In Conversation: Akil Godsey of End It
End It introduced themselves as a band with a death wish. Six years later, Akil Godsey wants you to know he's down for life.
I remember sitting at a dinner table with friends shortly before relaunching Anti-Matter and saying, “I want people to have somewhere to go if they want to know who Akil Godsey from End It is as a person.” I said that for a couple of reasons: First, I love End It. They truly remind me of the kind of hardcore that I loved in the ‘80s—that hard-to-capture mixture of irreverent, self-aware, fun, and harsh. But also, even though Akil is probably one of the most charismatic figures in modern hardcore, nothing I’d read about him really told me who he was. When I contacted him about having this conversation, I was hoping we could peel back some layers.
Akil and I sat down on the morning of the same day that Turnstile threw the first pitch at an Orioles game. As we talked about Baltimore, and its indelible influence on the people and bands that this city shaped—not the least of which includes End It—it was not lost on us that we were living inside of a moment.
It’s pretty well-established that you grew up singing in the church, but you’ve never actually talked about that experience. Like, I grew up in the Pentecostal church. I don’t know what you know about Latino Pentecostals, but…
AKIL: Oh, I was gonna say, I know about the Pentecostal Church, so I can only imagine doing it in Spanish!
Yeah. It was basically a cult [laughs]. I literally watched my mom speak in tongues, I watched exorcisms… It was a little wild. You were raised Baptist, right?
AKIL: It’s a whole thing. Originally, I went to New Psalmist Baptist Church. That’s the church I grew up in and that’s the church my mom went to. Early on, my dad worked. He was a grown-ass man, so he ain’t getting up on a Sunday to go. But for me, it was: “Doesn’t matter what I do, you’re not an adult. When you become an adult, you don’t have to go to church.” Then, as the years went on, my dad got back into church and became a minister, but my mom kept going to the church she grew up in, and my dad went to the church that he joined—with, you know, people he knew from whatever journey he had traveled in his own world. I never saw an exorcism, but people getting hands laid on them and then falling out, and speaking in tongues, and elderly people busting cartwheels and toe-touches and shit? I was like, “Oh!” [laughs]. I was sitting there by myself like, I don’t know if they’re faking or not, but this can’t be fucking real. This is insane.
Sometimes there’s a moment when you’re young and you’re sitting in church and you almost want to believe it’s real. You almost start feeling it, right?
AKIL: Yeah! I’ve had moments where I got pulled up on the stage, and… well, you don’t necessarily want to embarrass the minister, so you may “fall.” But you’re like, did I fall because I was supposed to fall? I don’t know what’s going on [laughs]. I will say that as I’ve gotten older, I go back into church because I was in church before a whole bunch of crazy shit occurred in my life. So it’s a little surreal—and serene—to hear a hymnal. You feel like life is all right. You know how you go to school on a Monday morning and you gotta do a journal entry where the teacher asks, “What did you do over the weekend?” Every Monday, I was like, “I saw my cousins and I went to church.” That’s what the weekends were for.
Did you get something out of it?
AKIL: It’s kept me out of prison, but I fucking hated going to church. None of my other classmates went to church that I knew of. It made me wonder at a real early age if I was going to go to hell. Obviously, I’ve given in and I’ll see you there [laughs]. But I never really liked going to church. My mom put that on us. I appreciate some of the lessons learned, but that sense of community that was present in 1960s Baltimore, in the Black church? That shit was long gone by 1995. They moved into a bigger church, and the church started making a lot of money, and a lot of people from outside of the community started joining. And then the internet happened, so I didn’t necessarily need the church in the traditional way that Black people needed the church.
As a source of community, you mean.
AKIL: Exactly. I didn’t have that. [My family] moved me to the county. I’d go skateboarding and smoke cigarette butts.
At the same time, you seem to very much relate church with singing. Have you just completely extricated the idea of “I didn’t like church” from “I like singing”?
AKIL: Yeah, those are two separate entities. Because I didn’t realize the blessing that was growing up in the church and being in the choir as the days were going on. As much as they are together, they always felt like two separate entities. Like, it wasn’t “the gospel,” it was just gospel music—that’s church music. I still don’t like going to church, but I do enjoy singing, because you can sing in all types of different situations.
Has your mom seen your lyrics? Like, specifically, “There’s no God up there listening.”
