Travie McCoy: “I ran through the flames and stomped them out so others could walk through easily”

Travie McCoy is a survivor. A man who’s experienced a raft of life-shattering events – any one of which could easily send your average person off the rails – he’s an artist who has always found a way to pick up the pieces of his broken world and put them back together through music. And it’s the music he started making with Gym Class Heroes in the late-’90s that paved the way for much of what the alternative artists of today do so well.

In 2022, the vast majority of rocks fans have no qualms with (or at the very least, accept) the genre-fluid approach taken by many contemporary artists. From Enter Shikari and Bring Me The Horizon to twenty one pilots and Turnstile, the most exciting bands of today aren’t afraid to push the envelope in aid of sonic progression. But back in 1997, when Travie and his Gym Class Heroes began fusing their love of punk with hip-hop, R&B and reggae, many were unconvinced.

Outsiders for years in an alternative music scene itself on the fringes, the band then exploded following the release of 2005 single Cupid’s Chokehold, while Travie would also go on to have solo success – particularly in the case of his song Billionaire, which featured and kick-started the career of pop sensation Bruno Mars.

In the midst of all these triumphs, though, Travie’s life was tumultuous. He’d seen friends die from drug abuse at an early age, himself going on to become addicted to heroin and spend stints in and out of rehab. A biracial man, he experienced racism wherever he went, from his hometown of Geneva, New York to tours of America’s Bible Belt and small towns in the UK.

Despite the struggles, though, Travie is still fighting, and as he gears up to release excellent new album Never Slept Better – out July 15 via Hopeless – we invited him to take on the iconic K! Interview, where we discuss addiction, racism and the legacy of one of the alternative scene’s more complex characters…

You reference your roots in Geneva, New York several times on Never Slept Better. How influential has your hometown been on your output throughout your career?
“You know how people talk about how Japan was sealed off from the rest of the world for thousands of years? Well, I definitely feel like Geneva was sealed off for a couple of hundred! It’s a small college town, so we had to search outwardly to find outlets for our music – we’d go to Syracuse and Rochester a lot for hardcore shows. Although I grew up in Geneva and my family is there, I always felt from a very young age that my heart and my spirit were too big for that town. What sealed that for me was touring, and then coming home and seeing all the kids I went to high school with having families and doing the ‘real life’ thing. I feel like people from small towns tend to just settle – it’s like you graduate, go to college, get a degree and start a family, and that’s it. And I knew that was not my path at all. That said, I wouldn’t have it any other way, because us being so isolated made us want to reach out and see what was going on in the world. Plus, coming back off tour to visit family and seeing all the kids I felt inferior to in high school living their shitty lives was pretty awesome.”

A common lyrical theme throughout your career has been that of not fitting in. Did things get better or worse in that regard when you started touring?
“It got worse, to be honest with you. I’d never been to middle America before we started touring, and although I’d experienced some racism growing up biracial in a small town, it was never to the extent of that which I experienced touring the Bible Belt. Growing up in Geneva gave me tough skin, and tough hands too (laughs), but despite the racism, I do hold those formative years of touring very dear. To be blatant, Geneva is a pretty racist town itself, so it prepared me for travelling the States, to some extent. I found it weird trying to confront racism in a non-violent way, because my mom is whiter than most people, so I felt like, ‘If you have an issue with me, then you have an issue with my mom, and I’m going to beat your ass.’ But that’s just small-town living. Yeovil in the UK is the most racist small town I’ve ever been to in my life. We did a show there once and I shit you not, I got surrounded by 10 kids with knives – like 10 12-year-old kids with knives. And I was like, ‘This is gonna end one of two ways: you guys are gonna stab me to death, or I’m gonna beat the shit out of all of you.’ They ended up putting the knives away and I invited them to the show that night, but that small-town mentality is everywhere.”

What about the musical side of things? Did you feel like people ‘got’ what you were trying to do with Gym Class Heroes’ genre-fluid approach?
“Definitely not at first. I don’t mean to keep going back to the race thing, but a lot of people were like, ‘Who’s this big black dude with the tattoos?’ It was like that when I was attending hardcore gigs, too – the hard-line straight-edge guys would beat you up if they saw you smoking a cigarette, but because I was six foot two they weren’t gonna fuck with me, even if I was drinking and smoking outside the shows. But getting back to the Gym Class Heroes thing, we would literally play with anyone who would have us with them. That mean death metal bands, funk bands, reggae bands, feminist slam poets… it ran the whole gamut. Nobody was expecting what we brought to the table, and what we brought was a lot of shit with loads of different influences, so nobody knew what to expect. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, though, everyone was on board by the end of the show. I remember one time we played with Fear Before The March Of Flames and, obviously, there were a lot of people there who hadn’t come to see us. There were these girls on the side of the stage mocking us during our set, pretending to be rappers with hand gestures and everything. They looked totally stupid, but by the end of the show they were all on the stage dancing and loving it. That’s a testament to how music can change peoples’ state of mind.”

