West Coast rapper Glenn Waco is moving on up by moving south. He recently jumped ship from the gray skies and rain clouds of Portland, OR for the sun beams and palm trees of Southern California. That said, he still has a foot firmly planted in each locale.

In his hometown, he established himself as both a musical and political force. His most recent album North Bound is alive with deep thoughts in tribute the North Portland neighborhood he's from, tackling the realities of his surroundings from desperation and power imbalances to police shootings and future progress.

While the topics can be hyper-local, the ideas translate and relate to the masses. Prior to his departure, he's been at the forefront of Portland's Black Lives Matter movement, organizing and attending rallies and playing a role in a protest that Janelle Monae and Jidenna attended and performed at when they were in the Rose City. He can also lay claim to having a hand in Trail Blazer Damian Lillard's first on stage performance last summer via the semi-annual We Take Holocene concert series that Waco organizes. Now along partner Alia Zin, he's hoping to establish himself in a new state with the same mindset of using music as a message.

Homebase: Long Beach, CA

Hometown: Portland, OR

How did you first start rapping?

Writing became a therapeutic process for me to deal with the depression and anxiety of seeing what strokes and heart attacks did to my adoptive mother, which was my biological great grandmother at the time. 

Everyone expected me to get caught up in the streets after she lost her voice and feeling on one side of her entire body, but I found music kept my mind where it needed to be. The snap music era was brutal, but that's the time Lil Wayne was dropping mad verses and Jay-Z was coming out of retirement so my love of bars and wordplay came from that. I would be at my computer downloading mad music, watching Malcolm X and Black Panther speeches and interviews in an attempt to fathom the world and search for answers. I engineered everyone's music, including my own, at my high school Roosevelt after teaching myself how to run Pro Tools, Lupe Fiasco dropped and inspired me to always put a message in my music. Late Registration and Food & Liquor are two albums I will always hold close because they were therapeutic for me through that rough period in my life.

You've been very involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. How important are politics to your musical output? 

I've come to understand that as much as corporations get accredited to controlling everything, artists are the real social engineers. We control culture that in effect programs and conditions the minds of human beings, that's power. People don't realize how powerful their voices are—these systems of oppression cannot function without the oppressed and once the oppressed realize that then real change will occur on a multitude of levels. The power has always been in and will always reside in the people, music freed slaves. 

I was blessed to receive council from the founder of the black lives matter movement in Portland (Don't Shoot PDX) Teressa Raiford & the founder of OABA (Oregon Assembly of Black Affairs) Cal Henry. Now I have a deeper understanding in that politics isn't something we aren't already involved in, we deal with politics in every day life whether that's convincing someone to borrow some money or drive us down the street; in the most remedial terms it's simply getting people to do what you want them to do, so if I want to change the world I have to first change myself and then create things that will change the world, for me that's music. Once I do that I'll influence others to do the same. 

What about the rap appeals to you as opposed to other genres?

Hip-hop at its very conception was born out of poverty, it was an attempt of turning a negative into a positive, an escape from a dark reality, something I don't think any modern genre other than blues can really compare to. There's so many different perspectives in hip-hop and it can't be constrained to one sound or style because it's able to merge with any genre you put it with, it's the universal language of the oppressed in my opinion. In saying that, I can write a song about Assata Shakur, systemic oppression and then turn around and make a song that goes hard at a party, put them all on the same album without batting an eye and they'll all have continuity within context of the album. Hip-hop has no limits.

What's your writing process like?

It varies, but recently my writing process has been more centered towards me spontaneously getting a melody stuck in my head, me mumbling some words to it, recording it on my phone, developing the concept from that and then things fall into place from there. Sometimes I have a beat and sometimes I get with my producers to build around the concept and melody.  

What are you working on right now? 

I'm working on the follow up to my first album NorthBound that I released November 2013, it'll be dropping later this year. I'm also working on the third and fourth installments of my concert series, We Take Holocene, that'll be in May and August of this year at Holocene in Portland. Just getting in a creative space and surrounding myself by positivity and people who inspire me has been my goal so that I can spread that energy. 

What are your goals career-wise?

I want to be considered one of the best to do what I do. The secret is there is no best because that type of stuff is always subjective, but as long as I'm in the conversation I'll be good. There's only two labels that I'd probably ever consider signing to, but other than that I want to remain independent and be able to throw my own tours, have a direct-to-consumer relationship with my fans and have my brand be a social, political and Human movement outside of just music.

My goal is to help bring balance to the industry, because right now these kids are being force fed a lot of violence, self-hate and self-destruction on a multitude of levels in exchange for profit—that's a reflection of how our current system of capitalism is really damaging the world, and I believe we need to turn that around so that we can really deal with the ills that plague our communities.  

What are your interests outside of music? 

I love video games, I love anime, I'm a die hard Dragonball Z fan, I love Naruto and Attack On Titan. Reading is fundamental and something I haven't given proper time to over the years so I'm getting back into that...I like to keep up with Marvel, DC and what's going on with upcoming movies. I YouTube browse a lot to find miscellaneous things that spark my imagination or open my mind up to what's going on in other places in the world. Other than that, I'm chilling. 

If you could soundtrack any movie or cartoon, what would it be and why?

Man that's a good hard question...I think Hunger Games—I love that movie series although I've never read the books. It's so close to what's going on right now with our society, and I can relate to the various anxieties that Katniss felt throughout the series. I'd love to do songs like “the Hanging Tree.”

Besides Hunger Games, I think Star Wars would be dope. Watching episodes 1-6 I really peeped the motifs and I think I could make a dope project around what Annakin went through mentally or peel back the layers of all the space stuff to relate the conflicts of the series to the ones we're currently facing, it would be an exciting challenge.