Future: Syrup, Strippers and Heavy Angst With the Superstar MC"I embraced what I thought people was gonna hate about me. I was gonna turn the hate into love"
Studio nights, dirty Sprite and metaphysical visits with strippers: Inside the life of superstar MC Future. Photograph by Theo Wenner
Outside, it's rush hour, a still-sunny spring evening in Atlanta, but in here, you'd never know it. This room is windowless and dark, illuminated only by a projector shooting shimmering green stars onto the ceiling, a computer monitor displaying Pro Tools, and the glowing rack of gear beneath it. The air seems composed mostly of high-grade kush smoke, accompanied by just enough oxygen to sustain life. On a shelf in the corner are liter bottles of sugary sodas – Sprite, Pineapple Sunkist, Strawberry Fanta – mixers for a bottle of codeine cough syrup adorned with a picture of Homer Simpson.
Future photographed in Atlanta on March 31st, 2016. Photograph by Theo Wenner. Styling by Bobby Wesley. Hair by Shekinah Anderson. Grooming by Mike Rogers. Jewelry by Elliot Rogers.
This control room and its adjoining vocal booth, in a gated studio complex on an industrial road a couple of miles from downtown, is the workplace of choice for Atlanta's reigning hip-hop king, Future. Six feet three with long, blond-tipped dreads, top-notch cheekbones and the sleepy swagger of the high school athlete he once was, he looks less like an actual rapper than a movie star cast as one. Even leaked mug shots from his pre-fame hustling days look like outtakes from magazine shoots. He has a big, bright leading-man smile that he holds in reserve, unleashing it most consistently in the presence of attractive women.
He's puffing on a blunt, taking a sip or two from a Styrofoam cup of the narcotic beverage mostly known to hip-hop fans as "lean" or "drank" or "sizzurp" before he helped rebrand it as "dirty Sprite." With his lyrical salutes to Xanax, codeine, Adderall and Oxycontin, he's one of the first rappers who could conceivably sign a sponsorship deal with Big Pharma: "I just took a piss and I seen codeine coming out," he rapped not long ago. He considers himself a rock star, and he's dressed like one: pale jeans, strategically shredded, with a plaid shirt tied at his waist and a crisp white tee. (The following day, he wears a $435 T-shirt by the high-end brand Enfants Riches Déprimés, emblazoned with the words "high risk/children without a conscience.")
Tonight, Future will write and record four songs from start to finish. ("Ain't gonna never be sober," he raps in one of them. "You can't lose your composure/'Cause once you lose it, it's over.") "Future was always the person to knock out multiple bangers in one night," says producer Mike Will Made It. That ability helps explain Future's astounding output since October 2014, a creative run pretty much unmatched in quantity and quality by any contemporary in any genre: five mixtapes, two full-fledged solo albums, plus What a Time to Be Alive, his smash collaborative album with Drake.
The influence of Future's ever-evolving sound – centered on his melodic gifts, spontaneous, mesmerizing flow and a digitally augmented baritone growl that sounds like he's gargling ones and zeros when the Auto-Tune is cranked up – is everywhere: Fetty Wap seems to have gotten his entire style from Future's 2012 hit "Turn on the Lights," while Brooklyn rapper Desiigner has been dominating radio with "Panda," a song so derivative in its lyrics and production that Mike Will, for one, thought it was a Future track on first listen. (Future is reluctant to address this subject: "I never worried about anyone else ... I don't even want his name in the article," he says of Desiigner.) The actual Future pops up on standout tracks on both Drake's and Chance the Rapper's new albums (at one point, a Drake-free version of the Viewstrack "Grammys" plays in the studio), and Future and Drake are touring arenas together this summer.
With Drake in Atlanta last June. Their 2015 collaboration, 'What a Time to Be Alive,' is one of three Future albums to hit the Top 40 in the past year. Prince Williams/Getty
It's been an insane streak, all in the wake of a life-shaking mid-2014 split from his former fiancee, R&B star Ciara, the mother of the youngest of his four children. He's determined to keep it going. "I want to keep doing what I'm doing and see how far I can go," he says. "See when it stops. See what the end is like. I want to make this moment last as long as I can make it. If I miss a day, I'm afraid I'll miss out on a smash record."
Even up close, his songwriting method is hard to comprehend. Seth Firkins, his longtime engineer, a friendly stoner with a John Belushi vibe, compares Future to a "medicine man." Firkins, who is parked semi-permanently in front of that Pro Tools monitor, plays a looped beat from one of Future's preferred producers – today there are tracks by Mike Will and Metro Boomin – while Future hangs out in the control room, maybe mumbling to himself, maybe smoking his blunt, maybe just pacing. Until he gets on the mic, he can be silent for 45 minutes at a time. Eventually, without a word, Future disappears into the vocal booth, in front of a portrait of Jay Z, and begins rapping. After years of collaboration, he and Firkins have an uncanny bond: Without any instruction, the engineer always knows when to cue up the verse again, always understands which part to loop as the chorus.
