City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Alejandro Hernandez that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.
“I’m not tryna get high, man. I’m tryna get righteous,” says Stock Marley. He’s in his west-side apartment, delicately rolling up a joint. “This is a daily sacrament. It’s a way of life. I’m not tryna do things fast—I’m trying to do it right. With the weed, with the music, we’re just trying to be righteous all the way around.”
Marley was born in Columbus, Ohio, but he’s proud to show off his adopted west-side community—he’s invited me into his home with open arms. Before our interview, he breaks down a few chunky colas of cannabis, which he says he helped a friend grow. For him, he explains, this isn’t so much recreational use as it is ritual. After one hit, he opens up to me: Both his parents were addicts, he says, and while his mother is in recovery, unfortunately his father passed due to the affliction. Marley developed his own addictive personality, but he credits cannabis for keeping him on the right path.
“I firmly 100 percent believe that if I didn’t fall in love with weed, I would have fell in love with something much more destructive,” he says. “I started smoking late, like around 21, and as I started smoking, I started freestyling and thought that shit was fun. People were like, ‘Yo, you’re really good—you should do something with this.’”
Marley’s musical career began soon after his introduction to weed. On and off between 2005 and 2012, he attended Oakwood University, a historically Black school in Huntsville, Alabama, where he joined a poetry club called Art N Soul. He was reluctant to rap at first, but his peers encouraged him. He joined a music collective called Free Nation, which also included Chicago’s own Mick Jenkins—a Huntsville native who was then a fellow Oakwood student.
“The group was founded by Prop, who told it to his friend Maine the Saint, and they called it Free Thought at the time,” Marley recalls. “They asked me that day, like, ‘Hey, you tryna get down with the Free?,’ and I’m like, ‘Hell yeah.’ The first time I would rap [publicly] would be a competition called ‘Who Got Bars?,’ and Mick joined the competition as a separate student. He then would drop a Free Thought bar even before joining the group, and everybody got kinda pissed off. But I was like, ‘Yo, I don’t think anybody is gonna prove themselves like he just did—we might as well ask him to be a part of the group.’ And so we called him over, we voted, asked him in, and that was it.”
After college, the members of Free Nation scattered across the country to their respective hometowns, though they continued to collaborate when they could. Five years ago, Marley took a leap of faith, leaving his life in Ohio to move to Chicago, and he’s since toured nationally in support of Mick Jenkins.
He’s also made a viable music career for himself without a proper debut release, in part by flying overseas to work with international artists and brands on jingles that play in stores. The most streamed song on his Spotify page, a collaboration with Random Dan and Ben Weighill called “Sing,” was created under the auspices of Audiomachine, a California production house that specializes in film, television, and video-game ad campaigns.
Marley’s identity as an artist doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with those tracks, though; on his own, he prefers introspective, rhyme-heavy lyrics and down-to-earth, soulful production. That’s the sound he’ll showcase on his debut album, but first he wants to give listeners a preview of what to expect with an upcoming release he’s titled The Build With Me EP.
“You have to be invested for something dense,” Marley says, “or if it requires some intentional thought. I understand the times we live in. I get it—we don’t have a lot of attention span. It hit me that [my team] needed to drop music before we dropped the album. And then The Build With Me EP started to form. This is gonna be the joint or glass of wine before a heavy conversation. It’s the official ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Stock Marley, let me show you around.’”
Marley designed the soundscape of Build With Me with casual listening in mind. It’s not that he doesn’t want fans to take the time to listen to his lyrics, but rather that he also wants them to be able to play the EP in the background of their daily lives. His album, on the other hand, will be something they sit down with. Guests on the EP include east-side rapper Recoechi, Free Nation comrade Prop, and Pivot Gang rapper MFnMelo. It was recorded entirely at Studio Shapes with staff engineer Renzell (who also mixed and produced) and mastered by Elton “L10MixedIt” Chueng of Classick Studios fame. If all goes to plan, it’ll come out in late October.
By naming the EP Build With Me, Marley is inviting listeners to form organic relationships for the greater good, not just with him but also within their respective communities. Shortly after arriving in Chicago, he volunteered at a Save Money Save Life event where children were taught how to treat gunshot wounds. The experience gave him culture shock, but he knew he wanted to be a positive role model. He now serves as a board member for nonprofit organization Chicago Votes.
“I think as I’ve been moving along and just showing genuine love, the reaction I get from people is mind-blowing. There’s no genuine love—it’s all transactional,” Marley says. “But we gotta have faith, man—have faith in ourselves. If we got faith in what we’re doing, we don’t need to be flailing about in the water trying to save ourselves now. We should be reaching out for each other.”
Chicago gets a lot of criticism, Marley says, for not honoring its hip-hop roots. The old-school sound has been overshadowed by drill artists. “They don’t show us a lot of love,” he says. “They don’t show us a lot of community. But it’s here. Touch grass, touch people, have real conversations, real ideas. Look somebody in the face and be like, ‘I love you, man.’”
Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate community-driven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond
