Musician raps to his own beat
Cade Hartong performs. Photos submitted
By Tom Victoria
Cade Hartong makes music in ZazaLand. The rapper, whose moniker is Zaza Cade, brings some melody to his music.
The musician described his style.
“I'm really like a melodic rap artist,” Cade said. “So I'm singing a little bit more on some of these beats. I'm trying to get my voice incorporated a little bit more, but also have many verses where I'm just straight rapping, talking about my life or my stories, those kinds of things.”
The 26-year-old rapper, who is based in Los Angeles, released the single It’s You on Valentine’s Day.
“It is a totally new vibe of anything I've ever done,” Cade said. “This is me getting into the singer-songwriter side of me where I started. It's funny how this song actually came about. I did it with one of my best friends named Phil (Miron AKA Phrequency) in the production school I went to last. For one of the homework assignments, two people got paired up and they blend this artist and this artist and now you two make a song. We got Kaytranada and somebody else. Then I sang on it and people just really loved it. We made it over a year ago and people have still been asking me to put it out, so we ended up putting it out.”
He dropped his latest tune, No More Small Towns, in March.
“No More Small Towns is the first little project I put together with the help of some friends,” Cade said. “I love it and think the listener will enjoy it because there are a few different vibes in there.”
Upon embarking on a music career, he picked Zaza, which is urban slang for marijuana and a first name to be found in the Old Testament, to be part of his stage name.
“It is just funny to me,” Cade said. “It was a trendy word, and I liked saying it at the time.”
He explained the importance of his craft.
“Music is my passion because it is who I am,” Cade said. “It is the only thing I feel at home doing, the only thing that feels right. It really is a universal language.”
He said it’s easier to express himself through music.
“It comes off more emotional,” Cade said. “I'm an emotional person. My emotions are kind of loud. When I'm angry, I can't help but show it in a way. And when I love, I love big and hard and too much. Whenever I sing or I get into my music, I can kind of turn that switch off and just let it be. I can feel what I want to feel to that full extent without having to feel like, okay, I need to step back because I don't want to hurt their feelings or I don't want to come off too strong. I can just do it, and you can't really judge me for it. I don't care if you do or not. This is just what I'm doing. So I feel like I'm more in my own comfortable zone in lyricism than when talking about things.”
He bases his lyrics on real-life experiences.
“These days, I'm definitely really tapping way more into my heart and my mind and speaking from them,” Cade said. “I'm not going to say everything I've ever said is 100 percent true. I'm sure there's some lyric about me talking about me doing something crazy like running from the cops. I've never ran from the cops in my life. There's a couple of things here and there just for the sake of maybe hip hop, but these days, I'm really avoiding that. I would say 90 percent at least of what I'm trying to say has pretty good merit to it.”
There’s one thing he hasn’t drawn upon from his life for songwriting.
“I've wrote about heartbreak, but I've never actually had my heart broken,” Cade said. “I've only had three girlfriends. I left all three of them, but I've wrote about heartbreak. Honestly, the heartbreak comes more because I had to leave them. They weren't what I wanted it to be, so that did hurt. It wasn't like I was in love and then she left me. It was more like I thought I was in love, but you weren't what I thought it was kind of thing.”
For the artist, whether it’s easier to write about good things happening or bad varies.
“It totally depends on the mood,” Cade said. “It's weird. It depends on the mood and how the music, the beat will hit me. If I get a beat that's sad and I'm in that mood, man, I can tap into that emotion. I can kind of get into that headspace, then it'll just kind of happen. If the beat is uplifting and hard and all fast, I'm going to talk about something good, talk about I'm making money or something. These days it's easier to write about good things, though. In general, it's easier to write about good things because lately my life has been just going straight up, straight uphill. I don't have anything to complain about these days, man. So I think these days it's real easy to write about the good things that happen.”
The artist has his own label, Aliens on Earth Records.
“It's very small deal right now,” he said. “Me and my brother (Nash) started it. It's official now. But right now, it's just us and a couple of close friends formed a collective. We're just all within this system right now, supporting each other, trying to build some capital. We're going to do a clothing line and merch apparel for the Zaza Cade brand. And then some other people with us, we'll try to help them with their merch.”