AKIL: [Laughs] You gotta think, I was reading The Great Divorce, Lord of the Flies, Who Moved My Cheese? And Rich Dad, Poor Dad when I was like eight or nine years old. My father is a Freemason. So the way I approach the world… Church is really just a ritual. And that’s great, it’s got its place. But there’s a greater world out there. So that’s the thing: When the old man wasn’t at church, he was giving me all these books to read. I’m carrying around a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order at fucking twelve years old because I’m a fucking crazy person.
I love that you talk about church as a ritual, because I’ve thought about that so much in my life. That attraction to ritual kind of inspired me to be a Hare Krishna in the ‘90s.
AKIL: I tried to become a Rastafarian [laughs]. In retrospect, you know, you hear about the Black man becoming pro-Black after they moved us to a white part of the world, you get into all these radical politics and belief systems, but then you also smoke a lot of weed. So you’re like, “Oh, this is great. They’re using the Bible I grew up on, we smoke weed, the music is awesome, what they say seems to be the truth, so fuck it, we can run with that” [laughs]. But then, as the years go on, you do enough research and you realize [religion is] all bullshit. It’s people hurting each other and disagreeing for absolutely no reason. Because the golden rule is really the only rule that matters.
Right. I’ve been atheist for 20 years, but in the last few years, I started studying Zen Buddhism—which is still atheist, so I’m still in that zone [laughs]. But again, one of the things that appealed to me about Zen was that sense of ritual. There are ways of being when you are inside of a Zen Center that they call “forms.” So there are forms for how you greet someone or how you sit on a meditation cushion or whatever it is. These forms, I feel like we all have them in some way.
AKIL: Yeah. Like I mentioned, I was raised by a Freemason. And of course we’re Black from Baltimore, and we’ve got gangs and organized crime. After you learn enough, you realize it’s all one and the same. Everyone knows everyone. In order for business to be conducted, there’s just a certain way that business is conducted. It may not be Zen Buddhism, but if you’re gonna come into this space right here, this is how you go about it.
There are forms.
AKIL: There are forms, yeah. There’s proper procedures for everything. It’s not necessarily just church. A hardcore show has forms. Like, at least in Baltimore, you can’t just come in from out of state or out of town, where you don’t actually know anybody, and just think you’re gonna come in and assault everybody. Because I’ve been to many a show where it’s like, “Yeah, dance hard or die. But does anyone actually know this motherfucker?” [laughs] Like, he’s not friends with anybody by proximity or anything and he’s in here dancing that fucking hard? Take him out. He don’t get to be in here no more. Take him outside. Or at least go talk to him and be like, “Are you OK? That’s not how you act here. We don’t know you. We’re from here and don’t act like that, so why should you come here and act like that?”
It’s funny that you say it like that because I’ve always thought of your lyrics in this way where Baltimore is almost a personified character in them.
AKIL: Yeah!
What is it about that place that gives you that sense of belonging? It just feels like Baltimore has really captured your imagination.
AKIL: Well, you know, not a lot of people make it out of Baltimore. And that’s not the cliché of drugs and crime, or you’ll get killed or go to jail or something like that. It’s just really easy to get comfortable here. Especially after going to a lot of other places, if you’re from here, the sense of community that we build and have with each other—even amidst all the drama and dislike of people—it’s really us versus you. Because it is so small and so niche. Which is one reason why when people claim it so much, and they haven’t contributed, we feel some type of way. The National Anthem was written here. Many a battle was fought in the name of the United States, but for some reason, on this one little patch of land next to the water, the theme song for the whole country [came from] here.
Also, Baltimore is willfully ignorant. That’s one of the things I actually love about it as the years go on. I don’t have to change my actual opinion on things. It’s all about what I do. Don’t necessarily worry about what I’m saying, ‘cause I know many cats who say one thing and do another. I know some people whose sense of humor, their perspectives, their mindsets are piss-poor. However, I’ve seen what they’ve done for other people in the world. I hear about how they interacted with people on the job, respecting things they said when no one else was around.
It also sounds like one of the elements of Baltimore that you seem to relate to is this sense that it’s been looked over.
AKIL: Oh yeah, don’t nobody want to come here. No one wanted to come here for a very long time. And that’s hearing from the cats who were there, and the ones who were there before them. It’s very easy to skip over this little dirty port city. Especially considering how violent it is. Like, I’m not playing into the violence that occurs in Baltimore. I’m not this aggressive. The world made me like this. I’m actually a very normal person who grew up in the church. But you get out here in the world and don’t nobody care about that shit.
I get what you’re saying. I grew up in New York City.
AKIL: Yeah, so you know.
I’m not a violent person.
AKIL: I’m not a gangster.
But when I was younger, I had to learn how to fight. I had to learn how to protect myself. I never started anything, but I knew at some point my number would get called [laughs].
