Southwest Alumni Nazeem and Joles

Nazeem x Spencer Joles: Bringing a new flavor to Minneapolis hip-hop

by Peter Diamond · February 3, 2016

 

Nazeem and Spencer Joles as seen in the "Chinatown Dream" video

Nazeem Cunningham met Spencer Joles in middle school, and neither expected to be making music together almost a decade later.

“I kind of just went up to him and started freestyling, but we wouldn’t ever freestyle about anything or have it rhyme. It would just be ridiculous,” Joles said.

By the time the collaborators, now both 20, made it to Southwest High School, they began writing music seriously, and the two have been close collaborators ever since.

“Sometime in high school we realized we could actually kind of make music,” Cunningham said. “At first we were going to start a band similar to Rage Against the Machine, but then we started just writing raps, freestyle a capellas and stuff at lunch, and we just decided to be rappers after that.”

Coming of age in South Minneapolis has impacted their worldview and is referenced throughout their songs.

“South Minneapolis is awesome because there’s such a huge hip-hop influence, it’s a huge punk community, and I just like to observe those attitudes and those ideologies in my music and with fashion,” Cunningham said.

Their upcoming mixtape, coyly titled The Album, was produced entirely by Joles. It blends deceptive party tracks like “Smoke Daht” with the incise, razor sharp social commentary on “Chinatown Dreams” or “Fallen Souls,” which also features P.O.S. On the latter, they tackle white privilege, the case for reparations, and gun violence.

Peter Diamond is a senior at the University of Minnesota — Twin Cities and a sound and vision editor of The Wake Student Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @repetediamond.

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