A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY BY RYAN PITKIN

A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY

Ahmir comes of age in new ‘Timeless’ album

BY RYAN PITKIN

When I first met Isaiah Ford in the food court at SouthPark Mall back in February 2017, he was only an adult by legal standards. Three weeks past his 18th birthday and two days past the release of his debut album, Black Tape, which he dropped under the pseudonym Ahmir the King, the young rapper had yet to finish high school.

Upon listening to his latest release, Timeless, which dropped in December 2021, it quickly became clear that Ford has officially entered adulthood.

Not only had he dropped the King from his name, using just his middle name Ahmir for a moniker, but true personal growth was apparent in his lyrical content.

Sure, on Black Tape he had tackled adult content such as police violence, having just witnessed the local unrest that followed the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott in north Charlotte.

While he did dive into some drama between friends in Black Tape, in Timeless Ahmir truly becomes introspective, looking back on a transition into adulthood that saw him finding and losing love, becoming disconnected from his childhood friends for the first time, and losing one of his closest family members to incarceration.

“Life changed,” he tells me. “You know how they say life hits you fast after school? Life really changed.”

We’re sitting at a table on the mezzanine above Starbucks in Harris Teeter on Central Avenue, where it’s clear that the degree to which his life has changed since we first met is only just setting in as he says it.

“It was like when you go from a space where you’re around everybody you know for your whole life, you’re around all your people, and then everybody kinda left,” he says of the time after he graduated from Rocky River High School.

Not only did most of his friends go off to college, but he moved with his mother to a suburb of Charlotte well outside of Mecklenburg County.

He was out of touch and out of sorts. His relationship with his girlfriend went bad and he missed his friends. He took his first full-time job at Target and hated it.

Charlotte was calling him, so he moved back to the Queen City, living with his uncle until he was kicked out over what he calls a misunderstanding.

He still valued being around his people and his recording studio, so he lived out of his car for a bit. And such was the backdrop for the making of Timeless, a record that sees Ahmir battling with themes of love, loss, loyalty and insecurity.

“This album was just the progression of what I

thought at the time, and you really hear me grow up,” he says. “Then ‘Timeless’ [the outro track] at the end, it’s just more of a reflective standpoint.”

In that titular track, Ahmir reflects on what he once coveted — money, cash, clothes, hoes — and asks if it’s worth it.

“It’s a cycle you get stuck in and it’s not a good thing, and so after doing it for so long, you think you want these things, you want to get outta the house, you want to live, and then you get tired of that shit,” he says. “You grow out of it and you start to understand what people been saying when you was younger but you had to see it for yourself.”

During the time he was writing and recording Timeless, Ahmir watched friends get hooked on drugs and alcohol.

He then saw his cousin caught up in a scary situation that resulted from an attempted robbery.

Three men tried to rob his cousin, one of them ended up dead. His cousin went to jail.

Ahmir references this and other personal experiences in Timeless, fully expressing his fears and frustrations in tracks like “Hold Us Down” and “Til the Casket.”

In our conversation, he’s not as ready to dive into specifics, understandably in the situation regarding his cousin, who’s still caught in legal limbo.

Yet it’s not hard to see just how much that one tragic incident has affected the way he looks at the world.

“It was just a layered situation when it comes to the people and parties involved; it will make you reconsider who you have around you,” he says. “It was one of those things where you’re like, damn, you really never know how deep shit go, people looking into you and things like that.”

These issues manifest in the track “Questions,” in which Ahmir confronts the listener with a litany of questions that test their loyalty — be it a love interest or a friend.

It’s something he’s struggled with his whole life.

“I think you hear that on Black Tape even,” he recalls. “It’s easy not to trust people. A lot of people, they don’t really stand on their word, and I feel like a lot of people, they don’t live by the same morals that I do. So it’s easy for miscommunication to happen, because what you think is right and what I think is right might not be the same.”

Yet still, there are some friendships he’s held onto through the tough times, and over the past year, he’s been able to see the work of his peers pay off.

Charlotte rappers Reuben Vincent and MAVI — both friends of Ahmir’s who appear on Timeless — have seen great success in recent months. September saw MAVI join Jack Harlow’s Crème De La Crème Tour while, in December, east Charlotte’s own Reuben Vincent was signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.

Watching the success of his longtime friends has only vindicated Ahmir, justifying his drive and pushing him to keep moving forward.

“I know 1,000% it’s possible because we’ve seen it — I’ve seen it,” he tells me. “I’m proud of these boys. You’ve seen us being supportive of each other from day one. Just knowing that what I’ve seen in them came to fruition, I know what I see in myself is also going to come to fruition.

“Everybody, like our entire generation, we’re really trying to change shit,” he says of his local peers. “These next couple of years in Charlotte, we really want to do things different as far as shows and community and really building, so that’s a big, big focus. But them making the accolades that they’ve been able to achieve and things like that, that’s definitely going to open doors.”

Now he just has to stay prepare to walk through them.

AHMIR

PHOTO BY @KNXWLEDGEISPOWER