ShyBelligerent is suffering.
You can see it in his videos, where he walks desperately through cemeteries, city streets and unfurnished rooms. You can hear it and feel it in his voice. The 30-year-old rapper born Michael William, thin as a stick, with sharp, angular features and a thin mustache, is also fearless on paper. He writes about everything that has been done to him and everything he has had to do.
“I can’t let go of the past,” he laments on his latest album, “It’s a Ugly Come Up.” “Where’s Hennessey? I’m going to get it. All my life I’ve been so bad.” The mostly piano-based beats complement each other exquisitely. Shy himself is touchingly human, full of energy, but also lonely and scared.
“I had to plan everything out,” Shy says of the new album. “I was actually able to make it into a big project.” Much of her previous work was rushed and improvised. This time, however, Shy took her time. Lyrically and thematically, “It’s a Ugly Come Up” is focused without infringing too much on the spontaneity that has become Shy’s trademark.
For Shy, the lyrics are of secondary importance. His power is in his voice — a nervous, erratic, unbridled howl — that reveals him not as a victim but as a vehicle for chronic pain. The Compton native says he is tormented by what he has experienced, or, more to the point, by what he can’t stop experiencing. How fitting that Shy tweets under the username “@sbbenthroughit.”
Her song “Cry Me a River” is a desperate expression of grievance. To date, “River” is the most viral song Shy has created (156,000 views on YouTube and counting).
“In the L.A. music scene, my problem as a producer is that everyone sounds like everyone else,” says TooRawEntertainment, Shy’s producer who sends him beats from his studio in Arizona.[Shy] “He definitely stands out. His singing is crazy and his energy is even crazier. And he speaks the truth, really, in his raps.”
The video for “Cry Me a River” shows the Los Angeles rapper stumbling around in a ramshackle tent next to a train station. Shy is no homeless man: in fact, he’s a very vocal tenant of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, better known as HACLA. Though he has a place to stay, he sometimes seems lost in his chaotic inner world. In conversation, the rapper lives up to the duality implied by his name, alternating between quiet and boisterous. But if you only know him through his music, nothing can prepare you for how demure and put-together he is in real life.
“I think that’s one of the most remarkable things about him,” says DeJon Paul, an Inglewood rap critic and blogger who is also a regular on the popular hip-hop podcast “No Jumper.” His local earnestness provides a refreshing contrast to “No Jumper” host Adam22. Every year, Paul publishes the local equivalent of XXL magazine’s freshman class list. Shy was one of the few chosen in 2023.
In conversation, ShyBelligerent lives up to the duality implied in his name, alternating between calm and boisterous.
(David McGriff)
“He has a big personality in his videos and in his posts,” Paul said. “But when you’re with him or when you interview him, when you meet him in public, he’s quiet, stoic, reserved.” The explanation for that lies in Shy’s upbringing.
“It wasn’t your typical mother-father situation,” Shy says. “My mother was supposed to fight for me, but she couldn’t do it.” His mother abandoned him when he was a baby. His unstable father was no better suited for parenthood. As a child, Shy was left in the care of his stern, church-going grandmother and his grandfather, a jazz enthusiast. Shy remained in their care until he was 15.
Some good things came out of this family arrangement. His grandfather instilled in him a musical curiosity that persists to this day (“That’s why my style is so unique.”) But Shy was a frightened and sad child. His already small world shrank by half when his parents abandoned him. He couldn’t make sense of it. The more he searched for answers, the more overwhelmed he became by entropy and uncertainty.
“Later,” Shy says now, “I was able to speak up, ask questions and figure things out.” But grieving the loss of his youth, he became quarrelsome and sometimes belligerent. Shy’s trajectory is well-known: frightened and abandoned boys often grow into angry men.
For a time, he sought release and restoration in the classroom (his favorite subject was AP English). The football field was another precious sanctuary; Shy played defensive end on the Compton High football team. Even then, though, he had plans to pursue a career as a rapper; it was around 2009 that he got serious about his craft. Los Angeles is a networker’s paradise, and Shy likes to network, but he didn’t always do it. His teenage apprenticeship was entirely informal and self-supervised.
“At the time, YG was at his peak,” Shy says. At the time, YG was a rapper from Compton who had become a superstar and had provided Shy with a blueprint for success. “At the time, I was trying to make a name for myself, but with the few resources I had, the little knowledge I had at the time, everything was complicated.”
William had only the cheapest equipment at his disposal: RadioShack microphones and “jammed laptops.” In the end, he built a functional studio with primitive equipment.
If Shy’s creative life suffered, it was because he had competing responsibilities. He had a child at 15. This infuriated his fundamentalist grandparents, who made him seek steady work, like Ice Cube in “A Bird in the Hand.” He worked in dollar stores, warehouses, anywhere that would pay a legal wage. Shy’s work history is largely transparent, but he has done things for money that, by his own admission, are inexcusably vile.
As Shy’s rapping evolved, so did his journalistic sense. He began experimenting with the street-reporting vlog model on YouTube. The following he gained from this activity was not huge compared to mainstream vlogs, but it was not insignificant either. Shy says he has a knack for timing, for capturing extraordinary scenes as they happen.
On tracks like “Son of a Bitch,” William recounts a period in his life when he was “whoring out whores.” This isn’t a euphemism or a case of hip-hop fabulism. He has direct experience of trafficking women.
“It was for a short period of time,” he says, though he admits it was active long enough to inflict lasting damage on the women funneled into his “stable.”
“Having daughters would make you rethink the whole situation,” he says. “Now I see the bigger picture.” These may seem platitudes, but on “Son of a Bitch,” Shy sounds like the most spiritually tortured ex-dealer in hip-hop history. (Suga Free with a conscience? Jokes aside, their rap styles are very similar.)
Watts had always functioned as a second home for Shy, and at some point he moved there permanently. In retrospect, Watts was the best place he could have gone. Shy’s identity is tied, almost inextricably, to this tight-knit community of 35,000. Would there be a Belligerent Shy if he were still hanging around Compton?
Watts served as a second home for ShyBelligerent, and at some point she moved there permanently. Her identity is tied, almost inextricably, to the community.
(David McGriff)
Shy’s adopted home is fertile ground for rap talent. He currently lives in the low-ceilinged, lemon-colored Nickerson Gardens apartment complex and identifies intensely with the place. In his X bio, Shy is introduced as an unsigned Nickerson Gardens artist. His free agency is a geographical catastrophe and also an A&R failure, says Paul.
“I'm surprised TDE hasn't signed him,” Paul says, referring to Top Dawg Entertainment, the prestigious label whose roster (Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q) comes to Nickerson every year for a holiday party and toy drive.
Therein lies a fundamental action verb: snatch. Shy is always snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He has talent, emotional courage, great sonic instincts (his beat selection is top-notch). But he often feels like an accident waiting to happen. “It’s a Ugly Come Up” is so wild, so unabashedly uninhibited, that Schoolboy Q’s “Blue Lips” seems almost family-friendly by comparison.
Any major record label would try to smooth over Shy's rough edges, and who wants that? He certainly doesn't. Despite all the self-doubt and pain he's endured in his 30 years, despite all the catastrophic blows his psyche has taken, Shy stands by his music. It's his only source of self-esteem, self-efficacy and pride.
“I’m a musical genius,” he says flatly. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, maybe not, but his dramatic genius is not in dispute. When it comes to using hip-hop to dramatize human pain, there’s no doubt that ShyBelligerent is every bit as genius as he claims to be.
