It’s Just Osiris…
Photos & Words by Cameron Dorsey
There is a lot of power in a name. Most of them are given to us, some are chosen, and some are earned, but what does it mean to reclaim a name? For creatives, an alias is sometimes used as a shield, an alter ego with the courage to do what we can’t, to take the hits we can’t handle. So to own your given name takes a strong sense of self and identity, and being true to yourself is all Osiris has ever been capable of doing. The producer/rapper/writer has almost always taken the road less traveled but it was always the right road for him. Osiris isn’t trying to sell you his art, or himself for that matter. He’s not dying to work with the hottest artist out or play algorithm games just to get you to click a link. Not one for the spotlight, Osiris simply cares about the art of creation itself, but if you’re lucky, he just might poke out of the shadows and you can catch a glimpse of the talent that allows him to be…just Osiris.
What do you go by nowadays? Are you still Eyesthrice, or are you maybeosiris, just Osiris?
It’s layers to it man. First off, Eyesthrice is dead, that was never supposed to be my name. I used to change my name on Twitter a lot, I had like flexandfinesse, themostdope, basedmessiah. From 2011-2012 up until 2018-2019, I had like 50 gazillion different names. So I used to listen to Pro Era heavy, and Nyck Caution said “Found myself through the light, Eyes thrice” and I was like, oh, that's hard and I just made that my Twitter name, and that just kind of stuck but the actual display name is Osiris. Lex Lucent had done a show in Norfolk, and I was like, Oh, can I perform? She was like sure, yeah. So I was gonna perform as Osiris, but I didn't even realize she didn’t even know my name. So when I looked at the flyer, it said “Eyes The Rice”. I hit her up like Yo, Eyesthrice is the name. I didn’t want to just change it to Osiris because I halfway didn't want anyone to know that it was me going to be there. So like, if you knew who I was on the internet, you knew who I was. So like, yeah, that's kind of how it happened and it just stuck from there. I never said “I’m Eyesthrice”, but it was kind of like having a graffiti tag or something that you like to do and people just associate it with you. So, right now, maybeosiris is the internet handle, but that was coming from a place of doubt. Partially because YK Osiris is so ass, and he's like the most famous person named Osiris right now. Every time I meet people, every third person, “Oh like YK Osiris” like, nooooo. So yeah, man, right now I'm just Osiris bro.
So you said you're performing at the Lex Lucent show, what were you performing?
I rapped this song I made about this one woman. I was in love with her I’d say, romantically but also we felt like we were a twin flame type beat. And I remember writing the song, we were talking and we were having these great conversations about just anything and everything. I was just over at my homeboy’s crib all the time at that time. And we were going back and forth to the studio and I remember coming up, just spur of the moment, started making a song around like a couple of bars about the woman and went to the studio the next day. Because everybody was in the studio smoking and drinking, they’d go to sleep at like 1-2:00 in the morning, I'm making music. I made all the beats all day because I'm in the studio making beats for everybody, so when they go to sleep, oh, I'm on the mic. It's like 4 AM, I'm recording songs. So I have recorded the song that I had written the day before over this beat that I made and performed that, just that one song. I told everybody to put their phone away, I thought I was Mos Def or Dave Chappelle or something. I thought the girl was gonna be there too but she couldn't make it and I'm glad she wasn't, I was going to embarrass myself.
So what came first rapping or producing?
