Wale covers Honey magazine along with a interview and Rocsi gives a great interview which is one that we all been waiting for. Wale talks about album sales, success and Solange? My girl Rocsi Diaz tells the people why she is not a jump off and how she worked hard to get where she is.
READ MORE for the full interviews.
Wale’s got a thing for chicks who rock Air Max. He’s distracted by one as we’re setting up for the first shot of the day. L.A.’s breezy, blue expanse serves as his backdrop.
"Hey,” he shouts as she’s passing. “I like your sneakers."
A middle-aged white woman in a floppy, white sunbonnet jogs by blazing some purple Nikes. She looks back to check out her suitor, chokes out a nervous chuckle, and picks up her speed. We all fall out laughing. Then the collective gaze shifts back to the 24-year-old rapper’s own feet. He’s wearing the same pair. And yes, they’re purple, too.
Wale is that dude.
Funny and fashionable — the DC emcee gets as much credit for his kicks as his punchlines. Right now, just days from his album drop date, Wale is in set position at the starting block. Even though he’s been here before — five times to be exact — this is his major label debut moment. Attention: Deficit is his opus in legitimacy. His Olympic dive into the mainstream. He may have yoked up a grip of fans with every mixtape he leaked along the way (from Mixtape About Nothing to Back To The Feature), but releasing a Roc Nation project (and a single featuring pop parfait Lady Gaga) is an entirely different endeavor.
Wale is a complex character. It seems that almost everything he reveals to Honey competes with popular perception. He has a rep for being a cocky dude. Well, that guy is nowhere to be found during our time together. The subject of our photo shoot is modest — more uncertain than insecure. Even poised on the apex of his career, with infinite industry cosigns and a major label push, he’s anxious, not confident.
“This is my biography,” Wale says of Attention: Deficit, which leaked a couple of weeks before it’s official date. “It’s honest. Raw emotion. It’s close to me. That’s why part of me will be a little offended if it doesn’t get heard. I don’t want people to take lack of sales as me taking a hit. This is something different. My label is letting me put out an album with a single that released seven months ago. We’re not going for first week sales. We’re only shipping out 30,000 of them. We’re going for that grind. We’re showing people that you can build a fanbase the old fashioned way.”
Wale is knee-deep in the digital age. A couple of his peers are doing laps but he gets it.
“I’ve got work to do before I can even catch up to Cudi and Drake,” he admits. “They’ve progressed a little bit quicker than I have. I worked twice as hard because I wasn’t fortunate enough to be under a successful rapper to inherit some of their fan base. I had to work for it all and my city had to hold me down.”
Wale may have DC on lock and the Internets all a-twitter, but he’s more anxious to attract some estrogen to his audience. His latest effort is a damn good stab at the panties. He’s got that whole spoken-word thing going on, and an affinity for meaty metaphors and cipher-worthy similes. Almost every track on the album is as likely to show up on your favorite rapper’s Most Played list as it is your YSL-worshipping homegirl’s. And somehow, it never feels forced.
“I think people try too hard to market to females,” says Wale. “They insult their intelligence. I feel like there are going to be a lot of females who miss out on some great music on my album just because I wasn’t a huge radio artist.”
Not if we have anything to do with it. The records speak for themselves. It’s not about slipping in a random “respect” anthem or sticky-sweet hook — he actually talks to us. Sans condescension. And though his female-friendly tracks may garner gallons of groupie love, it’s a different type of chick that gets Wale’s attention. No deficit there.
“It’s about the intangibles in 2010,” he says. “The superficial shit is cool — like, yeah she can fuck, or she got a big butt. That’s the x-factor. We’re not going to have sex 24/7 so we need to be friends. I want a girl who you could hijack all her extra artificial cosmetics for a week and not even notice. Somebody who’s smart and can stimulate me mentally because when you on the road it’s not like you can look at ‘em or touch ‘em. I can’t stand girls who don’t challenge their intellect. It don’t hurt if she can sing a little bit.”
