ShyBelligerent shines a light on vulnerability in L.A. hip-hop

ShyBelligerent is hurting.

You can see it in his videos, where he paces helplessly through cemeteries and city streets and unfurnished bedrooms. You can hear and feel it in his voice. The 30-year-old rapper born Michael William, who is rail-thin with sharp, angular features and a pencil mustache, is also fearless on the page. He writes about all that’s been done to him, and all that he’s had to do.

“I can’t forget about the past,” he wails on his latest album, “It’s a Ugly Come Up.” “Where the Hennessey at? I’m finna down that. My whole life, I’ve been down bad.” The beats, mostly piano-based, are exquisitely complementary. Shy himself is movingly human — full of vim but also lonesome and afraid.

“I got to plot it out,” Shy says of the new album. “I actually got to make it a great project.” Much of his previous work was rushed and improvised. This time around, though, Shy took his sweet 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, lyrics are of secondary importance. His power is in his voice — a twitchy, erratic, untethered yelp — that reveals him not as a victim, but as a vessel of chronic pain. The Compton native says he is tormented by what he’s experienced or, more to the point, what he can’t un-experience. How appropriate that Shy tweets under the handle “@sbbenthroughit.”

His song “Cry Me a River,” is a desperate airing of grievances. Thus far, “River” is the most viral song Shy has ever made (156,000 YouTube views and counting).

“In the L.A. music scene, my problem as a producer is that everybody sounds like everybody else,” says TooRawEntertainment, Shy’s producer who sends him beats from his studio in Arizona. “[Shy] definitely stands out. His delivery is crazy and his energy is even crazier. And he tells the truth, for real, in his raps.”

The “Cry Me a River” video captures the L.A. rapper flopping around in a raggedy tent adjoining a rail yard. Shy is not unhoused — he is in fact 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, at times he seems lost in his chaotic interior world. In conversation, the rapper lives up to the implied duality in his name — alternating between quiet and rambunctious. But if you only know him through his music, nothing can prepare you for just how demure and put-together he is in real life.

“I think it’s one of the most remarkable things about him,” says DeJon Paul, a rap critic and blogger from Inglewood who is also a regular on the popular hip-hop podcast “No Jumper.” His local gravitas provides a refreshing contrast to “No Jumper” host Adam22. Each year Paul rolls out the local equivalent of XXL magazine’s Freshman Class list. Shy was one of the chosen few in 2023.

“He has this bombastic personality on wax and in his videos,” Paul said. “ But when you hang out with him or when you interview him, when you run into him in public, he’s quiet, stoic, he’s to himself, he’s reserved.” The explanation for that lies in Shy’s upbringing.

“It wasn’t your typical mother-father scenario,” Shy says. “My mother was supposed to fight for me, but she just wasn’t able to.” His mother walked out when he was an infant. His unstable father was not any better prepared for parenthood. As a child he was “signed over” to his stern, churchgoing grandmother and jazz-enthusing grandfather. Shy remained in their care until he was 15.

Some good came of this familial arrangement. His grandfather instilled in him a musical curiosity that persists to the present day (“That’s why my style is so unique”). But Shy was a cowed and glum child. His world, small to begin with, shrank by two when his parents left his life. He couldn’t make sense of it. The more he fumbled for answers, the more overwhelmed he became by entropy and uncertainty.

“Later down the line,” Shy says now, “I was able to speak up and ask questions and figure things out.” But in grieving his lost youth, he became quarrelsome and sometimes belligerent. Shy’s trajectory is all too familiar: frightened, neglected boys often become angry men.

For a time he sought release and restoration in the classroom (his favorite course was Honors English). The gridiron was another precious sanctuary; Shy played defensive end on the Compton High football team. Even then, however, he had designs on a rap career; it was around 2009 when he got serious about his craft. L.A. is a networker’s paradise and Shy likes to network, but he didn’t always. His teenage apprenticeship was completely informal and self-supervised.

“This was when YG was in his prime,” Shy says. At the time, YG was an up-and-coming wiry truth-teller, a fellow Compton rapper who turned into a superstar and provided Shy with a blueprint of how to succeed. “I was trying to make a name for myself then, but with the little resources I had, the little knowledge I had at that moment, it was rocky.”

William had at his disposal only the cheapest of equipment — RadioShack microphones and “busted-up laptops.” Eventually he built a functioning studio out of primitive equipment.

If Shy’s creative life suffered, it was because he had competing responsibilities. He fathered a child at 15. This enraged his fundamentalist grandparents, who sent him scrambling for steady work, much like Ice Cube on “A Bird in the Hand.” He worked in dollar stores, warehouses — any place that would pay him a legal wage. Shy’s employment history is largely aboveboard, but he’s done things for money that by his own admission are inexcusably vile.

As Shy’s rapping evolved, so too did his journalistic sense. He began to experiment with the vlogger model of YouTube street reporting. The following he gained from this activity wasn’t huge relative to the biggest vloggers, but it also wasn’t negligible. Shy says he has a knack for timing, for providentially capturing extraordinary scenes as they happen.

On tracks such as “Son of a Bitch,” William recounts a period in his life when he was “pimping hoes.” This isn’t a euphemism nor is it a case of hip-hop fabulism. He has direct experience trafficking women.

“It was for a short amount of time,” he says, while conceding that he 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. “I’ve seen a bigger picture now.” These may sound like limp platitudes, but on “Son of a Bitch,” Shy sounds like the most spiritually tortured ex-trafficker in hip-hop history. (Suga Free with a conscience? All jokes aside, their rapping 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’ve gone. Shy’s identity is bound up, almost inextricably, with this close-knit community of 35,000. Would there be a ShyBelligerent if he still were mooning around Compton?

Shy’s adopted home is fertile ground for rap talent. He currently lives in the low-slung, lemon-hued Nickerson Gardens apartment complex and identifies intensely with the place. In his X bio, Shy introduces himself as an unsigned artist from Nickerson Gardens. His free agency is a geographic catastrophe, and also an A&R failure, says Paul.

“I’m surprised TDE hasn’t snatched him up,” Paul says, referring to Top Dawg Entertainment, the prestigious label whose roster — Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock, Schoolboy Q — descends on Nickerson every year for a Christmas jamboree and toy drive.

Therein lies a critical action verb: snatch. Shy is forever snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He has talent, emotional courage, great sonic instincts (his beat selection is top-notch). But he often seems like an accident waiting to happen. “It’s a Ugly Come Up” is so feral, so brazenly uninhibited, that Schoolboy Q’s “Blue Lips” seems almost family-friendly by comparison.

Any major label would try to soften Shy’s rough edges — and who wants that? Certainly not him. For all the doubt and pain Shy has endured in his 30 years, for all the catastrophic blows to his psyche, he stands by his music. It’s his one source of self-esteem, self-efficacy and pride.

“I’m a musical genius,” he says flatly. Maybe that’s hyperbolic, maybe not, but his dramatic genius isn’t up for debate. In matters of using hip-hop to dramatize human hurt, there’s no question ShyBelligerent is as great as he says he is.