Tales of a Westerner: The rising rapper Cowboy Killer on a new generation of country rap, overcoming your past, and reconciling the West with the hood
By Katharina Moser
“It was a dangerous journey ahead for the Cowboy. Hard times hit, and by the time he reached out west, the wild country was on fire. There was something so beautiful about it. Land as far as ye could see. Ghosts of enchanted winds. But still nowhere to run. A wanted man. The last of the gunslingers with a price on his head” – this is the story of the Cowboy Killer, as the rapper´s lyrics narrate it. With a cowboy hat on his shoulder-long hair, Lucky Jeans and an alligator leather belt on his waist, and not to forget the trademark cowboy boots, the rapper Cowboy Killer bears a name which could spring from old Western, and so could his hip hop tales that are reminiscent of what the Wild West once was, and still can be, in the imaginative mind of the artist.
And indeed a journey it has been for the young rapper, a rising star of the American rap scene, who is just now touring the states with the household names Yelawolf and Caskey. Having grown up in a log cabin on a farm in the Appalachians, Ohio, Cowboy Killer took off to Florida when he was 19 years old. “I build communities wherever I go. It´s just about going out in the streets and meeting people”, he says. Sitting in Virginia Beach, the likable guy with an infectious smile just has an off day from his national tour. “Growing up on the farm I didn’t have access to musicians or people that were creatives. So I was just looking for people to make music with.” After five years in Florida, he went to New Mexico, which is where he met most of his crew today. His music took off when he went to Nashville to dive deep into the music business. “Wherever we go, we like to make DIY spaces, creating our own venues, house shows, and safe space environments where everyone can come. It´s all about the people first. I always say I´m not in the music business, I´m in the people business”, says the Cowboy Killer and smiles. “I´m trying to make it accessible. We shoot videos from an iphone, and I have a studio in a shed in the backyard. And now I´m on a national tour with Yelawolf and Caskey based on that concept: it doesn’t matter what you got – make do with what you got.”
With his unique blend of hip hop, country, blues and rock elements, the rapper unites the best of both worlds with the old and the new, and holds a mirror up to an idea of America on the periphery of past conquests and present identities. “I took up everything that I consumed as a kid. We had one classic rock channel, one country channel, and my sisters really loved emo stuff like My Chemical Romance. So I was always a medley of the music that I was around”, Cowboy Killer explains. Starting out as a rapper, he mostly rapped on beats that were typically hip-hop, but as he got older, he embraced all the sounds that he could mix into this, among them the bluegrass influence, which was part of the Appalachian culture he grew up with. “I kind of had that epiphany: I am around banjo and violin players, so I can just record and sample them. I like Western sounds and old Western movies. I like to combine all that in my music”, Cowboy Killer recounts. “I was not dead-set on inventing something. But it turned into what I call the Trapgrass genre – trap drums and bluegrass.” The rapper is sure that with his very own style, he will change music.
Indeed, some music magazines have already praised Cowboy Killer´s latest songs as being on the forefront of a new country rap movement. While the rapper is convinced that a new generation of country rap styles is on the rise, and that he is one of those giving birth to innovation in the genre, he´d rather not be put into a box. Country rap, according to him, is a term that is used very loosely. “Genres to me were just pointless. Because I didn’t have any rules or a set-up blueprint of what I should do. People always talk about finding your sound, but I think I have certainly found my sound”, he says. “And I call it Trapgrass, because I don’t think that I should even be boxed in with other country rappers. I don’t think they do what I do.” Cowboy Killer wants to bring in the time for production, banjo players, live instruments. “I think true artistry is taking a chance, and taking a risk on what is new.” He is not, however, as conceited as to think that he would reinvent the wheel. “I don’t think it´s something that has never been done, I think all genres are just taking from something else. But I definitely think the combination of the 808, the trap sound and these country, western, bluegrass, and americana elements is something that we are refining and doing better than ever before”, he explains. “Country rap got a bad reputation because it was neither country nor rap – but now it is. Some country rappers out here are more real than country artists because they really grew up in the country, they really have that truth to tell.”
The music of the Cowboy Killer, however, is not only about the sound, but about the storytelling as well. Listening to stories of deserts, gunslingers, grit and resilience, it almost seems like the rapper is speaking in two voices – one his very private and personal self, the other his alter ego of the legendary Cowboy Killer. “I think the stories I tell are about overcoming. I want people to feel like how I feel on stage. Of course I´m my mama´s son and at the end of the day I´m Paul.” But there is a much deeper, collective narrative behind it as well. “I grew up on a farm raising animals, walking down the drive at 5 in the morning to catch the school bus. I never had a father figure in my life. The only father figures I had in my life where not really my father. I grew up around people that were constantly in turmoil, losing jobs, addicted to drugs, finding outlets that were not healthy for them”, the rapper reveals. “Why hip hop related to me so much was because I was fatherless, but also because I grew up in a place that experienced gun violence, drug addiction, and turmoil of its own that was similar to that in a city. I didn’t really see the big difference that some people would make between country and hip hop. So I tell those stories. I tell stories of skinning a chicken, or my mother taking me hunting, or me being out in isolation and trying to find my tribe.” The only difference between the Cowboy Killer and Paul, he says, is the elevated energy.
