Zman DA1 Can't Stop

The hip-hop road has been rocky for the New Orleans rapper, but he has stayed at it even though he’s not always sure why.

Zman DA1 considers himself a work in progress down to his name. “I know Z-man is a common rap name,” he admits in an email interview. “There’s a Z-Man that’s a beat maker in Baton Rouge and a Z-Man that draws art, but I set myself apart by taking the hyphen out and adding the DA1 at the end.”

Zelvin Collins has been writing and recording hip-hop since he was 11, but he took two years off from releasing new music and started again this fall. His story is a reminder of how hip-hop can be part of the fabric of life, not just as the music people listen to growing up but as part of the way they socialize, form cliques, fight, and learn life lessons. He started off listening to trap and Chicago drill because it was new and popular with his friends. When he heard the Pharrell Williams-curated soundtrack to the game NBA 2K15 with tracks by Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot and particularly A Tribe Called Quest, Collins found a vibe and sound that spoke to him. He preferred the older drum sounds and style, even though his friends didn’t share the love.

He started off learning from Bankroll Fresh, Chief Keef, 2 Chainz, Lil Durk, LA Capone, B.O.B, Famous Dex, Lil Mouse, Ricch the Kidd, and whoever was hot and underground, but once he found a more authentic voice, he says people on Reddit heard a little Kanye West, Common, Q Tip, Digable Planets, and Cassidy in his flow.

“Kanye West makes sense because I listened to all of Kanye West’s albums,” Collins says. “He became my favorite rapper after B.O.B because I liked every song on College Dropout, which is common for most Kanye West fans. Common is understandable because he collabed with Kanye.”

That journey and the way the social and the artistic come together makes Z Man DA 1’s story like a lot of stories in New Orleans and in cities across the country.

You can hear his story so far on Soundcloud, YouTube and streaming services. The mixed feelings spawned by his influences shows up in his work, so while he raps, “I’ve been in the church / I’m going to die of old age” in one song, he says, “I wanna be a man that gets all that ass” in another. Still, the through line in “Gassed Up,” the latter song, is Collins’ reliance on the phrases “I wanna be a man” and “I’m trying to,” emphasizing the idea that he’s not positive where’s going, but he’s working on moving forward.

On Soundcloud, your bio says that a bunch of songs were taken down, and you refer to that in the song “Trust You” as well. What happened?

My songs were taken down from SoundCloud when I was in high school.

I graduated from NOCCA and Morris Jeff in 2021. I was a sophomore I believe at Edna Karr while I was also a student at NOCCA. There was this guy in my second period who was more into underground rap, subgenres of hip-hop that people don’t mention too much like phonk, rock, emo rap, heavy metal rap, etc. and he was an Odd Future fan. He was always bugging and bothering me, wanting me to join his rap group, and he also wanted to be my manager.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to be my manager because he commented obscenities under YouTube posts of random people making people think I was the one saying those obscenities. He also wasn’t promoting my music to the target audience that I was interested in promoting music to. When I told him so, he released a diss song about me on SoundCloud with someone else. I reported that song, got it deleted, so he reported my songs and got all of my songs deleted. I reuploaded what I could and made new songs, but I have so many strikes on SoundCloud that I just gave up on it and I only upload on YouTube or Distrokid from now on.

I mainly talked about it in my song “Photosynthesis,” and I specifically mentioned how it happened in “Trust You.”

You say you took a two year break from rapping and making beats. Why?

I didn’t take a year break from rapping, but making beats, yes. I’m always rapping, Do I think I could work harder with my lyricism and memorization skills? Yes, but I will never stop writing literature in general nor stop reciting literature until maybe I’m past my sixties.

I also have a rap group called Money Bag Entertainment or MBE for short that I started last year on an app called Rap Fame and we branched off into BandLab and YouTube. We know that Money Bag Entertainment is a common music group or label name and if we blow up I’m willing to change and trademark it. Just like I know Z-man is a common rap name.

As far as music production, I haven’t really had the time because in Mississippi I was studying audio or sound engineering even though I never took one class on that subject. After dropping out, I had to go back to hobbies that were actually making me money and one of those things was film. Being a background actor made me hundreds of dollars month to month and then I did end up getting an actual job at Sonic. I have a vlogging channel that recently turned into a reaction channel that I’m trying to get monetized. I write books, and I do all of the artistic stuff that I could be paying someone else to do like, cover arts, book covers, editing, and producing by myself, so I have so many hobbies other than beatmaking.

You say you have recorded more than 100 songs. What have you learned from that kind of intensive creativity?

The main thing I learned from this creative intensity is that life isn’t perfect and music isn’t perfect. You can break the scale, be off-key, play the wrong note, but as long as it sounds good no one cares. Life has no rules and music has no rules because the only judge is yourself. That’s why if someone sends me a verse they don’t like or a beat I don’t like, I run with it anyway because you have to stop caring about what people think sometimes.

There are tracks I thought were amazing once that I think are trash now and vice versa. At the end of your life, you don’t know how people will think of you because everyone that’s left behind. Even family doesn’t know everything about you.

You say you started rapping when you were 11. What was your first song about?

The first song that I wrote was called “Triple 7,” and the first freestyle that I released on SoundCloud I believe was called “I Just Wanna Win.”

I was mainly freestyling and I came up with freestyles pretty fast, but I’m not as sharp as I used to be. When I wrote “Triple 7,” I was on the bus during a field trip to the zoo. Kids in front and behind me were trying to read it. The hook started, “Triple Seven I’m not an OG / This is for the people that don’t know me / You gotta keep it on the lowkey,” and then towards the end I said something like, “People these days need to stop all the killing,” then I kept rhyming with that phrase to keep the hook going.

It was a weird, long hook and I didn’t understand what I was saying in the rap because it was my first. I was a better freestyler than writer at the time, but I wanted the song to have a positive message.

The “I Just Wanna Win” freestyle was me singing, “I Just Wanna Win” a bunch of times and then freestyling a bunch of street stuff I haven’t done in my life. A lot of my freestyles came easy because I was cursing, rhyming one-syllable words, and rapping about violence or drill, trap type stuff just because I was peer pressured into rapping about that.

My friends wanted me to listen to drill and trap music and start making music like that, but I ended up doing my own thing.

You recently started releasing music again. Why?

My peers wanted me to make music and people still tell me to this day that I sound like a rapper. It possibly might be meant for me especially since I started playing drums at an early age and music came back to me in a different way. I still don’t know what God specifically placed me on earth to do, but I feel like it might be storytelling because all I ever do is artistic things to express how I feel.

I want to give up, but I can’t give up and when I first started making music I was growing rapidly easy. I started rapping right before SoundCloud rappers became a thing in 2014. It was easier then and it’s harder now, so it almost feels like I started late.

I was growing my fan base then, so I’m releasing music again now so that I can start growing my fanbase again. All my songs that I have ever released mainly been just solo songs. I just started releasing collaborations with other artists but it made me realize that it doesn’t matter who is on your song. If it’s a hit, it’s a hit. You have no control over it, it’s like falling asleep or falling in love.

Honestly, I kind of wish I could go back in life and focus on sports because it sounds so easy to do, but I really don’t know that.