Hodgy Beats is No More. Jerry Would Like to Introduce Himself

Courtesy of Bryan Meltz.

“I feel like I just woke up,” Hodgy Beats says. He’s standing in front of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, on a fair-weather afternoon the Monday after Thanksgiving, and although he came here straight from the airport, he’s not talking about feeling groggy, but about a spiritual awakening. It happened when he was 29; he’s 33 now, and ready to reintroduce the new Hodgy that he’s spent the last six-odd years finding. First things first: That moniker, the one he used as a quick-witted, lyrically dexterous founding member of Odd Future, is gone. These days he goes by Jerry, the nickname he anointed himself with in childhood, a spin-off of his government name, Gerard Long. The new music he’s putting out— a three-song sampler that he released in November, another three songs last week, and the album they’re building up to (more on that later)— won’t even live on the old Hodgy DSP or YouTube pages, algorithms be damned. “I'm grounded in the rebrand,” he tells me as we stroll around a serene pond on the museum grounds. “I don't care how long it takes, I'm moving forward in a different direction.”

He’s done a lot of work on himself—years of introspection, reflection and confronting traumas—and emerged on the other side of that as a different, brand new person who’s finally ready to present himself to the world. But pivoting from a perception that’s persisted since 2010 presents its own challenges: How do you dramatize and convey a whole new outlook on life, and a new commitment to personal growth and change? In other words, how should he—as he put it to me—“embody what the brand of Jerry is?” One of his first moves was to ride a bull.

The first new video on Jerry’s YouTube page is a short called “Facing Our Worst Fears.” In it, our hero gets a crash course in bull riding before mounting one himself. The first try goes quicker than you can pause for a quintessential record-scratch, freeze-frame, You’re probably wondering how I got here… moment. Of course, it’s the “downfall” part of the prototypical hero’s journey, before the climax yields success. Is that the arc Jerry’s on now?

“I was ready to experience something that was beyond me and reckless,” he says with a smirk. (Right before he hopped on, an onlooker at the ranch told him You’re making me want to ride bulls again, but I fractured my back. “I was like, How you fracture your back?” Jerry says. “He said, Riding.” So, recklessness: check.) “Once I hopped on the bull, I started thinking about my life and shit,” Jerry says. “Things have enabled me to reflect and I'm thinking of how far I've come and if anything were to happen, I'm accountable for it.” Accountability and reflection are maybe the two most prevalent themes Jerry returns to in conversation, along with the newfound level of self-acceptance he’s achieved—and is striving to maintain. “We never know what's going to happen,” he says, “but with consistency comes more results.” To wit, the fit that Jerry chooses for his bullriding, fear-facing experiment: a Saint Michael tee that reads DISORDER/CONTROL.

A casual listener could find their way to Jerry’s music and, quite reasonably, have no idea they were listening to the same man who’s been performing as Hodgy for the last 13 years. In Odd Future, he was always the straight shooter, a casually dazzling lyricist who could just as easily match Tyler, The Creator’s raucous energy or just bar you to death low-key. Real heads know he technically released the collective’s first solo project with 2009’s The Dena Tape, which dropped about five months before Tyler’s Bastard. Once the group blew up, he and producer Left Brain formed MellowHype, a sub-duo within Odd Future that quickly became a slightly more niche but just as rabidly-praised fan favorite. Hodgy was the “Hype” in that equation, unafraid to get in your face—on wax, or literally.

The Jerry of today is much more reserved—quiet, contemplative, and (dare I say it) even a little press-shy. This is his first in-person interview in…he doesn’t know how long. He’s friendly, open and talkative, but at the same time the tiniest bit withdrawn and jittery, dad cap pulled down over his dreads, tortoise shell glasses pushed up firmly on his nose, and only occasionally does he peer out from under the former and over the latter to make eye contact. A fellow Monday museum-goer—of which there are many on this weekday afternoon, as L.A. as ever—would mistake him for just another well-dressed millennial who appreciates Matisse, not a key part of one of the previous decade’s most important rap groups.

Speaking of rapping: His forthcoming LP lovemesooner is 18 tracks that are almost completely devoid of bars. Almost completely devoid of drums too, for that matter. Instead, the mode he’s fully in is (as he flows at one point) “singer/songwriter like I’m from Tennessee,” crooning his heart out about love and relationships, alluding to past traumas, and bemoaning miscommunication over acoustic guitars. Where he once prioritized showmanship and technical craft, he’s now completely pivoted to vulnerability—so much so that Jerry says none of these songs are the product of written-down lines, but rather pure expression.