There is a rotating crew of visitors on hand, in addition to two ever-present helpers – Shootrr, who shoots Future's Instagram pictures, and Nyce, his videographer. (Future's personal assistant, an efficient woman named Ebonie, is elsewhere in the studio complex.) A rapper named Mexico Mark hangs around for a while. Another guy introduces himself as a childhood friend of Future's, before imbibing enough dirty Sprite to lapse into near-catatonia on the couch. It's a Tuesday night, so it's relatively quiet – late on a weekend, it can be hard to find a place to stand.
The vocal booth is even more dimly lit than the control room, almost pitch-black. Once Future is in there, swaying at the mic to the beat of the moment, a song almost always manifests itself. That includes the choruses: Future usually writes and sings his own hooks. Singing rappers are nothing new in the post-Drake era, but Future's actual melodic inspiration came from closer to home: His cousin Rico Wade is the leader of the groundbreaking Atlanta production crew Organized Noize, and Future hung out in Wade's fabled studio, the Dungeon, for months at a time, learning from the likes of Outkast and Cee-Lo. Even as he helped shape a new Atlanta sound, Future served as a bridge between the soulful, progressive Organized Noize approach and the trap anthems of Young Jeezy and Gucci Mane.
When he sings, Future has a tendency toward melancholy, and the strongest of tonight's hooks combines triumphant lyrics with a hint of actual blues: "I got it way gone, gone, gone," he sings over a martial Metro Boomin beat, with a soulful half-tone bend on the last "gone." "We gon' get whatever we want." In the verse, he raps, "Feel like I ain't done enough/Make you feel my pain/I ain't done yet."
He later learns that the hard drive holding all four tracks, the whole night's work, was somehow corrupted, and the songs may be lost forever. He shrugs it off: There's more where those came from, and he has more pressing things to worry about.
Future met Ciara right outside these studio doors, where she was also recording one day (veteran pop and R&B producer Tricky Stewart owns the studio). They took pictures together, and the glamorous singer immediately called him by his real name, Nayvadius – and, as one of Future's friends recalls, began giving him suggestions on how to pose for the shots. They hit it off, and were soon dating seriously. Future moved to Los Angeles to live with Ciara, putting aside his deep ties to Atlanta and his perch at the top of the city's music scene. He recorded a single with Miley Cyrus, dressing up as an astronaut in the video, and released Honest, an album that was perceived as a pop-crossover bid, despite tracks as grimy as the trap banger "Move That Dope." He dyed his dreads blond and started walking red carpets, hitting fashion shows, smiling more in pictures. "He was with an R&B chick, you know what I'm saying?" says Mike Will. "Ciara, she didn't even really like when people cursed." She became unpopular among some of Future's friends. "She was bougie as hell," one says. The couple got engaged in October 2013; soon afterward, Ciara announced she was pregnant.
By the middle of the next year, the relationship imploded amid widespread rumors that Future had cheated. ("I [don't] respond to rumors I respond to money," he wrote on Instagram.) It was just three months after the birth of their son, Future Zahir Wilburn, and public backlash hit Future hard. That, combined with a lukewarm response to Honest, left the rapper adrift. "I was scared as shyt," he says. "I was one step away from being married, and I feel like I failed publicly in relationships. Then you want to go back to doing music, to what you know. And if the people didn't accept you again, the one thing you feel like you can fall back on, it walked away from you. You feel like it's over."
With then-fiancee Ciara, 2013. Scott Cunningham/Getty
One of Future's closest collaborators, DJ Esco – who helped break Future's earliest music via his Monday-night gig at the Atlanta strip club Magic City, perhaps the most important tastemaking spot in all of hip-hop – encouraged him to get back to his roots. Future had broken through with a relentless series of street-focused mixtapes (his first solo hit was the sublimely unhinged "Tony Montana," where he raps in a half-assed Scarface imitation and, in between more conventional boasts, claims to have "crab cakes everywhere"). "I told him, 'We didn't get here doing this kind of music,'" Esco recalls. "'Let me remind you what kind of music we used to do.'" He also encouraged Future to focus on his verses as much as his choruses, to let loose his lyrical skills.
"I remember Esco going, 'You need to spend time in the studio and get back to creating,'" Future says. "'Block all that shyt out. You going through a lot right now. Turn that shyt into music, or it's gonna get the best of you.' Because everything's popping up in the media. Every day, it's something. It was getting bigger than my music." Future was worried about being seen "like a fukking joke."
The first of the ensuing flood of releases was the instant-classic mixtape Monster, where Future deliberately played into the backlash. "I embraced what I thought they was gonna hate about me," he says. "I was gonna turn the hate into love." In the title track, he was a "monster on these ho's," guzzling codeine and having copious casual sex. He coined the phrase "fukk up some commas" to denote spending large sums, and got unnervingly confessional about Ciara on the track "Throw Away," which is half 808s & Heartbreak, half Elvis Costello's "I Want You": "Got my dikk sucked and I was thinking about you ... When you're fukking another nikka, hope you're thinking about me."
Future quickly regained his street cred, garnering buzz worthy of a brand-new artist. He was soon back in Atlanta and began crossing over to wider fame simply by refusing to do anything to cross over. "Tryna make me a pop star and they made a monster," he raps on "I Serve the Base," a mission-statement track on last July's uncompromising DS2, a woozy, psychedelic triumph that stands as his bestselling solo album.
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