JIG LeFrost

LETTER FROM FINLEY TO ACHILLEAS

Dear Achilleas,

I’m sitting and writing this letter on the patio of your brother’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. As Chuck 3 is finally coming to a wrap, I can’t help but think about what the closest thing is to that beautiful feeling of making a magazine. I initially thought it was something similar to biking over the Williamsburg bridge full speed, road tripping up to Oregon, or even a forever night with Tommy. I think I’ve come to the realization that it’s not any single act but rather the way we story the past. It’s all of us sitting around the fire and talking about the 7+ years of the craziest shit in the world happing and laughing so hard all along the way. It’s looking back at all those beautiful ephemeral moments that are just always over too soon. You really can’t see the moment you’re in until it’s just about over, which is a shame isn’t it. I’d like to think Chuck was born out of a similar mentality, storying the past. But its multiplying fecundity would suggest it is not just a magazine documenting the past, but rather one foretelling the future. Future Chuck. I’d like to think of it as the Benjamin Button of printed magazines. Fast and loose, wise and handsome. Sounds like you and Aristo. I couldn’t choose which letter I wanted to use so here’s a poem I wrote with Willie Nelson and Bobby D.

Dear Achilleas,

May god bless you and Chuck Magazine. May all your wishes come true. May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. May you grow up to be righteous and to be strong. May you always know the truth and the light surrounding you. Cheers to my best friend and a magazine that keeps on making itself. Cheers to the dads. Cheers to the future.

Long live Chuck.

JIG

LEFROST

Jordan I Garrett, or J.I.G. LeFrost, was our first interview for this issue. There is always that feeling before knocking on the door or calling to let someone know we’ve arrived, where you get bursts of doubt, the feeling that you haven’t prepared enough, or thought of the most accurate questions. With Jordan, as soon as he opened the door, that all melted away. He opened his home and his soul to us in a way that still to this day moves us when we read this interview. Some people were born to tell stories, and we believe Jordan is one of those people. We sat in his living room watching the sun pass through his stained glass windows as Jordan told us all about his life with laughter, immense loss, and most stunningly, his complete and absolute openness in seeing the world for the beautiful mess it is.

How did you find music?

I was on the poetry stuff early on, I started drumming when I was in the sixth grade. Rapping started because when I started high school at Branson, I always really wanted to do JTS (Junior Talent Show) because in my eyes, every year the headline performers always looked like they... can I curse a little bit? No way! [Laughing]

[Laughing] He was like, “Yo, you suck.” My Dad was very fucking honest. Especially because it was a very white school.

Yeah, probably 90% white right?

Say anything you fucking want.

It looked like the guys who closed always got all the bitches. So sophomore year I was like, I gotta get a good routine, I started talking to all my friends, saying “What are we gonna do?” We’re sophomores, they’re telling me to chill, the year goes by, I’m still pressing about it. And then over summer, I go “alright, guys, what are we gonna do?” And they said, “We are going to be glow in the dark stickman. We got costumes, we’re doing these crazy fucking dances.” They’re sending me videos of them, I go, “Oh shit, that’s gonna be crazy. When do I get my costume? You know, I’m a little wider than you guys. I’m gonna need a special fit.” And they go, “We already got our routine and everything... What are you gonna do for JTS Jordan?”

Damn...

I thought that those guys were gonna hold me down.

Yeah.

What the fuck am I gonna do, the option was being a techie or coming up with a performance. And I’m an egotistical piece of shit. So I’m performing. I think, Oh, they’re gonna swipe me? I’ll blow you out of the fucking water. So I went on YouTube and took a beat and started writing to it. And I wrote and wrote, and a week before the talent show I showed my Dad, and he just said, “Son, this is the worst shit I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Exactly, I was the biggest black kid at the school. So he was like, “If my son gets up on stage and raps like this? I can’t go back.”

Oh my god, yeah.

And I was like, “Ahh Dad fuck off this is alright.” I did the audition, and it was terrible, I didn’t remember any of the words, I was reading off the phone. I was super scared, it was my first time performing in front of people. Afterward, the teachers, they’re looking at me saying, “Alright, very good job.” And I thought I did pretty terrible. So later they announced the line-up, and they put my ass last.

