At only 21 years of age, Craig Vill is a promising rap star. His latest album, The Most Notorious Poet Laureate, came out on Jun. 9, 2022, and it really caught my attention. So much so that I reached out to him requesting an interview. Being this the first time he got asked to do something like this, he accepted with excitement. During our conversation, we discussed his lyrical journey from poet to rapper, the inspiration behind his songs, and why the pandemic was, after all, a blessing in disguise.
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Courtesy of Craig Vill
I meet Craig Jackson-Johnson–aka Craig Vill–on a late Tuesday afternoon. He’s connecting from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He recently came out with his latest album, The Most Notorious Poet Laureate, which follows his previous two releases, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and To Live and Die in PA, released between 2021 and 2022.
We start our interview by talking about notorious Philly MCs, like Tierra Whack and Black Thought from The Roots, as well as Kendrick Lamar, names that will come up again later on in the conversation. But for now, we focus on him, as an artist and a human being, and on what inspired him to turn his “petty lil’ lunch table rap” into a potential career. All of this in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Is it a Craig Vill song? Spoiler alert: it is! Still can’t believe it? Then read on.
Who is Craig Vill?
“I’m new to this whole thing,” he admits. Craig is 21, still in school, but he already has 300 monthly listeners on Spotify. (He promises only a small portion of the streams he gets come from him, to keep this metric as authentic as possible.)
He started as a poet, reading his work in front of his school, until someone proposed to put his poetry over a beat. After postponing this project throughout his freshman and sophomore years of college, as a Junior, he finally decided to give it a try.
“I think I’m pretty lyrical,” he says, and I assure him that he is absolutely lyrical, in my opinion. As a matter of fact, I had first reviewed his song “The Cry for Help” on my blog, Art Kills, and, when his latest record came out, I was expecting most if not all of his tracks to follow a similar pattern.
However, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that Craig’s music was all but repetitive: from afrobeat bangers to emotional piano medleys taken from YouTube, to instrumentals borrowed from Kanye West and TLC, his focus on this new project was to try out many different sounds.
But how did we get here? Well, that was thanks to a revelation he had when a friend of his asked him to take part in a COVID project.
A Blessing in Disguise
Craig is part of the generation of young artists who got started during the pandemic. One of his friends was looking for a poet to join his video for Women’s History Month titled “Poetic Beauty.” Instead of reciting his poetry, however, Craig decided to rap.
“I’m feeling risky today,” he told himself. “I wanna rap.”
And then? “I got in there, and I was like, give me five minutes and I’ll make a verse. I’m ready. I get in there, I rap rap rap rap and I remember I messed up and then I was like, don’t stop it, and I kept going.”
He then shared the final product on Instagram, and people admired how he kept going despite messing up at first. Craig didn’t realize how good he was at rapping until he heard himself do it. “I gotta thank the pandemic ‘cause, without the pandemic, I would’ve never had that revelation,” he says, looking back.
Did the pandemic make Craig Vill then? Though he believes he would already be famous if it wasn’t for it, it was that single episode that occurred during COVID that actually inspired him to learn how to put a song together and figure out his sound.
Would that have happened anyways? “I really don’t think so,” he concludes. “I feel, without that moment, I probably wouldn’t have even started.”
From It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and To Live and Die in PA…
Courtesy of Craig Vill
Craig’s first record, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, couldn’t be more different than his last. The artist feels it features the best rapping, or, as he puts it, “just hunger: hunger like starving, hunger like an animal in the corner.” No hooks, no bridges, not even that melodic: just straight rap. At that time, Craig’s intent was one: to rap, and to do it well.
In his second record, To Live and Die in PA, he took a different approach, which pushed him to figure out his sound and his “story,” melodically.
So now, his third album was meant to be a fusion of the two: beats and lyricism. And that’s how The Most Notorious Poet Laureate started: an I-wonder-if-I-can-do-it kind of project.
But what inspired the title of the album? Though some people might connect it to The Notorious B.I.G., that’s not exactly true.
The title actually comes from a line by Black Thought from The Roots, something like “I’m the most notorious poet laureate, stoic warrior.” Appropriating this title is Craig’s way of proclaiming himself the new most notorious poet laureate, something he actually feels: that he’s the next big name in the rap game.
And what did he do next with his new title? Making it into a whole album.
… to The Most Notorious Poet Laureate
There are quite a few tracks I really enjoyed from the record: “The Prelude,” “Hermes,” “Rollin,” “No Thugs,” and “Ogbunabali,” as they encapsulate the best of both worlds–the hottest beats but also the best lyrics.
Among other themes, Craig wants to tackle the Black Experience, though not like Kung Fu Kenny, who wrote a whole album about it, did. He doesn’t want to offend anybody nor lie, unless he deliberately admits to doing so. Instead, he wants to incorporate these heavy topics into something that people can enjoy.
His most political lines actually come from one of his older songs, where he raps: “I only wanna buy a car to drive in it and die in it / Gotta teach my kids to hold their breath for 9 minutes,” a reference to George Floyd’s death in May 2020.
In spite of “Rollin” being his favorite song on The Most Notorious Poet Laureate, it was with “Hermes” that he had the most fun, admitting that he wanted to be an “absolute clown.” And what if you got all the bad off of your chest and put it in a song? Well, then you’d get “No Thugs,” which, inspired by the violent episodes you encounter in Philly, Craig called a pure anarchical song. Not only anti-police but anti-law in general.
Between Law School and Future Projects
Craig’s biggest inspiration? Personal: his grandmothers. Artistic: Steve Wonder. (Though he doesn’t believe he’s really blind, joking “don’t let him lie to you.”)
Steve is also Craig’s dream feature, for two main reasons: 1) he would add his unique flair to the song; 2) the artist could prove to the world he’s not actually blind. Alternatively, he would pick Kanye or Lauren Hill–though he doesn’t think the latter would show up.
Between one joke and the other, we get to my final question: where does the artist see himself one year from now? Besides graduating and working his way through Law School, Craig has different projects coming up: visually appealing music videos, performances, short films (wink wink)--all things he’s afraid of trying out right now.
In two words: branching out. “I wanna see myself branch out,” he says. And honestly, I see him doing just that, with that same hunger that got him started in the first place.
Follow Craig Vill on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. You can stream his on Spotify and SoundCloud.
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