If the rapper goes on stage, he wants the people to have fun with all of his party songs. But he also has songs in the vault that he doesn’t play every night. “They are very deep to my soul, because they are about what got me here, which is pain. I just want to inspire people, and not only to inspire them, but also help them get out of those kinds of situations that I was in”, he says. “There were many times when I was self-doubting myself if I was ever gonna make it out of the situation I was in. Especially being from the middle of the woods – how do you get seen by people? How do you make a name for yourself in a town with 30 people?”, he tells. “So now I want to spread that: find your tribe, find your community and the people that are willing to help you. I hope that my music does this to people – help lift them up. I hope they feel like the Cowboy Killer.”
But it is not only personal for the rapper either. “A lot of times it was political for me, because I am white, and I am hip hop. So politically I was always one foot out the door, and I´m not welcome until I´m invited in.” But Cowboy Killer has received many invitations by now, having worked with household names like Lupe Fiasco, Danny Brown or Virgil Abloh. “I have worked with guys that really made a name for themselves, for the culture, for the rest of hip hop, so I don’t take it lightly that I´m in hip hop. I really am a student of the game, and I know that hip hop comes from a political place at the end of the day. A place of not only rebellion, but of a culture.”
The political dimension of his music and identity, however, reach far beyond just this. As a white rapper who embodies the identity of a cowboy, of a conqueror of the West, reiterating ideas of ruleless outlaws and moving frontiers, he walks a slim line in an ideologically charged terrain – and he is well aware of that. “It´s extremely difficult, and you mentioning that brings me relief, quite frankly. This line I walk on – I think that I´m paving a new way in music. Western influence is appealing to me, having grown up on a farm and raising cattle and riding horses. So obviously that culture meant something to me, it’s a real culture” – he corrects himself – “not only a culture, it’s a lifestyle”, he reasons. But on the other hand, he is against music discriminating anyone in any way. “I always thought that it was strange that we wouldn’t allow black people to make country music, and we wouldn’t allow white people to make hip hop. That’s a very strange concept to me, and the idea of racism and discrimination in music, of making those lines – it doesn’t make any sense to me. Music is just supposed to affect you, to make you feel something. It shouldn’t discriminate. We should just be able to look at music and say, do I like this or not, turn it up or turn it down.” The same, he says, goes for the idea of conquering the west, which features in some of his songs. “I think I´m bringing people along that are very good role models for how to make music, and how to tackle the business in their own way. And not feed into the capitalistic approach of just taking away. Everything I do is coming together from a genuine DIY place.”
Isn´t he afraid that people on the right-wing spectrum might see his music, which plays with ideas of the old Wild West, of cowboy resilience, of taming the desert, of outlaws and gunslingers, as an affirmation of the old American colonizer, settler and missionary ideology? “It´s so far from that!”, the Cowboy Killer calls passionately. “I´m around so many different types of people. That’s what being a cowboy is to me: respecting your neighbor, taking care of people.” The Cowboy Killer, who was an activist for Black and LGBTQ people in Florida, wants to reconcile the idea of the cowboy with hip hop culture and the hood. “I´m killing the cowboy to create a new one. We´re good people, us hillbillies. We agree with a lot of the sentiment that all kinds of people are not being treated fairly, and that we have to stand up for what is right”, the Cowboy Killer says. He is convinced that the situation in America has gotten worse. “And I care because I feel as if a part of me is resentful of the fact that I was being discriminated for making the music I make. Poverty does not care who you are. And if it comes down to that, music can be the platform to talk about it.” The timing, he says, couldn’t be more perfect for the Cowboy Killer. “I try to find that bridge with people. In Brooklyn, for example, they have no relation to me, but actually they do. We´re different but we are so similar in so many ways. I wish we operated on that plain field all the time.” Country music and hip hop, he has realized, are so similar – the hood and the country are so similar. “I´ve ridden horses in Compton, and I brought guys from the inner city to where I come from. And they find love and joy in it. I wish we could do more of that.” For the Cowboy Killer, hip hop is the new rock ´n roll. “I think this might be the last frontier. There is a reconciliation happening, and I´m trying to be it.”
With this vision for the future, he wants to bring out a tremendous amount of new music over the next months. “Trapgrass The Album is coming”, Cowboy Killer says and laughs heartily. He aims to drop the album in February, if everything goes as planned. “We have music that’s gonna sweep and change stuff around”, he is convinced.
Meanwhile, in his song “The West Was Won”, the cowboy emerges as the victor – but with the Cowboy Killer´s words in mind, we know that this is the new cowboy, one who is not only outlaw, but also reconciler. “Can´t kill the killer”, he raps – and surely not the Cowboy Killer, either.
The Wrapper 