Rapping, I was a child rapper bro. I grew up with 4, technically 5, but four brothers in my household, and my two oldest brothers and I had a little rap group. My dad was a rapper, he had several groups and stuff and he'd been through the whole thing. I’ve told you before about Jay-Z trying to get him to rap, so my dad was the real deal. He was hip hop so like, the house was hip hop. I'm talking about when he had the homies over and they were doing music, we saw them locked in. Studying, practicing, rehearsing, “Nah that ain't good, do it over” making these beats, we saw everything. So he got us involved and I actually wanted to get involved because I loved writing. Like I learned all my dad raps like this my favorite rapper right now. So he would write for us at first, we recorded a song called Brothers in the Lost World, I remember it word for word. My dad’s best friend, my uncle ADL, would make all the beats and stuff, he would send over beat CDs. My dad wrote our first couple songs, but he would sit us down and have us write our verses and we’d be in there for hours. I'm five or six years old, so I'm trying to figure out what to say as a five-year-old; do I talk about playing with toys, going outside? I know a bunch of other stuff, but I can't rap about that type of stuff. We used to listen to all kinds of music so it was a lot of things to draw from, but as a six-year-old, like dad, I don't know. But he used to make us push through that and tell us no, you do have something to say. So I'm talking about like a two-hour-long beat CD on repeat all fucking day, just having us practice writing; not to get to any end goal or to be famous, but just so that you can keep your mind sharp and your skills sharp. We would just battle each other in the house. We had a karaoke machine, we wouldn't even have beats, we would just be rapping acapella or having a cypher, battling on the back porch just from just for the love of hip-hop. Eventually, my older brother Malik would get on songs with my dad so hearing them rapping together was hard. Then maybe like ‘07, we got introduced to Fruity Loops. My dad being in the neighborhood doing what he had to do, he made sure that we had all the cutting-edge technology. We had all the camcorders and this was back when they had little CDs or the little cassette that you put in the camcorder, you put it in a big VHS with the adapter, he had us hooked up. We had the beats, we had the mics, we had everything. My brother Malik and I were sitting on Fruity Loops making the worst beats I ever heard in my life, but then you’re like oh, hold on, I just gotta do this, you start learning. So it was rapping first and then the beats second. I will say it was a big pause for a while and I picked music back up probably around 16 or 17. At 17, my parents got me a laptop for Christmas, they thought I was going to college (haha). I did eventually go but the first thing I did on Christmas Day, I downloaded FL Studio just off instinct and since then I was like that's that was the starting point of where I'm at now, I'm making beats every day.
So he basically had y’all in rap camp from five. Was it more so to give y'all something to do to stay out of trouble like how people give their kids sports or something else?
I mean, I don't think it was really just to give us something to do because we were doing all these things. Like my brothers all played football, I hated playing football, but they played sports and shit. I did things, Odyssey of the Mind, I did extracurricular stuff, they made sure we were involved in those ways too. To my dad, it's not just that we’re rapping, it’s that hip-hop is a derivative of all the black struggles in this whole country. Like this is the current point in time of all black history, like all that leads up to this, this thing right here that we love so much. So that was really more so you got the essence in you, and you can do all the other things great too because the essence is in you, and how we express that is hip hop. It’s kind of like how people's grandparents would pay James Brown or Donny Hathaway in the house. He knew we had it in us really, but at the same time, the stuff he would write for us was along with what you just said, keeping us out the way. Because we were in Dickerson Courts, that's where Dump Squad was, there was a lot going on out there and my dad was involved too with a lot of things, he was really just trying to keep us safe. We weren’t in the house all the time but that was his way of saying study, keep your mind sharp, and stay on point. Because you’re doing literature, like he was studying words and language and all those things so like that was his way of keeping us on track and focused.
So being exposed at such an early age, did you ever get to a point of frustration where you were just off music completely?
