Keep in mind, C-Sick doesn’t have a musical background. No music training, whatsoever. He learned all of his skills from studying the greats like Just Blaze, YouTube videos and FL Studio tutorials. As his passion grew, he began looking up beat battle competitions. To his surprise, a pretty big one actually took place in Chicago: The Red Bull Big Tune. He applied, was accepted and at 17, made it all the way to the big stage in New York. Looking like a scene out of the TuPac classic film, Juice, C-Sick had one minute to make the crowd rock to his premade beat before his competitor tried to steal the show. Needless to say, C-Sick took home the championship in 2008. The producer mastermind was born.
His first professional track was Nas’s “Film” off the Last Real Nigga Alive: The Lost Album vol. 1. C-Sick then made a beat tape, Jugrnaut Presents: Yes, Please! Soon, DMV rapper Logic was hitting him up for beats.
“A fan posted my ‘We Get High’ beat through a fanpage on Facebook,” C-Sick says, recalling what Logic told him. “From there, he reached out via Twitter… I was on my way to class at Truman. I looked him up and I saw how versatile he was. I was like wow, he’s just like me.”
That opened doors to more collaboration for the then 19-year-old. Chicago’s own King Louie, for starters. “I sent Louie like four beats and one of them was ‘Val Venis,’ which was my first local single, which I guess became national, too.” After working the Chicago scene for years, he then landed on Donnie Trumpet’s Surf. C-Sick did the drums for “Warm Enough” and “Windows.”
“Usually, I just send MP3s over and you rap over ‘em,” C-Sick says. But for Surf, Chance The Rapper summoned C-Sick to the studio. “Chance was like, ‘man, you just do you on the drums.’ He told me African drumming, like big sounding drums. I was like, I know exactly where to go in my computer to look for that because I have plenty of sounds just sitting there.”
That’s just one of the many accolades of C-Sick’s 2015, his biggest year so far. His tag is all over Lil Durk’s 300 Days 300 Nights mixtape, Logic’s The Incredible True Story, Tink’s Winter Diary 3 mixtape and more. He’s already well on his way to the 2016 takeover. “I still act like nothing ever happened to me, you know,” C-Sick says. “It’s just great motivation for me to keep going.”