Joey Badass Wants to Be Rap’s Revolutionary Star—But Is Rap Ready?

Despite the half-dozen promotional stops he’s scheduled to make around Manhattan this grey afternoon, Joey Badass is in a black Lexus sedan, headed to Brooklyn. In the SUV that trails behind him—one of those new Escalades with a digital camera feed where the rearview mirror should be—the driver turns on the radio. Wolf Blitzer explains sarin gas as the Lexus and the Escalade ease into parking spots.

The destination is Sweet Chick, the hip fried chicken chain of which Nas is a part owner. This location, on Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg, is the original; Joey eats here so often that the restaurant started carrying organic grenadine just so it could make him the Shirley Temples he prefers. He steps inside, clad in bright red, and is greeted less like a rap star than a younger, precocious cousin. The front of the building now sports a mural dedicated to All Amerikkkan Badass, Joey’s then-forthcoming new album: It shows an American flag rendered in red, white, and blue bandanas.

Inside Sweet Chick, there are waffles, breasts, thighs, biscuits, those Shirley Temples. The soundtrack is what you’d expect from an eatery that prides itself on its New York hip-hop roots: Boogie Down Productions’ “Remix for P Is Free” bleeds into the Mos Def adaptation of “Children’s Story.” Conversation at the table drifts from BDP and Black Star’s shared DNA to the roots of Southern rap, specifically the Rap-a-Lot catalog. Before long, though, Joey retreats inside his iPhone, which he holds with one hand, motionless, a foot or two from his face. He mentions something about Spotify—a fan posted a screenshot of his forthcoming album on the streaming service—and hands dart to pockets, iPhone after iPhone, until a Spotify premium subscriber can check to see if the album has accidentally been posted early. It hasn’t.

In less than 12 hours, All-Amerikkkan Badass will be available online. (Nervous hangers-on have been reassured that Kendrick Lamar’s album, widely believed to be dropping at the same time, has been pushed back seven days.) This is the last hundred meters, a sprint to finish made up of photo ops and radio spots. It’s designed to create a fever pitch for what’s officially his sophomore LP, but is really his fourth major work in the last five years. His star-making mixtape, 2012’s 1999, cast him as the millennial rapper who respected history. It was an impressive, sometimes virtuosic record, but it made it appear that Joey was looking backward for inspiration. The two records that followed—a follow-up mixtape and a debut retail album—didn’t reorient him in the public’s eye.

That’s one of the uphill battles Joey faces: He’s only 22, but he’s no longer an up-and-coming talent waiting to be discovered by cool kids and would-be tastemakers. Even though All-Amerikkkan Badass marks something of a stylistic break, Joey often finds himself caught in the crossfire of his city’s (and his genre’s) internal, eternal, aesthetic squabbling. And while he should be enjoying the success of his highest-charting single to date (“Devastated”)—not to mention his star turn on the acclaimed USA drama Mr. Robot—he’s uneasy with the nature of this new attention.

“It’s funny now,” he says. “I’ll talk to people and they’ll be like ‘Hey, Joey Badass, right?’ And I can kinda feel that they only know [me from] ‘Devastated.’ And then the next thing they say is, ‘Yo, I love your role on Mr. Robot.’ It’s funny, people know me from something other than music. To me, it’s like, music is my number one thing. But those fans may be looking at it like, ‘Bro, you need to be doing more acting, fuck music.’”

He stares out the window of the Lexus. “It’s real funny.”

With this album, Joey is taking on a new artistic point of view and trying to engage in earnest with the world as he sees it, today and in the future, rather than through the smeared lens of a half-remembered Clinton administration. Will fans and critics accept a pivot like this from an artist they’ve seemingly pigeonholed? There’s an exclusive concert slated for midnight.