Source: Radio New Zealand
“Please do not hate me, I’m too young,” Zaidoon Nasir raps on ‘French Fever’ – a track about being bullied by a high school French teacher, released under music moniker WHO SHOT SCOTT.
“[The teacher] started calling me stupid or whatever, and she grabbed my book in front of the whole class, and just like ripped it to shreds and threw it on the ground, like a full-on power-move thing.
“I was 15 years old, just going through this, like, ‘What the heck? This demon’s waiting for me at school’,” he tells RNZ’s Music 101.
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Getting bullied by classmates, mostly about being hairy, made him feel “very alien, very outsider, very loner who eats his school lunch alone”.
On HAIRY , the alternative hip-hop artist “takes that energy and flip it into something powerful”.
Although he doesn’t really connect with the term “alter ego”, the persona of WHO SHOT SCOTT allows Nasir more freedom of expression, although the rapper is not at all the “crazy, chaotic guy” he might seem in music videos.
WHO SHOT SCOTT & Tony Stamp
So’omālō Iteni Schwalger
Nasir likes to keep it chill, with a “ritualistic” life that involves listening to jazz and bossa nova, and practising twice-daily transcendental meditation.
“I don’t know how it works, but I do know that, since first doing it about two years ago, my life has gotten better, so I’m just going to keep doing it.”
The cover of Auckland rapper WHO SHOT SCOTT’s upcoming debut album HAIRY , which comes out on 5 June.
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The musician, who still deals with anxiety, says he sometimes still has to remind himself to trust his own intuitions and instincts, as we all do.
“ If there’s something there, deeply, that’s telling you that ‘This is wrong’ or ‘This is right’, there’s a reason that feeling’s coming up.
“I try to keep the outer noise and my own mind fog noise down as much as possible, so that, when things feel wrong or feel right, I can really lean in or lean away… it’s like riding a wave or something like that from my perspective.”
To Nasir, it’s beautiful that people all around the world resonate with the deeply personal tunes he’s likened to “a therapy session from hell”.
“There’s some healing happening for me, creating the stuff I’m creating, and I hope that somebody else out there heals from listening to it too.”
Songs:
Lenny Kravitz – ‘Fly Away’
Gorillaz – ‘Feel Good Inc.’
Quasimoto – ‘Low Class Conspiracy’
Movies: Books:
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
Podcasts:
Tetragrammaton
Broken Record (with Malcolm Gladwell and others)
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
