On Friday, November 23, Chicago-based rapper KC Ortiz performs at Subterranean as part of a showcase organized by Chicago label Futurehood, which supports gay and transgender musicians of color. She’s no longer actively working with the label, founded in 2015 by rapper Mister Wallace and producer Aceb00mbap, but their parting was amicable—there’s a reason the concert is called “Futurehood & Friends.”
What church is on the cover of Church Tapes? That was my church when I was a little kid, True Vine Missionary Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama. They’re not there anymore. I actually searched the address on Google Maps, and that’s what it looks like now. I don’t think anything’s in there anymore, but yeah, I got that picture off Google Maps.
How would you characterize or categorize your music? I don’t feel like I can . . . when I was in the air force, me and my friends, we were always burning CDs off the Internet. We would drive around and just listen to CDs, and my friends would be like, “What is your taste in music?” Because it would be like “Clint Eastwood” by Gorillaz, and then it went into a gospel song, and then it went into a techno song. When I think of my style of music, I don’t want people to know which way I’m coming from—I wanna be unpredictable.
Has this journey affected your music or how you portray yourself in any way? I still talk about sex and all that stuff in my music, but I remember before, I would write stuff about people I didn’t like, and now I just don’t feel comfortable doing that. It’s really hard for me to retaliate now, even when people hurt me in real life. It’s so hard for me to retaliate, because it’s just like, why bother? And a lot of times when I retaliate, I just end up feeling bad later, so it’s easy for me to just let it go and to not have to deal with that. I still work on it, because it’s a constant process. I came from a rocky environment where you have to kind of be mean or tough or fight all the time, and now I’m realizing you don’t have to do all that.