He was initially inspired by an influential hip hop artist.
“It was Lil Wayne,” Cade said. “He was for sure the first one that I was like I want to do what he does. I like listening to him. I've always been a little bit different from a lot of people. I was in southern Georgia, so this was middle of the woods. I lived like eight miles outside of a town. And the town I lived outside of, the population today is like 600, so nothing. Everybody only listens to country, Hank Williams Jr. and all these older people, and I would come up listening to Lil Wayne. They'd be like, what are you? We don't listen to this here.”
He took advantage of a pending birthday to acquire the album.
“I had a birthday and I told my grandma, I just want one CD and it's Lil Wayne's album I Am Not a Human Being,” Cade said. “She bought it for me. She's like, well, put it on, I want to hear it. The first song is called Gonorrhea. She said: oh, my god, I cannot believe I just bought this for you. She eventually came around. She realized that I'm not being influenced by the negativity of whatever might be there. I'm just engaged.”
He started rapping as a tyke.
“I was a little kid,” Cade said. “The way it started was that song Right Above It by Lil Wayne and Drake. It came on the TV. I recorded it. I wrote down all the lyrics on a piece of paper, so I could memorize them and go to school and recite the whole song for all my friends. And I did it. Then I felt empowered because I could do it, that I had memorized this whole song. Then that evolved into songwriting. Then from songwriting, I started rapping. When I was in high school, everyone knew me for freestyling. I was going around rap, battling people all the time in high school.”
As a teen, his music started by plucking strings.
“That's really where my musicianship really started to blossom,” Cade said. “I started off with a guitar. I taught myself how to play guitar, and I started writing songs. The reason I started getting good is because I really started tapping into real emotion. I wrote a song after the Sandy Hook school shooting a long time ago. It was powerful, man. I remember when I was playing it, I was young. I couldn't have been older than 13, maybe. I remember I would play for a lot of adults. Mind you, it was a very sensitive time, but it made a lot of people cry. From there, I just wrote song after song after song and just started flexing that muscle. After a little while, I started teaching myself piano. And piano is now my specialty instrument. It is my baby. I'm way better at the piano than I am the guitar.”
He lived in various states growing up.
“I was born in Florida,” Cade said. “I lived in Florida from about 1 to 7. Parents split. I moved to Georgia. I lived there till I was about 15, and then back to Florida with my dad for the remainder of high school.”
He’s now attending college to obtain a music business degree. Cade is a bit of an elder statesman at school.
“Here's what I love doing, especially because I'm 26 in a classroom full of 19-year-old people: I try to act like a role model to a lot of these people,” he said. “One of the first things I say is what is it you want to do? You got to get it in your head and start working towards that. Don't have this vague image of I want to be in music. Know where and find that.”
Cade wants his education to coincide with his music career.
“My brother and I are actually both in college right now,” he said. “We're in the same classes. He is my current manager, so he's going to business school right now to really learn the ins and outs of being a manager. I'm there so I can know it, too, just so I'm not out of the loop whenever anything comes up in the future.”
Cade’s prior education led to his heavier use of piano.
“I had gone to college before for a year for production right before this,” he said. “While I was there, I was producing because I thought I wanted to be a producer at first. The more I got into producing, I was making all my beats with piano. I would start with a piano and do something from there. Now, I like beats that have a piano melody in it.”
Case said his favoring a contemporary style makes pinning down his target audience a less than simple task.
“Funny enough I'm finding it hard,” he said. “Here's kind of the deal. Hip hop is for sure one of the most popular genres out there. You can go to most clubs, they're going to be playing hip hop. My issue is they're playing hip hop that had its heyday already. They're playing Drake and Lil Wayne and the songs I was listening to in high school or maybe five years ago, and they're good and I get that. But for me, I'm a person that's always looking for the next song. Something new. I heard it and I give respect to, obviously, the oldies, but I like new things. I like to consume new music as often as I can. And it's really hard right now for me to find clubs that are playing the new underground rap artists. Me and my brother right now are actually looking for a venue to try to start implementing that around L.A. I think the new age hip hop is hard to find. More people are hating it because every time something new comes out, everyone wants to hate on it at first. So I think it's going to take another year, but eventually I think it'll be more popular.”
