You sense that Sage Elsesser would excel in any endeavor he set out to master. Give him a year of focus and he’d perfect the thousands of folds required to make a paper samurai worthy of gold at the Origami Olympiad. Give him six months of training and his alpine lineage and preternatural athleticism could have him scaling Everest and snowboarding down it. Hand him a first-class ticket to any conflict zone on Earth and his diplomatic temperament would ease tensions that have long bedeviled U.N. envoys.
There is no concrete evidence for any of these claims. But the anecdotal data is practically irrefutable. At 29, Elsesser’s past and present lives include time as a professional skateboarder and avatar of F—ing Awesome and Supreme. Under the alias Navy Blue, the Mid-City native is one of the most revered rapper-producers of the contemporary hip-hop underground — who received writing credits on Frank Ocean’s “Blonde” as a teenager and steered creative direction for his longtime friend and musical collaborator, Earl Sweatshirt. You may have seen Elsesser’s face staring back in brand campaigns for everyone from Calvin Klein to Tommy Hilfiger or bought his signature line of Converse skate shoes. He’s the co-founder of a vintage watch collective, Very Special, whose clients have included Hailey Bieber and Future. He also plays the congas and the batá, a sacred Afro-Cuban double-headed drum.
The hidden difficulties of these Renaissance-man ambitions would be familiar to every legitimate multi-hyphenate from Gordon Parks back to the original polymath, Leon Battista Alberti, a 15th century Italian artist, architect, linguist, priest and cryptographer, who wrote that “no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”
“I feel like I’ve been at an emotional capacity lately. I’m feeling spread quite thin,” Elsesser says, shortly after we sit down for lunch last month among the well-heeled summer tourists at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood.
None of the patrons appear to be dedicated readers of Thrasher or Quartersnacks, which affords Elsesser a preferable anonymity. The braids of a few years ago have given way to a shorter coif and a closely cropped beard, neither of which obscures the high cheekbones he shares with his sisters, the models Paloma, a Vogue cover star who has walked every runway from Fendi to Balenciaga, and Ama. He wears a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans that look basic until you’re close enough to see the meticulous stitching, texture and heavy, expensive fabric.
“I give a lot of myself to each thing I do. And I try to really be present for most of it,” Elsesser says. “I’ve been really conscious of the language that I use. I don’t know how I feel about the word ‘intention.’ I’ve been grappling with it, but I’m trying to be really intentional with my energy and where I put it.”
The last 72 hours have been a blitz of activity. On Friday night, he performed a set at a block party in South L.A. On Sunday, there was an all-day photo shoot for this Image story. Today, Monday, is the interview, to be immediately followed by a fitting in the Valley for Ferragamo — the Italian luxury house that put him up in this Art Deco landmark on the Sunset Strip.
“I probably won’t be doing any more interviews for a minute,” Elsesser says, acknowledging the end of the press cycle for his most recent album, June’s “Sir Render.”
The promotional run has taken him across both coasts and to Paris Fashion Week, where he and one of his favorite brands, Stone Island, collaborated on an album listening event and a limited-edition vinyl run, featuring a special cover with a custom sculptural bust of Elsesser adorned in a bespoke chain mail top, which was described in publicity materials as “evoking protection, introspection, and the notion of internal armor carried throughout the work.”
If brand copy should be taken with a gallon of Morton, Elsesser’s duality is unmistakable. He’s developed the armature required to handle being in the public eye since 17 — when he turned pro and became generationally canonized for “Cherry,” a 40-minute skate video for Supreme that featured Elsesser and his similarly soon-to-be-deified friends, including Na-Kel Smith, Tyshawn Jones and the late Dylan Rieder. A little over a half-decade later, the onetime crucible of downtown cool sold for more than $2 billion to the parent company of Vans and North Face; the brand equity that “Cherry” contributed was incalculable.
A waiter comes to take our order. Elsesser asks if they can bring a bowl of fruit. Denied, he settles for iced tea, but encourages me to eat with the geniality and concern of a grandparent. Calling him an old soul veers a little too close to cliché, but it’s clearly something that he’s heard all of his life. If the dharmic wheel exists, this isn’t his first 360 flip.