You’re the closer! So, you thought this was your moment?

No... I was like, What the fuck did I do? I gotta do this in front of the whole school? I went home, I told my dad that I was going to be closing the show. My Dad was like, “With that, oh, God...” So he sat me down and he went bar by bar with me and showed me how to structure a song. My Dad does not make music, he didn’t rap or anything. But he showed me, “Alright, this is structure, you have to have this repeating refrain here, you need to do this here...” I rewrote it a bunch of times and then got something kind of decent out of it. Then the day of the show was when I actually memorized it...

I still remember it dude. It was notorious, I was a freshman, it was probably a month into school, and you closed it out with everyone surrounding the stage. Was it from that day on, a star was born? “I’m a rapper?”

I had friends who had recording studios in their homes. After that performance, they would say come over and record. I would try to coordinate with them, I would show up at the house and be waiting for two hours, and they would be just drunk or high. I’d wonder why they weren’t performing the way I wanted them to. They’d be so out of it, and at that point, I was like “This is bullshit.” And I would tell my dad, “I want to focus on music, I want to do this.” He always said, “Why don’t you work with the people who are taking you seriously?” I didn’t understand they were high, so I just thought they wouldn’t work with me... and you gotta know, I was an innocent child, I didn’t grow up drinking, I didn’t grow up doing drugs. All that stuff was surrounding, but I didn’t participate in any of it. I was in an education program called “Making Waves.” The program was every day after school from fifth grade to the end of high school, I came in to study, do homework, and learn SAT words. From three to six during the week and on Saturday, from ten to two, I would just be in school or the program always, so I didn’t get the opportunity...

To get high after school, or to mess around, there was so much structure.

Exactly, so I didn’t have time to meet friends or collaborators or anything. For me, everyday was waking up and working, and then coming home and sleeping. So I barely saw my Dad.

What was your Dad doing when you were growing up?

My Dad is an entrepreneur. I got to grow up watching him my whole life, he was a software genius. Self-taught. This was when computer’s first dropped — I’m watching him read software books every night. He started a company called Vianovus which was a project management system. They

managed multi-billion dollar budgets for construction projects. My whole childhood was just watching him code and watching real business. Then he had to sell his business in 2008 because I broke my leg. He was about to sign the insurance papers when I broke my leg, but he never did so he had to sell his company.

What happened? Holy shit.

Yeah. So my Dad had to sell his company to this bigger company. After he sold it he started working for UC Berkley, paying for my school, paying for fucking living somewhere, you know, food, and I think it just came out to nothing. Even though we’re supposed to be middle class, it was a significant change from how I grew up.

I can be hyperbolic in my expression, but I like to think that it’s fun. But, that led to the staff not believing me as a child when I broke my leg. I was playing basketball, absolutely just uber-confident, the whole gym looking at me, I’m talking shit. I planted my foot to go to a reverse layup, and my knee muscle ripped off a piece of my bone. Instead of going up, I just collapsed. Everyone is laughing, “Ah, Jordan fell, that’s hilarious.” And I was sitting there just thinking, Oh shit, this doesn’t feel right. I was trying to get up and I couldn’t put weight on it, I couldn’t walk. So they call my Dad and they tell him I’m being dramatic, so my Dad didn’t sign the insurance papers because he’s thinking it’s nothing. When he came to get me, he saw I was just dragging my foot. He was like, “Are you okay?” And I was like, “I broke my fucking leg, nobody here believes me.” So he took me straight to the hospital, and they do scans but still don’t believe that I broke it.

You’re kidding me, the hospital didn’t believe you?

Finally, they call a specialist who comes the next day. I had to stay in the hospital overnight. The specialist came in just like “Wow, that’s so broken.” We didn’t have insurance to cover it and they did surgery on my leg. I was in there for I think a week and the bill came out to something crazy, like $600,000. Yeah, how do you think that changed you, or the way you saw yourself?

