Photo courtesy of Ilana Roth
Back in Alumni Village, Alice Osborne, one of Charles’ best friends since high school, sparks a cigarette. “The arts have always been his thing. I’m guessing he’d probably say something along the lines of ‘oh, I didn’t start until this point in time,’ but that’s just him being modest. That the thing about him is, he’s unbelievably modest… But realistic at the same time, which is rare,” she says exhaling a stream of smoke.
With his back pressed into his chunky Purchase College desk chair, Charles Proileau vigorously shakes his head chanting “No, I’m not gonna do it. No, I’m not gonna do it. No, I’m not gonna do it,” recalling a time when his father told him he should rap. With his right hand he grabs his mason jar half-full of spiced rum mixed with orange juice and ginger beer, takes a sip, puts his fingertips together and shifts his seat to highlight his undivided attention.
It’s a Saturday night at SUNY Purchase and the clamor of a budding party in his apartment was making it’s way into his bedroom. Charles hops up to shut the door behind him and slams the space bar on his laptop. The third of 5 tracks off his up and coming EP as ENxVE starts to play. It’s dirty, a grainy quality that is unmistakably lo-fi. ENxVE’s trademark tenor pitched voice begins to spit verse after verse. The vocals are clean and calculated in stark contrast to his beat of choice. When Charles is ENxVE, his mouth is unstoppable. His wit and speed impressing anyone within earshot.
As the album hums in the background he continues to speak, getting lost in conversation about the inevitability of rapid stylistic evolution that electronically produced music enables. “I’m worrying that my intent to make dusty flips n shit is kind of being superseded by my need to make really hyped up stuff which is only pretty fun in the moment,” he says. What he wants as a musician is always plagued with external conflicts; struggling to strike a delicate balance between crowd pleasing tracks that knock and the lo-fi, lyric-heavy music that he loves to make.
Back in the living room, the crowd has increased in size as the sub woofers buzz and thump against the surface of their cheap wooden dining table. Charles grabs both empty mason jars and runs to the kitchen to refresh. Slamming the door behind him and plopping back into his desk chair he removes his glasses and plays with one dreadlock taking the story back to when ENxVE did not exist.
“My dad was a hip-hop artist. He always encouraged me to do it, and I always denied it.” he said. Proileu Senior was living in Atlanta working as a studio manager at the time of Charles’ budding interest in the art of spitting bars. Watching ENxVE perform now, one would be hard-pressed to imagine what he considers his initial lack of interest in pursuing the art. In his home town of New Rochelle, Proileau’s musical endeavor began upon entering high school. Where he was artistically is far from where he is now. He played guitar and wrote indie rock in a band called The Specifics with his present day college roommate, Devoye, who now produces hip-hop beats.
“To sum Charles up… It would be easier to sum anyone else up. He’s extremely diverse. He constantly struggles to be well-versed in everything. He’s got a lot of things going on in his head. Your average person wouldn’t be thinking the way he does. He is always on a train of thought and discovery. He wants to know and understand,” Devoye states.
His insatiable interest in music was what drove him to learn and try more. Slowly, Charles began to toy with the idea of starting a rap project. He always wrote but never shared.
Around his Junior year in high school, he paid a visit to his father at his studio in Georgia. He let slip the possibility of being interested in rap. However, despite his fathers excitement and offers to let him use his studio to record, he claims he was still unsure he wanted to commit.
“It’s funny because I just didn’t feel like there was any validation in it for me. I don’t need to do this. I don’t have to. Artistic practice in general, for me, is something I need to be fully okay with in myself before I can take someone elses word about it.”
Passion and integrity are his greatest motivators.
“It was cool being a studio rat for a little bit. Just watching all these dedicated musicians come in and do these sessions everyday,” he trailed off. With the mention of his studio experience it was very clear his younger self was getting comfortable with the idea of giving rap a try.
Soon enough his mind was set. “I was like. You know what? I like rapping enough to do this. I sat down— I was there for about a week, and it was 4 days of straight writing and recording.” While in the studio, he met producer and recording artist Stevie J, best known for the show Love and Hip-Hop: Atlanta. Prior to this encounter, Charles had never been placed in a situation that required the practice of artistic integrity.
J gets young Proileu alone and makes a proposition. In the voice of a pseudo music business sage he tells him that if he was serious about pursuing a hip-hop career, he should come to him for guidance. As Charles proceeds to end Stevie J’s pretentious statement he gripes, “-that moment I first spoke to him… I was just thinking, ‘Ugh, you are such a snake bastard.’ Everything about him smelled dirty and wrong. I wanted to be a righteous person and maybe it was a little presumptuous on my part but… If I had a business mind back then I would have been like ‘Hell yeah! Gimme a f*ckn contract!’ But I guess moral compass and whatnot kinda made me like, nah.”
It was inching past midnight and the crowd on the other side of the door was slowly dwindling. Delving further into the topic of his moral compass Charles speaks about his usage of the N word in his music. Shuffling his feet he looks back at his laptop and pulls up his browser. He goes to a Soundcloud page under his producer name [pzndrt] and plays some beats he’s released taking a sip of his drink with his left hand.
ENxVE is set to release his EP within the next month. With an album he’s been sitting on, on deck. He reveals his conflict, “I used the word Ni**a and it didn’t sink into me, the severity of the word. I always knew it was a serious thing and I also always knew that there was always a certain amount of privilege that I’m afforded as a black person being able to say it. It started to irritate me whenever I would hear it while listening back. I don’t want to use the word and have the connotations associated with the word to then have my work be defined.”
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