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      Covid. A Coma. A Stroke. José Parlá Returns From the Edge.

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      After a lengthy recovery, the artist comes back with the most vigorous work he’s made: “It took me a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”DETROIT — During the three months last year that the artist José Parlá was in a medically induced coma after contracting Covid-19, he had vivid dreams that he later found difficult to process: managing a Miami hotel circa 1980 and navigating a kidnapping plot involving his brother and the Hong Kong triads. “I was perceiving these dreams not as dreams but as memories,” he said. “Events that I believed had happened but weren’t real.”The intensity of those visions, experienced unconscious and close to death, are metabolized in Parlá’s new body of work, completed since his recovery, titled “Polarities,” at Library Street Collective, an art gallery here. Seven large-scale paintings on canvas and two on wood, at human scale, can be read as a body scan, and their dense networks of lines radiating outward from a central node can appear arterial, conjuring the intricate workings of the respiratory system, or the firing synapses in the brain.But as personal as they are, they avoid much of the solipsism that characterized artists’ work during the pandemic. Instead they take an expansive, world-historical view, reaching much further back, as Parlá’s work tends to do, to trace the psycho-geographic effect a place, and the memory of it, can have.José Parlá, “Degree,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas, from “Polarities” at Library Street Collective, Detroit.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Resistance,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá, who lives in New York City and whose work is in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the British Museum, first visited Detroit in 2006 not knowing anyone here, simply looking to walk around and take photographs. He returned in 2018, after meeting JJ and Anthony Curis, owners and founders of Library Street Collective, who invited him to witness the changes the city was working through. Parlá decided then to devote a body of work to Detroit, which probably would have debuted in 2020 if not for the pandemic. The idea was further waylaid when Parlá contracted Covid-19 in early 2021, becoming so ill that he was hospitalized, intubated, and put in an induced coma for three months. Halfway through, he suffered a stroke and significant brain bleeding. His doctors told his brother, Rey, they didn’t expect him to survive.“It’s a miracle that I’m here talking to you,” Parlá, 49, told me last month, his voice still a strained rasp from the damage done by the breathing tube, though flying at its usual excited clip. “When I woke up it took a really long time to understand what had happened to me.”Memory and resurrection are both at front of mind here. On a weekday afternoon, the hum of construction drones steadily downtown, the rapid development of the last decade continuing to revive central Detroit from decades of bankruptcy and population flight. A Gucci store is slated to open on a corner where even five years ago the thought of it would be absurd (it still is, though the absurdity now has a different flavor). But just five miles east, entire neighborhoods remain pocked by abandoned homes and ruinous storefronts — tracts of lots distinguishable only by the height of their overgrown weeds. Stretches of its avenues bear scars of Detroit’s dispossession: crumbling brickwork, weatherworn concrete, sun-bleached advertisements seized in time.José Parlá, “Polarity,” 2022. His skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveYou don’t have to be from Detroit to know what this looks like. It’s familiar to anyone who lives in or has moved through places that exist on the periphery, neglected by its center. It’s certainly familiar to Parlá, who absorbs the visual signatures of dilapidation into his paintings, murals and sculpture. Threaded with calligraphy, they read as abstraction but can also be understood as landscapes, or an anthropological excavation of them.He has located these textures around the world — in the Bronx, New York; Naples, Italy; Havana — translating these degraded environments into deeply felt portraits of human movements. Like Julie Mehretu, Parlá challenges the historical parameters of abstraction, but he works in a realist style, a focus that goes back to his earliest days of painting burners — large, elaborate wall works with aerosol — in Miami and Atlanta in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In terms of visual information, the wall, for Parlá, is of as crucial importance as the line or brush stroke or any other mark.“Polarities” is the first body of work he has completed and exhibited since his hospitalization. In its mere existence, it defies his doctors’ prognosis that he would likely not be able to paint again. Not that his recovery was easy. Known for his dynamic style of mural making — leaping off scaffolding while keeping his brush in contact with the canvas to achieve continuous, loping arcs, as he did for “One: Union of the Senses” (2015), a 90-foot mural in the lobby of One World Trade Center, in Manhattan — Parlá found himself barely able to walk a few steps without being exhausted.“Eventually one of the doctors brought me watercolors and watercolor paper, and I was able to do these tiny landscape paintings, and that really helped me to feel, ‘OK, I can still color and I can still make lines,’ but I had atrophy — my brother and one of the doctors would help me grasp brushes or pens because my hands didn’t have the strength,” he said. By the time he was discharged, in 2021, Parlá had been inside a hospital in New York for five months.José Parlá, “Detroit / La Habana,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on wood. “Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him,” said Michael Rooks, a curator, adding that “they bear witness to history” like segments of the Berlin Wall.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveThe day Parlá returned to his studio happened to be July 11, 2021, when huge anti-government protests erupted in Cuba, the first there in 27 years. Parlá, who was born in Miami to Cuban émigré parents, grew up moving between the United States mainland and Puerto Rico with an early awareness of political strife. Since 2020 he has worked with the artist-led activist group the Wide Awakes.“It brought me back to the protests we were all part of in New York in 2020 and everything we were fighting for,” he said. “You saw an opposite side of that in Cuba where young artists were fighting for their freedom of expression. It was very emotional for me.” Detroit and Cuba represented, in his view, the extremes of capitalism and communism, systems that have colored Parlá’s life since childhood.“One of my aunts was imprisoned in Cuba in the 1970s when a lot of political prisoners were given 10-, 15-year sentences,” he said. “It was always part of the culture; you knew you couldn’t say certain things. That hasn’t changed.” Indeed, one of the first places Parlá journeyed after his recovery was Cuba, in January 2022, and he returned in June. There he spoke with artists who have decided to remain, and who carefully make artworks to evade censorship and punishment.José Parlá, “Breath,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveJosé Parlá, “Position,” 2022, acrylic and oil paint on canvas.via José Parlá and Library Street CollectiveParlá was concerned he wouldn’t be able to paint with the energy and agility that has come to characterize his output. But the work in “Polarities” is at points the most vigorous he’s ever made. They thrum with riotous color and restive movement, the paint thick and drippy in places, rippling and gouged in others. In their fields you can locate any number of churning cataclysms — the 1967 Detroit Riots; the highway system that displaced Black neighborhoods years earlier; waves of displacement and migration.There’s a sense of all the anger and frustration coursing through the paint, an accelerative thrust that feels impatient, as if time is running out. Parlá worked on the canvases simultaneously, arranged side by side, mixing colors without stopping. “It’s the concept of oneness, of interdependence, how we all rely on each other,” he said. “The paintings rely on each other to be a good body of work.” They are paintings that are alive to political resistance, but also resistance to death.That quality of refusal can be traced to Parlá’s beginnings in art making. In many ways his mature work internalizes the graffiti tradition: its style, of course, but also its embrace of language (the work in “Polarities,” as in much of Parlá’s oeuvre, is layered with calligraphic glyphs and snatches of writing); its understanding of the way cities function as modes of communication; and, potently, its capacity to antagonize power structures.Still, Parlá chafes at what he refers to as “the G-word.” He often invokes the storied writer Phase 2, a mentor, who suggested that referring to masterful forms of color and expression as “graffiti” was as inadequate as “calling a meteor a pebble.”José Parlá in downtown Detroit, where he found inspiration for his exhibition “Polarities.”Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“Surfaces, whether they’re walls or canvases or sculptural objects, work as palimpsests for him, and I think that’s where his practice as a writer, as a painter, these calligraphic, gestural marks have meaning,” said Michael Rooks, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, and the curator of the 2014 exhibition “José Parlá: Segmented Realities,” Parlá’s first major museum show.“You can trace that impulse back to ancient wall writing,” Rooks continued. “If we think about other objects that evoke a similar social and cultural upheaval and transformation, like segments of the Berlin Wall, for example, they bear witness to history, with marks inscribed in their surface that had specific meanings for the viewer, for the maker, that may be lost.” Rooks considers Parlá a realist in this sense “because he is excavating our own experience” and invoking objects that are familiar, “that have layers of history.”Parlá’s skill is finding dignity in the accidents of time, the stalactitic surfaces and loping marks of a city’s streetscape, the things that accumulate over time and are eventually lost to it.Unsurprisingly, the restlessness that characterizes his paintings also translates to his schedule. He’s already at work on his next projects, presentations at the Brooklyn Museum and at Gana Art, in Seoul, as well as curating shows in Istanbul and Italy. Perhaps somewhat expectedly, he rejects that term, too: “I wouldn’t say a curator,” he laughed. “More like an anti-systematic operative.”José Parlá: PolaritiesThrough Aug. 24, Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, (313) 600-7443; lscgallery.com. More

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      Peeling Paint in Hong Kong Reveals Work of Newly Relevant ‘King’

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      When he was alive, the graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, or the “King of Kowloon,” was considered peculiar and personal. In a radically changed city, his mostly vanished art now has a political charge.HONG KONG — Often shirtless in summer, smelling of sweat and ink, the aggrieved artist wrote incessantly, and everywhere: on walls, underpasses, lamp posts and traffic light control boxes.He covered public spaces in Hong Kong with expansive jumbles of Chinese characters that announced his unshakable belief that much of the Kowloon Peninsula rightfully belonged to his family.During his lifetime, the graffiti artist, Tsang Tsou-choi, was a ubiquitous figure, well-known for his eccentric campaign that struck most as a peculiar personal mission, not a political rallying cry.But Hong Kong has become a very different place since Mr. Tsang died in 2007, and his work — once commonly spotted, but now largely vanished from the streetscape — has taken on a new resonance in a city where much political expression has been stamped out by a sweeping campaign against dissent since 2020.“In his lifetime, particularly early on, people thought he was completely crazy,” said Louisa Lim, author of “Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong,” a new book that examines Mr. Tsang’s legacy. “Even at the time that he died no one was really interested in the content or the political message of his work. But actually, he was talking about these Hong Kong preoccupations long before other people were — territory, sovereignty, dispossession and loss.”When a decades-old work surfaced earlier this year, it started drawing a crowd to a setting that could hardly be more mundane: a concrete railway bridge, built over a roadway and adorned with little besides a registration number and a warning against graffiti.The bridge sits near a bird market and a sports stadium on Boundary Street, a road that marks the edge of the territory ceded by the Qing dynasty to the British in 1860 after the Second Opium War. It is covered in gray paint, some of which flaked away this spring — exactly how remains a mystery — to reveal a palimpsest of Mr. Tsang’s work from several eras of painting at one of his favorite sites.Taking a photo of the newly discovered work. “There are very few King of Kowloon works left in Hong Kong, and now, those that are before our eyes are precious,” When In Doubt, an artist collective, wrote in celebration of the discovery. Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesLam Siu-wing, a Hong Kong artist, said he happened across the Boundary Street work while out for an evening walk in late March.“I thought the old Hong Kong was saying hello again,” he said.News of the discovery began to spread, with When In Doubt, an artist collective that Mr. Lam belongs to, describing his find as a rare treasure. The group noted that it’s one of the earliest artistic creations to prod discussion of an essential and increasingly pressing question in Hong Kong: Who does urban space belong to?The Latest on China: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 6China’s economy stumbles. More

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      How to Look at a Basquiat

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      It’s not everyday that New York has two Basquiat exhibitions. At “Art and Objecthood,” decoding the basics: his materials, iconography and unmistakable line.It’s not everyday that New Yorkers can choose between two concurrent exhibitions of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. “King Pleasure,” an immersive experience designed by the architect David Adjaye and curated by the artist’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, includes a recreation of Jean-Michel’s childhood bedroom and his studio and charges $35 admission. “Art and Objecthood,” curated by the art historian Dieter Buchhart at Nahmad Contemporary, gathers an extraordinary trove of paintings Basquiat made on doors, windows and a refrigerator.Though “King Pleasure” includes a number of never-before-seen pieces, too, its emphasis is distinctly on the artist’s life, so I’ve focused on the Nahmad show, whose sparse staging give you a better chance of engaging with the work itself. But you should keep his biographical basics in mind.Young and ambitious, Basquiat shot straight into the center of the New York art world when he was barely out of his teens, showing with some of the country’s most influential gallerists, haunting nightclubs with Andy Warhol, and producing a staggering quantity of art work before dying of a heroin overdose, at the age of 27, in 1988. In 2017, one of his paintings sold for more than $110 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.He was also the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian father and Boricua mother, and though his family wasn’t poor, he spent a few lean years on his own before he started selling work. When he did hit the artistic big time, he was one of the few Black faces there — and issues of race and class, complicated by his own extreme experience, are all over his work.Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled (Refrigerator),” (1981). In the artist’s hands, it wavers between appliance and found surface on which to draw.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkMaterialsLike most artists, Basquiat drew as a child, famously copying anatomical drawings from “Gray’s Anatomy” while recuperating from a car accident. His first real foray into the adult art world, though, was via the graffiti tag SAMO, which he and his high school friend Al Diaz posted up around SoHo and the School of Visual Arts. Before continuing on to canvas, Basquiat used “found materials” like discarded cardboard and paper or construction debris. In part this was born of necessity — canvas costs money, while broken windows were there for the taking in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.But Basquiat’s use of found materials was also, as the painted windows, doors and sections of wooden fencing in “Art and Objecthood” make clear, a daring artistic strategy that reverberated through even his more conventional efforts. Unlike ready-mades, the manufactured goods that Marcel Duchamp exhibited as art in the early years of the 20th century, Basquiat’s found objects aren’t exactly sculpture. They’re surfaces for him to paint on. But because they are, also, recognizable objects in their own right, they have a beguiling sort of ambiguity. You can’t quite see “Untitled (Refrigerator)” (1981) as only an appliance, or only a surface to draw on — the longer you look, the more it seems to waver between both categories. And once you’re primed for that sort of ambiguity, you start to see it everywhere. In another context, “Multiflavors” (1982), a royal-blue canvas on exposed wooden stretchers, might just look like a painting. Here, it’s a very peculiar object, too.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Minor Success” (1980). Pared-down graffiti techniques and pointed assertions of dignity and individuality.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkIconographyBasquiat didn’t spend long writing graffiti, but he used its techniques throughout his career. The graffiti writer’s pared-down repertoire of easy-to-recognize signs can be as effective on a gallery wall as they are on the side of a building, and one of his favorites — a simple, icon-like crown — shows up on the first piece in “Art and Objecthood,” a white wooden cabinet door titled “Minor Success” (1980). Beneath it are a face without features and a cartoonish sports car.“If you ask 10 people” about the crown, says Buchhart, the curator, “they’ll tell you 10 different meanings.” He goes on to cite Basquiat’s often-quoted remark that his artistic subjects — musicians, athletes, artists — were “royalty, heroism and the streets,” and the way the crown serves to emphasize images or works particularly special to the artist.Essentially, though, the crown claims a figurative mantle of royalty for the artist himself, for the figure he’s depicting, or both — Basquiat’s faces and bodies often read at least partially as self-portraits. But it’s also more nuanced than that, particularly as wielded by a young Black artist intent on making himself a celebrity. You have to ask what kind of social context required him to make such pointed assertions of dignity. Is it one in which Black faces struggle to be recognized as individuals? Or one in which status comes from the possession of material objects like a fancy car?Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Multiflavors” (1982). A painting on canvas demonstrates the unique quality of Basquiat’s writing.