“It’s like, ‘Man, this shit f-ed up my life, so I’ma f- up someone else’s life,’ ” he says. He returned to New Orleans and sold drugs for pocket change. His vocal talent was obvious, but reality interfered the laptop was pawned off, and later on, at age 16, he was kicked out of the house by his mother.

When Alsina was a scrawny teen in an oversized baseball cap, he began uploading videos to YouTube in which he covered songs by Lyfe Jennings and Musiq Soulchild. The shit just make you coldhearted, to be honest.”Īugust Alsina Cancels Brooklyn Bowl London Show, Citing Medical Reasons “Of all my childhood memories, I don’t have any good ones,” says Alsina. The family moved to Houston in an attempt to escape the claw of drugs, but it didn’t help. One day there would be lights, a TV on the wall and furniture in the living room. Both his biological father and stepfather were addicted to crack, and the household his mother attempted to glue together was shredded by instability. I come from nothing.”Īlsina was raised in Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, and his childhood was not a happy one. “I came up in the 504 where the block stay hot/And the hot boys all tote Glocks,” he sings on “Shoot or Die,” his remix of Justin Timberlake‘s “Suit & Tie.” “How I came up is deeply rooted into my music,” says Alsina. He makes conventional R&B in a sonic sense, but lyrically, he’s like a New Orleans narcocorrido. There is a desperation to how Alsina sings - not out of yearning for the affections of a woman, but from a hard life. All this crazy shit didn’t happen to me just to happen.” “I know that all of that has got to be for a reason. On top of that, in 2014 he was hospitalized for seizures that he blames on exhaustion. “I can see her,” he says, “but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what she looked like.” You take that for granted, waking up and being able to see.” He points toward a woman in a booth 15 feet away.

“I was like, ‘This n–a tripping.’ I went to see a few other doctors, but that was it - I had to accept it,” he says. He describes how a doctor told him that he had a degenerative eye disease, and that it was steadily worsening. In May, Alsina revealed that he is going blind. August Alsina onstage at WAOK Car & Bike Show in 2014.

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