Json
What do you think about when you hear the name Json? Perhaps you think about the name being loaded with some type of religious significance (J= Jesus & son). Or, if you’re a long time fan, you might think about his earlier album, City Lights and the intensely “rough and manly” lyrics he spits. You’ll be surprised to hear that Json came up with his stage name by simply dropping the ‘a’ from his first name (Jason). You’ll probably be even more surprised to hear that in his new album Growing Pains, he’s traded his street flow for lighter vocals and more emotional verses.
This St. Louis native has been making music for about seven years now and has proven that he is capable of evolving as a Christian rap artist. Growing Pains, his new album available February 21st, 2012, incorporates tracks that are innovative both sonically and thematically. Sprinkle innovation with amazing collaborations that include Tedashii, AD3, Mikeschair and Pro and you’ve got Json’s Growing Pains. The album is a tell-all of the artist’s life experiences, struggles and trials in the past year and emerges with a practical message for all believers: we are constantly being made over.
Read on for more from Json on his new album, his favorite track, and his take on a rarely discussed issue in our nation.
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BC: What is the meaning behind the title Growing Pains?
Json: Growing Pains is really based off of a text in Hebrews. I think its 5:14. It says that Christ was perfected through suffering. So, God is particularly at work behind the scenes using our suffering and even leading us into suffering, that we might grow as a result of it. So “Growing Pains”, I think, is the exact life of the believer.
We’re not called to try to pray our way out of suffering and out of pain. We’re called to trust God to keep us through them because he’s using them as a means of our own growth. So really it’s an encouragement for every believer because we all suffer, though often we try to shake face and act like everything is gravy all the time as opposed to saying, “Yo, this is where I am but God is bringing me through it”.
One of the scriptures that really reminds me of that is Jesus being lead into temptation. The text says that the spirit lead Him through the wilderness and particularly to be tested. That proved His son-ship. That proved Him as the Messiah as he endured the temptation of Satan. So I think we face various trials, like it says in 1st Peter, that prove our character and prove that we are sons and women of God.
BC: What's the story behind your single "Make Me Over?"
Json: “Make Me Over” is really what I’ve been going through. The Lord has been making me over so, in direct connection with the album Growing Pains, which really is a picture of my last year of life and just everything I have been going through. “Making Me Over” was just the idea of everything that I have been experiencing over the course of this last year that’s been difficult, that’s been tough, that’s been trying, God has been making me over as a result of it. Every believer is being made over. We’re being made new.
So, that particular song is crazy because I was in the studio with Pro when he was working on his album and me and him wrote the hook for his album. You know, it was one of those songs where you’re like “Man, I wish that track was mine.” But he ended up not using the song for his album and was like “Yo, J you want this track” and I was like yeah. He made the beat and it just worked. It just fit perfectly with my concept and with my project. So, “Making Me Over”, AD3 is on the hook and Street Symphony is on the track.
BC: You have two great collaborations on this single with AD3 and Tedashii. How did this collab come about?
Json: Well, AD3 was on the “Goon” track from my last album. Pro was actually singing that hook at first. But everybody thought it would be better if we had somebody who could actually sing on the joint. So, AD3 was the first person that came to mind and he murdered the track. Actually, I let Lecrae hear the song and he said, ‘Your verses are dope but I think it would be doper if you let somebody lay some vocals on top of your joint.’
So, the stuff that’s in the verses that AD3 is doing was kind of an idea from Lecrae after I let him hear the song and I feel like it brought a lot of flavor to the verses. As for Tedashi, AD3 and I were talking and he said, ‘Yo, I think Tedashii’s voice will sound great on this track.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it probably would.’ So I hit up Tedashii and he knocked out the verse in less than five days. So it just kind of brought itself together. I always enjoy working with those dudes too.
BC: What is the writing process for you like? Do you tend to sit down with the word at your side? Where does your inspiration come from?
Json: Well, honestly, this album most of my inspiration came from life and what I was experiencing. So, everything is pretty much personal on this album. The writing experience for this project was writing everything in my head and then recording it. Ninety percent of the album I didn’t even write down. I didn’t really write much of anything down. I actually had to record it because I would have forgot it. I didn’t have to write anything until after I recorded it to make sure that I have the lyrics on paper. Well, not paper because people don’t really use paper anymore (laughs).
So, the writing process was really about hearing things that were very personal to me. Some of them I had concepts for. I have a song called ‘Secrets’ and it’s about sexual abuse. The experience for that was I already had a concept and knew that I wanted to write about this subject matter so I went to St. Louis to the studio and J.R. started making the beat boom. Once it was done I got home and started feeling the emotion of the track and just wrote according to the emotion.
A lot of my writing experience was really just more so me taking the experiences I was going through and then writing them. One example is I have a song called ‘Goodbye’ on the album. It’s the last song on the album and it’s really just about us leaving St. Louis and the difficulty that my wife had with that. On Thanksgiving, my wife thought that her family wasn’t going to be able to visit her so she was just hurt, crying and a little upset about that.
So, I immediately went to the studio, literally ten minutes after we had the conversation and I wrote the second verse for “Goodbye”. When you hear it, you’ll see that I’m talking about the experience me and her just had. It’s personal in that way, where literally things would happen and I was writing about them and just going into the studio and emotionally expressing. It was a really therapeutic process for me.