With certain guardrails, he’ll unflinchingly delve into deep-seated psychological wounds. He tends to speak methodically and carefully — in a way that could seem guarded, but more aptly reflects a chronometric yearning for accuracy.
When he discusses the previous Friday’s show, he’s quick to mention becoming choked up five songs in, during a performance of “Sunlight of the Spirit,” a song about the fragile beauty of life, recovery and “childhood trauma [that] make you grow fast.”
“I get really emotional performing this stuff, especially when my dad is present — because a lot of it is about my relationship with him,” Elsesser says. “I’ve witnessed a lot of his hurt and resilience and his ability to push through and remain present for me. It’s really empowering.”
He laughs, slightly embarrassed by his earnestness. But that’s what endears him to his fans, who appreciate the chthonic split between the aerial skate aesthete and the grieving empath.
Onstage at this diverse block party of young and old in Malcolm X shirts and backward Jamaican flag hats, Elsesser bobs his head as if lost in thought. He thanks the crowd for the “time and space to navigate the stuff.”
The “stuff” being a body of work angled toward wistful ruminations on familial heritage, the search for brotherhood and “the question of what to do with all the sorrow.” In less graceful hands, it could come off solipsistic, but Elsesser sifts through the pain in search of reasons to better himself and transcend grief — to savor life not merely for its blessings, but for its adversities too. During “La Noche,” an elegiac piano hymn about trying to find peace of mind, he shakily sings the hook, telling the audience, “I’m not the best singer, but I sing because I love life.” They join in.
Before he performs what was supposed to be his last song of the set, Elsesser exhorts the attendees to clap “one time for gratitude.” Then adds half-jokingly, “OK, I’m gonna go and be in my head somewhere.” But the attendees demand an encore. And after it ends, his shirt is almost soaked through, his brow furrowed. His last words of the night are “I did my absolute best for y’all, I swear.”
When he steps off the scaffolding, two dozen fans swarm him. It seems less hero worship than a reunion of old friends.
His memories begin in mourning. Elsesser’s first life-altering experience came when he was 5 and witnessed his father grappling with the tragedy of losing his eldest son. “I saw how it changed my dad,” Elsesser says. “I saw the place that he went and how much love lifted him up — how when I’d give him a hug, I could see him smile, knowing how much pain he was enduring.”
What Elsesser knows, he heard secondhand. His father’s child from a previous relationship was raised in England. There were hardships and traumas, periods of institutionalization. He apparently hopped into a friend’s car, which turned out to be stolen. There was a police chase through London. A crash. He was 18.
“But I really don’t know, of course,” Elsesser says, his voice trailing off. Nearly a quarter-century later, the emotions remain visceral, but he’s uncertain whether the memories are real or dreamed.
“I remember being with him when he received the news through a phone call — or maybe it was a fax machine,” Elsesser says. “There was a stillness, a deafening silence. It was the sensation of being a kid in a room where there’s only one light source and you can see the floating particles in the air.”
His first trip to the United Kingdom was for the funeral. The bereaved received rap demos that Elsesser’s brother and his friends had recorded. Even then, the kindergartner recognized the significance of this last testament.
“I was fully hearing him,” Elsesser says. “And I still listen to the cassette tape often. It’s special.”
Around the same time, Elsesser discovered hip-hop via 2Pac’s posthumous album, “Until the End of Time.” Coupled with his brother’s recordings, it taught him that art could outlast mortal limitations. “It grounded me to be able to listen to someone not in the physical form,” Elsesser remembers. “They came through the stereo, speaking loudly into my ear, filtered through the added beauty of a child’s brain taking that all in.”
The first rap song that Elsesser wrote, years later, was called “I See Angels.” In the household, spiritual jazz, classic soul and funk, and Afrobeat were omnipresent. His father is a Swiss-Chilean multi-instrumentalist and master of percussion, who bought him an Akai XR20 drum machine, and shortly thereafter, taught him how to chop his first sample (Nina Simone’s “Four Women”).