I always grew up idolizing entrepreneurship and business, and I grew up watching him run business meetings, writing himself checks. He never brought girlfriends around or anything, so for him, it was all work. That was how my brain was conditioned, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and the University of Oregon had the best fucking entrepreneurship program in the country, like, top five or some shit. I applied early. I knew that’s where I wanted to go and when I got in they gave me the out of state tuition cost. It was $60,000. I tried scholarships and everything but eventually, I was talking to my Dad just saying, “I don’t know how I feel about spending a down payment on a house to learn how to buy a house.” Once it became clear I couldn’t do it, I started applying to a bunch of different schools, I just kind of went to University of Santa Cruz. While I was in Santa Cruz I started doing more music and music just amounted to a lot more than anything I was doing academically. And my Dad always would just tell me, “Whatever you do, don’t go into fucking debt.” And then the first quarter of the sophomore year it was just getting tough financially. I wouldn’t even have money after my scholarship. So I just said “fuck it, this isn’t the place, I’m done.”

Was it at that point that music took on a more significant role in your life?

In Santa Cruz there is only one venue, it’s called the Catalyst, they have a main room that fits 1000 people and a small room that fits around 350. I opened for Blackalicious in the main room. A few months later a different promoter hit me up to perform at Rage Cage. I performed in front of a shit ton of people, it just kind of started to snowball from there. Then I did my own shows, decided I wanted to plan a tour because I had experience in front of 350 people and I knew I could move a crowd. I started booking venues and shit for myself and just kind of kicked everything into overdrive. I just wanted to perform whatever and wherever I could, so I got to open for other big acts, and I started to go to the Bay Area a lot more and started making a community for myself. Just through performances.

It’s crazy to hear about this super intense growing up, a very regimented schedule, watching your Dad be very hard working. Having that intense educational base, wanting to go to school for Business Management. It’s a beautiful way of finding the music because it wasn’t you saying, I’ll just try it and see how it goes. It was a very serious decision to do the music, there was no fucking around.

Exactly, I couldn’t fuck around like that, there was none of that. Everything for me was ultra discipline, I know it doesn’t look quote-unquote right because I don’t do it the conventional way. I’m looking at everything from a business-oriented perspective, so early on, when I was 18 or 19, that shit turned off a lot of people. I had a management deal, and my biggest thing was, I wasn’t a great rapper yet, I was a great performer. It made my manager really, really unhappy, I definitely know I pissed him off a lot because I don’t just listen and take. I inquire. “Why are we doing this? What is this gonna do? I don’t like the way this is going...” They wanted to do a Twitter strategy with me and I didn’t like it, so, at one point in the middle of our contract, they just stopped talking to me. I’m a people person. I’m not an internet person. Spotify has a playlist called “Internet People,” which is cool. I’m happy for them. I’m never gonna be the coolest guy on the Internet. People are gonna like what I have to offer because it’s a different energy. It’s a human energy.

Absolutely, it comes out in talking with you, so once you were out of Santa Cruz what did you do?

In early 2017 my best friend and collaborator, Neel passed away randomly. And after Neel passed, I did this tour I had planned, I went up and down the coast — San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego — when I came out of it I spent the rest of my time just with his mother, his family, and his girlfriend, just mourning my friend. And that took a lot out of me and my creativity.

It’s a collaborator, you lose that connection and you lose that artistic voice.

I didn’t know what to do, he was the most amazing guitar player, he could hear something and just play it immediately. Then after he passed, I just felt lost. So in 2017 I started doing creative direction, basically teaching other people how to rap and how to move in the industry. I would help out a lot of young rappers and producers. I put my own creativity behind me, and I started to get really bad writer’s block. For the first time, I felt a wavering in that drive and the belief that I was made for music, you know, I had lost that. I wanted to make beautiful music, and that’s what Neel and I were doing. I was being really honest, and this is a big trigger for me, but nobody cared... And I’m really in tune with that if I see nobody cares. I’m out.

If nobody cares, you can feel like you’re just yelling in the void.

Then, my Dad went on a trip, he came back, and he just died. The night I ended up taking him to the hospital, I was trying to write music, I was writing and I heard a thud. I came into the room and saw my Dad on the floor, and he couldn’t breathe. So I called the fire department, they came and took him to the hospital. They sent me to the wrong hospital. So then I’m calling every fucking hospital in the Bay Area. Eventually, I found out where they took him, so I went and he was doing alright, he was lucid a little bit. And this is just a very common thing with black people, but doctors will find everything other than the issue that’s wrong with you. So they’ll go, “Oh, he’s an alcoholic? Does he drink a lot? His liver is not working?” And I’d say, “No, my dad would have a glass every three months.” Or “Oh, is he diabetic?” “No, he’s not diabetic...” They kept trying to figure out all these things that were his fault that could be wrong with him.

