Some musicians have the misfortune to discover, at a certain point in their careers, that it is possible to lose everything. Anderson .Paak had learned this harsh lesson twice over before he had graduated from high school.
It all happened in Oxnard, California. His mother – a Korean-war orphan, raised in Compton – built up a successful organic strawberry business that enabled the family to move from a one-bedroom apartment into a five-bedroom mansion. Brandon Paak Anderson thus enjoyed a privileged adolescence, until El Niño devastated the crop two years running and plunged his mother into bankruptcy. She remarried and made another small fortune as a professional gambler until she was prosecuted for undeclared winnings. This time she lost all her money and went to jail for seven-and-a-half years. These whiplash reversals of fortune have left her son with a keen sense of the contingency of life.
“My whole world was flipped upside down,” he says now. “I think that stayed with me. Everything is temporary and you should appreciate it while you have it. I love experiencing things that taste great and things that look good but I know it could be gone in a matter of seconds.”
Today .Paak is an endlessly renewable source of good vibes. The only thing in the plush tea room of the Langham hotel that is brighter than his tangerine beanie hat is his expansive grin, hence the name of his forthcoming arena tour, The Best Teef in the Game. His promotional visit to London happens to coincide with the implosion of British politics, which, as an outsider, he finds utterly baffling. “You guys are in a pretty big mess,” he says, refuelling with a triple espresso between radio appearances. “I don’t even know what the equivalent would be on our end. That’s like California being like: ‘Nah, fuck the rest of the United States, we’re going to be our own thing.’”
In the unlikely event of secession, the state could turn to .Paak to supply its national anthem. Following Venice, Malibu and Oxnard, his new album Ventura is the fourth to be named after a beach in southern California – and the last. Tough luck, Laguna.
“Hell yeah I’m done,” he cackles. “When we look back on it, it’s going to be a little map of the coast, y’know?”
The 33-year-old singer, rapper and drummer has the work rate of someone who is making up for lost time. He was nearing the end of his 20s when producer DJ Dahi invited him to try out some vocals for Dr Dre’s 2015 comeback album Compton. The eminence grise of west coast rap was so wowed that he featured the previously unknown scene-stealer on six tracks and has been his musical mentor ever since.
“I don’t feel like he’s been this involved with an artist since Eminem and I think he missed that,” says .Paak. “It was a learning process for both of us because we both want a lot of control.” Under Dre’s wing, he has already worked with several of his heroes, including Q-Tip, André 3000, Pharrell and Kendrick Lamar. The opening acts on .Paak’s arena tour – Earl Sweatshirt, Thundercat, Noname and Mac DeMarco – reflect the kaleidoscopic diversity of his music, which assimilates R&B, jazz, funk, house music, psychedelia, several shades of hip-hop and, in spirit as well as sound, the lush embrace of 70s soul.
It took many years of false starts and setbacks for .Paak to arrive at this confident blend. His youth, he says, was one long “identity crisis”. At elementary school in Oxnard, he used to bring in Dre and Snoop CDs for show-and-tell but when he started playing drums in his local church at the age of 13, he decided he needed to throw them all away and dedicate himself to Bible study and gospel music instead. “I was always so dramatic,” he says fondly. “When I’m into something I’m 100% all in.”
How long did that phase last?
He laughs. “Probably about a week.”
At high school in the neighbouring city of Ventura, he was usually the only black pupil in his year. “I kind of assumed the responsibility,” he says. “So I was like: ‘OK, I’m gonna be that talented black kid who can rap, sing, dance.’ I felt sick of it after a while.” He convinced himself that he was going to be “an 18-year-old millionaire signed to Dr Dre or Jay-Z”, but after record labels rejected his demo he reinvented himself again as a fan of Radiohead and Beck. “I was like: ‘Fuck this, I’m gonna be the alternative black kid: I wear skinny jeans and cardigans and I’m indie rock now.’ Eventually, I got into music college and thought: ‘What the hell am I doing? I love black music.’”
College was where .Paak met his Korean-born second wife, following a short-lived first marriage to a woman he met at church. His 20s were a bumpy ride. He recorded amiable soul as Breezy Lovejoy, a name that sounded rather too much like a minor Simpsons character (“Probably too on the nose,” he concedes), but there were times when he dropped music altogether, shuffling through countless low-paying jobs. His most lucrative employment was on a medical marijuana farm. “I got to see how much hard work goes into planting a good strain of weed,” he says, like a wine buff rhapsodising over the importance of good terroir. It was a dangerous business, though. “You’d hear about people being kidnapped and killed. That could have easily been us. I could still be in jail for the amount of stuff I was surrounded with. But I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was just trying to support my family.”
