NappyNappa, the D.C. rapper, won?t let the noise of the world drown him out

That fits. From the outside, Nappa appears to be wrapping up an extraordinary year, having generated a nonstop profusion of high-spirited, meta-spiritual rap music at exponentially high speeds. But aside from the pandemic, he says his 2020 has felt pretty normal. Sure, it’s probably been the most productive 12 months of his musical life, but Nappa says he isn’t trying to make a statement, or flood a zone, or wow a listenership, or even eat up the clock before he can go out on tour again. “I’m trying to keep a connection with myself,” he says. “Shout out Lil Wayne. Shout out Prince. I’m not gonna be suffocated by the world. I really gotta break through to whatever freedom comes through on the other side.”

Like his hyper-prolific heroes before him, Nappa doesn’t think of his productivity as a stunt, or even a strategy. It’s a way of being. Transposing his life into lyrics feels as natural as any other everyday act. Like getting dressed. Or reciting a prayer.

He’s dropped a total of four solo albums in 2020, including his latest maximal spritz, “IFEELJUSTLYKTHEIRART.” Earlier in the year, he issued two EPs with Psych Nah, an online creative partnership with Psychedelic Ensemble, a solo Polish producer based in London. And back home in the real world, Nappa has released more than a half-dozen recordings with Model Home, his brain-scorching improvisational duo with area producer Patrick Cain.

Through all of this music, a philosophy seems to be taking shape, with Nappa describing the act of rapping as being “receptive and unafraid of what the world is.” Or maybe it’s more like “the little spaceship, or whatever vessel you use, to travel through the portal.” The portal to where? “To freedom.” And what is freedom, exactly? “Unconditional love,” Nappa says. “Being able to reciprocate it, live in it, all of that.”

On the physical plane, Nappa has lived nearly all of his 24 years in Washington. Raised in Southeast Washington by his grandmother, he attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts where he studied dance and learned to rap alongside his friends, including longtime collaborator MartyHeemCherry. After being “thrown out” of Ellington his junior year, he moved to Georgia to live with his mother, but eventually returned to D.C. to commit his life to music.

That sense of commitment may have first taken shape during the Sundays Nappa spent as a child inside his grandmother’s church, Holy Redeemer in Sursum Corda. “I was in there arguing with the priest,” he says of his initial resistance to organized systems of belief. “But over time it was like, ‘What can I hold onto from that, and build from, and go forward?’ I can’t say I didn’t learn from old women talking about God all day.”

By now, our conversation has moved from the city’s sidewalks to a grassy lot where a team of nearby construction machines are trying to reincarnate a demolished block into new condos. It seems as good a time as any to ask Nappa if he believes in some kind of God.

“The Source!” he shouts over the noise, throwing his arms out toward the field. “We didn’t grow this grass!”

So when God is everywhere and music is everything, what does the shape of his day look like? “I wake up and hit up every homie I make music with, like, fifteen people,” Nappa says. “Whoever responds first is who I’m about to be on the path with.” That means he might spend the day online swapping song drafts with producers overseas, or meeting up in the studio with Cain to cut all the way loose. Either way, he relishes teamwork. “I like to have input in the sounds, but I don’t want to be the producer and the rapper — that’s where the community comes in,” he says. “This music, it’s not just from me. None of this is.”

Nappa’s collaborators say he works fast, and with zero ego, plus, he makes surprising decisions — all good working habits that push the music in unexpected directions. “Nappa picks beats which I was certain nobody would ever choose to rap over,” the artist Psychedelic Ensemble says in an email. “The most extreme example of that is ‘Teeth.’ I am still amazed that song exists. Like, why would anyone choose a beat that manipulates a sample to sound like gritting teeth? And yet, here we are.”

Over that gnashing Psych Nah track, Nappa excavates his own brainspace for “neuro-chem gems,” rapping about how “communication with the natural world makes us more intelligent.” Over his woozy solo cut “BAGZ 4 TH LOST,” he raps with loosey-goosey lucidity: “True rebellion ain’t just trying to survive, it’s creating a new way of life.” Over the asymmetrical grind-and-bump of Model Home’s “REV,” he runs circles around an alliterative mantra — “Revolution, reputation, reparation, resolution, restitution!” — until he trips over his own tongue.

“Different sounds put my mind in a different place,” Nappa says. “I get to play with that, I get to create thoughts around those sounds.” He treats his voice as a sound, too, frequently distorting it on his recordings, a tactic designed to focus the listener’s attention (“You have to tune in”), while forging a metaphor for the noise of the world around us (the distortion “creates these textures of existence”).

Then fate intervenes to help prove his point. The scraping and grinding from the neighboring construction site suddenly grows so loud, it threatens to blot out our chitchat. “See?” Nappa shouts through his mask. “This conversation is distorted!”

Funny how everything goes clear in that noisy moment. Nappa isn’t an “alt-rap” abstractionist. He’s a realist. He’s rapping about the reality he lives in — his time, his city, his head. Even when he’s piloting a spaceship into a state of unconditional love, he’s also doing the everyday work of organizing his everyday thoughts. He might sound like he’s rapping to us from another plane, but he’s still a part of the world we all share. “I think of the audience as, like, adjacent to me,” he says, “so we’re looking at the same thing.”

What does he want us to see? “A new sense of self,” Nappa says. “I’m not thinking what I do makes me different than anybody. I want people to see a new sense of self, new ways to get through this [life]. And that’s it.”