Not for me, my oldest brother got to that point and he wasn't rocking with it at all ever after that. For me, I wanted to do different stuff because everything had to be hard and gritty and I didn't want to do that all the time. I thought it was cool sometimes but as I got older, it was like oh I like rock music, I like J-pop, I like electronic music, and I was just fascinated with everything. So I wanted to get into different things and I was getting clowned for it in the crib because it was like “Bro, what are you listening to?”. We’d play Smackdown vs Raw and their favorite song is Money In The Bank by Lil Keke & Scrappy but my favorite is the heavy metal song Bullet With A Name On It you know, it was like a parallel. I still loved all parts of it, but it was like, man, I want to do other things. So I started I got into writing stories, writing was my thing from like 10 to 13. I was writing poems, trying to write novels. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I would stay up until three in the morning on a school night writing in my journal trying to write a novel, or reading books every day and bringing books to school and reading them in class instead of doing my work. That's when I transitioned into reading and writing and then I came back to music in about 2014. I remember in middle school at Huntington, somebody I was friends with this one too, and he was like, I'm gonna go to music technology. I said what the hell is music technology? He said it's an after-school program where this dude and his wife are literally teaching us how to make music like he's teaching us how to do everything. So I go check it out and I'm telling you this dude had a piano in there, studios, and he turned an old computer lab into a studio environment. So he would bring us in and we will learn how to mix, how to master, how to engineer. So that's where I learned how to really produce, combined with the fact that I was reading and writing poems and stories. The turning point for me and when I knew that I had it like that was when I was reading Holes, and it was a poem at the end. It was talking about beautiful eyes in the moon, something like that, whatever, whatever. So I flipped that and incorporated that into some lyrics that I was writing for a song, and the song ended up being so impressive that everyone was like let's make the whole song about this concept of beautiful eyes. It was a whole production, it was a dude on piano who was just a great pianist, church people are always the best musicians. We had a couple of singers and it was a girl named Courtney who was rapping. I was really subconsciously producing a song at 13. I'm watching these older dudes who are real engineers and they had hardware, they had real gear, I'm like, what the heck is that? I had never seen it like that before and they showed me all that stuff. So they had an awards ceremony, I ain't know I was getting no awards because I wasn’t on honor roll, so I didn't go. So I see everybody afterward and they’re like “Yo, you got like eight awards”, I was like hell nah bro. I went to the office, the awards were all lined up on the desk in the office. So at that point, I was like dang, I really do love music, bro, like that was the point for me.
I want to get to your music inspirations of course, but outside of music, where do you pull inspiration from, like you mentioned the Holes poem and crafting the whole song out of that, so where do you pull inspiration from outside of other music?
I think there's a lot of things man, everything around me really, not every little single thing but it could be anything at any given moment. For me, I really love nature, so anything alive, even down to something that you wouldn't think of. At my old apartment, I used to literally sit on the back porch and it would be bees swarming doing their business in the grass and I would sit cross-legged on the ground and just watch them, like that was my meditation. It could be reading a good book, I love soup like I'm really passionate about soup, I made probably one of the best soups I've ever had in my life, it’s the little things like that. If I eat some good soup, it's like damn, that's going to translate into some kind of art form more than likely, I absorb all these different things. It could be the way somebody’s eyebrows look like damn the arch of this woman’s eyebrows right now, like it just takes my mind to a whole nother place. But one of the biggest sources of inspiration internally would be my dreams. I have a lot of dreams, I remember dreams from when I was like four or five years old, some very interesting dreams and very terrible nightmares. I had some really intriguing like Inception-type dreams, I've had dreams where I woke up and I'm still dreaming and I tried to wake up again, like 10 times and I had to bust out it, it's ridiculous. So like, that's also a core part of my imaginative processes.
In that subconscious…
Yeah, a lot, man. I'm tapped in with my subconscious in a lot of ways. I guess I’ve learned that that's a gift. I thought everybody was but from talking to people I found out it's not that common.
So back to the music, what was the stuff that your dad was playing? And then also when you started branching out, what caught your ear as you formed your own palate?
