Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
“I’m Coming,” a slow, soft, soulful track, is a song about the possibility of redemption through love and is at the same time a foray by Native American rapper Wreckless_ into R&B.
Wreckless_, the artist name for Dakota Soldier, was written for a friend during a time when Wreckless_ was going through rehab from a period of street life and drugs in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
“That was for a girl that I really liked,” he said. “She’s always been there for me.”
This was after his baby-mama left him, “I kind of like fell apart” and fell into life on the street, which involved drugs and jail.
“And I met Fay,” he said. “She’s a really good girl. She goes to church, and she is always praying for me. She was always there for me.”
He wanted more than friendship and tried to turn the friendship into something deeper, but she didn’t want to. Eventually, he said, he fell deeply into a street life of drugs and crime, and they drifted out of contact.
“She just couldn’t do it anymore. “They usually don’t, the good ones. They won’t stick around for that stuff.”
After a year, though, he entered rehab and got clean, and one day he found a friend request from her. That is when he wrote “I’m Coming” for her.
“We started talking again, and that’s when I wrote that song. I sent it to her and she messaged me back immediately. She loved it.”
Walking down this path to a dead-end road
All exits passed, there’s no where left to go
I wanna change for you,
I want to turn around
And that is when, about a year ago, Wreckless_ got back into music. He put an underground mixtape out on social media, and it “did pretty good,” so, he decided to take the best few songs he had ready and put them out.
“I’m Coming” is one of the latest.
“They all went crazy for that one,” he said. “I played it for my counselor at rehab and she started crying. It was a good song, and I wanted to get it out there.”
Wreckless_, who comes from Cherokee and Cheyenne stock, is now 32 and has been making music since he was 16. In between relationships since then, he would “go back to the streets for a while.”
Tahlequah, pronounced TAL (rhymes with “hal”)-ih-kwah, a city of a little more than 16,000 in eastern Oklahoma, is the capital of the Cherokee Nation and the seat of Cherokee County.
“It’s a small city-town,” he said, “but we got problems with drugs. They’re bad, like methamphetamine and they have homegrown gangs there.”
Wreckless_ and his friends at one time formed a group called GMC.
“That was the name we came up with. We’d sell drugs and make music. I was pretty popular.”
During that time, the music he made was primarily hip-hop and rap.
“That was, like I said, when I was into drugs.”
Last year, he went back into rehab and music and started taking it seriously.
“I’m Coming” got the attention of Dubbo, an Austin hip-hop star of Babygrande Records, and he and Wreckless_ collaborated on some songs.
“He really liked my music, and he told me what to do if I wanted to take it serious. You know, you got to promote, and invest in yourself, and my music career has taken off.”
Dakota has turned his life “all the way around.” From the days when his family wanted him to leave Tahlequah, he has gotten sober and is now a student at Rogers State University in Claremore.
“I got friends in prison, and in their letters they were saying, ‘You got to get out of there, bro. You gonna end up in here.’”
“So, I took off and I went to rehab in Miami.” After a brief relapse, he got straight again early this year.
His goal is to make music his full-time career. He is working on an album, The Millennials, Volume 1, with 15 tracks, planned for a 2025 release.
His music is primarily rap. He does trap beats, hip-hop, and country, emo and punk rap, and now R&B.
“I like all genres,” he said. “I can do it all.”
Connect to Wreckless on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
“I’m Coming,” Spotify
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Would Johnny Marr place one of his solo songs ahead of favourites from The Smiths and Electronic? His choices are revealed in NME’s Blind Ranking video below.
Ahead of the release of ‘The Age Of Everything’, which arrived last Friday, October 2, NME sat down with the guitarist for a look back through his catalogue. Marr was challenged to place five songs in order of greatness, choosing a position for each without knowing which song would follow.
Electronic’s ‘Getting Away With It’ came first, with Marr saying it “goes down very very well, even if people are hearing it for the first time”. Next came ‘Spin’, taken from his latest solo album. Reflecting on the newer song, he admitted that “not everybody knows it, but it makes an impression”.
When ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths came up, Marr observed: “Obviously it’s very well known, but it goes by so quick.” The track remains a “connection” to his younger self, he explained: “I can hear the young man who wrote those guitar parts”. He described his 2014 solo release ‘Easy Money’ as “pretty catchy”, adding that it “goes off bigger than any other at any gig”. He then considered another much loved Smiths song, ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’.
“Beautiful song to play. Very proud of it still,” Marr reflected. Recalling a recent performance in Liverpool, he added that “it occurred to me that it’s the ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ of my generation.”
See where each song landed in Marr’s ranking by watching the video below, then share your own order in the Instagram comments.
The wider conversation with NME covered his “emphatic” album ‘The Age Of Everything’, his admiration for The Cure and Fontaines D.C., and his thoughts on why Andy Burnham should be able to listen to The Smiths. Read the complete interview with Marr here.
A Liverpool concert on November 14 is next on Marr’s schedule, followed by a brief run of dates with stops in Mexico, São Paulo and Chile. His largest solo headline performance to date at OVO Arena Wembley had been planned for later this month, but has been postponed, with a replacement date yet to be announced.
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