Genre fluidity is now common place in alternative music. Do you think you were a bit ahead of your time in that regard?
“I always say that I ran through the flames and stomped them out so others could walk through easily, but I wouldn’t change a thing. There was never a mission statement for Gym Class Heroes – it was just four kids with different backgrounds and musical upbringings from the same town that decided to have sex with each other and make a band.”

Do you think you got the recognition you deserved at the time?
“That’s a tough question. What I would say is I feel that people don’t understand everything that happened before Cupid’s Chokehold – I think people felt that Atlantic and Fueled By Ramen signed the band and suddenly made us this big thing, but before that we were booking all our own tours, working with venues directly, driving the van – we put in the grind, and I think that gets overlooked despite us having built a grassroots following all by ourselves. We brought through fans who were there at the start were with us at the 7-11s buying sandwiches, letting us sleep on their floors and all that shit – we weren’t some industry plant that was put together and tossed out there. We definitely put in the work.”

While the band was blowing up you were dealing with some serious addiction and mental health issues. How difficult was that period, and did the industry exacerbate your problems?
“I was a people-pleaser for a long time – I just wanted people to be happy, so I compromised a lot. When I think about how those problems started, I go back to an incident that happened when I was younger and a friend of mine overdosed on heroin. My friends and I went to the funeral, and we were all grieving in our own ways, which largely meant debauchery and getting fucking wasted. We decided to go to a party at a frat house, which was the wrong idea, because me and 15 fucking gutter punks don’t belong at a frat house at all! The minute I walked into the house, I knew something bad was gonna happen. A really good friend of mine, a girl, got hit in the face by a fully-grown man, and I lost my shit. I ran across the fucking room and all I wanted to do was kill him, literally put him in the fucking ground. I hit him, but as I was doing it I slipped on some spilt beer and my foot popped – I tore my ACL and MCL, and broke and twisted my meniscus. I ended up getting kicked and punched a lot and at some point they dragged me out of the house. When I got to the hospital, they put me on Oxycontin, and we all know that can lead to heroin, which is what ultimately happened to me.

“I’ve also recently been diagnosed bipolar, and honestly, I don’t know what that would have done to me had I not had music as an outlet. That said, though, I don’t think the music business helped with any of that at all. I’ve seen first-hand people dealing with mental health and addiction issues, and I’ve seen motherfuckers in the industry cater to that, rather than helping them. It was often a case of, ‘So and so can’t go onstage – we need to get him some pills.’ And it’s like, ‘This guy is having a breakdown right now, but all you want to do is sedate him or get him a bottle of wine so he can temporarily be back where he needs to be.’ That’s when I started realising they don’t give a fuck about us – we’re disposable to them. It’s all about the fucking machine – they don’t give a fuck what they have to do as long as the machine keeps going. But I’ve realised you really don’t have to be a part of that machine. Had a I remained a part of it, I wouldn’t be here doing this interview with you now.”

The title of Never Slept Better references the novel The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, a story in which the protagonist ultimately wins. Is the inference here that the album represents a victory for you?
“Absolutely – you couldn’t have put it better. Never Slept Better is a victory lap. It’s like, yeah, I swam around that fucking island, defeated all those fucking goons and killed all the dogs. What I love most about that short story is that they don’t really get into what happened between the protagonist and the antagonist, but the former ends the novel by saying he just had the best sleep of his entire life. It just felt like the perfect representation of everything I’ve been through over the past 10 years.”

What does the future hold for Gym Class Heroes?
“At the moment, the grave has been dug, but the coffin hasn’t been laid in it yet. We’ll see.”

Finally, what’s the key to a good night’s sleep?
“Weed – marijuana makes me sleep better than anything! It’s a combination of that, my fiancé and my dogs – they’re the Holy Trinity that lead to the best night’s sleep.”

Travie McCoy’s album Never Slept Better is out July 15 via Hopeless

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