“Some of the songs are actually a conversation between me and another person and I'm singing as her and what she's saying to me and I'm responding to her through rap or whatever else it is,” Jerry explains. “So a lot of it is conversation. Some of these songs I'm in my head, where I'm kind of angry, and some are experiences that I've totally made up in my own mind. And the album is so cryptic because only the person I was in a relationship with knows what I'm talking about.” When I ask if said person has heard the album, Jerry motions to the museum cafe, where a woman he arrived with is giving us our space to talk. “She ain't fuck with some of it,” he smirks. “That was on her. I was like, [oh] well.”

The details on Jerry’s personal life—current relationships, rumored past ones, his kids, of which there are now three—don’t get much less cryptic than that, both in his music and this interview. But he was forthcoming about his overall personal journey. Jerry was born in Trenton, New Jersey, but he grew up just blocks away from the museum we’re at now—he estimates he’s touched literally every block in Pasadena—but since 2020 he’s been living in Toronto, a decision that he owes his current livelihood to.

“This place is pretty complex,” he muses as we stroll around the museum. “We move through the city, it's like the walking dead for me. People be alive, but they're not really in there.” As the bloom on Odd Future’s rise fell away, Jerry grew to find the city claustrophobic above all else. “What I noticed,” he says, “is that if you have that one person that you see at every party, you know you're doing the wrong thing.”

In the transition, Jerry’s gone full Nature Boy, finding solace and inspiration in stillness. “There's something in the air in Toronto,” Jerry says. “There's something about creating in the snow, taking walks.” The move came a month after he got sober, but it was the product of a much longer period of soul-searching. There wasn’t one particular inciting incident that spurred this journey, no standout dark night of the soul. “It was probably a series of events,” he reflects, noting that a trip to the grocery store for one thing almost always ends in a full basket. “It took losing a couple of people. It took loss. And having to face that. I find it more painful to look at the thing than to turn around and act as if it isn't there. [But] once you face it, that's how you get through.”

“I believe I boxed myself in at a point in my life and I needed to create a new existence within myself and be bigger than what it is that I created,” Jerry continues. “So I had to go into myself in order to be something bigger than what I was. [For] a lot of people, it's hard to change, man. It's hard to grow. It's hard to see things for what they are without your own ego or judgment attached to it.” Jerry can slip in and out of heady, metaphysical-speak when recounting the work he did on himself, but one thing he takes pains to stress often in conversation is the neverending nature of that process. “I had to see myself and my actions and my own accountability in life in order to get to where I am today. And I practice that shit every day, accountability. I can get hit by a car, leaving this museum walking, but partially that shit is my fault.”

Not if you had the light.

“But I still stepped out in the street. You understand what I'm saying?”

Jerry came to Norton Simon often enough in his youth; he chose to revisit it today as a kind of brick-and-mortar signifier to reflect how much he’s changed, how far he’s come, how it would feel for the Jerry of 2023 to take the same steps Hodgy-Jerry once took. In the moment, he doesn’t have an answer just yet.

He stopped, as we strolled around the first-floor gallery, and considered Picasso’s Woman with a Book. “You always think, Is it the art that's great? Or is it the person?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. “Because these people were sad fucking people, man.”

It’s a loaded statement coming from an artist whose new music contains the refrain “Take my pain and make these pop records.” Jerry doesn’t get too specific about the pain and trauma he’s endured and since unpacked, but he’s explored all different types of therapy, from expression-based practices like painting to talk therapy, hypnotherapy, EMDR, and IFS. “The ones that I found most effective for me were IFS and EMDR,” he says, at first telling me to look into them for homework before relenting and explaining both. “EMDR is trauma therapy. IFS is based on separating and identifying your personalities. If you have more than one, which I assume we all do.”

Eventually at some point on his path to betterment, he realized he had to separate from Hodgy. “Hodgy was a persona,” Jerry says now. “When I think about it [now], it felt like method acting. You go through a lot of shit and then some crazy blessing—like traveling the world with your friends—happens and you haven't dealt with any of the experiences you needed to. Sometimes life could be too much for a person and they're too afraid to admit it. So I developed a persona that was named Hodgy. I used it as a defense mechanism and once it didn't work anymore for me, I stopped.”

In the interim, he continued to make music, “finding different voices” and perfecting his new sound until he was comfortable with sharing it with the world, shrugging at the idea of his newfound sobriety affecting his creative process. “It goes back to that walking-dead shit,” he says of his days being not sober. “I was one of them. Alive, but not in there, not present.” You were a pretty good rapper for someone not present, I counter. “But was that me rapping? They call alcohol ‘spirits’ for a reason.”

As he tinkered with new sounds and styles, he eventually felt like what he landed on—what he’s presenting on lovemesooner—is something wholly original. “I'm the best at what I do because I'm the only person that can do it,” he says. “I feel like people aren't remembered for being the best because the best can always be replaced. But if you're the only one that could do something or you're the first person, that might be more important.”