AKIL: As everyone who has ever hung out knows, it’s not if, it’s when. But also, no one ever said you have to win the fight! No one said you had to be Ali. Motherfuckers just want to see if you’re gonna defend yourself, because if you’re not going to defend yourself, then give me your lunch.
You said that church kept you out of prison earlier though. Why would you say that? What was going on in your life?
AKIL: There are times where you get emotionally charged in a situation, and you will want to do something violent or reckless—you take a second and you can’t do it. Because if you do have agape love for the people in the world around you, you gotta just eat that one. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. It gets real messy, real quick, when you just react. So the church maybe taught me a little bit of patience, and that’s necessary sometimes.
I still have that patience, and as I hang out more, I realize it’s actually the default for most people who actually do things—people with influence, who make decisions. That wild reckless bastard? He’s going to wind up dead or in jail. That’s not how it works. Like we said, there are forms. There are procedures to everything. And I learned a lot of that in the church. Anything that’s moving is working in the same way, which is why I move so seamlessly through pretty much any situation. Because I know how to show up, regardless of what’s going on.
A bunch of years ago, I was hanging out with Tim Armstrong from Rancid, and he got so excited when he found out I was the youngest of three kids. He was like, “That’s why we get along!” He didn’t really expand on that, but we do get along really well. So knowing that you’re also the youngest of three, I’m a little bit curious as to what you think that says about you.
AKIL: I think it’s that I’m used to being subordinate, but the people I had around me were really taking care of me. So I was able to be subordinate because I knew on the other side there was protection and respect and trust.
I like that. I also felt like I grew up faster because I was doing everything my older brothers were doing.
AKIL: In some regards, yeah. One brother is sixteen years older than me. He came out of the Marine Corps and everything, so of course I wanted to be as tough and as cool as that one. That’s actually why I started rapping. We all started rapping. Because when he was in Hawaii, he was in this rap group called Torture in the Chamber. The shit was cool, he shot a music video and whatnot. So I started rapping. My other brother is seven years older than me, so when he started drinking, of course I had a beer. But if you're gonna hang out with [him], you’re gonna go to these college parties when you’re in middle school, so you gotta learn how to keep it together. Which is why I can put down a fifth of gin before noon and you’ll have no idea.
You probably don’t want to do that.
AKIL: It depends on what kind of Tuesday we’re having [laughs].
So then at some point you have your initial exposure to punk rock, which as I understand it, came from MySpace.
AKIL: From a fucking meme!
I’m assuming it was within the realm of what was the more popular “punk” of that era.
AKIL: Punk rock was this fringe thing to me. Before 2002, I’m twelve. Punk rock to me was still this thing where dirty kids had mohawks and skateboarded. But then I get to high school, I get on MySpace, and I find out about this thing called hardcore. So I start going to local shows, and of course, the algorithm starts pulling me in different directions. I find out that [what I was listening to] was actually screamo metalcore, but this over here is what is traditionally known as hardcore. And I listened to that and I was like, “Yeah! OK! I’m supposed to be over here!” So actually, I got hip to early 2000s metalcore shit and worked my way back to become more of a skinhead, hardcore kind of guy.
Also, growing up in the church and having a musical background, I appreciate enunciation. So I find punk and I’m like, “Yeah, I can hear what they’re saying.” And what they’re saying is way more in tune with how I’m feeling. I don’t know about a lot of early 2000s hardcore shit. I wasn’t a tough guy then. I could not relate to white boys with shaved heads, spin-kicking and shit in the early 2000s [laughs]. It was cool, but to me, something about it just didn’t make sense. It was like, “I don’t know how you can be going off that hard. I don’t know what that young man just said.” But then I got hit with actual hardcore—like, “As One,” that’s what I’m talking about.
I’ve heard you say at one point that you have never “experienced anything racial” in hardcore, but then in a different interview you said that you had. I’m not sure where you are with this now, but when I first got into the scene, I remember it being a little difficult for me. I mean, were there other people of color in the New York scene? Absolutely! But we’d really all have to come to the same show for it to be a moment [laughs]. I remember asking myself this question at the time, which was: What is it that’s so different about me that I’m coming to this place, and I feel like this is where I want to be, but where people like me are not coming, or they’re looking at hardcore like, “No, this is not for us.”