Can’t you just figure out why he’s sick?

Exactly, I kept trying to talk to the doctor in person, the doctor wouldn’t meet with me. He died two days later. I woke up to the hospital calling me saying, “Your father passed away 10 minutes ago.” And I was like, “Why didn’t they call me? I’ve been trying to talk to a doctor...” I could go on for a while about how much I fucking hate... not the people who practice medicine, but the system. What is Soulja Boy like in the studio?

Just speed. All of this is going into how I ended up reclaiming myself as an artist, I learned that speed is your most precious resource. That’s all you have, because that’s your friction against the clock. We’re all gonna die. You’re gonna get rich, but how fast are you gonna get rich? Cash today is worth more than cash tomorrow. Because tomorrow, they’re going to take my one dollar per song and turn it into five cents a song, and it’s only going to get lower, depending on the new platform. Look at this country, a million dollars today is not a million dollars in 2000. A million-dollar house today is kind of ass, you know, I like to look at Zillow.

Yeah, to peruse around.

I’m so sorry.

I appreciate it. Thank you. That was August 2018, and I just lost Neel in 2017, so I just stopped. I moved in with my godparents. I was working on other people’s albums, they are doing great, while my shit is terrible. I’ll never forget my girlfriend was sitting in the room with me while I tried to make a beat and I was just like, “Wow, I hate this. I suck at this. This is terrible.” So I just felt, Alright, well, I guess I’m gonna move to Los Angeles. So I did. One of the first engineering sessions I had was with Warhol. I was struggling to engineer for him because he was so fast, and I hadn’t dealt with that kind of speed. I wasn’t prepared for Los Angeles at all, but I did it, it went well, and I got paid. I kind of turned in overdrive, I started freelancing for a bunch of different studios, all my gear’s mobile. I’d just take my shit around all Los Angeles. I started moving up and up and up and up. I was assisting Soulja Boy’s engineer and I got to watch how fast he recorded.

I’m gonna need a bit more than a million for a nice house [laughing]. But Soulja Boy didn’t say anything, he didn’t remember me a single time I walked in this house. But watching him exist and move was a catalyst for me internally. Soulja Boy is one of the pioneers in rap music for finding these Atlanta guys. He was one of the first people

to work with Migos and Famous Dex. The way that he records is very much in line with what people in Atlanta are doing, like Young Thug and a lot of others we all hoist up as some of the most creative people. I saw that he was just doing every song off the top of his head, in 20 minutes, and it sounds pretty fucking good. So what the fuck was I doing?

Right, why am I sitting here waiting and thinking, and not making?

Exactly, I felt like a fucking idiot. How am I gonna make a better song if I’m not making more songs? So I started freestyling, I remember once in high school I freestyled with Lucas Mobley [see page 102], and there were some baddies around. I freestyled, it was just awful. They were like, “Oh, he’s terrible.” Since then I never had done it seriously. But after seeing Soulja Boy work I have been freestyling everything I release. I’ll just freestyle and then go back and edit and freestyle. That’s my writing process now.

Your drive is really admirable because there are a lot of rappers who just fall into the ego or drugs or whatever it is, seems like people can get so far away from the work, but you’re so focused on the process itself.

This is where the system of being able to filter out people in terms of sharing songs comes in. Because meaningless feedback doesn’t help you realize how to make the song better, right? It comes down to the people who are around you. When I was in high school people were telling me, “Yeah, this is good.” But nobody’s telling me what’s wrong or how it can be better. That’s the biggest thing.

So you would say it’s about the speed but also the quality of the content? When it comes to rap the baseline is speed in my head. All of the things that I do are just about being as fast as possible. I know I’m probably one of the best rap recording engineers. Just number one, I have the vibe. That’s like 85% of it, but the X-Factor, 15% how fast are you? And because I’m a super nerd, I learned how to produce, how to engineer from the internet, nobody taught me. I’m releasing songs so frequently because I want to build a catalog. What is my family going to eat off or what am I going to eat off of? I own all of my songs because I’m not signed to anyone right now. So, if something crazy happens tomorrow and I get huge and sign a record deal...I don’t have to give up my catalog, I own it. So, they blow me up and I still own all of my music.

