Corey Waterman, AKA Rochester-based hip-hop artist Negus Irap, has an immediately identifiable voice. He sings with a melodious tone channeled through a thin, slightly raspy tenor. When he turns to rap, however, his delivery becomes punky, with quick, decisive jabs that can leave a listener dizzy from the flurry of clever rhymes.
Waterman wasn’t always a fan of his own voice. “It was too high for me,” he said. “There was a point in time — you could go check out some of my older records — I used to put a deeper effect on the vocal, but that didn't really work for me either.”
Despite that early hang-up, Waterman appears to have become comfortable with his sound. He released his sophomore full-length album, “King Pari,” in August with much the same swagger as his 2021 debut “My Name Is Guss,” but this new record features particularly tight production from Bo$ton Trillion and ETO. Waterman thinks “King Pari” is an improvement, citing more money invested in the project and a patient approach in which he valued quality over quantity during the studio sessions.
The rapper’s goal for audience reach was a modest one: 40,000 digital album streams in a year. Within two months, “King Pari” had surpassed that achievement with 60,000 streams. Before the album’s release, Negus Irap had received a single signing offer from a record label. After the new music dropped, he got seven different offers in a matter of three weeks.
Local producer Josh Pettinger, whose Wicked Squid Studios hosted a cypher video featuring Negus Irap in 2020, describes his verses as one describes a master at his craft. “At times they are brutally clever and witty and at other times pointed and sometimes even deeply emotional and revealing,” Pettinger said. “He is also quite clearly a scholar of internal rhyme schemes. This enables him to weave fantastic trains of thought together in a way that feels both playful and effortless.”
Waterman still has his day job, owning a local moving company fittingly called Waterman Moving. He does, however, see a move to music full-time on the horizon.
But Waterman says a hip-hop career might not have been an option at all without one important local artist. “I probably wouldn’t even be rapping if it wasn’t for Hassan Mackey,” he said. Waterman recalls that, as a school kid, he paid another student to put the music of rapper Tyga in his mp3 player. After listening to it for several months, Waterman participated in a rap battle at lunch and borrowed some of the lyrics he had heard. It turns out, they weren’t Tyga’s rhymes after all — a friend pointed out that those were Mackey’s words. That night, Waterman began writing his own raps for the first time.
He’s come a long way since leaning on other rappers for a solid flow, and Negus Irap’s newest offering is in stark contrast to his previous album. “‘My Name Is Guss’ was a darker time in my life,” Waterman said. “With ‘King Pari’ I purposely wanted to make it feel more bright, a little bit more happy — because I’m more at peace.”
Daniel J. Kushner is an arts writer at CITY.