As for how he went from MellowHype to crooning songs about a girl who “approaches their relationship like robbery,” it all lines up with his personal mission to keep exploring his own vulnerability. “Love is an interesting topic,” Jerry muses. “It is something that is forever relevant. It's also an avenue I've never really taken. I've taken quick little jabs at it, but to be vulnerable—I don't hear men being vulnerable in music. Not from women that much either.”

Just don’t box lovemesooner into the toxic category prevalent amongst pop and R&B at the moment. “I used to listen to R&B a lot,” Jerry says. “From time to time, I still do, but [when] I listen to today's music, it lacks emotional intellect. It makes me think it's all formulated and shit. It's corny.” Or, as he remarked in the gallery, “Most artists that seem great today copy artists that suffered. And those are normally the rich ones.”

The finished album feels raw but also polished, placing Jerry’s real-time thoughts against lush instrumentation, some of which was provided by the likes of Leland Hansen and Chester Whitty of BadBadNotGood and even one song from the Gorillaz. Don’t, however, go into it expecting to hear beats from the likes of Left Brain or appearances from any of his other Odd Future crew. “I don’t see that right now,” Jerry says of linking with any of the old gang on wax in the near future. “I just don't see it. It's nothing personal.” When a majority of the group reunited at Earl Sweatshirt’s tenth anniversary Doris show earlier this year—the first time that many core members were in the same place at one time in a long time—Jerry was noticeably absent. There have been minor, seeming dust-ups and miscommunications within the group in the past; today Jerry says there’s nothing but goodwill on his part. But he doesn’t exactly have FOMO for missing something like that picture either.

“I be having too much fun doing what I'm doing, honestly,” he says. “But I did see the photo. It looks like everyone is doing well and if that's what we were set out to do at the age 16 to now, then shit. When I see people doing well, it expands for me and it shows me that I could do well too. I don't look at people and be like, Oh, this motherfucker doing great—I hate this n-gga.”

Still, it’s startling to hear someone who once put so much into rhyme construction now do the complete opposite for the duration of an entire album. The mainstream success his founding peers have attained—isn’t there a version of Hodgy Beats and/or Jerry that could reach those heights as well. Does he want that? Did he ever?

Jerry recounts an interview he remembers giving in France once. He was 19 years old, and declared he would be the best rapper in the world. “And I meant it,” he says now. So what changed in those 10-odd years? “I realized I was in competition and that's a losing game, in the end. I was very unhappy when I said it, as well.” But, singling out no one in particular, he wonders if his old crew feels the same. “I wonder if they had a conversation with themselves and [their old self] asked themselves today, is that what they wanted? If they got what they wanted? If so, great. For me, my perspective is I'm a person that's never going to arrive. I'll never arrive.”

With that mindset in place, Jerry is focused on staying level, noting that “good days can crumble you and bad days can humble you.” Pain persists, but his days of blacking it out, through substances or otherwise, are over. “I don't want to forget today,” Jerry says. “I want to know what today was like. I want to go to sleep and before I go to bed, pray and ask myself if I did the best I could today. Then wake up, pray, do my program and tell myself I'm going to do my best today.”

As for working through lingering negativity, the new Jerry does his best not to dwell. “All that other shit that happened before, it's dead. It doesn't even matter, but we carry [our traumas] somehow. So I'm learning how to let go of it and live life for now. Optimistically, plan for the future, if it doesn't work out, then, shit. I see old people all the time. It worked out for them. It's going to work out for me too then.”

Right now, the plan is for lovemesooner to be the foundation for a much more productive period of Jerry music. There’s a second album he’s already working on and hopes to finish in the coming weeks in Japan, one that he promises is more “noisy,” with more raps, more written lyrics, “hard tempos.” Beyond that, he says, he intends to retire ten years from now, at 43, to travel, live his life, focus on the loved ones around him.

I ask him if he feels like he’s on track for his goals. Jerry stares off into the distance from the front of Norton Simon towards the rest of Pasadena, before he conjures up a memory that answers my question more literally than I meant it. “There’s this one memory I have of this one n-gga that was ranked the fastest in Pasadena,” he recalls, staring out as if we can actually see the track from here. “We were doing the 220 or something like that. I was neck to neck with him. We hit that third curve—he took off, [and suddenly] there was a big gap between us. That n-gga ran.”

He hit another gear.

“Yeah, that's something I didn't have in me. Metaphorically, I have it in me now. I'm hitting the stride. I'm looking up, looking forward to what is to come.”

Originally Appeared on GQ