BC: Do you tend to write your music in a way that your listeners will interpret it for themselves?
Json: I think I wrote this album very general so the listeners wouldn’t think I was talking about myself all the time. So, even though the album is very personal, I don’t think every song is written from a personal outlook or a personal view per se. The listener is always going to interpret things the way they want to, but you want to write in a way where in some cases you want the listener to think through certain things. Some things I write, I want the listener to really wrestle with what I’m saying. Other things I write, I really want the listener to feel what I’m saying. Some things I write, I really want the listener to feel like they are along with me. I try to think about what the listener is going to feel like when they approach it.
BC: What sets this album apart from your previous releases and what can listeners expect from it?
Json: I think this album, in my opinion, is my best work to date, but I think it’s very, very different from anything I’ve done prior. First, it’s different sonically. Percussion on the album is very diverse. I have some records people would probably consider pop. Most of my prior records are very manly, like in a rough sense. This music is more emotional. So, I think for men who are just willing to go emotionally to these places with me, they will be able to really relate if they are willing to go to those places. Sometimes it’s difficult for men to deal with emotion. I think women are going to love the project because women deal with emotion a lot more often than men do.
Also, there’s a lot of singing on this album. It just went hand in hand with how I was feeling. I will also say that it’s different in that it’s the most practical album I’ve written. It’s a very, very practical album. I feel like any Christian can come to the album and relate to it in some way, shape, form or fashion. But it’s also different in that it’s a very mature album. You have to come to it with maturity. You can’t just come to it and expect to get hype until you fall out; it’s just not one of those albums. I think that’s definitely one of things that sets it apart. And it’s not a street album. Like, City Lights was a straight street record but this album is not evangelistic at all. I wrote it for the believer. I wouldn’t say this is the joint you would pop in for a dude who doesn’t know the Lord; I wrote it for the believer. I would definitely say it differs in that way.
When I think about City Lights, I think about something real rough. I tweeted that City Lights was the hard me, like the man who grew up without a father and this album is the emotional me, the man who grew up raised by a woman. I think those are the contrasts you can definitely see in the project.
BC: What song on the album resonates with you the most, the one you find yourself putting on repeat?
Json: Man, honestly, I can’t really say. It’s hard for me to pick one song. And really, this is not a marketing answer. But, really, I can’t think of just one song. I love ‘Behind the Clouds’ that features Christ Lee, that joint just makes you feel good. I also have a song with Mikeschair called ‘It’s Alright’. I love that joint. It’s really hard to say exactly which song I like the most, but I will say a song that I think is going to be very impactful is called “Secrets” and it’s about sexual abuse.
Just looking up stats, particularly on women who have been sexually abused, it’s amazing what the statistics look like. One in four women are sexually abused and I think about 50-60% of teenage pregnancies are a result of women who have been sexually abused. That’s just an astronomical number; it’s just unbelievable. [There are] 39 million reported sexual abuse cases in America.
I think this song is very graphic. So, you feel the intensity of what sexual abuse is and what it does to someone but it’s also very hopeful and it’s not written in a way where I then got saved, everything is okay and it’s wonderful. It’s not written like that because I don’t think that’s true. But, it’s written from the place where the person is still wrestling through it yet trusts the Lord as they wrestle through it. And it’s a subject that’s very rarely talked about, period. Not just in our genre, but period. It’s very rarely talked about. So, I think it’s going to give a voice to those who have experienced it because most people who have experienced it don’t say much about it. Most of them hide it. That’s why the song is called “Secrets”. I think it’s going to be a very impactful song.
BC: We always like to ask at BC what's your conversion story? How and when did you come to Christ?
Json: I’ve been saved now almost ten years. My conversion story is kind of lengthy but I will just say that I grew up as a typical dude in the hood: selling drugs, robbing, a bunch of stupid stuff. I got saved at the age of twenty-one. I think the Lord ultimately used my wife (she wasn’t my wife then but she’s my wife now). She just made the decision to make a stand for the Lord and she didn’t want to be with me unless I made that same decision. So I was like deuces. She bounced and we broke up. Over the course of time the Lord was just doing something in my heart and I just got rocked by the Gospel. I never really understood that me and God had real beef.
So often people talk about how much God loves us that I thought His love would trump Him having beef with me and having to judge me. But, just the reality that I knew I was definitely a sinner and thought that God would just let me off the hook because He loves us, [I realized] that I had to place my trust in His Son. That just caught my attention. So, it’s been almost ten years now. I’ve been married eight years and have three kids. I’ve been doing music for the last six or seven years. The Lord has just been killing it, man. I definitely wouldn’t turn back for anything.
So that’s the short version, but we have a documentary that’s thirty minutes long that walks in detail throughout this whole thing. We interview my mother and a lot of other people. You can go to YouTube and watch parts one and two. Just search City Lights documentary and get it all in real detail.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoRPigVjAm0
BC: What is your favorite scripture?
Json: My favorite is 2 Corinthians 4th chapter, really the whole chapter, but specifically verses 7-11. It’s my favorite text because it just points to the reality of what I think every believer wrestles with. The word says,
“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power of God may be of God and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our bodies.”
Just the idea of that being a promise of pain and suffering, but it’s also a promise of God keeping us. It’s just dope whenever we experience things to know that God is keeping His promise to be with us so it’s just definitely encouraging.
