Though his career as a musician seemed to steadily accelerate upward, the climb was filled with pandemic-related obstacles. For Bivins, though, the struggles came less from the outside world and more from within.
“Mental health is real, y’all, don’t fuck with me,” he says, reflecting back on the second round of COVID and a string of events that changed his life and trajectory. When he lost his grandfather who raised him, Bivins had to reckon with his own name.
“When I was young, I didn’t want to be part of that side of my family,” Bivins says of his legal last name, which he had intentionally been misspelling his entire life. “I made that decision so young. Life gets real, though, and once you got older, you start to understand things. I was asking myself why I was still doing it. For some reason, subconsciously I was still stuck on that shit.
“For three-quarters of my life, almost the full length of it, it was like, I’m spelling this shit a certain way, and going by a creed based on animosity almost. Like, when you’re young, you’re a kid and you’re prideful, and I didn’t want to associate with that. I’m talking official documents, school stuff, and then life happens. I had to get over myself and take that challenge.”
He didn't recognize the darkness that crept in as depression at first. He'd experienced grief before, but he had never made time for it or known, as a child, that he needed to let it out.
“You’re fighting so many battles, eventually you’re just like, why am I even doing some of these things anymore?” he says. “That sort of thing wakes you up to a lot of different stuff. It changes aspects of your life, mentality. You’ve got to readjust who you are in certain ways. It took some adjusting, how I was feeling, along with those thoughts like, you still got a life, you’ve got to live.”
Now Bivins is releasing new songs under a (slightly) new name. Bivins delves into his battle with depression in his upcoming release, I Hope You're Listening, Too, planned for release on July 28. Part one, I Hope You're Listening, was released in 2018 following a breakup. Part two explores a different type of loss, yet still asks the same question: Is anyone listening?
While performance always came naturally to him, there was a point when Bivins didn't feel at his best. His mind began running wild, looking for someone, anyone, to tell him he could’ve done better.
“Everyone was ‘big-ing’ me up, telling me it was great, and I knew I couldn’t have that many ‘yes-people' around me,” he says. “What I was looking for was people to just be genuine. I was asking people, looking for someone to tell me it just wasn’t that good. I was down on myself a lot, telling myself like, yo, I’m better than that, and people would try to build to me up, but it wasn’t of my own standard.”
Bivins began to step back and observe, reflecting on a show he opened during that time period when he felt the disconnect as an artist with his lyrical content. Despite turning up crowds, he asked himself what the purpose was.
“You fall back and watch the things people talk about and it doesn’t really describe the individual,” says Bivins. “I was wrestling with morals and it felt like, I’m going through shit, what the fuck is this? This shit is mad superficial.”
Becoming growingly critical of himself and the world he was in, Bivins withdrew inwardly. In his place of solitude, where many would assume artistry would be at its best, he found the opposite. The things he’d excelled at as an artist were losing their luster — social media, securing gigs, performing gigs — and draining his mental health even further.
“Early on, I was focused on marketing methods and understanding these finer details how to run campaigns, finance algorithms, the money train ..." – Shaquan Bivins
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“It started to feel like, damn bro, I’m whacking a brick wall with a whiffle bat. Am I really just trying to be one of these cats?” he says, shaking his head. “I just wanted to relax. And I was jaded, I get it. Really, it was the whole idea of doing ‘the dance,’ trying to get gigs, hit quarterly goals. My goals were bigger than that.
“You’ve got to really self-reflect. With my name, I was like, why was I doing it? Then I was asking, why was I doing music? In that aspect, why was I doing the performances and all that, when there’s other lanes and things I want to be doing as well, having this inner turmoil about my performance, when I was just putting too much emphasis on the cosmetics.”
The business mindset that earned him his success seemed like it was holding him hostage up to this point. What seemed like giving up before began to look more like a reevaluation, a necessary hiatus for him to step back and start learning.
“Early on, I was focused on marketing methods and understanding these finer details how to run campaigns, finance algorithms, the money train,” he says. “It got to the point to me, personally, where I just know what that means. Making music wasn’t the problem, doing the dance just isn’t interesting. From there, I just fell back with the music I made and kept refining it. The streams are cute — how can I get trophies?”
At this point, Bivins began to reevaluate his goals, working on movie scores, studying music theory and cinema, and working on his next album, I Hope You’re Listening, Too. With the marketing knowledge he already had, he rose from the depth of depression with a new mentality.
“How can I miss you if you don’t go away?” he asks. “I had to want to do it again. To be the best rapper is subjective. I wanted to do something factual. Like people talking about Grammys. I asked in an interview, what’s the award mean? Why do we keep coming back to the same thing? It’s for an aesthetic, a certain look. Yeah, they got history and lineage, but that shit translates to other places. It’s the cosmetics, how it’s dressed up, the stigma. I want to do something factual, that can’t be disputed.”
