PODCAST: Inside Berklee—Zaid Tabani

As an artistic expression, hip-hop continues to engage the public on some of American culture’s toughest issues surrounding racial and social inequality. For proof of the power of what’s happening in hip-hop now, one needn’t look further than the armful of Grammys that Kendrick Lamar walked away with for his genre-bending, unflinchingly honest sophomore record, To Pimp a Butterfly.

And yet, when Zaid Tabani, a native of Irvine, California, came to Berklee in 2013, his identity as a rapper had only been defined by defense, by the struggle to prove that what he was doing was art and deserved to be taken seriously.

All of that changed when he auditioned, and became one of the few students in the college’s history to audition with an original hip-hop performance and be accepted, first at the college and then by its community. “When I came to Berklee, I was way more accepted. I was treated like a musician, and that was crazy to me,” Tabani, a sixth-semester professional music major, says. Through working with faculty like Paula Cole, Brian "Raydar" Ellis, and Caroline Harvey, he gained the confidence to move from focusing on defending himself to being himself.

In this episode of Inside Berklee, Tabani talks about his journey as a rapper, and the peaks and valleys that led him to the release of his new record, Bos Angeles—a nod to finding his voice within rap’s historical landscape, but also bridging the gap between where he’s from, where he’s been the past four years, and wherever his art will take him next.

Producer: Bryan Parys
Engineer: Steve Xia
Recorded at the BIRN Studios