BLU’S ANGELES

Blu

Nearly 20 Years After Below the Heavens, Blu Comes Home to the City That Made Him

Los Angeles has never simply been where Blu is from. It’s part of what made him.

Before Johnson Barnes III became one of underground hip-hop’s most respected pens, L.A. gave him family, faith, struggle, sunshine, contradiction and dreams. He grew up seeing both sides of the city—the Hollywood promise and the realities beyond the spotlight—and learned to write from somewhere in between.

Then came Below the Heavens.

Blu & Exile’s 2007 classic introduced an MC unafraid to make the personal universal. Love, money, God, doubt, family, ambition and manhood all lived in those rhymes. Nearly two decades later, the album remains a cornerstone of underground hip-hop.

But Blu never let a classic become a cage.

From Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them and Johnson & Jonson to Good To Be Home, Bad Neighbor, Miles and countless collaborations, the sounds changed while the pen kept moving. Different producers brought out different shades of Blu.

Now, after reuniting with Exile for 2026’s Time Heals Everything, he returns to the place underneath it all.

LA.

Produced entirely by Oakland’s Sndtrak, the September 4 release is a companion of sorts to Blu’s Evidence-produced Los Angeles, but this isn’t postcard California. Through the title track, “Jesus” and the album surrounding them, Blu explores the city he actually knows—the soul beneath the noise, darkness inside the sunshine, faith, memory and home.

Nearly twenty years after Below the Heavens, Blu doesn’t need to recreate the young man who made it. The student has become part of the lineage himself, with a catalog younger MCs can now study.

Yet he’s still searching. Still writing. Still evolving.

Because before the classics, the flowers and the miles traveled, there was Los Angeles.

And LA isn’t Blu looking back. It’s Johnson Barnes coming home—with more life behind the pen.

Q. Long before Below the Heavens, the acclaim or the catalog, there was Johnson Barnes growing up in Los Angeles and discovering his voice. What did L.A. give Blu before Blu ever gave anything back to hip-hop?

Blu: L.A. gave me a loving family. Loving mother, loving father. L.A. gave me the perfect example of life in modern day. L.A. was flourishing in the ’80s, as well as eating itself alive in the hood. L.A. gave me the best of the best. The same thing everyone else had, just in better weather, a promising economy and big dreams, courtesy of the biggest entertainment industry being right up the street.

L.A. gave me everything I needed to be the best me I could be. Physically, spiritually, mentally.

Q. Nearly two decades after Below the Heavens, people still speak about that album with genuine affection. What do you understand about that record—and the young man who made it—today that you couldn’t have understood while living it?

Blu: I understand the hard work put into making that record what it is. I overstand the message through experience. I understand that the relativity in the record made it easy for people to relate to me ’cause they felt like they could almost touch me because I was so personal.

Blu

Q. You’ve built some of your strongest work through one-MC/one-producer albums. What did you hear in Sndtrak that made you trust him with an entire project rather than simply a handful of records?

Blu: I heard a dream I had. I heard my dream West Coast record in terms of production. I heard everything I asked him for, plus more. I heard a classic.

Q. Calling this album simply LA carries weight because your relationship with the city runs throughout your life and music. Why was now the right time to put those two letters on the front of an entire album?

Blu: Honestly, it is a part two or sister album, or companion to the album I made, produced by Evidence from Dilated Peoples, called Los Angeles. After I made Los Angeles with Evidence, and having the experience of rapping about my city on Good To Be Home, I just couldn’t stop rapping about the city.

It was there before all my girlfriends. It was there before all my friends. It was there at the very beginning with my mom and dad. It’s been here my whole life. Imagine how much you can speak on something you have known so intimately, and for so long.

And I’m not done!

Q. The title track feels warm, soulful and lived-in rather than like the stereotypical musical picture people sometimes paint of Los Angeles. What version of your hometown did you want listeners to hear through LA?

