Joey Bada$$ Talks New Residency at Columbia University & Creating a Safe Space for Men of Color

Donning a fitted navy blue suit and with a cocktail in hand, Joey Bada$$ stands to address the lucky few patrons invited to dine with him inside New York’s lavish Caribbean fusion restaurant Tatiana By Kwame Onwuachi. Braised oxtail, honeynut piri piri salad and half-drunken palomas blanket each table inside the dimly lit eatery. Industry luminaries like KidSuper’s Colm Dillane, and Cordae can be spotted mingling amongst the crowd, but as Joey stands, a powerful hush falls over each table.

Joey and his longtime manager Sophia Chang remind everyone why they’re here, in support of something bigger. The dinner – sponsored by Tres Generaciones who also awarded the rapper with the Impact Award at Billboard’s Power Players Event last September – is to support Joey’s ImpactMENtorship program, which launched last year to provide free mentorship and support for men of color. 

“I think people sleep on the fact of how important it is, especially for communities of color, to have proper representation,” Joey tells the crowd as silverware and glasses clatter around him. “I’ve been navigating this industry for the last 12 years of my life, and every room and every table I come into, the circumstances are the same. There’s not enough people who look like [us] in positions of leadership.”

While patrons begin to applaud in approval, Joey quiets that down to continue his stirring speech. 

“This ain’t about me,” He says. “Making music is cool, having platinum records and stuff like that is cool. Starring in TV shows and all of that, it’s cool. But this, this is my greatest creation to date.”

While Joey also thanks everyone for attending, the Pro Era leader has another big announcement: Next semester he’ll be serving as the first Artist Scholar in Residence at Columbia University’s Edmund W. Gordon Institute. This now marks the rapper’s second residency at a prestigious university, having been an Artist in Residence at New York University’s Tisch School back in October. 

Teaching at the collegiate level is just the latest feather in Joey’s cap. The Bed-Stuy Brooklyn rapper-turned actor-turned-philanthropist has been stacking up artistic accolades for over a decade. After debuting some serious acting chops in 2016’s Mr. Robot, Joey Bada$$ took a brief hiatus from music in 2019 to explore that outlet. The following years found him delving entirely into 50 Cent’s Power universe as the fan-favorite character Unique in Book III: Raising Kanan. Come 2022, Joey finally got back in the booth and dropped off 2000, the follow-up to his seminal mixtape 1999. The point is, the polymath has a lot going on. He’s even got a new album due out in 2025. When I spoke with Joey earlier in the week, it took a moment for the busy multi-hyphenate to register why I was chatting with him.

“Oh OK, so we’re talking about that,” Joey says when I mention the Gordon Institute. Long story short, Joey hosted his first annual Impact Summit with them back in June, and the school reached back out to him following its success. “One plus one just equaled to two,” Joey quips.

Billboard spoke to Bada$$ about his recurring mentorship, his new residency and creating a safe space for men of color.

What about this opportunity are you most excited about?

I’m just excited to expand and just to kinda create a new — how can I say it — a new norm for people like me. I don’t think people expect rappers to be doing this type of thing, or rappers to be scholars themselves. I’m just kinda excited about challenging the status quo.

At your IMPACT Mentorship summit, you spoke about the importance of creating a safe space for men of color. In your opinion, how does education factor into that? How can education be more inclusive?

Mentorship is a matter of exchanging information and providing wisdom for people who are looking for it. A slept-on idea is the confidence that it gives people, especially men of color. We grew up in this world where we’re told our ideas or opinions or even our emotions are not valid. So to be sharing space with people who look like us, who are further along on these paths we may wanna take, means everything/ Sometimes, people just need reassurance because they’ve never gotten it before.

Other rappers like Lupe Fiasco have also taught at the collegiate level. What role do you think education plays in hip-hop?

I think it plays one of the biggest roles. Hip-hop was founded in the beginning as a means of spreading messages through communities. The first rappers were, in every sense of the word, neighborhood reporters. So I think education is key, and hip-hop is the channel that we can spread a lot of information quickly.

As a high school dropout yourself, how has education come back into your own life and shaped you as your career has gone on?

Education is everything. Your ideology is a reflection of the education you get. It affects your mindset, which affects the way you navigate the world. You’re talking to someone who dropped out of high school and never got his high school diploma, but who is now having residencies at Ivy League schools. That was all with the self-education I had to pursue, and it’s clearly made all of the difference in my life. I shouldn’t be here, statistically speaking. 

At what point did you realize that you had to seek out that eduction yourself?

When you’re seeking growth, you realize that education is a vital part of that process. Otherwise, you’re just waiting on experience. Experience doesn’t necessarily happen every day. Sometimes, it takes months in between something significantly happening to you or in your life that you learn from and it’s a lot of chop wood, carry water, same thing every day. So, in that interim, there’s things like creativity and education which ultimately pushes you towards that growth space. I guess that’s how it happened for me, I’ve always been attracted to self improvement. I call myself a self-improvement junkie. I’m always looking for ways to better myself.

Do you have a message for young people who might not feel seen or heard in more mainstream education spaces across the country, like the classroom?

I’m not sure if I have a message for them apart from, “Don’t give up.” Keep trying and know that you are not alone. That was one of the biggest lessons I had to learn through my time and experiences of feeling like I wasn’t heard, it was realizing I was not the first and I was not alone. The more that I vocalized or I fought for my right to speak, the more those people came out from the shadows. If there’s anything, I’d tell them don’t be discouraged.

Do you think a good education can foster more creativity? How can learning make art better?

Yeah, I always talk about this concept of walking around with this bucket of inspiration, and we all have it. We all pull from it to create or to show up however we show up. I think one of the main ways to fill that bucket up is with knowledge or education. For me, if I find myself having writer’s block, one of the things I do to refill the bucket is pick up a book. I go fill my head up with something that I didn’t have before.