Kids of Hip Hop takes a dive into the eclectic mind of Raydeo World

I met up with Johnny A.K.A Raydeo World on a Friday evening, we were supposed to link the day prior on Thursday but it was his girl friend’s (who’s a model) bday photo shoot and he had to put on his Photographer’s hat. When we did end up linking on Friday he was super busy with the weekly release of his Freestyle Friday series. He was DMing the series latest episode to his fans, friends and family, carefully responding to every single one of the 384 comments and doing anything else he could to engage with his loyal listeners.

Raydeo is very focused and extremely determined to making music work for him as a career. When we spoke in the interview he told me about the moments in life that lead to him knowing that music was his passion: he was extremely depressed and had no friends when he entered high-school, so one day, he ditched school and went to go smoke, when it was his turn to hit the blunt he shied away and in that moment realized he was lost. “There’s nothing wrong with drugs or smoking, it’s just not for me” he told me. He knew from then he was an outsider and wore that on his chest ever since. When he told his parents he didn’t want to go to college it pushed him to start taking music more seriously.

Raydeo released his debut project “What Am I” In October of 2019. When I asked Raydeo about the project he said

“‘What Am I’ is basically like a personality trait that I felt was like the grittiness, the shit that i went through, the shit that built me up to this point, but it wasn’t really Raydeo, it was more of my angry side of Raydeo. So my angry side is more of Billy, you know he wilds out, goes crazy, doesn’t give a fuck, says disrespectful shit, normal trap shit you know. But that’s just one side of me and I’m ready to present the other. Every project is going to be a different personality trait”

Since “What Am I”, Raydeo has dropped many new singles, 2 iterations of a vey successful series called Freestyle Friday, and he’s ramping up for the release of his newest project which will be titled “Maniac”. In the forthcoming album Raydeo explores the inner depths of someone’s mind in order to speak on larger universal issues, like economic and racial inequality. I’m personally very excited for this project because I’ve witnessed Raydeo’s development from “What Am I” to his latest release “Slippery”. He’s come a long way from being the angry kid who feels like he deserves a seat at the table.

Check out our conversation below: