A Day in the Park with Wiki

Near the end of a day spent being swept up in classic New York City activities, Wiki tells me about a movie he recently watched that immediately became a personal favorite. I’m Not Rappaport is a solemn buddy comedy from 1996 about two octogenarians who bond after meeting on a bench in Central Park. Midge Carter, played by the late Ossie Davis, is the jovial, half-blind superintendent of an apartment building who’s getting forced into retirement; Nat Moyer, played by the late Walter Matthau, is a lifelong communist, former labor organizer, and habitual liar. Rappaport is at its best when Davis and Mattheu are given room to lovingly argue with each other on some Odd Couple shit. And when the camera saunters through Central Park, lingering on eccentric regulars like a ballroom dancer and his blow-up mannequin and a vindictive cowboy drug dealer. It’s an honest and quaint rendering of perhaps the most ever-changing city on the planet at the end of the millennium. 

Wiki, a lifelong New Yorker and avowed cinephile, saw Rappaport for the first time a few months ago, around the time he turned in his sixth studio album, Ancient History. The rapper born Patrick Morales is only 32, but he says the film is oddly reflective of his current life. These days, 15 years removed from his frenetic origins as a member of the raucous trio Ratking and a decade into his solo career, every morning starts out more low-key: get up, brush teeth, make coffee, head to Seward Park on the Lower East Side to smoke a spliff and people-watch. When we first link earlier in the day, which just so happens to be the afternoon before Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, he affectionately refers to Seward as his “office.” He had just come from an appearance on Hot 97’s morning show—his first time ever being featured on the institutional rap radio station, a badge of honor for any native New Yorker—and he’s eager to walk through Seward’s winding paths, pointing out landmarks and greenery like an excited tour guide.

Seward also happens to be the first of 10 parks he shouts out on History’s aptly titled lead single “Park,” an ode to the oases where he’s found peace amid neverending concrete since he was a child. “I grew up right by Riverside Park, so I would always be out,” he explains. “It’s definitely just that escape from the city, but it still has that city energy. There’s always something going on, always a conversation to be had.” Wiki’s detail-rich writing rapidly flits between different locations: Watching potential future MVPs shoot hoops at Rucker Park, taking a quick dunk in the Angels of the Waters fountain at Central, spending days talking up dime-pieces and putting grooves in benches. Its video, an amorphous collage of park footage co-directed by Wiki and frequent collaborator Weird Dane, has allegedly been warmly received by City Parks officials.

A song like “Park” runs the risk of being entangled in cheap nostalgia, but Wiki’s words, combined with the psychedelic churn of producer Zoomo’s beat, root it firmly in the present. It also comes through in the mixed emotions about New York that drive Ancient History highlights “IHNY” and “Bloom.” Wiki begins the first verse of the former by connecting the indigenous Lenape people who once occupied the land to the burgeoning hip-hop and punk movements of the 1970s and to his uncle remorsefully recounting the lives he couldn’t save during 9/11. “This fuckin’ city,” he grumbles near the end of the song before saying it again in an overblown accent, embracing the complicated bliss of it all. 

But his most measured analysis comes at the end of “Bloom.” Where once he’d dedicate entire songs to tearing into ignorant gentrifiers on earlier projects like the Navy Blue-produced Half God or the Subjxct 5-helmed Cold Cuts, here, he trades the piss and vinegar for hard-earned peace of mind: “To separate real from the fake takes a trained eye/But I've trained mine/Can see it in plain sight like a stain on a Hanes white/They always show the same old signs/But hey, I pay no mind.” Being in your early 30s is already a delicate crossroads anywhere, but amid the foibles of a changing city, where out-of-town yuppies are constantly driving locals out of their homes, makes things even more precarious.

Entering a new creative cycle and facing old demons doesn’t make things any easier. Over the past few years, Wiki found himself in a bad emotional headspace. Drinking had caught up with him, as he outlines on the harrowing History track “Bourbon,” and he tells me that although he first flirted with sobriety around 2021, it came with intense peaks and valleys. By now, his relationship with alcohol is more stable. The day we meet, he confirms he hasn’t had a drink in exactly two months—the longest dry spell of his life—but still hesitates to label himself properly sober. “I don’t wanna be the oh, I’m sober! guy. I’m not trying to tell anyone to do it. It’s really a personal thing. I’m not like, Drinking is the worst thing in the world, even though, for me, I think it is,” he says. “I wrote ‘Bourbon’ sober as fuck, and I needed to be able to get that perspective on it.  My fellow alcoholics and drug addicts, when they hear that shit, they’re like Bro, you hit it on the nose. It’s how I be feelin’, but you put words to that feeling.’”

That, combined with some travel to Ireland and Australia, brought him back to New York refreshed and ready to create. Work on Ancient History technically began in 2022, when Wiki first recorded its Alchemist-produced title track (“Jaded at 28, stayed within the city walls,” goes one lyric). Initially, he thought the idea of combing through recent ups and downs would be too on-the-nose, but as more songs started coming together, he and his team saw it as the lynchpin for the entire project. 

“You could say all my projects are about growth, but Ancient History isn’t just me stuck and like, Oh, I’m depressed and I need to get this all for myself—and then boom, back in the hole of depression,” he says. “It’s been four years of making the real decisions and taking actual steps. I’m growing up for real and putting shit behind me. I’m about to go have fun and be creative and be a fucking artist with a clear head. In a way, this is like my last album and my first album: The last album for the old Wiki, and then it has bits and pieces of whatever’s to come next.”

There are plenty of parallels between Ancient History and the rest of Wiki’s discography. I’m most reminded of his earliest work, like his 2015 solo debut Lil Me and his proper label debut No Mountains in Manhattan, both of which approached love, the bruising nature of tour life, and the endless nuances of living in the Five Boroughs. History is less about nutcracker-fueled romps across the bridge and late-night cab rides on the FDR and more about excavating self-worth, with a dash of anti-capitalist agita for good measure. “Right Away,” with its shuffling beat and odes to the mundanities of waking up on the right side of the bed, is a grown stand-in for party-focused tracks like 2017’s “Pretty Bull.” “Something New,” a duet with the Brooklyn-born rapper Salimata, is a low-key riff on the time-honored tradition of the New York rap love song, which itself fleshes out ideas about romance explored on Wiki’s own 2019 track “Babygirl.” And it all congeals with the title track at the end, one more burst of bravado from a Manhattanite more content to spend his money at a Dunkin’ Donuts than the posh coffee shops continually popping up on his street.

“Grown” may be the word that best describes Ancient History, but its curation of artists across generations of the alt-underground prove Wiki’s far from another term often synonymous with maturity: “washed.” Plenty of longtime collaborators are in the mix, from Ukraine-born rapper Your Old Droog and vocalist Duendita to producers Lil Ugly Mane and Navy Blue. But newer names are everywhere in the credits too, from Salimata to the likes of Brooklyn’s Lord Unknown (“GTFOH”) and Bronx kingmaker Mike, under his DJ Blackpower alias (“Something New”). Wiki also takes risks with lush and somber cuts featuring multi-instrumentalists like Carrtoons (“One Time”) and Nick Hakim (“7 Deadly Sins”). As a rapper who started out on the vanguard and continues to embrace the now—he cosigned fresh tri-state area talent like Subjxct, YL, and Papo2oo4 before many others did—Wiki takes pride in keeping up with the times. “It’s hard to strike that balance and not just be seen as going with the trend just because,” he admits. “But sometimes, you wanna go a different route and just be a student of the game. I feel that’s part of being a good artist.”

Honest artistry and a loyal following has kept Wiki in good graces. Just last year, he had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme; Safdie was a camera operator on the Ari Marcopoulos-directed video for Ratking’s “Piece of Shit” from 2013, and hit Wiki about being in the movie years ago, when the script was first being written. Wiki remembers his mother seeing the film and being confused as to why he wasn’t in it more. “She was like, ‘Why were you out of focus? Why’s it all on Timothée Chalamet?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, he’s the fucking star of the movie,’” he laughs. 

Near the end of our day, Wiki tells me the story of a statue in Seward Park dedicated to a dog named Togo. Togo was one of several Siberian Huskies who saved a small town called Nome by carrying life-saving drugs across the blistering Alaska wilderness during a diphtheria outbreak in 1925. Balto, the dog that led the trek’s final stretch, has his own larger statue in Central Park, and his story was even retold in a 1995 animated film. But it was Togo who headed the team through the longest and most treacherous parts of the trip, running a total of 261 miles in temperatures that dipped nearly 100 degrees below freezing. He’s relatively unsung, but his legacy certainly connected with Wiki. “At one point, I wanted to put Togo on the cover of Ancient History,” he says with a smirk. “It was so personal to me, but no one would get it. But if you come to this specific spot in New York, you’ll know what it means.”