The recording studio of the rapper Gabe Killian, who also goes by the stage name Capeesh, is located in a peeling gray apartment block on N. 6th Street, just past the defunct Camp Curtin BBQ. You go up some dirty stairs past a stained-glass window—“Stained glass, stained streets, stained everything,” Killian says—and arrive at a surprisingly ample apartment, where the studio sits off a brown-carpeted corridor. There’s a crib in one corner for Killian’s 10-month-old son Ryden, named for the Japanese god of lightning, and some posters on the wall, including one for the Beatles, Killian’s favorite band. A black skull on a table commemorates the studio’s nickname, the Headquarters. (It evolved from another nickname, “Head Hunta,” that Killian used for a former roommate who is one of his producers.)
On a drizzly Tuesday in late April, one of his days off from selling cell phones at a Camp Hill store, Killian was in front of a computer monitor in the Headquarters, cycling through songs. Killian, 26, is skinny, with a buzz cut and deep-set, shadowed eyes; he wore a black hoodie and jeans and sat in a wicker chair. He put on a track he recorded for a mixtape in 2011. Hip-hop mixtapes, typically used for promotional rather than commercial purposes, often contain a medley of originals and remixes of popular songs. On the track in question, Killian raps over the B.o.B. song “Airplanes,” which begins with a chorus by the rock singer Hayley Williams. Then Capeesh comes in:
Where to start, how ‘bout where I left off,
Made a bet on life, and I guessed wrong,
I guess y’all just wouldn’t understand,
How come nothing ever went according to the plan?
As the song played, Ryden, standing up in his crib, started bouncing on his knees. “This one’s probably my favorite song off the mixtape because it’s the only one that I actually put my personal feelings into,” Killian said. He reflected on how his style of rapping had changed in the years since. He used to put more animation into his voice, thinking that would make it “sound more ‘hype,’ more energetic.” Now his rapping voice was closer to his speaking voice—deeper, more relaxed and sounding more like him.
But it had also been a while since he’d released any new material. The “Airplanes” remix was part of a three-mixtape series, “The Conference Room,” “The Press Conference” and “The Confiscation,” which Killian had completed in 2012. The titles represented a three-stage plan of attack—a conference room is for drafting a business plan, a press conference is for taking it public, and the “confiscation” was the stage of taking over, he told me. Rappers don’t usually do three mixtapes in a year, but it was a time of intense productivity for Killian, who had just gotten out of prison. “I was just like, ‘You know what? I just wasted a bunch of time doing nothing, and I’m ready to roll,’” he said.
Since the mixtapes, though, he’d gotten more precious about his releases. His next step was an album, which, unlike the mixtapes, would be composed entirely of original tracks. You only get one shot at a debut album, he thought, and he wanted it to be as close to perfect as possible. The demands of fatherhood were also slowing him down. Some days, even when he didn’t have Ryden (he and his ex-girlfriend share custody), he would come home from work planning to record and find he didn’t have the energy. Nonetheless, he believed in his heart that he was meant to be a rapper and, seasoned by past experience with the industry, he’d sketched out a rough marketing plan for when the songs were ready. “The passion’s definitely there, but, not being able to pull it out of me whenever I want to, I just feel drained a lot of the times,” he said. “And that’s hard. But a little bit of success can change all that. You know what I mean?”
Killian grew up in Edgemont, a neighborhood north of the East Harrisburg Cemetery, along Route 22. His family was musical; his mother is a music teacher, his brother plays in a band in Boston, his cousin is an opera singer in New York. His parents were also religious and ran a strict household, but the neighborhood was urban. As Killian puts it, “Everything my parents tried to protect me from was at my neighbor’s house.” As rap music was increasingly coming into style, he became attracted to it, in part because he wasn’t allowed to listen to it.
Killian’s earliest influences were gangsta rap—“dark, angry, violent music.” Perhaps predictably for a white rapper of his generation, he was most strongly influenced by Eminem, although he wasn’t impressed the first time he heard him. “He sounded like an annoying white dude,” he told me. Over time, however, he became enamored with Eminem’s wordplay. You can feel the influence in songs like “Star City,” whose lines are packed with internal rhymes and double-entendres. (The title comes from a nickname for Harrisburg.) The chorus, in a quick 10 words, glances past the title, the city’s area code and Killian’s record label—“EnV,” short for Envisioned Entertainment—finally landing on a pun: “Star City, seven-seventeen, me and my team gettin’ EnV green.” Then comes the first verse:
Star City, letterman, varsity
Liquor store on every corner, Bar City
Rappers everywhere you look, Barz City
You know I make ‘em get the point, archery
Like a lot of rap music, Killian’s songs often have a combative undercurrent, with lyrics directed at enemies, real or imagined. “Every time I hear ya shit I click the next song,” he raps in “Star City.” To Killian, these lyrics represent a competitive spirit that defines the genre. The thing that first inspired him to write rap was a friend telling him he shouldn’t bother, because Killian would never be as good as he was. “I wrote some stuff, and the next day I rapped at him, and all his friends were like, ‘Ohh! You got beat by a white boy!’” He likes to compare rapping to entering the ring for a fight. “I’m not an arrogant person, but when it comes to music and rhyming, I do feel like a boxer would never go into a boxing ring expecting to lose,” he said. “Why would a rapper go out there expecting to be second best?”
