for it um i was in college and i was just like this is crazy i get to like go you know interview paul wall at like three in the afternoon for school credit or something um and i don't know i kind of i kept doing it i kept doing music journalism in one form or another and i was after college um at vice at a few other places i mean i would write for the fader i would write for um where else

I don't even remember. Pitchfork sometimes. And I feel like I was, like, into, you know, a certain kind of, like, dance, club music, underground rap thing that was really emergent at that time and now is, like, you know, pretty dominant that somebody would, that those things would have crossover, that, like, kids in their basement would be making, you know. jersey club or footwork in australia or what have you but at the time that felt very exciting the kind of yeah global you know club music phenomenon caribbean stuff uk so that and and that was yeah it was super exciting to me and i was i was also throwing parties at the time um i was like i was i'd been doing it in college you know just like booking shows with the school money that they would give us and then i kept doing it like i was like well let me see if i can do this like in new york with like my own money which was uh what are some like lineups that you put together crazy proposition yeah i mean i would try and do like um a mix of um like a you know like a vocalist like usually a rapper and then a bunch of djs and a lot of this was with um uh suz the the large from from mix pack and i kind of had like a um an ongoing party series i'm almost embarrassed to say what my side of that was called but it was it was like a collab it was just like me and her and i remember the first one we did i want to say it was like sicko mob suicide year darky freaker hell great love them we did mom dance and beat king we did cupcakes first new york show damn That was an era. That's so sick. You were sick of mob. Yeah, it was sick of mob's first New York show. Did that go off? Surely. It went insane, yeah. Somebody set up a fire extinguisher in the middle of their set and shut it down. But I brought them back eventually. I did DJ Nate, his first New York show. Oh, yeah. I was playing some Nate last night. Well received. It's aged like a fine Bordeaux. Is that Gucci Goggles era? Or is that Footwork era?

he played a little bit of both i feel like by that point because it was like 2015-16 he was mostly more into the gucci goggles thing yeah i mean i was obsessed with bop i was like this is the craziest music ever made who else was part was big in bop apart from sicko mob and dj nate i don't remember there was a bunch of like one-offs like there were okay there was like some guy called like mbe there was um flea was some guy I'm dredging this up, but who else? Rat Pack, Mini Stepper, Flophouse. I don't recall. Yeah, exactly. There was some group called Most Hated that had an amazing song called Nina, actually. Yeah, bop music. Did you hear about DJ Nate being seemingly paralyzed for life but somehow recovering? No. I think this was like a few years ago. I forget exactly what it was that happened. I think maybe he got shot and like a bullet lodged in his spine. And the initial prognosis was that he'd be like paralyzed from the waist down. Like he's in like a wheelchair. And then miraculously he managed to like regain his ability to walk. And presumably footwork. What a miracle. And Bob. Yeah. He's a chosen one. He's one of those guys who like anyone who is like remotely into the kind of like extended like, sphere of music that we all like, like, respects, like, reveres deeply, but he's also one of those guys who, for whatever reason, wasn't able to, like, capitalize in a way that he, you know, his music arguably deserves. He was, like, way too early, and he was, like, so not, like, palatable, I think, or interested in participating in the kind of, like, greater Red Bull industrial complex of the era. He was an iconoclast, for sure. Yeah. I don't remember there being much talk of him crossing over at all with like the like tech life extended universe. No, not at all. It felt like a completely separate thing in some way, which I never understood. I guess because by the point they were getting their kind of like festival slots, he was like making this insane bot music. Yeah. Was he a lot younger than the rest of those guys? Was he maybe sort of 16 when he was doing the bangs and work shit?