My dad was on all rap shit, he did not discriminate a lot when it came to rap unless it was like little corny, gimmicky stuff. My dad really focused on knowledge-based hip-hop, so he started us off with things like Rakim & KRS-One, but then we had every 50 Cent CD, G-Unit mixtapes. We had Eminem, Lil Wayne, we were big on hot boys. Whenever somebody died in the neighborhood, somebody was playing Man I Miss My Dawgs on the speakers real loud, all as a neighborhood you just came out and sing that and you didn’t even have to know who it was, so it was a lot of that going on. Jadakiss, Twista, Common, like he loves niggas that could really rap. But he also would play Minnie Ripperton, a lot of soulful shit too, he loved to sing those songs. So he would mess with us, he’d just bust out singing, making stupid faces then he’d just start chasing you around the house, that was cool. Now, the other side of things came from my mom, she was everywhere with it. She’d go from Nickelback to Carlos Santana to Erykah Badu to Kanye West in a heartbeat, and in one session like just cleaning the house. We had all the CDs like my mom’s CD collection compared to my dad's was so crazy. She had Alicia Keys, Usher, Amel Larrieux, Algebra, Marsha Ambrosius, like different names that you wouldn’t really be hearing about. Carlos Santana is really my my true introduction to jazz as a segue because he did a lot of jazz-incorporated rock stuff, basically jazz-rock fusion for a long time. The album that I remember is Abraxis, that album was crazy. They would put all the CDs on the computer and we had LimeWire and we were the ones making playlists and CDs for everybody so I had access to all the music that everybody was listening to. My mom would get requests from people so I would go through her collection and I'm listening to all these things and she was going crazy, she kind of got me. I love the production of people like Dwele and like all that stuff, she was the source for all that side of things. So the harmonics, the crazy Sonics were everything, I loved it. My uncle was stationed in Japan and I swear to God, I wanted to be Japanese so bad. I don't know why, but I was in love with everything Japan at that time. I was about 11 and I was just looking everything up and I got into J-pop and stuff like that, that's really where I started getting into the International stuff. I was into how people make music in other countries like, whoa, there's Japanese jazz? What the hell? And video games, oh, my God these Japanese folks know what they’re doing on these soundtracks boy, let me tell you. Almost every game from Japan has a crazy soundtrack, but I really love what they do with the racing games. But yeah, all that stuff, just listening to everything. Listening to commercials and hearing all these different sounds and wondering who is that? I'll never forget, I was watching Cartoon Network one day, and it was a song about spring break or something like that and it was by a band called the Hives, and I was like, yo, I gotta have their music. When they asked what I wanted for Christmas, I said I wanted a Hives CD. I didn’t know what album I was gonna get, I just knew I wanted something by them. Then when my mom came back with the CD and I got an MP3 player, I spun that album for like two years straight bro.
How would you describe your creative process?
Depends on how I feel that day, but most of the time it depends on what I'm creating. If I'm making a beat, I like to make drums first, I have a percussive mind. Lately, I've been tapping into melodies and harmonies, but naturally I'm percussive. I was making the beats on the lunch table at school, like making the beats for everybody so naturally that's what I started with, and usually that's when I make some of my best stuff. After that, I love synthesizers, so I'll just explore synthesizers. Depending on the mood I might just choose a preset, but if I'm feeling good, then I'll make a sound from scratch and just go from there and just kind of let it float. I try not to get caught up in being super technical because when I was trying to do that, I was not being creative. So I just kind of let it flow but still try to keep everything sounding cohesive. But yeah, it's hard to explain really but I just go in and just start painting, you know.
So how did you develop your sound, did you have phases where you were trying to emulate something else and then it just kind of morphed into its own thing, or you were always just making songs from scratch and just figuring it out?
I definitely was a big emulator, huge J Dilla fan, Pete Rock fan. So before I got my own computer, I was rapping more at that time, so I would try to emulate Kendrick and Drake and things like that. I would actually write down their verses, like Rigamortus by Kendrick, I would write it down as if I'm writing the rap so I can embody that shit for real. I’m in math class not paying attention just writing Kendrick lyrics down. I had no cell phone or iPod then in 9th-10th grade, so I had to kind of go off of memory, or when I get home I played it on the computer. So I'll just recite them and rehearse them, I'm doing dishes rapping it. Then once I go to write my own raps, I'm no longer trying to emulate them but it's almost like I downloaded them into my subconscious; so now when I go to rap, here's everything that I learned and it’s the same way with beats. I would study and I'll recreate the drum patterns and just doing that over time, I developed my own swing, and then learning where those drum patterns came from and learn where the swing and the style came from with certain jazz or blues or soul, and then go back and try to recreate those and then now naturally I learned, it’s just the same as practicing an instrument really. You can learn the standards and learn what the great people did before you with any instrument that you play, and then you don't go copy what they did, but now you've got seasonings in your cabinet to go cook with so that's basically what I did.
So it's evident that you’re passionate about the music, but the output is very, very sporadic. Where do you stand on putting music out and when is it necessary to you? What does it take for you to just put out some of your art?
Hmm, that's a good question, to be honest, I really think is the period that we live in right now. Over the past five years, I used to put stuff out like beat tapes and everything, but I watched everything shift. Like SoundCloud, I remember when SoundCloud was first getting started, and you could put stuff up there without having to stress about getting plays and streaming and all this extra stuff; but now everything is monetized and it's off-putting for me. Like damn, what if I really don't care about making money and I shouldn’t have to care about that to push it out. It also stems from being a nervous kid growing up, I didn't want to speak up, I didn't have confidence in myself even though other people would see a light in me, I didn't have that same vision of myself. It's like subconsciously, that kid who's standing there nervous and doesn’t know what to do with his hands is still there in a way, to where when it comes time to put some music out, it's like damn, what if they think that this F sharp should have been an F, you know, it's stuff like that that would bother me because I'm not thinking about the average listener, I'm thinking about my other musician friends or people that I look up to not accepting what I did because it's not good enough. That's a giant part of it, we’re trying to work through that, but that's a big reason why.
So you are kind of a ghost in a way because you aren’t very active on socials, don’t drop music often, you have deep connections with people who are somewhat well-known in the local scene, yet you don't really push yourself out like that. So what's the reason for that? Obviously, that's at your discretion, but in your words why do you take a backseat when you could really be taking things as far as you want them to go?
That’s a valid point, to answer that question I would have to go back in time a little bit. So my dad is like super extroverted like he knows everybody and he’s always doing something somewhere promoting himself to put himself out there, my dad’s whole side of the family is like that. My mom’s side of the family is super introverted and isolated like I haven't talked to my grandma on my mom’s side in a minute like she just be in her shell but when I see her it’s all love but they're just like that, they like their space, and I take a lot of that on, liking my solitude. So it's not really anything that I'm purposefully doing more so it's kind of in my nature to just be alright, I've done this, I've supported this person, I've been a part of this thing. I could be leveraging those relationships, and I feel like in a way I should have done so because I had opportunities to do so and been like, oh, yeah, and by the way here's what I can do. And, you know, that would have been great for me, but the nervousness, the procrastination, and also the isolated nature, it's not a very good recipe. It's almost like a Lauryn Hill effect like, when it's time to go, do you go and perform or not, are you gonna come through or not, you know. But yeah, that's kind of where it’s at, it's a battle. Every day I'd be thinking like I have literally hundreds of files like just do it bro. So I'm trying to start working myself into it, it's been so long and I have the maturity to say, Okay, I need to tighten up, let's do this, let's just do something and don't worry about what happens afterward. Then go to the next thing or ride that a little bit and then go do something you know, just keep doing stuff. That and actually showing people that you are actually doing stuff and we'll see what happens, so that's where I'm at now.
So it’s safe to say that you're working your way back into a mindset of publicizing what you do, trying to get back in that mode?
In a way yeah, but ultimately I don't want to be too crazy. I don't like marketing myself, because I don't feel like a product, I don't like feeling like a commodity or treating my art like a commodity. At the end of the day, it’s kind of what you have to do but it's just so tempting to just fall back into that because it's all my favorite musicians ever did not give a fuck about none of that. They did not care but that was a lot of their downfalls too, the D’Angelos, even painters centuries ago like that was their downfall. Because they died not giving a fuck, now their spirit and art is rich, but their lifetime was not, you know, they could have done more. I also don't like competing with people, I’m not competing with anybody but myself at this point. In my mind, when you put stuff out there you are competing for attention. I feel like a lot of the marketing that people do like oh, look at me, I'm rapping on a beat, I’m making a beat, but I don't have the energy for that, I put all the energy elsewhere into the music and my life, so I don't want to consistently bang people’s heads like” yo, I just dropped an EP”, “oh, just to remind y’all, just dropped an EP”. I could probably use a person’s assistance with that part, strategizing, promoting, and marketing myself.