Another reason to establish a venue are the deplorable tactics of some club owners.
“It's kind of tough out here in L.A.,” Cade said. “The weird thing is there's a lot of pay to play out. Very predatory on new artists. When I first started performing, there were one or two spots I would pay. These guys are scumbags. I was a new artist, so this is new to me. I didn't know how the game works, especially in L.A. I come from Georgia. I don't know how scummy people operate with money. The guy's like, yeah, you can come perform. It's only 200 to come perform. I'm like, I'm not going to get paid 200. And he's like, cut it in half. And then I show up, I pay 100 because I'm like, okay, well, I'll pay 100 and get to perform. He was telling me you got to sell tickets, man. I got there and he had sold none. Basically, there was nobody there. The only people that were there were the other people performing. I was like, why did I pay 100? Why would I pay so much money to perform for your friends? I paid you to perform for your friends. What the hell is that?”
The sky’s the limit for the rapper.
“I plan on going as far and huge as possible.” Cade said. “Not necessarily the fame. It's not really the fame that I want. It's more like I want the whole world to hear what I got to say and to listen to me. I hope that the whole world would like it. I want to sell at every arena that there is on earth multiple times, all in one week.”
He doesn’t have free time with his current schedule.
“My time is totally just absolutely consumed by music right now,” Cade said. “I actually landed an internship at a studio, which is right here in L.A. A lot of actually famous people go there to record. It's a very nice studio. So right now, if I got extra free time, I hit up the guys at the studio and I go over there and I hang out with them, help them around the studio, meet artists. I'm making music right now. There is no free time. Basically, we're just completely dedicated to this.”
Both he and his brother are trained to be disciplined.
“Nash and I are both military veterans,” Cade said. “We both served in the Marine Corps for five years. It wasn't that fun. That's why I got out. That's also why I'm 26 in college now was because the five-year military gap. So a little bit older in it now, but with the G.I. Bill, they're paying Nash and I to go to school. Right now, school is my job. That's how I'm pretty self-sustaining is because of school. I'm getting paid to go to school and school is covered. As soon as school ends, it's time for me to either get a job or make music happen. So I think that's why. That's where the real dedication is. I either got to go work at a grocery store or I can be performing and trying to make money from that. We look at it like we have a year left of basically total, raw dedication to this, so we should just completely immerse ourselves in it.”
Military service enabled him to travel.
“I went to Japan,” Cade said. “Nothing too scary, but I was over there for two years in Japan. I was in Iwakuni, and while I was there, I did air traffic control, so another fairly complicated job. I got all the qualifications I needed. Matter of fact, when I got out of the military, I got hired as an air traffic control specialist in a field in San Diego. Pay was great. I started off $38 an hour.”
However, the money wasn’t worth it to him.
“I immediately realized, I'm not built for this,” Cade said. “I can't do this. I can do it, but I can't do this for life. It was a couple of older gentlemen I was working with that were also vets, but they were the kind of vets that were, like: back in my day it was harder. They just would do that all the time. And they would just talk about their homes and their chickens and stuff. The job would be stressful. I ended up getting depressed because all my time got involved with work. I had the most money I had ever had at the time, for sure, but didn’t mean anything. So that spurred me to chase music and now I'm here.”
He enjoys interacting with an audience, but it took time to become acclimated to being on stage.
