Waiting for Latkes in Brighton Beach With Your Old Droog

It’s mid-December, and Your Old Droog is waiting on some latkes.

Droog, for those unaware, is a Brooklyn rapper who, over the past decade, has established himself as one of the best MCs in the game. His mind-bending wordplay, huge breadth of references, and incredible sense of humor have drawn critical raves and acknowledgement from almost every major rap legend, from Black Thought and Pharoahe Monch to the late MF DOOM and Sean Price. But now he’s trying something a little different: talking about himself.

We’re at LOFT by Hot Potato House, a restaurant in Brighton Beach not far from the Gravesend neighborhood where Droog was raised. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and a saxophonist is standing just inside the entrance, loudly playing a mix of jazz, ‘70s and ’80s pop, and Christmas music to a backing track. The setting is very familiar to the rapper, who says he spent more time in adjoining neighborhoods like Coney Island and Brighton Beach than in Gravesend proper when he was growing up.

Droog’s latest album, Movie, finds him looking back on his early days. His family moved to Brooklyn from Ukraine when he was just four years old, in the early 1990s. “My mom used to sew wigs right when we first moved to Brooklyn, in Midwood. She used to walk to Midwood from Gravesend to save money,” he recalls. In addition to money being tight, there was a stigma around being perceived as Russian in those post-Cold War years. The rapper says as a kid he was unaware of any socio-political implications of his background, whether they had to do with anticommunism or Russian/Ukrainian tensions—the latter became an independent country in late 1991, just two years before Droog came to the U.S.

“I was just a child,” he tells me. “There was tension between Russians and certain Italians and Puerto Ricans, but it was just in a one- or two-block radius, and that’s all my world was.

“But my family’s Jewish. I don’t know if people understand the distinctions back home. Some people won’t even view us as Ukrainians because we’re Jews. I don’t know if the world is ready for those conversations.” He says now that he’s “happy” about his early ignorance. “That’s a lot to think about for a child, right? What would I have made of it? I just knew what I was going through. I moved to a new country. I’m not examining my roots. I’m not talking to Henry Louis Gates.

“I go to school and they’re like, ‘You’re Russian.’ It wasn’t cool. So, at that point, I’m like, ‘I’m not even gonna tell you guys I’m Jewish.’ I’m getting bedtime stories from my grandma about the Holocaust. If I tell them I’m Jewish, they might kill me or some shit.”

A lot of these recollections work their way into songs on Movie, by far the most personal of Droog’s many releases. But that wasn’t his original intention. Incorporating childhood stories “wasn’t calculated,” he notes. “The production drove what I was talking about. I’m writing what the song needs to be, what it’s telling me to write. But I’m not gonna lie: when I do songs where I’m rapping just for rapping’s sake, you feel a little empty inside. You want to give a little more of yourself.”

Droog started rapping in junior high, when he saw a classmate spitting rhymes in the hallway and was inspired to challenge him to a battle. “Shout out Randolph,” he says, laughing. He recalls that his contribution was essentially “roasting in rhyme form.”

“It was everything bad you could say about somebody. It was a personal attack. We were both poor, but he was really poor. He had maybe one or two pairs of jeans a week, and I had four. That’s the perspective.” That early victory led to more battles and, eventually, a loss to “a dancehall rhyming cat” who had the incredible ability to rap over a beat.

“So, after that, I was like, hold up, I think I need to learn how to rhyme on a beat,” Droog remembers. That led to trips to the Bronx, which were initially just for fun—and, he admits, “really about weed”—but evolved into plenty of rapping, and discovering beat CDs that he could rap over. He was partial to J Armz’s instrumental collections, as well as a collection of Nas instrumentals.

When he was around 14, his very first studio recording somehow made it onto the internet. It attracted at least one listener: a teenager not much older than Droog himself, who got the young rapper’s number and prank-called his house to roast him. That early listener was none other than Steven “A$AP Yams” Rodriguez, who would go on to co-found A$AP Mob before dying in January 2015.



“He was tapped in,” Droog remembers of Yams. “The first time any official recordings hit the internet, he knew about them.” While Yams was skeptical of Droog’s first raps, the Brooklyn spitter won him over later at a battle in the Bronx. “It was at a basketball tournament. Yams held the camera. And I was the only dude from Brooklyn over there. He really fucked with me after that.”

Droog’s rap career first took off about a decade ago, when a few songs of his got major attention in the rap blogosphere, and his initial reticence to do publicity, along with a deep voice not dissimilar to a certain Queens rap legend’s, led many to speculate Your Old Droog was actually Nas in disguise. The conspiracy theory was definitively disproved when Droog gave his first public performance in September 2014, at the Studio at Webster Hall. The show was covered by The New York Times. That review, Droog recalls, is how his parents found out their son was a professional rapper.

“I just handed it to my dad,” he says. “I don’t know if he thought it was fake or some shit. We didn’t talk about it. I just gave him the paper and left—I’ll see you later. My pops used to be like, ‘When am I gonna see you in the newspaper?’ There you go.”

Since that early highlight, Droog has released a slew of projects, including Jewelry, a 2019 examination of his Jewish identity. That one began life as a joint album with Quelle Chris that they wanted to call “Crown Heights Riot.”

“It was gonna be Run the Jewels from hell,” Droog explains, before it morphed into its final form. Our conversation circles back to Movie, whose title was inspired by Droog’s parents’ tendency to say “kino” (Russian for “movie”) when something in a film was obviously faked. “Maybe it’s a sentimental thing,” he admits.

After a decade in the rap trenches, what’s left for Droog is an upcoming joint project with the enigmatic Los Angeles producer Madlib. The two were introduced through Droog’s DJ, Edan, who had a line into the producer’s then-manager and business partner, Eothen “Egon” Alapatt.

From Egon to Edan, and, eventually, to Droog, it was made clear the shadowy, esoteric beatmaker was interested in collaborating. After a few DMs in 2021, they got right to it, exchanging beats and verses via email, and locking in when either happened to be on the other’s coast. It was a banner link-up for Droog, who had been “waiting on that message for like 10 years.”

“It’s like you’re meeting your long-lost brother or cousin. There’s very few people in the game that I could discuss Frank Zappa’s Uncle Meat movie with. So that’s my guy,” Droog recalls. Their chemistry and shared fascination with obscurities have fueled a potent creative connection that has amounted to countless sessions and a ton of material.

In January, Madlib’s home and studio were razed during a historic wildfire event in the Los Angeles area. The producer’s record collection and recording equipment were reportedly lost, along with decades of unreleased music. But Droog’s not terribly concerned whether their joint album will be considered a casualty of the fires. He’s quite confident the debut of “Droogie Otis”—a tentative moniker for the duo, according to the rapper—will still arrive at some point this year in the form of a studio album or long-ish EP, forging ahead with the producer even after the blaze. “I think that’s just how we deal with tough times. Just keep working, keep powering through it.”

But there’s one additional desire.

“I’m trying to make a classic solo album that’s undeniable, that’s gonna stand the test of time,” he tells me as our meal winds down.

“I just want to keep elevating, and showcase exactly what I do best. It’s not just, oh, he’s good at rapping. It’s more than that. I’m specializing in writing the songs nobody else is going to write.”



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