Why do you hate when people ask you to send beats and what you want in a working relationship with another artist?
I love it when people like and love my music, that always makes me happy, but that don't mean I’m just gonna let you rap on it. I could be playing music at an open mic, playing some beats, and afterward, “Send me some beats”, I don't even know you bruh. You follow me on the gram and then the next thing I know, I got a message in my DMs, literally three words saying “Send some beats” like bro, the amount of times that has happened to me. People are gonna ask for dope shit because they want to rap on some dope shit, I understand that completely, I don't ever want to knock that, but I feel like when you collaborate with somebody that puts passion into their art form, as somebody that really cares about what's being made, you got to really get to know that person at least a basic level. If I'm going to trust you as a rapper, or whatever kind of artist you are, I got to know that you're not gonna get on here and say some stupid stuff, I got to know that you're going to respect what I'm doing and have an appreciation for what I'm doing and vice versa. Like for example, with the homie Swellz da God, he hit me up and he didn't say send beats, it was let’s link, like come to the crib. I came to the crib and we didn't make a song the first day we didn't make any music we just chopped it up, I played some stuff, he played some stuff and we just talked and we made it a routine every Sunday I was over at his house. Then it was like alright, here go these old beats I made a while ago, he rapped on them, I ain't got those stems, we can't do nothing with that, but it's like oh, I trust you as a rapper, you trust me as a producer, let's lock in and make and next thing you know, we got projects, so the process of building a relationship takes some time and it takes energy to try to step into another person's world and be in the middle of it but a lot of people don’t want to do that. I've sent people beats and they've used them, like the homie Will Amadeus, I've sent him stuff and he's done some great music to those but that’s the homie, you get the homie privileges, but when I don't know you, and the first thing you asking for is for some beats? That's like asking “Yo, let me watch your son” like no.
Talk about the importance of freedom and having wiggle room when you create.
Yeah, it's, it comes with its pros and its cons. Having too much freedom I believe is a breeding ground for negative things like procrastination and laziness. At the same time, it gives you room to experiment and to take your time with things and to learn yourself and produce more quality art, as far as me personally, for others, it might not work that way. I don't handle pressure very well, so like if I ever feel pressure to do something or make something for somebody, it's gonna lead me to ultimately procrastinate and not do it, because I have the liberty of being trusted to the point like oh he’s gonna do it, you know. So it comes with its downsides. I will say that I kind of need people to be on my ass a little bit.
You need the accountability.
Yeah, for sure, and I as a man gotta hold myself accountable. But at the end of the day, I get stuck in my rhythms, so sometimes I do need somebody to be like yo you’re tripping. Whether it be my brother, my momma, or my homies, I think we all could use a person, it could be a stranger, but just that thing that’s like hold up, bring it back.
Why do you make music, what drives you?
Carrying on the tradition and the essence of being black America and hopefully one day, passing that on and inspiring somebody else, giving somebody else the tools to carry that on, to keep that culture alive, that's the top goal. Also, I want to open doors man, like, I don't really care about being like superstar famous myself, but ultimately I do want to make it so that people who are like me and are different than those they were raised around, even people that aren’t similar that I was raised around, can have a space to do stuff and create things. A space where people can come in and develop some skills and learn whatever it is that they're interested in, whether it be rapping, making beats, writing poems, or writing books, I want to be able to make a space for creative minds to come in and do whatever it is that they want to do then go home with something, whether it be a finished product or just wow I really was just in there with people in the studio, like no matter what it is just a space for people to have. Kids need an outlet of some sort if they want it but something for their parents to be able to say, hey I think this will be cool for you.
