Jordan Raf Reveals All to His Label Boss

A young singer-songwriter and fashion enthusiast who decided to turn a post-breakup downward spiral into his debut LP Double Negative, Jordan Raf came through September of last year for an episode of Bizarre Ride on RBMA Radio. Raf’s record came out on POW Recordings and label boss Jeff Weiss had a hilarious and harrowing chat with him about his upbringing in San Diego and the dire situation that led to single “Roses.”

How did you first get started making music?

I first got started making music because I heard this album by My Chemical Romance called The Black Parade.

Is that really true?

No.

You were like... And then I went to Hot Topic, and I saw that there was a whole world that I could go into.

I don’t know, I just really like graphic t-shirts, so... I was just like, “I’ve gotta listen to whatever’s on them. No, I first got started making music because I got this Outkast record when I was like, eight or nine years old, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. It was the first thing I ever bought with my allowance.

What’d you prefer? Speakerboxxx or The Love Below?

The Love Below, definitely. Big Boi’s incredible, like, one of the most underrated rappers, by far, definitely. But André 3000, he had this pure performativeness. He’s just so ostentatious in his music. It was so beautiful and so powerful. Growing up as a kid, as corny as it is, I was definitely the black sheep of my family. Always just wanted to be something different, and André 3000 definitely embodied that. He was just so different than anything I’ve ever seen before. The fact that he was so expressive through music made me want to channel that, I guess.

Did you see him at Coachella?

No, never, I never saw them.

Everyone hated that performance, but I thought it was great.

I loved his jumpsuits, that was so cool.

Yeah, they were incredible.

I want to wear one that says, “What’s your favorite flavor of hummus?” Everyone hated it ’cause they misunderstood Andre. They thought he was the shiny-happy “Hey Ya” guy. But that’s why that song is so great, even though I couldn’t listen to it again even if you paid me like a million dollars. It’s the darkest song that everyone thinks is super happy.

You grew up in San Diego.

Yeah, but I was born in Dallas, Texas. My very Persian father moved to Dallas, Texas from Tehran to escape the persecution of Persian Jews. He came from a very religious family. All of my lineage is very much so.

Were there any rabbis in your family?

Yes, my great-grandfather is a rabbi. In the 12 tribes of Israel, there’s one named Issachar, and he settled down where modern day Iran and the Persian empire is. My family is the direct descendants of that. In the ’70s, when the Shah Reza was overthrown by the Ayatollah, and Iran became a much more Muslim government, my dad moved to America for all the American Dream, you know, the little mouse that wears the big hat and stuff like that.

He met my mom on a blind date in the ’80s in Texas, when they had big hair. My mom comes from a hick-ass family. My uncle is on probation for smoking weed, and my grandparents definitely say the “N word” and clutch their purse when they’re in a Mexican restaurant and stuff like that. Yeah, they met in Dallas, they had me, and I moved to San Diego when I was seven.

Did you ever think what would happen if you had stayed? You’d be like Leon Bridges.

Fuck. I’d be like Scotty McCreery. I’d be like Blake Shelton. I’d be Blake Shelton if I stayed in Texas.

You’d be a lovelorn country singer. You grew up in San Diego when the internet was obviously omnipresent. When I talk to Gaslamp Killer about growing up in San Diego, he always would talk about, there was a rave scene, and a counter-culture...

Actually, it’s fucking bizarre. San Diego has a really crazy hardcore scene, a really gnarly emo-hardcore screamo scene. It’s literally the embodiment of white privilege, hardcore music. It’s literally like San Diego is perfect, it’s like a utopia. It’s just like people doing prenatal yoga on a paddleboard. It shouldn’t be able to exist, but it does, and it’s great.

My dad worked his fucking ass off, he’s the true American dream. We bought a few bedroom house in San Diego, middle class, worked hard. My mom’s a preschool teacher, and we got to live in perfect weather. It was nice. Not to say that San Diego doesn’t have any socio-political detriments...

You used to hate LA. Do you still?

I did hate LA. I love LA now. It’s a complete different world of its own. It doesn’t make any sense at all, it really shouldn’t make sense, but it does, and I love it. I just look at it like a fuckin’ anthropologist. I try to bury my ego, and experience everything every different day. Whether it’s someone selling tacos in a taco truck, or an old man pissing into his own mouth behind it, or if it’s someone at Moon Juice, screaming at their daughter, “Mommy’s AMEX is in the drawer, just take one.”

One of my favorite things you’ve done was the “Roses” video. It seemed to capture the surreal nature of LA.

Thank you, Jeffrey. The “Roses” video was me trying to encapsulate all of my feelings about Los Angeles. I moved here for school. I went to UCLA to the art program. It’s hard, no one should have to – the only way to deal with the surrealism of LA is to embrace it.

I tried to put a little bit of symbolism in it. The rich old man, the daddy archetype. I put little signs of Melrose, and I had the city of industry as a backdrop for the beginning, as the gap between the insane amounts of wealth in Los Angeles. And then obviously, the objectification of women in R&B videos. That’s just so fucking corny and overdone. I just tried to paint the picture that I see, of how surreal it is. Even though it is slightly satirical, it’s also sort of a very real love letter to the city I’ve been living in for the past five years.

When did you come to grips with LA?

