Music
Nerve: “Sometimes I think I’m a rapper’s rapper"
As he steps up to share his Red Bull 64 Bars, we speak to the Brisbane emcee, producer and engineer about the long road to where he is now.
“Sometimes I think I’m a rapper’s rapper,” Nerve tells me down the line from his home in Brisbane.
We’re discussing the breakneck speed at which he raps on his Red Bull 64 Bars -- so fast you might miss some of his rhymes, punchlines and double entendres.
“Rap nerds love how I rap but I’m like, maybe I need to simplify it a bit,” he says. “It pisses me off sometimes. I have to [do it]. And then I realise later, bro, are people even going to catch what the fuck I’m saying?”
Nerve certainly crammed a lot into his Red Bull 64 Bars. Over three minutes he moves through a trio of different beats, gliding between old and new school sounds, weaving lines about girls and partying or going deeper about the need to protect his energy. He didn’t just rap for 64 Bars -- Nerve also produced all of the beats himself. It’s a powerhouse performance that shows off exactly why the Brisbane talent has become one of Australia’s most respected rappers.
3 min
Red Bull 64 Bars Nerve
A powerhouse performance that shows off exactly why the Brisbane talent has become one of Australia’s most respected rappers.
Stepping up for Red Bull 64 Bars is the latest move in a career that’s gone from strength to strength over the past few years. Nerve first began releasing music in 2017 but his path into rap began many years before that. He began rapping in high school, a time when he was “obsessed” with 90s heroes like A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, Biggie and Tupac as well as contemporary names like Tyler, The Creator and A$AP Rocky.
“At parties I would whip out my iPod Touch with my Notes app and start rapping to people if I got courageous enough,” he recalls. “And then I just thought I’m pretty good at this, hey. I started collecting egg cartons -- I got like 50, 100 egg cartons -- and I put ‘em up in the closet in my room. I bought this shitty mic off eBay, set it all up and started recording onto my old family computer and trying to make beats.”
He didn’t master the art overnight. “It took ages to make good stuff, but I was at least aware that I’d have to make a lot of shit sounding stuff before I could make good stuff. I just grinded that out for a couple of years, picked things up here and there, and got better. That’s still the process now, you know.”
From there, Nerve spent years playing free shows “to 5 people, 10 people, at venues where people would have to walk through your set to go to the toilet”. Eventually he started to pick up momentum: the gigs began to get paid, the right ears started getting pricked.
Nerve for Red Bull 64 Bars.
© The James Adams
At the same time as he was starting to rap, Nerve was teaching himself to produce. Learning how to make his own beats was a matter of practicality.
“When I was rapping at parties and writing my own stuff I thought damn, I gotta figure out how to record,” Nerve says. “But at the time, I was really into 90s stuff and I was really purist about it. I loved vinyl, I was obsessed with vinyl, I bought heaps of vinyl. So I would only make beats sampled off vinyl ‘cause I was really into that 90s steeze.”
He was sampling “random ass dollar bin” finds: jazz, world, music, Russian opera and whatever else he could salvage from the local Vinnies.
“I sounded like an old head. I sounded jaded as, at 17,” he laughs. “I was like ‘I’m only making beats sampled off vinyl’. And I eventually got over it, ‘cause I realised fuck it, if it sounds good it sounds good. But that’s how I learned -- sampling a lot of old vinyls.”
Nerve in the studio for 64 Bars.
© The James Adams
In his earlier days, Nerve was known for his grime-leaning beats. He says getting into grime was “a massive part of growing out of that phase of only making boom-bap stuff.”
“When I first got shown grime, it was radio sets where dudes were just going back-to-back for 30 minutes straight. I thought that was almost more hip-hop than hip-hop, because I was obsessed with cyphers where people would just spit bars back-to-back. And I loved underground shit where people would just go for four minutes, spitting with no hooks,” he says. “So I think with grime, when I got into that, it kind of opened me up to more synth-y, new school sounding beats, and also flows and lyrics. It helped me really branch out.”
I was obsessed with cyphers where people would just spit bars back-to-back
Today, Nerve says, he’s not wed to the grime sound -- playing instead with R&B, neo-soul and even punk. For his Red Bull 64 Bars, the trio of beats was a way to nod to where he started and where he’s going.
“The way I see how my career’s gone, I think everything’s been a slow but steady pace,” Nerve says. “It’s probably only been in the last 12 months where maybe I’ve had a moment where I’ve been like, oh, this is pretty serious now.”
One of those pinch-me moments came earlier this year when he quit his office job to focus on music full time. “As soon as I walked out the door on my last day, my phone buzzed and I got a cheque from APRA for royalties for radio play. It was the biggest cheque that I’d gotten from them,” he says.
“And I was like okay, yeah, maybe that’s a sign.”