“The first time I ever performed was at the last school I went to for production,” Cade said. “So last year, I got up on stage and I sang a song. I was so nervous that my legs were shaking. I forgot half the lyrics to the song. The second performance, I did it in public, and I was way less nervous. But me and my brother recorded it. Afterwards, we analyzed the hell out of it. He looked at me like, yeah, you're still awkward up there. By the fourth time I was performing, I'm like, now I'm ready. Put me up there. People love this, and I love it. I am an entertainer. People like me when I'm up there. I'm ready for it now. I performed a couple of times at school, at my new school. The first time I performed, there was such a good thing for me because there were eight people sitting out there and two teachers. If I can get up here and put on a good show in front of this awkward, weird crowd that no one's even bobbing their head, then I should have no reason to not be doing it in front of people that are really enjoying it. So I think I'm really getting acquainted with performing live. I really do love it.”
He now spurs the crowd to participate in that interaction more.
“There's been times where I'm performing and then everyone's sitting down,” Cade said. “I'll be like, everybody stand up, start dancing. Then everybody starts dancing, and then all of a sudden the vibe is just different. It's like the first guy to jump in the pool. Nobody wants to take the shirt off and jump in the pool first, but when he does it, everybody's going to do it. No one wants to get up and walk to the front of the stage and start dancing first because they think, oh, I'm going to look like a dumbass. But then whenever they do it, all of a sudden everybody else is like, oh, thank god, I've been wanting to dance. I just needed someone to do it first. But I think the more energetic the crowd, the more that I get jazzed up and want to feed off of that.”
He stays motivated by focusing on what could be the future.
“I stay motivated because I'm in Los Angeles, California, in an apartment with my brother,” Cade said. “I started a record label and I come from the woods of Georgia. No matter what happens to me from this point on, I have come ridiculously far. That just shows me that there's so much more that I could do. If I can do it, I would never forgive myself if I didn't try to. I know I can do it, so I just need to. The more I tell myself that, the more that it motivates me and I manifest things a lot.”
He doesn’t let negative situations deter progress.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Cade said. “We could learn from it, and we can move forward. All of these factors motivate me. The universe will tell me sometimes, you're doing the right thing, man. Something will happen that just really concretes it in my brain that we're in the right boat. This is not the wrong decision. It's over and over and over these days. The universe will try me, try me, try me and then really reward me. I wrote a song a couple of weeks ago that is for sure the best song I've written in a long time. In that same week, my car broke down, had to go get it replaced. Two of my exes hit me up. In the same week, I had a test that I was struggling with in school. It was so many things in this week that I wrote this song. I was just saying no to everything, not letting anything distract me, staying focused. Then at the end of that week, I landed the job at the internship. I met many famous people the first day I was there. This is my reward for saying no to all the distractions. That kind of stuff motivates me every time, because how can you not be.”
He offered advice to aspiring musicians.
“The greatest advice that I took was to just start going outside to events,” Cade said. “As often as you can, put your nose to the grindstone and listen for mixing events. Go to where there are producers, go let someone hear a tune that you've made or just go to events. When you go to events, the most important thing is there's two keys right now in networking. You got to be sober, so I know you might go to a club and want to get a drink. Don't. It throws you off as an unprofessional. If you're looking for the big times, you want to appear professional. Number two is you got to walk up to people and extend your hand and shake their hand and introduce yourself, because people aren't going to come up to you, especially high value individuals. They don't know you. They have no reason to come up and introduce themselves to you, so you have to have the courage to do it. For some, that's very hard. Even when people have fame, some people get nervous about that.”
He stressed rappers should have variety in their lyrics.
“I would say the one thing that I see a lot of rappers do these days that turn me off from them as an artist is their lyrical flow,” Cade said. “A lot of times, what I end up seeing rappers doing is their flow will be very on beat. It's almost like a metronome. It's a monotone thing. Try to think of lyrics as an instrument, really. There's notes you can play, and there's different rhythms you can play with your voice. Try to experiment with that. Think of how you do, maybe, a snare, like tat tat tat. You could do that with your voice. I just ran right back, and then it's kind of the same thing. Some people just don't quite want to play around with the voice. They just want to stay right on beat.”
He stressed the importance of not waiting to make music.
“Just really getting out there and then write music every day, write as much music as you can and put it out.”
Cade’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zaza_cade_/
Cade’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvd1vkkR73KYHdLe3ln8pJQ
Cade’s TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@zaza_cade_