“But I don’t think that everybody has the same thinking cap on, and that’s fine.” “I think I’m one of the greatest rappers of all time,” he says. His feelings encapsulate a longstanding conflict with adulation-he yearns for it, but doesn’t necessarily know when it’s going to come. “I was so surprised that they knew my shit all the way over there,” he says.

He remembers his first trip to California, when he visited San Francisco in 2009 for a promotional stop to support his first major-label single, “Chillin.” He talks about how the Chinese food at House of Nanking perfectly complemented the strongest weed of his life, but more than anything, he remembers how he felt at the Mezzanine nightclub, when a sold-out crowd, 3,000 miles away from D.C., knew every word he rapped. But the pain he acquired along the way gave him little to help him cope with the rarefied air he inhabits. Over the past decade or so, music has typically served as his therapeutic outlet, earning him major loot, a duet with Rihanna, an MMG platform, and a cosign from Jerry Seinfeld. “The tattoo shop can be your therapist sometimes,” he says as he sits on a reclining chair. It’s a mid-September day on Melrose Avenue, and the artist born Olubowale Victor Akintimehin is in the thick of a promo run for Folarin II-his seventh studio album, released Friday, a sequel to his popular 2012 mixtape-but he has some things to get off his chest, making Black Anchor the perfect place to fulfill his urge. resident, who’s stopped by to get tatted before he heads to Atlanta for the Afropunk festival. Inside, paintings of celebrities, including a portrait of Drake staring at an owl statue, line the walkway to a back room where I’m slated to interview Wale, a multi-platinum rapper and L.A. The building’s black exterior stands in stark contrast to its immediate surroundings, and to punctuate that difference in attitude, a sign on the window describes the shop’s hours as “Whenever the fuck we’re here.” Since the pandemic began, the West Hollywood hideout has been open by appointment only. The Black Anchor tattoo parlor sits inside an unremarkable building, sandwiched between a black-box theater and a vacant storefront with a “for lease” poster plastered on its wall.

Wale the gifted poster