I think so, but a lot of them were, too, if I recall. Oh, okay. I mean, Rashad was a bit older, but I think a lot of those guys kind of came up around the same time. Right, okay. Like, they were all teenagers doing it. Right, okay. I booked Rashad, too, in college. Oh, sick as fuck. Goddamn. Was there, like, a point where, because do you still book Shovel? Not at all. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I had a couple, like, sort of... hilariously disastrous things happened where I was like, I need to, I need to cut it. Yeah. What was the detail of some of the disasters? I mean, there was the one that was, it was an awesome show we did that just lost a bunch of money, but it was, um, spice and, uh, tank and a ton of other stuff. I forget who, but it was at like knockdown center, you know, it was a huge show, super ambitious, made a bunch of money, lost a bunch of money, whatever. But I was just like, okay, I'm. not equipped to be in a position to potentially lose, you know, 10K on something. I mean, there were some shows where, like, I feel like All in All is, like, one of those things where it's, like, you know, long-time gambler, like, runs the numbers and it's like, you basically break even. Like, we did one show that was, like, Zombie and Jack Donaghy. This wasn't with Mixed Packers. Damn. This is crazy. And DOS. It was Zombie, Jack Donaghy, DOS at China Chalet. We cleared, like, five figures for sure. Nuts. We did this one. I mean, this was... Okay. Yeah. I'll just tell the story. I've never been quite sure if I'm supposed to or allowed to, but it was pretty funny. The background is 2018, I booked Katie Got Bands for a New Year show. It was with Desai and Juliana Huxtable. It was sick. It was an awesome show. It went great. Katie's manager sort of set the whole thing up and no complaints. A few months later, the manager hits me up and he was like, yo, how would you like to book Migos? And I was like, I mean, it sounds sick. No, I mean, this was like right after Bad and Bougie came out. Biggest act in the country. And I was like, okay, how much? And he was like, 35 racks. Which, you know, I don't have that. But that sounded like super cheap. Made sense to me that I could find somebody to back that.

Um, and like that, that I'd make the money back on that. I mean, for like a, you know, nationally successful, whatever. So I, I got, um, a production company and a media partner and all of this. And like, I, I put together this insane lineup that it was going to be like Migos and was it, um, Wolf Eyes? It was like one of the guys from Wolf Eyes. Around Adam Bougie era? That's, yeah. Yeah. I was like, let's just go like. retarded with it yeah and then the production company you know the guys are okay they want um 20k up front production company wires it okay we're all ready to go and i'm just like oh can i can i talk to um migo's manager to like you know coordinate the announcement and the guy just doesn't respond and i was like okay like i'm gonna send you a few more emails before i freak out like no response and then I had someone else who actually knew the Amigos manager reach out to them and they were like, we've never heard of this. Also, what are you talking about? Our fee is like $350K. Like, well, you just got scammed. And yeah, so the guy had basically just been like, let me hit a lick on this 23-year-old white kid. Damn. Just like, ultimately the... Why is it always the honkies who are persecuted? We suffer. The production company, I believe, ended up hiring a PI who tracked him down, and I think he got arrested. So there you have it. But I don't think any of the money was recovered. Not sure. Anyway, at that point, I was like, what am I doing again? Why do I do this? I don't think I'm cut out for this cutthroat. concert promotion business yeah were you angling to be a full-time promoter rather than hell no i was just like this is just fun fun yeah yeah i liked you know i love the parties like it was an awesome time there was so much especially in that at that time i felt like there was like such a vacuum of especially rap music like no one was bringing you know i mean there would be like some boring ass show at sobs or something but nobody was combining um you know a rapper somebody it would be like

okay merlot from the uk and then like beat king on the same line like we just no one was i i didn't feel like that like that was the stuff i liked was the intersection of those two things and it was it wasn't being super represented um but it was also like i mean and there and there were like there were some really good venues i felt like at the time for it like trans picos was was really good we would do china chalet we would do palisades and at a certain point a lot of that closed and the what's replaced it is like you know super legit like elsewhere nowadays kind of places but i had less of the raw appeal to me i think i feel like electronic music in new york in the last sort of five to ten years has like professionalized in a way that it wasn't before is that fair to say i'm saying this as an outsider yeah i think so too i mean i don't i'm pretty tapped out nowadays um but i do think that in the last decade there was a pretty regular set of like hectic underground parties that and spots that were like really after hours and really kind of just in someone's house or something that I felt like I grew up going to and now I mean I'm sure that still exists and maybe I'm just like aged out of it but of course there didn't used to be was this sort of like super professional like you know the elsewhere and all of that which I think kind of swallowed most of what was happening I mean there's still bossa nova which i haven't been to in years but you missed out last night man that's so you're getting scammed to book migos in 2018 at the same time you did the sarah lawrence piece is that correct that was about yeah some sort of i think like maybe the migos thing was 2017 i i started working on the sarah lawrence piece um right after i um was laid off from Interview Magazine, which was 2018. After the Ron Reynolds interview? No, the whole thing folded. They laid us all off. And I was like, what am I doing again? I write about music for no money? That doesn't seem that awesome. What else could I do?

