For several months, there was no sleep in G-town for Young Eddy. With his mixtape slated to come out on Friday, Dec. 12 on datpiff.com, Greg Margida ’16, who goes by the name “Young Eddy” onstage, spent countless hours inside the KDIC studio recording track after track for his mixtape, “Trust Me Less.”
Margida started his rap career over a year ago in his hometown of Alliance, Ohio, or, as he calls it in his songs, “The A.” But Margida said that as he gained the courage to tell people about his love for rapping, he began to collaborate with other Grinnellians throughout his first year of college.
“I used to rap a lot back in high school,” Margida said. “I never thought I was really good at it though. But it kind of just took courage. I started by talking to Dixon [Romeo ’16]. I rapped for him and I thought I wasn’t too good. But he recorded his vocals for it and then we invited Jacob [Washington ’15]. His flow was good so I told Jacob that he needed to join in on the project with us.”
But Margida said he was also fortunate to work with broader scale artists, such as Young Chop and DJ L!.
“I tried to talk to a lot of producers through Twitter, which is where I started,” Margida said. “The first producer I talked to had his phone number on his Twitter page, but when we started to send each other text messages about prices for a beat, I told him that I could only afford $100 and he kind of got mad at me, so I kind of lost hope.”
Once he regained his hope, Margida contacted DJ L!, who also had his phone number on his page. From there, he got a chance to get a beat from Young Chop, whom Margida has not yet met in person.
The mixtape stands out not only for the number of collaborators with whom Margida worked, but also because of the arc the listener hears throughout the 10 tracks.
“The first songs that were going to be on the mixtape were about topics rappers usually rap about like sex, drugs and other topics. But I guess I moved away from those topics and started to rap about my own experiences, about realer experiences, about things that were true and real to me. Now I rap about songs that reflect who I am, like growing up,” Margida said.
Margida said that the mixtape entered its final stages this fall.
“The highlight of this process was definitely the Friday before Thanksgiving. I came in after one of my classes with my backpack that had all the books in the world,” Margida said. “I recorded the tracks line by line and worked on the mixtape until around 11 at night when I realized that I had already done the vocals for all the songs.”
When Romeo, who is credited by Margida as the producer of the mixtape, heard the final results, he agreed that the project had been successful.
“The thing that I like about Dixon is that he did not shy away from telling me if the songs were bad. So he finally said, ‘We could work with this’ when I called him up that Friday,” Margida said.
As a biology major, Margida examines and asks experimental questions. Similarly, he examines questions throughout the mixtape.
“The question that I’m examining in the mixtape is, ‘Did I make a mixtape that’s me or did I change who I am so that I could make a mixtape?’ And that’s how all the stories I rap about are in this mixtape,” he said. “The title has two meanings in the sense that I ask, ‘Should rap fans trust me as a rapper because I’m middle-class, in college, I’m not from the hood and I don’t have the rap background. And also should my loved ones trust me less now that I’m a rapper?’”
Whether or not Grinnellians end up seeing Young Eddy on the Gardner stage, the world will be able to live his visceral life experiences as they learn what it means to trust Young Eddy.
Fans can also follow Young Eddy on Twitter @realyoungeddy_. His freestyle raps are available on his Soundcloud.
