Nacho Picasso almost slept through his tattoo appointment the day I spoke to him.
Noon, when it was scheduled, is about three and a half hours earlier than he says he normally wakes up.
He can’t remember how many tattoos he has. He claims he lost track in high school. At this point, he counts the vacant spaces on his body instead: one calf, the opposite thigh, and his head (which he already has plans to cover).
Today he started inking that vacant calf with the beginnings of what he calls a “vampire bitch” sleeve. This morning’s appointment was for a tattoo of Vampirella, the cult comic-book character who’s sort of like an undead Bettie Page. Her trademark outfit is a thin red leather strip that covers only her nipples and her crotch. Next up is a tattoo of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the busty ’80s kitsch horror queen.
This is Nacho Picasso: the self-described “scumbag” of Seattle’s Moor Gang rap collective, and one of Seattle’s fastest-rising rappers. His latest album, High & Mighty, is a marijuana-smoke cloud of deft wordplay and lurid misadventures that has his notoriously rowdy fans hyped.
“I’ve got a special relationship with my fans where, if you get kicked out of one of my shows, I will tweet you to meet me in the alley, and I’ll still smoke a blunt with you or shake your hand,” Picasso says. “Kids get carried away at my shows. Fifty kids will get kicked out at a time. I feel like my fans identify with the rebelliousness and the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ fun attitude.”
On Twitter, fans have taken a special liking to High & Mighty track “Duck Tales” for its chorus “Don’t hold a grudge, hold a dick.” Then there’s “The Lick,” in which he says, “Kiss the tip like my pubes are the mistletoe/She don’t swallow, hold her mouth bro, pinch her nose.”
I ask Picasso if the sole female MC in the Moor Gang, Gift Uh Gab, ever gives the rapper a rough time for his skirt-chasing. Between “Duck Tales” and Picasso’s frequent Twitter updates about what girl (or girls) kept him up last night, it seems he might sometimes rub Gift Uh Gab the wrong way.
“Fuck no. She’s a Moor,” Picasso says. “You gotta have tough skin to hang with the raunchiest group of boys in the city. She holds her own. She puts us in our place half the damn time.”
Picasso’s High & Mighty track “Black Gypsies” is an ode to the Moor family, a group of roaming friends and MCs who purport to do what they want. “We live like gypsies,” Picasso says. “A lot of us never had fathers, so we became our own family.”
When Picasso was a kid, his father, a poet, died after a long fight with AIDS. His caretaker personally typed out his verse from his deathbed. Picasso likes to think he’s carrying on his father’s legacy through his music. “When I told his sister, my auntie, that I was doing music, she started crying,” he recalls. “She said I was picking up where he left off.”
While his father struggled with a lack of recognition for his art, Picasso has had quite the opposite experience. His massive fan following treats him like a king, tweeting affirmations daily and starting hashtags like #NachoPforPresident2016.
The highest compliment came when Marcus Lalario, owner of local burger shop Lil Woody’s, asked Nacho to design a High & Mighty burger.
“I was like, ‘Hellll yeah. Can I have anything on it?’ So I made this super-fucking burger that had everything on it, and he hit me up and was like, ‘Man, we’re going to have to dumb it down a little bit.’ ” The result is a concoction including bacon, Monterey Jack, American cheese, egg, pineapple, mayonnaise, and custom BBQ sauce.
“Man, the original one had Hawaiian sweet bread buns. It would’ve made you puke,” Nacho says. “Next time I’m just going to stick a patty between two cinnamon buns.” With Avatar Darko.
The Crocodile. 2200 Second Ave, 441-4618, thecrocodile.com. $10. All ages. 8 p.m. Fri., Nov. 29. www.nachopicasso.com
ksears@seattleweekly.com
