Detroit rapper Lelo on his new album, the industry and art

Detroit rapper Lelo is perhaps best known for his high volume of short songs that often wrap in two minutes or less.

His music appeals to young audiences, many of whom find him through his frequent posts on TikTok, something he says is an example of using the tools at his disposal. Lelo’s among the many new musicians entering a new era of the industry where the internet and social media play a significant role in an artist’s exposure and success.

The Detroit News sat down with Lelo — who was born Khalil Jewell — at the Detroit Institute of Arts to discuss his newly released album “New Detroit,” his influences and his thoughts on the Detroit music scene.

Question: Is creating the short songs something that is intentional for you?

Answer: A lot of it is intention. It’s intentional because as much as I’m the rapper, I’m the audience as well. I don’t always want to hear s— that’s very long. Except I do when it’s old music, and I’m so invested in the showmanship.

If you live in the time of Rick James and you had to go to the concert, you wanted to see him and get your money’s worth, of course. But when I’m swiping, and you could spend $5, $6 a month to listen to unlimited music, you kind of want to get the best of it as quick as possible.

A happy consequence of that is me as an artist, I don’t have to force myself to say more than what I needed to say. I don’t want to have to talk about this thing for four minutes, because I only have two minutes worth of content that’s authentic. So leave it at that, right? It just makes it have more replay value, and you can listen to the next song faster. I kind of fell in love with that. A lot of my favorite songs are the short ones.

Q: What was it like when you first started to come up?

A: It was just teaching me how to be a starving artist. People look at that in like a fine art way, like oh, paint every day, live in New York, being in your studio apartment. For me, that was going back to the ‘hood, recording every single day, living on my means and just getting it out of the mud. Especially in my perspective, I didn’t know anybody. Detroit is so tight-knit. Usually, a lot of the rappers that come up, they have someone in their family or friends that grew up that way. For me, I just had to do what I could.

I didn’t make any connections. Everybody that I’m with, that you see me with, like, there may be two or three people, producers-wise, that got added in because they were a friend of a friend. Everybody else, I knew them since middle school or high school, really we all just came up together.

Q: The songs on the new album, were those all made in a short time frame or are you pulling from songs you had in the vault from a long time ago?

A: Both. The album moved so much. For me at one point, it was a completely different thing, but my biggest thing was always recording and always making something. So when I get excited about something new, something old will get booted out. There’s stuff on the album from a year and a half, two years ago, and then there’s stuff that I made probably a week before I delivered it, or the day before I delivered it. Yeah, it’s really just an ongoing process.

Q: What’s the song on there that you had loaded for a long time, where you were like ‘this is going to be on the album?‘

A: Honestly, none of them. The ones that I was like that about didn’t make it. I thought that they were going to be on the album for a long time, and then we got there, and I was just like, never mind.

The ones that were the oldest on there were probably like “Hundred Thousand Ones,” “Leisure” was really old. “Leisure” is probably the oldest song.

Q: What’s the thought process behind where you want to shoot your music videos and the aesthetic you want to curate?

A: I think a lot of it is just keeping the fantasy alive. Like childhood. A lot of it is keeping it real to yourself. I never want to be a person that’s too obsessed with pleasing fans. I never want to be a person that’s also too negligent of what’s going on.

A lot of it is like, ‘All right, how can I spice up things that I’m already interested in?’ A lot of that, like soldier motifs, and stuff, that’s stuff that’s really personal to me and my artwork. Just like, what does that look like visually?

Q: Pitchfork’s review of your album said you are fitting into this context of the Detroit sound taking off in recent years. To you, is that true that Detroit rap has taken off in maybe the last five, six years? And do you see yourself fitting into that explosion?

A: Just being honest, a lot of what I’m doing is directly impacted by just the music I grew up on. A lot of that was Detroit music. But nevertheless, the explosion of culture in the last couple years has kind of made what I do easy. It created a path for me.

Even without these people, without these names, whether or not that’s my biggest inspiration, it’s still indebted to what they did. I don’t think it’s wrong, them putting me in that avenue. I don’t even feel boxed in. What I do, as much as it’s my new thing, it’s still paying homage to everything before me.

Q: You went to art school, right? What school was that?

A: Albion.

Q: Was that always the plan for you?

A: No, it just found me. I honestly kind of didn’t commit to anything at Albion, wasn’t liking the experience. My painting instructor, after I took one class with him, after the next semester, he found me and grabbed me, damn near ushered me in and told me ‘you should do this.’

Q: So painting was most of what you were doing. I see a lot of work and thought going into your album covers. Did you always feel like the visuals for your work had to be very artistic and thoughtful?

A: 100%. It was a balance of ‘All right, how can I make this as fly as possible with as little resources as possible?’ Because for a long time, there was no resources. A lot of it was just like, for lack of better words, digital papier-mâché, and like whatever I could make work.

Q: Do you have a favorite album cover of yours?

A: That’s a good question. I mean, honestly, ‘New Detroit’ was my favorite, really, because we had spent all of this time with these amazing photographers, super amazing, crazy, graphic designers. We put all this effort into it, just for me not to like it. Just like delving back into it, and everybody who I live in my home with, we all just sat with our computers, grabbed old pictures and made what made sense to the album. Just on an emotional level, I would say that’s my favorite.

Q: Is there anything that concerns you about the state of art in general, like AI?

A: With the AI thing, I just look at it as like a way to increase the value of real artists. This new thing comes out that makes things so much faster to create, it raises the value of the things that are more strenuous to create.

So long as we can always differentiate between what’s AI and what’s not — which is the scary part, being able to differentiate — I think there’s really nothing to worry about. You can’t recreate a lot of these experience and what’s real.