MEET KING YOSEF: PRODUCER-SCREAMER’S MISSION TO BE “THE ENTOMBED” OF UNDERGROUND HIP-HOP VIA REVOLVER
Photographs by Ryan McKinnon
Below transcript via REVOLVER. Read full exclusive here!
“There’s a lot of Asking Alexandrias in the community right now,” says Northwest-based screamer-beatmaker King Yosef of the booming world of SoundCloud rap. “I’m trying to be more of the Entombed to the Asking Alexandrias.”
The music of Tayves Yosef Pelletier is more extreme and closer to the bleeding edge than most of today’s internet-grown hip-hop. Though he’s produced songs for Billboard Hot 100–charting rap artists like the late XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God, Yosef animates the lo-fi, blown-out brood-scuzz of SoundCloud rap with the vein-popping screams of hardcore and the mechanical noise of industrial. At 21, he’s already been on a Top 40 album (XXX’s 2017 mixtape Revenge) and remixed former Crystal Castles vocalist Alice Glass for a 12-inch.
Yosef grew up in Medford, Oregon, which he describes as “a lot of people chewing tobacco and … shooting guns. … Southern Oregon’s not very culturally thriving per se. Up until 10 years ago, it was the meth capital of the U.S. It’s pretty much a Kid Rock album.”
His stepfather was an aspiring MC in an Oregon rap group — Yosef says the first CD he remembers owning was Mac Dre’s 2004 hyphy totem Ronald Dregan: Dreganomics — but he soon became enamored with metal. As a teenage guitarist, he cycled through metal- core and hardcore bands, tried to make EDM tracks on his laptop and skipped school to play music with older kids. He moved to Vancouver, Washington, (near Portland) shortly after his 18th birthday with the intentions of being a beatmaker.