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkWriting/DrawingAnother aspect of graffiti that Basquiat kept hold of was the use of writing for visual effect. In many earlier collages and works on paper, a deluge of all-caps writing fills every available square inch. But you can’t read from beginning to end and expect to find an argument. What you get instead is a cloud of loose associations more similar to a picture, in the way you read it, than to ordinary prose or even poetry.This quality is amplified by the way Basquiat mixes drawing and writing together. If you look back at “Multiflavors,” you’ll find that it has a three-pointed yellow crown in the middle and a cloud of red and yellow circles to one side, and that the white, yellow and pink writing, arranged over blocks of black and blue, forms a striking composition. When you come to read it, you find a group of what appear to be references to advertisements or restaurant signs, phrases like “cheap food” and “HACKED CHICKEN WITH MULTIFLAVORS.” You can’t definitively say whether it’s satire or poetry, angry or exuberant or funny. But it could almost be all of them.CompositionOne thing in particular that’s easier to see in “Art and Objecthood” than in the overwhelming visual cacophony of “King Pleasure” is how conservatively Basquiat organized the elements of his paintings. The sheer profusion of marks can be misleading, but if you recognize the scratches and scrawls of “Minor Success,” for example, as providing a texture rather than so many pieces of separate information, you’ll see that the arrangement of crown, face and car couldn’t be more straightforward. A squat little refrigerator is adorned with a burst of letters and a face in “Untitled (Refrigerator),” but they stop just short of the handle, letting the mostly blank lower section balance their effect. And even when every mark really does carry the same weight, as in an intricately painted yellow door, Basquiat keeps careful control of shape and color to create an overall effect of harmony and stability that balances the frantic energy of his lines.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled” (1982). His line “shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm.”Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkLineThe most stunning piece in “Art and Objecthood” may be an untitled painting from 1982 — the year the artist himself claimed to have “made the best paintings ever.” Done in acrylic and enamel on a packing blanket mounted on exposed wooden stretchers, it shows a Black face with white features and a blood-red skull marked with little black dashes like watermelon seeds.It’s a searing portrait of the psychic toll of racism: Even as slurs and insulting tropes leave him bloody and exposed, the figure wears a “white” expression to get along. It’s another stately composition, too, balancing a dense figure on one side with empty space on the other and underlining both for emphasis. And it’s as good a place as any to study what may be the single most distinctive feature of Basquiat’s work — his line.The line that describes this skull shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm. It makes a break in the jaw, uneven eyebrows, a bump on the crown of the skull. It doesn’t leave anything unclear; the drawing is as easy to read as a geometric diagram. But this shakiness does transmit extra information. It lends the figure a particular kind of intensity, making the eyes squint and the teeth gnash, and it gives a similar intensity to the art work as a whole, evoking the tension and energy that must have gone into making it. At the same time, it gives you a sense, more vivid than any mere biography, of the personality of the man who drew it — manic and melancholy, electric, incandescent.Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and ObjecthoodThrough June 11, Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue, third floor, 646-449-9118; nahmadcontemporary.com.— More

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      DJ Kay Slay, Fiery Radio Star and Rap Mixtape Innovator, Dies at 55

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      DJ Kay Slay, who served as a crucial bridge between hip-hop generations, developing from a teenage B-boy and graffiti writer into an innovative New York radio personality known for his pugnacious mixtapes that stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business, died on Sunday in New York. He was 55.Slay had faced “a four-month battle with Covid-19,” his family said in a statement confirming his death.Few figures in hip-hop could trace their continued presence from the genre’s earliest days to the digital present like he could. In late-1970s New York, Slay was a young street artist known as Dez, plastering his spray-painted tag on building walls and subway cars, as chronicled in the cult documentaries “Wild Style” and “Style Wars.”Then he was the Drama King, a.k.a. Slap Your Favorite DJ, hosting the late-night “Drama Hour” on the influential radio station Hot 97 (WQHT 97.1 FM) for more than two decades before his illness took him off the air.“Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” Slay told The New York Times in 2003, when the paper dubbed him “Hip-Hop’s One-Man Ministry of Insults.” In addition to providing a ring and roaring encouragement for battles between Jay-Z and Nas, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, Slay gave an early platform to local artists and crews like the Diplomats, G-Unit, Terror Squad and the rapper Papoose, both on his show and on the mixtapes that made his name as much as theirs.As mixtapes evolved from homemade D.J. blends on actual cassettes to a semiofficial promotional tool and underground economy of CDs sold on street corners, in flea markets, record stores, bodegas and barber shops, Slay advanced with the times, eventually releasing his own compilation albums on Columbia Records. Once illicit and unsanctioned, mixtapes now represent a vital piece of the music streaming economy, with artists and major labels releasing their own album-like official showcases that top the Billboard charts.“You were really the first to bring the personality to the mixtape,” Funkmaster Flex, a fellow Hot 97 D.J., once said to Slay during a radio interview. “That was very unusual. We were just used to the music and the exclusives.”Slay, who became immersed in drugs and spent time behind bars before making it in music, responded, “I had to find an angle and run with it.”He was born Keith Grayson in New York on Aug. 14, 1966, and raised in East Harlem. As a child, he was drawn to disco, dancing the Hustle; when early hip-hop D.J.s began turning breakbeats from those songs into proto-rap music, he traveled to the Bronx to observe and participate in the rising culture.“I had to see what was going on and bring it back to my borough,” he told Spin magazine in 2003. “So I used to hop on the 6 train and go up to the Bronx River Center [projects] to see Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation rock.”He soon took up the affiliated art forms of breakdancing and graffiti, even casually rapping with his friends. “Every element of the game, I participated in,” Slay told Flex. But street art became his chief passion, first under the tag Spade 429 and later Dez TFA, which he shortened to Dez.“I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said at the time. “You’re telling the world something — like, I am somebody. I’m an artist.”Amid the city’s crackdown on graffiti, Dez took on the name Kay Slay (“After a while you get tired of writing the same name,” he said of his street-art days) and developed a fascination with turntables. “Boy, you better turntable those books,” he recalled his disappointed parents saying. But in need of money and with little interest in school, he soon turned to drugs and stickups.Kay Slay at MTV Studios in 2007. “The game was boring until I came around,” he said. Brian Ach/WireImageIn 1989, Slay was arrested and served a year in jail for drug possession with intent to sell. On getting out, he told Spin, “I started noticing Brucie B, Kid Capri, Ron G. They were doing mixtapes, doing parties and getting paid lovely.” He sold T-shirts, socks and jeans to buy D.J. equipment and worked at a Bronx facility that assisted people with H.I.V. and AIDS.“I can’t count the number of people I saw die,” he told The Times of that period. “Working there really made me begin to appreciate life.”In the mid-1990s, Slay found the professional music business still unwelcoming, and he began to call out, in colorful language on his releases, those label executives he thought of as useless. “I told myself I would be so big that one day the same people I was begging for records would be begging me to play their records,” he said.It was that irascible spirit that helped endear him to rappers who had their own scores to settle. In 2001, Slay had a breakthrough when he premiered “Ether,” the blistering Nas dis of Jay-Z that revitalized headline hip-hop beef following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. His radio slots and mixtapes became a proving ground, and he later started a magazine called Straight Stuntin’.“He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” one D.J. told The Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”Slay’s gruff manner and mid-song shouts would go on to influence his contemporaries, like DJ Clue, a one-time rival, and those who followed, like DJ Whoo Kid and DJ Drama. Alberto Martinez, the Harlem drug dealer known as Alpo, who was killed last year while in witness protection, even hosted a Slay tape from prison.“The game was boring until I came around,” Slay said.He is survived by his mother, Sheila Grayson, along with his best friend and business manager Jarrod Whitaker.In Slay’s on-air conversation with Funkmaster Flex, the other D.J. marveled at the creativity of Slay’s boasts and threats — “If you stop the bank, then I’m gonna rob the bank!” — and asked his colleague if he ever regretted the shocking things he’d bellowed.“I said some foul things, man, on some mixtapes when I was not in full touch with myself,” Slay replied. “But I’m not angry at myself for doing it, because the boy that I was made the man I am today.” More