Why brainy rapper Ryshon Jones is never satisfied

It’s an old rap brag; Ryshon Jones has forgotten more rhymes than most MCs have thought of. In his case, it’s because he can trace his work back to the first mixtape he distributed in seventh grade, and because what he’s done in the past displeases him soon thereafter. “I’ll be real with you,” he says after we spend almost 10 minutes excavating just a sliver of his back catalogue. “There’s mad stuff I didn’t mention because I removed it for a reason. One thing about me is, I always critique my music. I’ll hear something and be like, ‘Damn, man, this shit’s like fuckin’ trash now and I want to make something new.’”

It’s just how his mind works. To call him cerebral or contemplative might give the false impression of repose. But what’s happening is way more active. Everything gets the thrice over, he remembers anecdotes on the fly, makes connections as he goes, absorbs everything happening around him for future processing, forms ideas only to take them apart almost simultaneously, cracks up at himself the whole time, and cracks you up in the process. And he’s equally complex in his music.

That’s what Justin Brown, then a hip-hop blogger living in Atlanta, heard in 2011. After listening to two of Jones’ songs, he reached out: “I couldn’t believe such different things were coming out of the mouth of a 19-year-old.” When Brown moved to New Jersey in 2012 to work at Homebass Studio, he met Jones and gave the young MC a free space to record.

Something changed — well, he quit his job to perform at the 2012 SXSW for one — in the nearly yearlong recording process for Jones’ only 2013 release, In Theory. The perfectionism that led to his past prolificacy became his reason to slow down. “Honestly, I want people to start from In Theory. That’s when I really found myself, or another side of myself … ” He trails off, a moment of self-definition is about to occur and he wants it just right, or maybe doesn’t want it at all. “I would just do a lot of observing,” he says. “Just take time alone and literally sit and think about everything.”

After In Theory, he went almost eight months without writing. He stopped “making songs just to make songs. … That comes with growth,” he says. “I’m just taking more time and perfecting things to how I want them to be.”

His latest, Hope Is a Dangerous Thing, was self-released this January, and is accompanied by a look book of poetry. The album comes at you from every direction: intriguing samples and murky, nocturnal production, beats that knock and others that feel like a long drag while “roaming through the night,” songs that bend and break down into silence or found sound only to be revived, sometimes completely transformed. Guest rappers, singers and a poet all get their moments, and there’s Ryshon’s intricate and emphatic flow acknowledging the drums but remaining untethered to them, his ideas taking precedence. 

You can tell him it’s great, but he’s already over it. “I don’t like Hope Is a Dangerous Thing that much anymore. And it’s only been out like three weeks.”

The nearly inevitable question after hearing his music and meeting him is this: Do you feel understood? He looks away for a second and you can almost glimpse the machinery working at the speed of thought: Do I feel understood? What would it even mean to be understood? My music or me? Can anybody really be understood? He turns back and doesn’t disappoint, “Yeah, yeah and no … I don’t know man, yeah and no.”