Find The Beat

“I wasn't doing music all my life, so I never really had a sense of how I wanted to flow or anything,” Blueface tells Apple Music. “So this is really what I started with and this is what I decided to elevate with.” The Los Angeles MC is of course referring to the unorthodox rhyme style that has, along with a growing collection of party-centric hits, come to define his presence in hip-hop. MCs finding unique pockets of their production to exist in is nothing new, but few have made it as integral to their brand as Blueface has. Calling his third solo project Find the Beat, Blueface is weaponizing the very criticism that his detractors hoped would take him out of the game. But as candid as he is about his style (“I rap offbeat,” he says. “I don't follow the guidelines”), plenty more forethought goes into what makes it onto a project. Below, Blueface tells Apple Music how some of his favorite tracks from Find the Beat came to be.
First Class “This was one of the ones I think is probably one of my best rapping, word-for-word-type songs. My mind state, when I made this song, was just where I'm at today: first-class life, red-bottoms, three-thousand-dollar shoes. Ooh!”
Weekend “When you rich, every day is the weekend. That means that every day, I can wake up at any time without calling in. My work is the weekend, so even when I'm out, I consider it working. Even when I'm spending money, I'm working. Whenever you see me, that's work.”
Obama “I put DaBaby on here ’cause the beat had a little bop in it and it was real jazzy, so it was a little bit in his comfort zone but out of his comfort zone at the same time. So a little experiment. It worked out, though—it's one of my favorites on here.”
Holy Moly “I wouldn’t say I stick to one sound. Mostly, people would say ‘Thotiana,’ but some people would say ‘Daddy,’ and then there's some people that don't like neither of those songs. Some of them like ‘Dead Locs’ more, some of them like ‘Respect My Cryppin’,’ those type of sounds. I just try to make my music as close as possible to how I'm feeling or what's going on at that time.”
Dirty “I was punching in on this song, so when I punch in, I get a chance to play with my voice. I added a little extra tempo to it, a little extra turn-up. Some tracks is like, I listen to it, and I keep fucking with it or fuck with it too much. Sometimes I go back to it three or four times. Sometimes I'll go back to the first way. I take constructive criticism from everybody on my team. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t.”
Period “‘Period’ is relationship shit and Instagram shit. Sometimes those two get confused, and this is my biggest pet peeve. If I've known you 13 years in real life, and you seeing something for five seconds on Instagram and you let that dictate our relationship, that's a turn-off for me. It depends on the person, but if I can cut them off I usually do, because social media is not real.”