Fivio Foreign: The B.I.B.L.E. Interview

Very few MCs can pinpoint their “most important” freestyle, but for Brooklyn upstart Fivio Foreign, it had to be the one—to borrow a term that pops up often in Fivio lingo—that made him go “viral”. “When I came home from jail, I did a freestyle on Funk Flex,” Fivio tells Ebro Darden. “I had said a line on there, ‘I got a question for the reverend/If you kill a killer, do you go to heaven?’ [Kanye] was like, ‘Yo, I need bars like that on my album.’ He reached out to whoever he reached out to and they called me.” So began a relationship that found Fivio sleeping and recording in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium for two weeks (“He got me a hotel too, but I just did it for the experience”), one that would culminate with West executive-producing Fivio’s debut album, B.I.B.L.E., an acronym for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”. “His help is like, he's a producer,” Fivio says. “He's a person who can call a feature in. He heard the songs and was like, 'Yo, let's take away the drums here. Let's call this person to add this. Let's change these words to make it more mainstream.' He do little perfections.” Ye knows talent, but to be fair, Fivio’s star had been rising for some time. Following the passing of friend and collaborator Pop Smoke in early 2020, Fivio was the man more established stars called when they wanted that unmistakable Brooklyn drill presence, a post that lead to collaborations with Drake, Nas and Mary J, Blige, to name a few. Fivio has had clout locally since 2019’s “Big Drip” single, but with the release of B.I.B.L.E., he’s focused on hipping the rest of the world to both his name and his story. “I feel like I've been waiting my whole life,” he says. “So I put my whole life into the album. It's so much events that was happening. I threw memories, shit that's happening now, I threw everything in one.”