AKIL: Of course, I can only speak from my own personal experience, but it definitely has to do with our upbringings, for sure. By the time I really got into hardcore, I was wild. I’d already been outside for a couple of days. So it wasn’t weird. Once I got in and started meeting people, it was no different than a cookout—like, a big function that I just happened to get invited to. It was cool. And they just accepted me, and people bought me beer, and it was fine. I can’t really speak to what anyone else was going through. I don’t know that it was like, “Man, I hope these white kids think I’m cool.” But I liked the music. I liked the message. I liked what was going on. We can even fight if necessary; I love a good fight once in a while [laughs].
I always bring up this super vivid memory of being at a Youth of Today show where everybody is screaming, “Break down the walls!” And I’m looking around and I’m like, “Everyone is white!” [both laugh].
AKIL: I’ve spoken about it before, and maybe I’ll call myself a martyr one day, but at this point, I’m jumping ahead. I stick around in the hopes that some other fat nerd will also see somebody like him and be like, “I’ll stay.” I had Jotham from Wisdom in Chains and other Black people around. I had older guys already there who were also Black. So it made it a little more comfortable to be there. And by continuing to do it, I’m sure I’ve exposed more people and kids to this hardcore punk thing than before. I don’t know why, though. I don’t know why more people don’t look like us.
You know what I really think it is? It’s the fact that good, bad, indifferent, I wasn’t raised to hate. Even though a common phrase in my house was like, “You gotta watch the white man,” it was never, “You gotta watch the white man, don’t trust him, don’t let him in the house” [laughs]. We weren’t actually raised to hate. So we came [to hardcore], we heard a pure message, and we went to the message. We didn’t care about the messenger because we actually aren’t racist. There’s a great message and community in this scene, and if you worry about where it’s coming from, you’re going to miss it. We didn’t miss it because we had knowledge of self to where we were just able to go to where the message was coming from.
I was talking to [End It bassist] Pat [Martin] last week, and we were talking about how things are moving for you guys in a real way. It’s like the bands that came up ten years ago are in this top position of sorts, but you guys and a whole bunch of other bands like you are next in line. So I asked him what he was thinking about right now, and one thing he talked about was that you guys—his words— “don’t really understand the popularity factor that exists with our band.” And I get that because when I was younger and first getting into bands that became popular, you don’t realize that it’s happening. You just have to figure out…
AKIL: …how to navigate that.
Exactly. What has been your experience as the band continues to evolve like this?
AKIL: I’m in a weird place now. I’m used to a certain level of attention in these spaces because I’m Black—but also I’m me. And I’m coming to grips with what that actually means. I’m kind of extra a lot, but I didn’t realize it because I’ve always just been being me. But now [it feels like] being me is becoming commodified. It’s weird because I’d like to just interact with everybody and get around like I used to, but I find myself not having the same energy to do it because I’ve expended so much of it over the years. Now that people are paying attention and whatnot, I’m tired [laughs]. When people tell me my band is popping, I get it, but I still don’t necessarily see it. This is not humility, but I don’t really understand where this is going. We haven’t done anything different. If you ask us to play a show, we’ll play a show. That’s all I’ve been doing is showing up. I don’t necessarily recognize the quality or the impact of what I’ve written. I’m just getting up there to play that shit.
Is that idea of change exciting or daunting to you?
AKIL: It’ll be cool when I’m out of the moment and I can appreciate it. It’s anxiety-inducing, for sure. But I don’t have time to dwell on it because we have to do the thing. There are things that need to be done. We can talk about how you feel later.
I feel like that’s almost a band epitaph waiting to happen [laughs].
AKIL: True.
I’ve heard too many stories of bands where no one was talking about how they were feeling and that turned into a fucking mess. Because feelings do come out.
AKIL: We’re alcoholics though. Of course we talk about our feelings. That’s half the van ride [laughs]. That’s the Baltimore thing again. We really do ride for each other like that. Even if motherfuckers get on my nerves, you don’t get to come over and just treat them in any type of way. I could be shit-talking them 30 minutes ago; go shove them in the chest and let me see what time it is. We are all Baltimorons. We are a gang. We gangbang, we talk about our feelings. The way things tend to work in this band is that you’ll be frustrated or upset, you’ll have your little temper tantrum, you may be quiet, and then at a certain point you don’t even address that person in the midst of a conversation and you’ll address it and then we move on. It’s more passive-aggressive than being mean to each other, but we get over it.
When End It started, you, in particular, seemed to have this real death fixation. And I’m curious about that because I always say that coming from a church background, and then leaving religion, I started to realize that religious life is an obsession with death. It was not about how I lived in the present, but about what happened to me after I died. I was always thinking about death. To what would you attribute your fascination with it?