And accept it as a whole? Honestly, the people that I’ve met here, I think. Definitely. If you know anyone that lives in Los Angeles, the first thing they’re probably going to tell you is how shitty the people are, because that’s true. Also, there’s the other part of the scale, where there’s some really fucking amazing people here that are so creative, and only want to help each other.

When I go to New York, it’s way less accessible. In LA, there are those fucking corny people who wear pukka shell necklaces. They have the Yeezys in the fucking distressed off-white, and they come up to you and want you to be fucking waiting outside for a Preme drop with them, who fucking knows. But there’s also some really talented people who are like me that weren’t born here, and really truly want to give their art a platform, and have something meaningful to say. It’s bizarre, the dichotomy.

Do you want to say a little bit about the story behind “Roses”?

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve talked about it a lot. Even though to people who are first listening to it, it sounds insane and cathartic. It’s important to open the dialogue to things like this. Double Negative itself as an album is very much so about mental health, and depression and anxiety, something I’ve struggled with all of my life, and I know for sure a lot of people in Los Angeles have. It was about going through a breakup that I had, and also my family sort of falling apart.

When this all was happening, me trying to finish my last year of UCLA, I sort of went down to Mexico, and I did every prescription I could get my hands off of. I threw all of my material possessions away into a pool in a very Gatsby-esque moment, and got banished from every relationship that I had, I was a hedonistic shell of a person. Just borderline, borderline, borderline.

Had a life-threatening moment, tried to take my own life. Woke up in a psych ward in Pasadena. Stayed there for three days, 5150. Finally, I got out. It wasn’t like any other feeling I’ve ever had in my life. It was like I was born again, really. It was a complete annihilation of myself. I felt like I just shed a big disgusting skin, and obviously I had so many pieces of my life to pick up. Before I did that, the second I got home to my house, I picked up my guitar, I got a notepad, and I wrote what is “Roses.”

Conceptually, it was like a survivalistic moment for me to write a really beautiful song. The chorus is “I was gone, I was gone, I was gone, and now I’m here.” That’s so simple. I’m not fucking Bob Dylan, but I was gone, truly, and then I got to sort of hit the reset button on my life.

Unfortunately because you’re a singer and make R&B music, you’ve gotten slotted into experimental or alternative R&B, which is the most heinous and disgusting term imaginable.

Fuck that.

When I first heard you, it was through Walker Ashby, who records under the name Toy Light.

Shout out to Walker. He’s gorgeous, he has a crazy jawline. An incredibly gorgeous man.

He introduced us, then I heard your music, I thought it was great. It’s weird, because I feel like there’s all these random white dudes that started singing. Most of them are terrible. Except for Inc, who are tight.

Inc are really talented, we like Inc a lot.

It’s an interesting time right now, to be a white R&B singer. There’s no Jon B that we can really gravitate towards. I was kidding mostly, about Jon B. He has a song with Tupac.

There is a very good reason why people should be dubious of white R&B artists. First of all, white people in general are the oppressor.

It’s hard not to hate white people in 2016. Donald Trump, police brutality... Kevin James has a new sitcom…

We give you so many reasons. My father is a person of color, so at least I have a little bit of perspective on that. On face value, I look like a fucking extra from Peaky Blinders or Boardwalk Empire. I realize that, trust me. I am like a fuck boy that fucking slides in your DM’s with a very offensive meme, and I do that sometimes, too, and I apologize.

You’re a man of complexity. Like Walt Whitman, you contain multitudes. Jordan Raf... the Walt Whitman of R&B?

At the same time, beyond that, beyond my service value which should absolutely be taken into consideration, I have a soul. I have one that speaks multitudes to my deep, deep general care for art and music. There’s just so many fucking wack alternative R&B artists out there.

Who do you like in R&B right now? Beyond D’Angelo, which is a given. He’s been around for 20 years.

D’Angelo is the pinnacle of virtuosity. He is the best musician alive right now. Black Messiah was a masterpiece. People did not give it the credit it deserved, especially after all that time. R&B. I don’t know. I think the term R&B in general is so problematic, because it’s becoming so cross-genre. It’s so interdisciplinary with all the different music things. Only because Americans love to declare things, and love put labels and terms on things so it’s easier for us. I understand, I do the same thing. When a friend introduces you to a new artist, you want to log line. You know when people are like, who’s Young Thug? He’s a crazy gender bending hard ass dude from Atlanta that’s super skinny and tall. What’s mine? This brooding half-Persian white R&B artist from LA? It’s not selling.

I think Eric Sundermann got it right when he described you as the guy that walks up to you in a cowboy hat at a party, and you’re like “Who is this douche bag?” But then you talk to him and listen to his music, and you’re like, “Actually, it’s really good.” Can you talk about “Duvet”? The video’s amazing.

“Duvet” just sounds like a song about fucking, but it’s really just a song about intimacy, and the Freudian life or death trap about what drives people to do things. It’s love, really, truly, at the end of the day. The video we’re about to drop for it is about intimacy, but also about death, and the life and death drive, and jubilation and love and rebirth.

What’s the best way to find Jordan Raf? YouTube? POW Recordings? At Tenants of The Trees?

See me at Tenants, fighting a bouncer. I’ll make a crop circle that is Vladimir Putin fucking Donald Trump. Whatever you want from me, I’m here. When you see me in the street, verbally abuse me, honestly. I love it, please.