Blu: I wanted them to hear the quiet pockets of a very loud town. The darkest corners surrounded by the brightest sunlight. I wanted them to hear the contrast of me & Sndtrak’s song called “Sunshine.” I wanted them to hear the city how I see it.

Q. “Jesus” introduces another dimension to the project. Faith, doubt, purpose and searching have surfaced throughout your writing over the years—where does that conversation find you today?

Blu: The Black man is God. God is everything, therefore I am God. And God is good. If you open your eyes right now, you can plainly see how good God is.

Contrast that in size compared to the amount of evil you see with your two eyes visibly when you open your eyes. God is more than 99% good, G. God is good, not evil. Therefore I am. That’s faith, doubt and the search today.

Q. Sndtrak comes from Oakland and carries that Soul Council pedigree, while you’ve spent your career interpreting Los Angeles through your own lens. What happened when those two California sensibilities met?

Blu: We found respect in each other’s craft and saw the potential of producing music together. Then we put that into motion and made it happen.

Q. Earlier this year you reunited with Exile for Time Heals Everything, and now you’re moving into LA with Sndtrak. After so many years together, what does Exile still pull from Blu that nobody else can—and what does Sndtrak uncover that feels completely his own?

Blu: Exile produces the deepest songs in my catalogue due to the tone of his production, the maturity of our friendship, as well as the longevity of our music chemistry as a duo.

Sndtrak is literally making a dream come true by producing exactly what I have wanted for over 10 years for a classic West Coast album. It’s one of those “you may not get it now, but it will hit you later” kind of albums, if not instantly infectious, like some of my favorite albums today.

Q. Your catalog has never followed the easiest route. You’ve moved between deeply personal records, experimental turns and collaborations without allowing one celebrated album to become a creative cage. Was there ever a point when you had to consciously stop trying to satisfy what people thought a “Blu record” should sound like?

Blu: I shattered the concept of recreating an album with the same formula when I made my 2nd album with MC/producer from Detroit named Ta’Raach. Our collaborative album C.R.A.C. is my most experimental album to this day.

Then I made an album with no drums or drum programming for my 3rd album. We called it Johnson & Jonson. I have vowed to never make the same album twice.

Although Los Angeles and LA are the same thing essentially, the albums sound nothing alike, and hold their own weight respectively, separately. It’s a continuation of Los Angeles like Bad Neighbor was a continuation of Good To Be Home.

Q. You came from an underground era when discovery meant blogs, record stores, message boards, touring and word of mouth. In today’s algorithm-driven landscape, what has been gained—and what do you think hip-hop has quietly lost?

Blu: Money and respect, in terms of value, for the art ever since streaming. Although I love the accessibility, the value has vanished financially and no one is really panicking. It’s like we can’t do anything about it to gain back value besides completely avoiding it because it devalued us so hard.

Q. At this stage, you’ve become part of the lineage yourself. Younger MCs can now study Blu records the same way your generation studied the artists who came before you. When did you first realize you had gone from student of the culture to somebody whose work was helping teach the next class?

Blu: “To know is to know you know nothing at all.” I live by that quote from Socrates. It means I will forever be a student to the craft. As long as my predecessors keep making music, so will I.

Q. With LA arriving September 4, what does this album say about who Blu is right now—not the artist people remember from Below the Heavens, but the man and MC standing here almost twenty years later?

Blu: It’s saying, “Damn, this album slaps hard as fuck,” lol!

Blu

Q. You’ve spent much of your career putting pieces of your life into records. When the catalog is eventually viewed as one long story, what do you hope people understand about Johnson Barnes that they could never learn simply by knowing Blu?

Blu: “I’m a planetarian, excessive display of enthusiasm. My crown chakra generates energy from the plexus. The masses discriminate because I’m connected. I came to planet Earth as a Negroid. Restore and recycled aluminum from planet Pluto. Melanin in my skin makes me Negro, Herbrew, Egyptain. We go way back, before G.I. Joe came out. No doubt I turn the party out.”

That’s Baatin’s verse from an unreleased Slum Village song dating back to like ’95, from a classic song called “Mountain Top.”

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