When Killian was 21, he got pulled over for a traffic stop and was told he had an outstanding warrant for transporting cocaine. The incident had taken place a couple of years prior, when he was 18; in his telling, he was set up to carry the drugs by a friend who was working with an undercover police officer. Prosecutors offered to reduce the charges in exchange for his cooperation setting up other friends, but Killian refused. He wound up doing six months, initially at the Dauphin County prison and later on work release. “It sucked,” he said. “It sucked.” After graduating high school, he had studied at HACC to become an elementary school teacher, a career path he subsequently had to abandon. But, he said, he still hopes his work will impact young people someday. “I love kids,” he told me. “I figure kids learn more from music than they do from their teachers.”
In part, his continuing interest in education stems from his concerns about society. Alongside his songs’ preoccupations with nightlife, women and sparring with other rappers, Killian also has an abiding interest in politics and the news, which he often expresses on his Facebook page. A frequent theme is the idea that the mainstream media conceal the truth about the world. “You could call me a conspiracy theorist,” he told me. “I don’t like to call it ‘conspiracy,’ because the only conspiracy is the cover-up that there is one. But I do a lot of research.”
This interest, in my view anyway, is behind some of his most provocative lyrics. In one 2012 track, “Accepted Ignorance,” he raps about subliminal messaging in pop culture: “Don’t you know that a subliminal’s intended for you / You be pretending that the message didn’t get you to do / What it was sent there to do.” The YouTube video for the song consists of a single still image, a photo of George Orwell’s “1984,” opened to the page with the three Party slogans from the walls of the Ministry of Truth:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
On a recent, mild Monday night, around 10 p.m., a patchy early crowd milled around the bar at Midtown’s Stage on Herr. A life-sized crucifix, covered in a skin of coins, hung on stage right, while a projector flashed karaoke lyrics on a nearby wall. Killian strolled in and took a seat at the corner of the bar. “Man, this shit is dead in here,” he said, surveying the crowd. On stage, a youngish man began an enthusiastic, if not always pitch-perfect, rendition of Donna Summer’s “Oh Billy Please.”
“This guy is terrible,” Killian said, smiling. “But the thing is, he doesn’t care, and I respect that.” When the song finished, he laughed, said “Good job,” and gave the singer a high-five as he bounded off the stage.
Killian is a regular at Stage on Herr. Sometimes, he goes to rap, through a kind of karaoke loophole—he picks out a favorite artist’s track, then raps his own lyrics over it. “That way the audience is watching you, and not the words,” he said. On other occasions he goes to, as he puts it, “prospect.” “There’s some real talent that comes through here,” he told me. One of his recent tracks, “Are You Gonna Love Me,” features a refrain by Veela, a local EDM singer whom he first heard at a karaoke night. (The song includes one of the better demonstrations of Killian’s internal rhymes: “I’ve considered getting the scissors, and cutting her off, I’m distant and bitter, / ‘Cause I envisioned a winner, not blizzards in winter, with splintering timbers, and miserable dinners.”)
After a few songs, Killian stepped outside for a cigarette. He sat on the steps in front of the bar, reflecting on Harrisburg’s music scene. In his view, despite plenty of “raw, undiscovered talent” in the city, the absence of any blockbuster successes has left local artists without much to aspire to. “It’s a genuine lack of belief in people, because it’s never been done before,” he said. He’d been rapping for 13 years, and he was frustrated at times by the feeling of diminishing returns: showing up at the same stages, circulating songs through the same social media networks for likes and shares. In 2011, he invested in a radio campaign for his song “Can’t Do It”—$1,600 for 8 weeks on 2,000 stations. The experience disillusioned him somewhat. “That made me realize that everything in the industry, no matter what industry you’re in, is all about money,” he said. (He simultaneously made a music video for the song and posted it on YouTube, where it garnered more than 30,000 views.)
Not long ago, he wrote a song he can really only use for promotional purposes, because the beat isn’t his. Called “Mona Lisa,” it features his lyrics over an instrumental track by Ryan Lewis, the musical partner of the rapper Macklemore, from their 2012 album “The Heist.” The piece is a five-minute tour of Killian’s range, crossing from languid stanzas close to plain speech to rapid successions of rhymes to repetitive, crowd-revving choruses. He rapped it for me the day he showed me his studio. By then he’d recorded it 15 or so times, always in one take, the way he records every song. But he had yet to produce a version he was happy with.
The piece is a kind of artist’s statement, building to a pledge to recommit his life to music: “I married the game, and here I am renewing the vows,” he raps. He named it “Mona Lisa,” he said, because he thought it was his masterpiece, and because he felt the song, like the painting, gave the feeling of a blank stare. Towards the end, he brushes off people who would drag him down—“enemies tryna befriend me,” “emcees tryin’ to offend me.” Then he makes a breathless promise:
I’ma spit it out til I’m empty
Yeah, spit it out til I’m empty
I’ma spit it out til I’m empty
Yeah, spit it out til I’m empty
A couple of weeks later, he finished the recording. “I’m ready to give y’all what I consider a masterpiece,” he wrote on Facebook. “But only if y’all want to hear it.” He asked people to “Like” his status to indicate their support. More than 60 people obliged, and he released the track the next day.
Capeesh will be performing in Reservoir Park on Aug. 23, as part of the 3rd Annual Harrisburg Music Festival. For more information, or to hear his music, visit Capeesh’s YouTube channel.