His mother is a Black American singer-songwriter, raised in Los Angeles with ancestral roots in Tennessee. Family lore has it that when she was first starting out, Marvin Gaye told her that if she was going to pursue a life in music, she’d better love it, because it would kill her. Her close friends included Jackson Browne — who brought the family Christmas gifts and gingerbread cookies every year in his convertible — and Cat Power, who used to take the kids on sleepovers to the Chateau Marmont. Both are big fans of Elsesser’s music.
His maternal grandfather, Madison T. Shockley Sr., was the multi-hyphenate prototype. A conscientious objector who spent three years in a Civilian Public Service camp for refusing the World War II draft, Shockley was originally an insurance agent before embarking on subsequent careers as a social worker, family therapist and actor in films like “The Color Purple” and “Back to School.” Before his 2011 death, Shockley instilled a philosophical hunger and love of language in his grandson — who later put a photo of the two of them on the cover of 2023’s “Ways of Knowing.” His grandma, still alive at 101, taught him, “Don’t let anyone steal your joy.”
“I lived in a duplex with my grandparents and saw them downstairs every morning,” Elsesser says. “My grandfather was always so present and had an infectious smile. I’d ask for a couple dollars for the bus, and he’d hand me two. When I’d say that I needed more than that, he’d answer, ‘Well, you asked for a couple. And don’t ask for a few because that’s three.’ It was such a beautiful, quick way to teach me to ask for exactly what you want.”
His memories of his early years in Mid-City are refracted through the fog of weed clouds and the fish-eye lens of a VX1000 video camera. The Midtown shopping center. Wandering through the stacks of the old Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose. World on Wheels. Skating at Los Angeles High, downtown and the sand gaps at Venice under a powerful, yellow sun. Or taking the Big Blue Bus to fly up and down the ramp at the Boys and Girls Club with his older carpool partner from UCLA Lab School, Thebe Kgositsile (who would soon become better known as Earl Sweatshirt).
“A lot of us had to discover [culture] on our own, but Sage was exposed to it early. He was a baby of Conart and the old rasta shop in Little Ethiopia,” Kgositsile says. “He’s the real deal — one of the first of our generation to be on Fairfax, a pylon and cornerstone at the forefront of a much bigger thing that later became known to the world. And he was always cool. Ever since I met him, he’s always had a totally unique fashion and skate style.”
The preteen Elsesser fatefully introduced Kgositsile to Tyler, the Creator, which resulted in the classic lineup of Odd Future that became a phenomenon in the early 2010s.
“He literally was like, ‘yeah, I’ll set that up for y’all,’” Kgositsile says. “And then we’re on the block and Sage is like, ‘yo, this is bro I was telling you about. I want you guys to meet.’ He introduced a 15-year-old to an 18-year-old when he was 12! That’s not normal at all.”
In the eighth grade, Elsesser accepted a full scholarship to an elite boarding school in East Hampton, N.Y. There was a requisite culture shock, missing friends and family, and impostor syndrome. He shaved his head and spent most weekends skating Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, listening to hardcore punk and Joy Division.
“I knew that my family couldn’t afford it and the scholarship made me feel like the token inner-city sponsored kid. There was a lot of pressure on me not to mess up,” Elsesser says. “Meanwhile, the kids from my neighborhood back home were getting locked up. It’s the reality of being Black and brown in L.A. You’re trying to make ends meet and get caught up in the snares. Then one strike, two strikes and now you’re doing time.”
As a senior, Elsesser was named best new artist at the Guild Hall Exhibition, the youngest-ever recipient at the prestigious visual and performing arts center in East Hampton. His submission, “Hard to Forget,” was a dry-point print of three people lynched in Alabama in the early 20th century.
Shortly after, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn offered him a full ride. By then, “Cherry” had made him and his friends the new faces of Supreme over a soundtrack of Chief Keef and Jane’s Addiction — the camera shadowing their tricky subversions of gravity, collisions with concrete and random cultural intersections (Tyler, the Creator, Chloë Sevigny) on the New York City streets.
