During a recent interview, Ghostface Killah opened up about how he wrote some of his verses through a schizophrenic episode he experienced, which he detailed. “Matter of fact, it might’ve started when I was in Ohio,” his remarks began. “You know, gun wars, we doing all this, I got shot, this and that and the third. One day… I don’t know, I just smoked some s**t, some weed, whatever. Like I told you, I’m standing in the kitchen, and everything just got light to me. I just dropped the water on the floor ’cause I couldn’t hold it. I ain’t pass out. But it was just like… I told my mans, ‘Yo, I got to go lay down. S**t, I’m bugging right now.’ But he said, ‘I’m bugging right now, too.’ In my mind, I’m like, ‘You ain’t bugging like this bugging right here.’
“So I lay down, and that’s when the s**t just… started whispering,” Ghostface Killah continued. “‘I’m gonna get you, I’m gonna get you.’ Just started going to those worlds. And I’m trying to fight it. Next morning, when I woke up, it was blurry. My vision was just kind of, like, you know how you… static-y on the TV? That’s how I was looking out of my f***ing eyes and s**t. Everything was just, ‘Damn, I got to fix the channel on this motherf***er.’
Ghostface Killah Speaks On Schizophrenia
“And it was lasting like that for, like, a minute and s**t,” Ghostface Killah went on. “Everything was just off. I don’t know, s**t made me depressed, I didn’t know what it was, I couldn’t figure it out and s**t. It had to go. Yeah, s**t was telling me to do s**t. ‘Jump off the train, n***a, jump out the car,’ all that s**t. Like, I’m going through all that s**t.
“And the only one that I could tell -– ’cause it was s**ts telling me, ‘Yo, punch him in his face’ and s**t,” Ghostface Killah concluded. “I wouldn’t tell everybody, I would just tell RZA. ‘Yo, s**t’s telling me to snuff you right now, n***a.’ But he’s so smart that he’d bring me back by, like, breaking down the brain on me. Like, he’d just talk to me about the brain and tell me what works and how this is connected.”
About The Author
Gabriel Bras Nevares is a music and pop culture news writer for HotNewHipHop. He started in 2022 as a weekend writer and, since joining the team full-time, has developed a strong knowledge in hip-hop news and releases. Whether it’s regular coverage or occasional interviews and album reviews, he continues to search for the most relevant news for his audience and find the best new releases in the genre. What excites him the most is finding pop culture stories of interest, as well as a deeper passion for the art form of hip-hop and its contemporary output.
Specifically, Gabriel enjoys the fringes of rap music: the experimental, boundary-pushing, and raw alternatives to the mainstream sound. As a proud native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, he also stays up-to-date with the archipelago’s local scene and its biggest musical exponents in reggaetón, salsa, indie, and beyond.
Before working at HotNewHipHop, Gabriel produced multiple short documentaries, artist interviews, venue spotlights, and audio podcasts on a variety of genres and musical figures. Hardcore punk and Go-go music defined much of his coverage during his time at the George Washington University in D.C.
His favorite hip-hop artists working today are Tyler, The Creator, Boldy James, JPEGMAFIA, and Earl Sweatshirt.
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