It seems you’re consciously building something. You know where you are in the big picture of your career.

I think of myself as a creator, I think of stuff and I make it. A lot of people are creative. So many people are creative. Oh, great idea. Can I see it? Can I touch it? Can I hold it? I try my best to sit down and just make things happen. You know, this rap shit, nobody sat me down and was like here’s a pen and paper, here is your textbook. I’ve been creating everything on my own, from the tour when I was 19 or pretending to be someone else when emailing venues, and negotiating better door deals for myself than established artists.

Maybe it took your best friend and your father passing away, for everything to be taken away, for you to say, “Alright, fuck doing this for everyone else. Fuck waiting at the kid’s house for two hours while they’re getting high. How am I going to do this for me? How am I going to put myself on because I know nobody else will...” And nothing against them, but I got to do this for me, because I’m looking around and I don’t think anyone else will.

Exactly, and that’s really what it came down to is I couldn’t see for myself. There’s a song I grew up listening to with my Dad on the WWE soundtrack, there is a line that goes, “You can’t see the forest for the trees. You can’t smell your own shit on your knees...” I couldn’t smell the shit on my knees. Everything I thought was a strength was a weakness and everything I thought was a weakness was a strength. Once I started putting it in perspective everything changed.

How did your friends react to this change of yours? It takes courage to do that.

I know people don’t listen to me. I know that actively the people around me don’t want to accept that I have done something that’s really scary. Because when I showed people this new shit, they were looking at me so fucking different. The best way to explain it is I couldn’t tie my shoes as a little kid. I tried so fucking hard. I would fucking bawl and cry and my Dad would be like, “I’m not teaching you, tie your fucking shoes.” It’s something that should just come naturally, and then one day I went down there. I just tied them, it was like “look at you go.” That’s how most things in my life have been like, you know, I try and try and try, then I wake up one morning, clear headed, and boom. I can do it. I’m confident in a way that isn’t normal. I feel like there are two kinds of confidence. There’s attractive confidence, and then there’s whatever the fuck I have. I’ll call it, unattractive confidence. Attractive confidence is when you walk in a room, you look good, you’re smooth, you’re suave, you got the mystique and the magic. You walk in and people go, “Oh, damn, that nigga nice.” Nobody has ever thought that when they see me, and I’m okay with that for now. Right now what they see is my unattractive confidence, which is, I’m working and you see it. There’s a big glass fucking door in front of me and I am chiseling away at every fucking piece of whatever it is that I want to create.

People look and think, “Why are you doing it that way?”

Cool confidence never came naturally to me. All I’m doing is learning every day. I think it just makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. If you were sitting here...

And it was a terrible fucking interview with stupid questions. Yeah, I’d be fine. Picking your nose the whole time? I’d be fine. I grew up experiencing the lowest of the lows, even before music and everything my Mom was in and out of jail growing up. She sold drugs, she wasn’t around. I lived with her for three years and it was terrible. Niggas was hungry. I was watching drug deals. I’ve lived the experience people talk about in trap music, right? So I can walk into session tomorrow, and niggas could have guns, everything, which I’ve been in before, and it doesn’t faze me. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable, I know I’m good because I know nobody is gonna have a problem with me. My learning is so public, I will throw some shit on the wall because that’s how you’re supposed to learn. What, you’re gonna look cool learning? You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t get in the mud so you can wash yourself off and look great after. That’s what life is about. So many people I know want to act cool and they haven’t learned, where’s the progress? It’s fear of failure. Fuck that shit, I’d rather fail in front of a shit ton of people than try nothing.

I think there’s something about creative people who have experienced loss. You sort of look around at the world and you see the people who try to hide the trial and error but are never really honest because of that fear of failure. That’s okay, but when you have an intense loss, you have to face that right in front of you. You look around and think, We all could be gone tomorrow. All this talking and acting cool is just for show. There’s that feeling of, I don’t give a shit if I look like an idiot, I don’t give a shit if you don’t like me, or don’t think I’m cool. Because I know that you can lose everything. And when it goes it goes.