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Call Me Out Now, September Up next
South Florida-bred artist Kid Faze is not a person who likes to wait. “The earlier you start, the faster you get to your goals,” says Faze. “My dad always said, ‘You can do anything, but whatever you wanna do, you should have done it yesterday.’” His meaning: Get started as soon as possible. The old motto “there’s no time like the present” is a moment too late as far as Faze is concerned.
It’s not that he is impatient. It took years of grinding to get where he is today. But the grinding is the point. Not waiting for things to happen but making things happen is what sets him apart from his peers. He has lofty goals, and reaching them won’t happen by waiting for things to fall into his lap.
Faze wrote his first raps in elementary school, inspired by a beloved uncle. “My uncle was more like a big brother to me. He was a part of a group, and I wanted to be part of the group, but I was too young at the time,” says Faze. “The first record ever sold was his record in middle school. I sold one of his mixtapes to one of my white friends in science class (laughs).”
Besides his uncle, Faze’s main source of inspiration as a kid was Lil Wayne. Experiencing his formative years during Wayne’s incendiary mixtape run in the mid-2000s was inspiring. “My very first music listening device was this pink, little, mp3-thumb-drive situation. My grandmother got me that.” he recalls. “The first thing I did was go to Limewire and search for Lil Wayne, and I got like the Dedication mixtape. I think it was the second one.” Ingesting that classic material at a young age fueled a young Faze’s love of music.
As he got older, Faze left South Florida for Orlando to attend the University of Central Florida to study computer engineering. Even though he did well, he reached a real turning point where Faze had to decide if he would go towards his destiny or waste time. “My sophomore year in college, I was going through a tough time,” he recalls. “I was broke as hell. I didn't have a car. I was going through relationship problems, um, trying to find myself as an individual.”
Then he decided to take a chance on himself and begin making music seriously. “I first encountered music when I got my first mp3 player, and I always said that I wanted to make a mixtape or wanted to get involved in music, but it also felt like it was an intangible thing. But now, I just started making decisions that, if I'm gonna do life, I’m gonna do life, how I wanna do life.” While he considered dropping out, he was on a scholarship, so he decided to make it work. He switched his major from computer engineering to music business and used that experience to stand out from the pack. He hasn’t looked back since.
Sometimes standing out from the pack also means standing alone. While his music leans towards the bouncy, catchy earworms that soundtrack late nights and parties, Faze gets most of his ideas in quieter surroundings. “Solitude is the biggest source of my creativity. Being lonely is not healthy, but being alone is,” says Faze. “I'm naturally a loner. Not that I'm not a friendly person, or a person that doesn't like being around people. I just find peace in being alone and having conversations with myself, letting my mind come up with ideas.”
Kid Faze’s ideas are not small, either. He sees himself as more than just a musical entity, but an artist and overall creative more in line with people like Kanye West. “I'm trying to build something on par with what Disney has built,” he says. So beyond making high-energy tracks with huge commercial appeal like his recent drop “I Don’t Care,” Faze is simultaneously trying to conquer an ever-growing digital environment with KiddoBoy, who stars in the video for the aforementioned track.
“He's a reflection of me, but he is his own thing. He's built off, obviously my look, my personality, but he’s not a voice. Kid Faze is the artist. KiddoBoy is simply a digital entity that we will see in the near future in video games and film and other types of visual media. We're writing a short series for him now,” Faze explains.
Again, big ideas. Music is just the first step to leading a much larger conversation. “I'm trying to really impact the world, leave my mark on the world and push this culture forward,” says Faze. Doing everything independently is extremely important to Kid Faze as well. His company TMRW Co. manages all of his publishing, merchandise, and touring. “I wanna have theme parks. I wanna have a publicly-traded, multi-trillion dollar company. I always say that I'm gonna be a billionaire, but KiddoBoy's gonna be a trillionaire.”
