Yo ! I’m psi.ko, you can call me psi (pronounced like “sigh”) if that’s easier, either will do !

I’m a lyricist, beatboxer, songwriter, producer, a public nuisance sometimes too. Change is my message and Hip Hop is my medium. My tag line is “I’m just a nobody writing somebody bars” and I think that fits what I do perfectly. I’m just another average human being doing something in this world that may/may not have an impact in the grand scheme of things, nothing more, nothing less. What I do is more important than who I am, that’s why I’m an anonymous artist…

How did your journey with music begin?

I was very fortunate to grow up in a household where music was part of our lives. My parents are not musicians but made sure that we had an appreciation for the arts. So, on a technicality I would say my musical journey started when I became aware that I was a third culture kid, and the realities of that e.g. having access to different music - Arabic at home, French/euro-American because of where I grew up.

At 7 years old our cousins visited us and my older cousin did this small beatbox thing that honestly wasn’t even beatboxing, but I thought it was the sickest thing ever. It went “p-p-p oh my god, p-p-p that’s the style, p-p-p boogie” and I was like “WHAT”. After that I became obsessed with listening to music and trying to recreate the drum patterns I heard. I would spend hours practising and coming up with new sounds that I would then demonstrate to my family or in the playground at school. The funny thing is that I didn’t know that it was called “beatboxing” until about a year later when a classmate told me that the noises that I made were called that. I then learned about its history within wider Hip-Hop culture and started watching Beatbox Battle TV (I’m sure it’s changed its name by now). Safe to say I was known as the beatboxer for quite some time. 

I always loved writing too. I used to print out lyrics of songs I liked and unpacked them to study their contents, but I didn’t “officially” start writing until my first year of uni – there’s a whole story behind that and how I formally “got into” music but this is where it all started.

How does your culture and heritage play a part in your music and creativity?

Both my music and I are products of my diasporic upbringing. Through no fault of my own I’ve been made aware that I am – in the astute words of Lowkey – “both but neither, [but it] doesn’t mean that [I’m] none”. That’s to say that growing up in a different culture than the one that is my constant at home is always part of the conversation of my music. I am both Iraqi-Arab and also European in many ways but whilst I sometimes feel less than in both circles, I still am informed by both things.

I can’t remove that context from what I make, and the conversations around identity (in the sense of statehood) and wider politics are constants in my music and play a huge role in the contents of my writing. 

You can see glimpses of these things in the music video and lyrics of “To me, From me” where the video posits itself as a sort of conversation between past, present and future iterations of Iraqis in the arts scene. 

My culture informs the way I think of beats and rhythms, it informs the content of my lyrical referencing, it’s something that is continuously cited in the bibliography of my music.

I was first introduced to your music around the time of the release of your single C.H.A.V, which immediately drew me in. Talk to us a bit about this single.

C.H.A.V was a track I wrote while in my second year of university. I wrote it in my dorm after hearing what I believe to be lecturers say, “we have a lot of chavs in our department”. I remember hearing that and just being absolutely dumbfounded at how a comment like that can be passed around so flippantly in an academic institution of all places. Safe to say the class struggle was alive and kicking in my uni as it was and still is all around the UK. After finishing my lecture, I went straight back to my dorm and wrote C.H.A.V. 

The song is about the demonisation of the working class, questioning the established ‘aesthetic’ of chav imagery, behaviour, etc., the racialisation of chavs as Romani, or white English, specifically youth, of low/working class socio-economic grouping whilst the term “roadman/men” is heavily racially aestheticised and linked to black youth despite both groups being demonised for the same thing - being poor.

The song is also a reclamation of the word chav and its false etymology: “Council Housed and Violent”, which many in the UK believe the word to stand for. That’s why I titled the Track C.H.A.V, I knew how people would read it, but the song disarms the listener and takes them from a place of understandable judgement due to the track’s title and leads them to wherever their understanding takes them.

Should you understand the song at face value, you will hear a young rapper from “ends” putting a positive spin of the word chav. Should you dig a little deeper, the song directly questions the notion of “the deserving poor”.

There is a reason why the chorus ends on the line “I’m just a chav I’m just a chav, I aint got nothing to prove”. It is a total rejection of the political obsession with means-tested welfare programmes that have become so hyper specific they are no longer accessible by those in society who need them. It is a rejection of the demonisation of the working class. Call me a chav, fine, I won’t live my life trying to reject my reality or prove to people that I deserve the “handouts” I’m given by a State that has a never ending, ever-changing list of criteria I could never fit in order to be viewed as deserving of basic rights such as housing, education, healthcare, whatever. 

“Should you understand the song at face value, you will hear a young rapper from “ends” putting a positive spin of the word chav.

Should you dig a little deeper, the song directly questions the notion of “the deserving poor”.

We shot with you and your friends, who also happen to be your creative partners. How did you establish those friendships and creative partnerships? 

All routes lead back to Abdulisms AKA Abdulrahman Salih. Apart from Leila who is blood, everyone else (Reem N. Amin and Hasna) were artists and creatives that I had the privilege of getting to know via my work with Abdulisms which I now call “sister Abs, the connector of dots”. 

We’ve all hung out, we all keep in contact, we support each other ... family things innit. That’s why I wanted them on shoot for this too, I don’t really like being at the forefront of things, I always believe that a collective is stronger, and I wanted them to show up as themselves in their styles for this shoot. 

As for Leila, that’s actual family, my sister, my biggest cheerleader who will also tell me what’s up. She’s a jack of all trades, from location scouting, to runner, getaway driver to daily manager, Leila does it all and she always keeps me grounded. Love ya sister.

What's it like being a young creative in London today?

It depends on your circumstance and context. Apologies for sucking at short answers but it’s true. If you are a young creative with the right connects, the correct entourage, good backing, and funds you will have a very different experience than a young creative that has none of that and is going at it mostly on their ones. 

Generally though, there are a lot of things to do in London, a lot of people who are in the creative scene who just want to make things and that’s refreshing. On the other hand, I see a lot of people effected by their online presence. There seems to be this unspoken rule that everything you make should be shared because “content is king”. You get a lot of people telling you “To make it you have to put yourself out there”. I see this constant need for hypervisibility because if you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. This side to being a creative is where the creativity can sometimes get hollowed out and die. 

What advice do you have for other young creatives?

I’m not one to give advice much because people will inevitably do what they want to do in the end and I’m sure that other young creatives know exactly what they are doing. However, I’ll humour you …

My advice would be try and spend the same amount of energy you put into your craft on putting things in place that remove the obstacles you and other are facing. Get unionised, organise to standardise processes, hold people accountable, rally around people who are being taken advantage of.

Credit those that deserve the credit, don’t pull the ladder up after you if you were able to climb it… art is for everyone, work towards its democratisation wherever/whenever you can. You’ll be fine, there is no expiration date for your creativity unless you’re dead and even then … your art lives on.