AKIL: You hit the nail on the head. The whole time I’m sitting in church, people don’t necessarily understand or recognize my level of understanding and reasoning as a child. And I’m like, OK. So I’m supposed to be nice to people not because people deserve your respect, but so you don’t go to hell. You can only go to heaven or hell. You can only achieve these things by dying. And if you kill yourself, you’re going to hell. So why are we so worried about dying? When do we get to the living? I’m only living in subordination to this thing, and then I die, and that’s it. It’s a lot of death. So we’re saying the same thing. Why are we so concerned with death?
What made you bring that into the band?
AKIL: Well, one, definitely that band Neglect out of Long Island. Definitely a whole lot of Neglect worship. But I was introduced to Neglect by the homie Mike—rest in peace. Mike killed himself. That was my first real close friend to do some shit like that. So I was digesting that grief and getting through all that. I didn’t even realize I was that fucked up over Mike for like four or five years after that. I started doing all types of things in reaction to Mike passing away. And then I got to do this band.
I get that. The singer of my first band, Fountainhead, killed himself. His name was Bill. He was our singer, and he was always one of the cool kids in the hardcore scene for me. Like, when I met him, I was like, “I wanna be Bill” [laughs]. He was fucking cool. Charismatic. But he got into some trouble, and it’s a really long story, but the next thing I know someone is sending me a link to an article reporting his suicide. And the fact that someone I was so close to took his own life, that affects me differently the friends I’ve had who died for other reasons.
AKIL: Exactly.
What was your experience like?
AKIL: I had a woman from Chicago I was dating. I wish we could have had this conversation in a less heated moment so I would remember it more fondly, but we were going at it. And she was like, “You can’t keep having survivor’s remorse.” Because, obviously I’ve not committed suicide, but I’m a wild boy. Now that I’m on the other side of things, like, I should be fucking dead. There’s no way I should still be alive. I used to just leave the house, and I didn’t care. Not that I was gonna take somebody else with me, but we would just leave the house with not a care in the world after Mike passed away. But she saw it. She was like, “You can’t keep having survivor’s remorse.” That’s how we bonded. That’s why I like Neglect so much. Because I never heard somebody say shit like that on aggressive music. Mike showed it to me, and then Mike did what he did, and in processing that I was wild as shit. But she said that to me and I never forgot it and I have lived my life differently ever since then. It was like, “Mike’s dead. You’re not.”
I would never want to make someone feel the way I felt. I can’t even fake the funk no more. I’m going to try to stick around as long as I can, because I’m not going to do you like that. I’m a dad now, and she don’t deserve that. It’s just maturity. And if anything, I don’t feel sad for Mike like that no more. I feel mostly upset that the boy didn’t give himself enough time to mature. Because it’s gotten so much better—and this is outside of being in a band and all that. I done had a kid, I’m in a good relationship right now, I’ve had cars, I’ve had money, I’ve lost money. I’ve gone to Europe. I’m just from Baltimore. What am I doing in Texas at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday? Well, guess what, I’m here. So yeah, I had a pivot. I can’t kill myself. That ain’t right. It’s not fair.
When I heard you used to work at a mortuary services place, I remember thinking, “What is this guy’s deal? Why is he like this?” [laughs]
AKIL: Well, that was because I needed money and they were paying [laughs]. But I think it’s a good career! People are going to die. And even once this music thing is done, the goal is to open a crematorium. But that’s one of the reasons if I ever come off so matter-of-factly or condescending in some regards on this topic, it’s because I have seen a lot of death. Not just from doing that job, but just being from Baltimore. So you really start to let shit go. My lady smokes cigarettes. I don’t like it. We both know cigarettes are gonna kill her. I still buy them for her. Why? Because she’s grown. So I make the decision every day that if I’m gonna love her and care about her, then I guess we smoking fucking cigarettes. Just let go of some of that control and your life will get easier.
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What a great, in-depth interview. Thanks Norman.
End It got going after I moved away from Baltimore, so I don't know Akil outside of Instagram, but Pat is one of my oldest friends (ask him to tell you the firecrackers in his basement bedroom story sometime) and I'm so stoked to see everything they've done and how they're carrying on the Baltimore hardcore tradition. Hopefully they make it out to Denver some time soon.
Really love the way you have been setting up and framing each weeks set of readings so that they give each other depth and context. Listening to End It, you can hear traces if that gospel theatricallity that I really respond to. I want to briefly shout out another gospel influenced hardcore band here in NYC called Winterwolf, who also incorporate afrofuturist world building into their sets. Going to enjoy doing a deeper dive of End It this week.