I'd had this, like, kind of vague interest in getting into real reporting, and I'd done a few stories that were kind of on the fringes of involving investigative skill set. Nothing serious, but I was like, okay, this is actually really exciting. I had written this sort of, like, you know, slightly juvenile, like, story about Anthony Fantano that had ultimately, for the fader, that was like... whatever it wasn't a particularly good story but it was um sort of my first sense of like chasing something that was like a little bit under the radar and i um yeah i just wanted to keep doing it so i i got laid off and i was like okay i have like six months of unemployment to like fuck around and find out and i got this tip that turned into the sarah lawrence story and i just spent the next year basically doing that um I was still writing about music. I wrote a Fader cover story on Lil' Tracy around that time. It was one of the last big music stories I did, which was awesome. He's amazing. The Sarah Lawrence thing was kind of, for me, almost a crash course in investigative journalism, which I had not really done before. Did you have to let yourself become... kind of completely consumed by the story for an entire year oh yeah i mean it was like the only thing i could think or talk about right wow okay and that just seems like because it seems like the kind of the main guy at the center of that kind of scandal seems like quite a i feel like a dangerous character is that is that fair to say and how i guess like if you're consumed by this thing and the object of your obsession is someone who's kind of dangerous and who must have at a certain point been aware of you how how did that all yeah stack up in your mind he was aware of me and he was dangerous but i think i think the thing is like he was really only i mean the way i saw it was that he seemed dangerous only to the people that he already had power over and i didn't feel like he was especially um the kind of person to you know go out there and try and

inflict harm on a reporter. I mean, in fact, he participated in the story, and I think he thought that he could influence the story in the way that he wanted. I think he had a degree of... I mean, I don't think megalomania is too strong a term about how he could influence people. With good reason, he had been doing so in one form or another for a long time. So I think he thought... that by participating in the story he could bend it to be what he wanted, which James and I, James Walsh, who I wrote the story with, a friend of mine, were more than happy to let him do because he would say things on the record that were astonishing. But I don't know. He also decided early on that he wouldn't talk to me and would only talk to James. So he came into the office once and... wouldn't let me talk to him, but he would let James talk to him. So I was in the other room with my ear pressed to the wall, listening and texting James questions, which was fascinating. But it was, you know, I never, honestly, I've never felt like any story that I've done, even though a lot of them have involved pretty adversarial characters, I've never felt anything like personal risk, really. Why did he refuse to talk to you? I don't really know. I mean, he said, if I recall, it was something along the lines of like, I mean, I think because I've been working on this story for a lot longer. I've been working on it for like six months on myself. And then the magazine brought in James to kind of help me finish it. So I had been reaching out to all these people for months and that word had gotten back to him. And he, you know, I think he developed a sense of like who I was talking to and what I was trying to find out. James, I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't know why he thought that James was, he honestly, I think, and this is, I could be completely wrong about this, but the sense that I had was that he thought he could like kind of play us off of each other and convince James that I was somehow like, like that working against him or that, I don't know. I mean, it didn't make any sense, but he, yeah, he was like, so it would be like, oh yeah, like Ezra's out to get me, but like, you know, you're,

James, like, you're, you know, someone I can talk to. Like, you know, like, I can tell you what's really going on. And, you know, he had this whole kind of, like, vast narrative that was at the core of what the cult was, where he was the victim of this far-reaching conspiracy of which I would come to be a part in his mind. Right, okay. And my parents and all this. I mean, it was crazy. But he, I think... believed that he could um either that he he either genuinely believed that james and i were like somehow doing different things even though we were overtly working together or he thought that he could manipulate us in some way Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people Clout is killing our people They move like the groupies, them Sending shots or snap But in real life don't use their skank