The crunch came in 2011, when .Paak lost his job and home just after the birth of his first son Soul (he now has a second, Shine), an episode he recounts on Malibu’s highlight The Season/Carry Me: “Cursing the heavens, falling out of orbit.” Inspired by the DIY ethos and unapologetic individuality of newcomers Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean, he knuckled down to making new music every day while crashing on the floors and couches of supportive friends such as Shafiq Husayn of Los Angeles collective Sa-Ra. “I was just trying to be an adult,” he says. “I remember thinking: ‘My family deserves better. I’ve got to focus.’”
This do-or-die effort spelled the end for poor old Breezy Lovejoy. The curious punctuation in .Paak’s surname symbolises his attention to detail. Woe betide any journalist who omits it. “There’s little things that artists do,” he says with a sly smile. “Because we work so hard we want to make people sweat sometimes.” By the time he got his shot at impressing Dr Dre he had the songs, the vision and the voice. Dre said he heard “natural pain” in .Paak’s distinctive rasp and lyrics about “stompin’ down demons”.
What surprised him about Dre?
“You see someone who’s very serious, with this gangsta rap persona, but that dude is really funny and humble. You get a couple of drinks in the dude and he can’t stop smiling. He’s so excited when he’s making new music, almost like a kid.”
Malibu was one of the most celebrated albums of 2016 but the more diffuse, guest-heavy Oxnard inspired a minor backlash, even as it was winning .Paak his first Grammy. “That hurt for me because I’d never had anything that caught any kind of grief,” he says. “I was like, ‘Well damn!’” He hopes that Ventura, which was recorded simultaneously and arrives just five months later, will conclude the beach series on a high before he moves on to the next phase. “I’m glad I had this album ready. It was like: break in case of emergency.”
The first single King James is his most political yet, referencing Black Lives Matter, Trump’s hypothetical wall and Colin Kaepernick’s take-a-knee protest. “In history, there’s been a bunch of Jameses that are leaders so it’s a salute to modern-day leaders,” he explains.
Such as? “James Brown. LeBron James. Er, James Earl Jones.” Pause. “James Bond?”
OK, maybe not James Bond. “This is the age of awakening,” he continues. “It’s no longer that we’re just here to be entertainment. We see what’s going on and we’re not going to be numb to it any more. Are we supposed to play along like everything is cool, and still cheer for the team when just down the street 12-year-olds are getting killed? Are we going to act like schools aren’t getting shot up? I’m seeing it in real time just like everyone else and I don’t have the answers. All I’m here to do is give you guys something to think about while you dance.”
Of course, celebrity engagement with politics does not always end well. Just as James Brown enraged his black fanbase by endorsing Richard Nixon in the 1972 election, Kanye West caused uproar last year by buddying up to Donald Trump. “Kanye’s always out on his own,” .Paak says, diplomatically. “He’s always radical. He’s willing to go out on a limb and make an ass out of himself and then come back like: ‘You know what? I was dumb but I’m on to the next now.’ He probably did a lot of damage with some of the comments he said and his alignment with Trump but, honestly, with Kanye it’s always been about the art. I’ve never looked at him as a political figure or someone I needed to hear speak about different issues.”
Perhaps .Paak just isn’t the judgmental type. He even has a kind word for a man he has every reason to disdain. When .Paak was seven, he witnessed his estranged father brutally assault his mother. His father, an alcoholic and drug addict, was sentenced to 14 years and died barely knowing his son, yet .Paak retains some sympathy. “My pops, God rest his soul, he fell victim to a lot of different things,” he says. “It was a different age for the generation that battled with crack cocaine and heroin and alcoholism. Man, it was tough. We’re still feeling the ripple effects of that. It doesn’t mean we can’t make our own waves and change the narrative. We don’t have to give in to our past.”
You can see where .Paak’s music gets its warm, reassuring glow. Like his heroes Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder, he can sing about personal and political strife without losing his essential optimism. At a time when hip-hop’s dominant mood is morose and minor-key, .Paak’s mission is to make people feel better.
“I have to fill that void,” he says. “There’s no one in hip-hop that’s bringing that happiness, that fun, feelgood music that isn’t cheesy. When people hear my story it’s very dark. People are like: ‘Damn! And then what happened? How are you not on crack cocaine right now?’ But I would have to try and make a dark record. Not to say there’s not pain there but there’s some hope and humour and optimism. I can’t help but do that.”
And here they come again, like a benediction: the best teeth in the game.
Ventura is out now on Aftermath Entertainment/12 Tone Records