“It’s not easy to traverse all of these worlds, but it’s part of what makes him so unique,” says his older sister and manager, the director Kanyessa McMahon. “There’s no one who has ever been in the middle of all these moments as quietly as he has been. Supreme didn’t find a bunch of kids and put them together. Sage just brought them and said, ‘These are my friends.’ The people who know, know.”
Navy Blue emerged from a depressive bout circa 2015, his freshman year of college. At first, his tracks were posted anonymously on SoundCloud, as a way to separate the art from the dozens of images of him seasonally plastered in Supreme advertisements. The invisibility offered a protective cloak, allowing his existential confessionals to develop free of the expectations placed upon Sage Elsesser, pro skateboarder.
Often rapping over drumless loops, Elsesser took inspiration from Yasiin Bey and the late Ka, the Brownsville MC and producer who spent his days as an FDNY captain and nights as a pillar of hip-hop’s avant-garde. In his final years, he became a mentor to Elsesser, and his departed spirit hangs heavily over “Sir Render.”
Over the last decade, Elsesser has amassed an immersive catalog rooted in ancient precepts that seem almost alien in the modern world: nobility, the quest for dignity, karmic debt, familial inheritance and how to sustain faith in a shallow environment. All of it was released independently on his own imprint, save for a brief one-album stint on Def Jam in 2023. As a producer, he’s made beats for the most vaunted names of the underground, including Sweatshirt, Mike, Mach-Hommy and Armand Hammer.
For all his disparate pursuits, Elsesser revels in the small details, incapable of giving anything less than total dedication. He’s been sober for six years, after a rehab stint recommended by a therapist. The clarity sharpened his perspective. The competitive streak is innate. After our initial conversation, we speak again via Zoom in early August. He’s more comfortable in his Bed-Stuy apartment than at the Sunset Tower, exposed brick now behind him, his dog Wednesday nearby gnawing at her paw.
The conversation returns to his Los Angeles show from two weeks earlier. I ask what went through his head after he walked off.
“I’m a perfectionist, so I wasn’t feeling confident,” he admits. “I’d been so consumed with video treatments and merch designs, to where it was like, ‘Oh, I’m a practicing rapper. I should know all my lyrics.’ But I didn’t know some of them, and I messed up a few times.”
I mention that no one in the crowd could tell. He understands this, but it doesn’t alter much. In the next breath, he mentions his Saturn return, the astrological transit that often triggers a reevaluation of one’s pursuits and place in the cosmic octagon. Thirty is only a few months away. The first act is finished. That’s not to suggest any radical reinventions are afoot. He’s still skating, still modeling. His desire to create “boundary-pushing music” occupies most of his imagination, waking and liminal.
Elsesser mentions his natural collector’s streak and inclination toward abundance. But at this stage, he’s seeking ways to simplify and declutter.
“I have too many sneakers. I have too many T-shirts, too many football jerseys that I never wear,” Elsesser says. “My closet is full of winter coats, you know what I mean?”
This aversion to excess is coupled with gratitude. Elsesser says that what he desires most is to remain compassionate and open-minded.
“I want to be of service to the world,” he says. “I’m still going to hold the door for an elderly woman, regardless if she’s racist or not.”
He mentions a dream of returning to school in 10 years, to become a therapist for people who lack the financial means to afford psychological care. Maybe buying some land. Tending a small cherimoya tree. A little while ago, he bought a leather shearling Double RL coat for the express purpose of wearing it in Switzerland a half-century from now. He unfurls the vision. A home in the Alps. Two German shepherds on a loose leash, maybe off leash.
“I’d be just walking and breathing in the most beautiful crisp air,” he says. “A full head of hair. And maybe wearing this striped shirt that I got — if it still exists.”
By then, the idea is to have completed the cycle. Perfected all the things that he wanted to perfect. And now, be the latest node in a transmission that includes Ka, his parents and grandparents, and the ancestors he never knew, but whose wisdom he inherited.
“I’d love to take what I’ve learned and be able to share it with other people,” Elsesser says. “Nothing that I’ve experienced thus far has been in vain. It’s all a reference point.”
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