Wait, could it be? A witty reference to his rumored industry crush? The blogs have been buzzing about a relationship between him and Solange for months. The infamous Central Park picnic pics. Their flirty (and very public) tweets don’t do much to hinder the gossip, either. Back in the telly, we get a glimpse of another side of Wale. (Truth serum comes in many forms and flavors.)
“I do love her,” he admits of Solange, flashing a Cheshire. “We’re friends. She’s amazing. She’s a good person. Any single mother contributing to society the way she does — I got a lot of love for them. She’s got to do a lot on her own and raise a young black man in this day and age, so my hat goes off to her. She’s definitely an anomaly. And the way she can do that and manage to do the same things that I complain about having to do.”
His affection is as obvious as a set of flushed cheeks. And impossibly adorable. Wale, the former mixtape rapper from inner city DC, is borderline giddy. “Did you interview Solange about me?” Wale asks. He’s sprawled across his bed; head practically buried in the pillow. “Did she smile when you mentioned my name?”
Wale is dead ass. But not in a corny, love sick pit-bull way. His honesty is endearing. Wale insists that he and Solange are just friends but it didn’t take a crowbar to pry his desires out of him. He stops singing MGMT’s “Electric Feel” long enough to address his future.
“It would be nice to settle down,” Wale says. “I wish that was coming soon. I’ve done a lot, man. I have no interest in accidentally getting a groupie pregnant, I’ll tell you that much. I don’t want to be the 50-year-old pops. I wanna be like, Yo, I’m bout to take off tour, go fly to see the wife, the girl, the kids or whatever I got, then come back to this bullshit-ass lifestyle with all these fair-weather friends. It’s about real love.”
(Yeah, we're fans. And we're not talking about Mary J.)
Source: Honeymag.com
The tiny BET host doesn’t engage in the whirl of activity surrounding her. As her hair stylist and make-up artist go to work, and the fashion assistants bullet past her for last-minute adjustments, Rocsi Diaz — in a voice barely above a whisper — reminds the room that she has to be out of the Brooklyn studio in less than two hours for a meeting. She’s about her business. Her glass of Redbull and vodka remains untouched, still posted up next to a posse of eye shadows, blushes and glosses on the table.
The 25-year-old doesn’t crack her first smile until the pre-shoot convo shifts to Halloween and costumes — she’ll be Lady Gaga. The TV host is perfectly aware that her demeanor comes off a bit cold. She admits it took her BET producers months to realize that she didn’t hate them; she’s just quiet.
“Rocsi the personality and Rocsi the person are two different people,” she says.
And Rocsi the personality gets a lot of shit. She’s been called out of her name on blogs and trashed by commenters. It seems that everything about her is scrutinized — her wardrobe choices on 106th & Park, her ears when she pulls her hair back, and her alleged affair with Michael Misick, the former Premier of the Turks and Caicos Islands and LisaRaye’s current husband.
“I think a lot of these Web sites need a story.” Rocsi says. “They need to find somebody to pick on, and I just so happen to be one of those girls. I’ve always had that coming up against Free on a black network and not being black.”
And although she won’t discuss what her manager refers to as the “LisaRaye situation,” she did touch on her relationship choices. “With men in my life, I’ve always made good choices. I would love to think that. It’s just really hard to trust people, and that’s just coming from not knowing everybody’s intentions,” Rocsi says.
If it’s not LisaRaye’s husband, it’s her 106th & Park co-host, Terrence J, Floyd Mayweather, Trey Songz, or Tyrese.
“I spent time doing radio so anybody that came on that [106th & Park] couch, I had already interviewed. I had weight to my name already. So Queen Latifah, Ludacris, Lil’ Wayne, Baby, all these people respected me. They know me; they know I’m a hardworker. I just went out last night, and I had a genuine good time. I hardly ever really go out,” Rocsi says. “And the next day its ‘Rocsi’s dating … popping bottles with Trey Songz … tryna get with ...’ I was like ‘What?! No, I wasn’t even sitting at his table!’” If I take a picture with somebody, I make it a point not even to put my arm around them. And it’s so hard because people just want to pick on you. I’m like ‘Dude, you don’t sleep with everyone you take a picture with.’ Like, come on. I think it’s getting to an ignorant stage.”
