Social Status on Penn Ave. in East Liberty is a sneakerhead’s delight. Perfectly pressed streetwear dangles from wooden hangers, display cases stud the sales floor sporting eye-catching accessories, and, all around, the walls are filled with handsome leather or candy-colored shoes. But there’s more to this spot than just footwear.
To enter the retail area, you must first pass through a very different kind of space: an airy community room full of tables, a small cafe counter, and books on racial and economic justice like Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. Here flashy, fun fashion collides with community-building and purpose, and it’s here that Pittsburgh City Paper sat down with rapper on the rise Fedd the God for a chat.
“Outside of music, I’m very into fashion,” says Fedd, who showed up sporting Travis Scott Air Jordans in olive green. “I spilled some spaghetti sauce on ‘
‘em, but you know it’s kinda cool. They’re meant to be worn!”
Polished style, community-mindedness, that cheerful outlook — these are among the things that Fedd the God stands for. And with the release of his first full-length record, Soul Searching, earlier this year on fellow Pittsburgh native Wiz Khalifa’s Taylor Gang label, he is also poised to stand for Pittsburgh rap to a wider national audience.
Fedd grew up on the North Side, where each neighborhood had both its own musical flavor and its own allegiances.
“I’m from Northview Heights, but then I moved to Manchester, so both areas play different variations on the South’s music,” Fedd says. “So [in Northview], you would hear a lot of project New Orleans, like No Limit and Hot Boys. And then when I moved down to Manchester, they would play a lot of Webbie and Boosie, so that’s where you get a lot of the realism from me. The flashy, fun, jumpy came from Northview, and then the realism comes from Manchester.”
Fedd embraces these sonic influences throughout Soul Searching’s 11 short, punchy, party-and-project rap tracks. But the doings of sometimes deadly neighborhood factions are something Fedd is determined to transcend. His entry into making music, in fact, came after the death of his friend and rising artist Trillzee.
“I’ve watched a lot of people dead and gone just from trying to [align themself] to one neighborhood,” he explains, “and I more just want everybody to come together. So that’s why I be on that North Side shit. I’m from this as a whole. I’m from the North Side. It’s a broad and more beautiful thing.”
Thanks to landing a spot on the roster at Taylor Gang, Fedd is now repping the North Side and Pittsburgh as a whole to huge audiences around the country and learning at the feet of Wiz Khalifa, author of such mega-hits as “See You Again,” which has nearly 2 billion streams in Spotify. It’s a position, Fedd says, that he’s earned with a dogged work ethic, shrewd thinking, and gumption. He recalls an early moment with Wiz at Rolling Loud in L.A., where the latter was headlining the festival in front of a crowd of 30,000.
“Wiz comes up to me right before he gets on stage and says, ‘Get ready, you’re performing “Activated” tonight. Show track.’ Show track is when you get on stage and you have to remember the words to the beat, the exact cue, the exact time you come on,” Fedd tells City Paper. “So I get out on stage, in front of a sea of people, and I got the microphone and I’m just like, whoa! I really had to go in my pocket and put my glasses on because I don’t want to fumble this shit, and I just rap it! People are going crazy, and I just look behind me, and I see Wiz has the biggest Kool-aid smile on, like, ‘I got one. I know you can do this. I can throw him to the wolves and he’s gonna come out with a coat on.’”
Having checked many items off the working musician dream list — the experience at Rolling Loud, an appearance at South by Southwest, features in esteemed media such as Lyrical Lemonade — there’s still much that Fedd aspires to do. Like creating a No.1 song, for instance, and continuing to explore ways to wed his music with another of his passions, video games. When he’s not in the studio or out on the road, he’s often interacting with his fans on the video game streaming website Twitch.
“Music and video games are best friends,” he observes. “On Madden in 2003, one of the first rap songs I fell in love with was Al Fatz’s ‘I Done Came Down.’”
So, what would be his dream combination of a video game and one of his songs? “‘No Limit’ on the Grand Theft Auto VI soundtrack, ’cause it’s in Florida and there’s a lot of projects down there. ‘No Limit’ is about the projects.”
As his star continues to rise both inside of Pittsburgh and among wider audiences, Fedd is focused on being a part of changing the narrative about his hometown.
“Pittsburgh has a narrative of, can’t have nothing, can’t do nothing successfully as a minority, and I think they’re very wrong. I’m a testament to that; Slappers N Bangers are a testament to that. We can do it. My homies at 1Hood, they’re changing it. We’re changing it very fast. I feel like I’m crawling so everybody can walk.”
And what does he want the world to know about Pittsburgh? “Pittsburgh is the best place on earth. I’ve been everywhere, internationally, and nationally. I always want to come home. There’s always a yearning feeling like, they need you. Like I’m always going to different places, and every time I go, I always want to bring a piece of that back to here. This is what made me. I want Pittsburgh to understand, I’m nothing without Pittsburgh. So Pittsburgh needs to get it crackin’!”
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2024.