“I got where I’m at because of my work,” Rocsi insists. “I never had to lay on my back to get where I was. I come from a Latino background where family and the way we were brought up was very important. That’s how we conducted ourselves as ladies. And that’s a very important thing to my family, so yeah, when these blogs come out and they start talking shit — you’re messing with what my parents instilled in me. And I know it isn’t true. But I’m glad I have great family members who know that I wasn’t brought up that way, to not be blinded by this industry.”
“It hurts when my brothers call me,” she continues. “I mean it’s real bad when it gets to the point where everything’s so unbearable. You really got to have that strength, because if I didn’t have that strength in me, I would kill myself. There are some days when I’m like ‘How bad do I want to kill myself right now? What is the point of going on when so many people despise me or hate what I do?’”
Rocsi’s not suicidal. Hard on herself at times, perhaps, but she prays to keep her strength. “At the end of the day, I don’t meltdown because I’m still going to be on BET,” Rocsi says. “Internet gangsters are so tough. They’re so tough.”
It was her shocking revelation on national television in July that gave millions of viewers a peek at Rocsi “the person” and may have garnered her more fans than dissenters. During an episode of 106th & Park that discussed self-image, Rocsi admitted to dealing with anorexia for about three years when she was a high school cheerleader.
“You’re never really cured, because sometimes you have to psych yourself up that you’re eating healthy, you’re at a healthy weight. As women you have those fat days, but in my mind, those days are a little too frequent,” Rocsi says. “To this day, when somebody calls me thick, that’s not a compliment to me. Don’t call me thick. I hate that. I think thick is fat. I used to think that if I had curves or stomach flab that meant I was fat. I used to go over 110 lbs, I would think ‘I’m fat.’ If I see on a scale 118 [lbs.], I would start starving myself to get myself down to what I need to be at.”
It’s not all about weight, though. The ridicule celebrities receive does not go unnoticed. “That’s why I give Solange props for cutting all her hair off,” she says. “I wish I could do that. My ears are too big, though.”
With accolades from men’s magazines, and the decision to do a King magazine spread in 2007, her confidence seems palpable. Plus, the five-feet and some change host is pretty petite, although she admittedly doesn’t come from a naturally small family.
“We’re Latinos. We like to eat,” she says. “The majority of the people in my family were heavyset.”
Born in Honduras and bred in the Big Easy, Rocsi moved to Dallas to live with her father when her mother relocated to Egypt in 2000. She got her first taste of radio in Texas as a member of a street team.
“It was just an opportunity to have a cool job at the time,” Rocsi recalls. “I became infatuated with the radio station. I started hanging out in the studio trying to learn how the boards work.”
The programming director had her reading commercials within three months and she found herself on a weekend show shortly after. Then HOT 97 in Boston called with a job offer. Considering her track record, it’s easy to assume she’s already planning life after BET. And she is, kind of. Rocsi wants to be an actress. She’s taking classes, checking out some scripts, but she assures me she’s happy at BET.
“I would love to do film and [be] casted … in a dramatic role. I just want to be great at [acting]. Until then, I love my job and there’s nothing in the world that would bring me to leave 106th. I think we’re getting bigger and badder and there’s no point in me leaving right now. But I could dab,” Rocsi says. “Acting is my therapy. I could be somebody else and if I want to cry, I can cry, if I want to scream out … because if Rocsi does it, Rocsi looks crazy.”
We don’t think so. Scream all you want, girl.
For more information on Rocstar Rebuilds, Rocsi’s non-profit organization that helps rebuild schools affected by Hurricane Katrina, check out her official website.
Source: Honeymag.com
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