It started out as an inside joke: Rappers of a certain tax bracket, at pains to impress peers who had all the same jewels, watches and cars as them, instead signaled their status by telling people “I know Nigo.” Before long, it happened enough that the Japanese fashion designer started printing the words on t-shirts for his industry friends. Pharrell Williams is the elder statesman of this club, which also includes Pusha T, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky, and Lil Uzi Vert, all of whom appear on I Know Nigo, an album out March 25 that memorializes their friendship with the Tokyo streetwear legend. Tyler, the Creator, Gunna, and Pop Smoke also appear on the record, which is the Bape founder’s first album since 2005’s Nigo Presents: Return of the Ape Sounds.
“I first met Pharrell through our mutual friend Jacob the Jeweler,” Nigo told me in a recent Zoom interview. “Jacob was making some pieces for me and I mentioned I was a fan of Pharrell’s music, so he introduced the two of us.” That was 20 years ago, just shy of a decade after Nigo founded Bape in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. Initially a cult brand built around limited-edition t-shirts, Bape gear became ubiquitous in early aughts hip-hop, worn by artists like Beastie Boys, Busta Rhymes, Clipse, and Kanye. Nigo’s legend grew in tandem with the brand, and before long his Tokyo atelier became a kind of mecca for rappers on tour in Japan.
“I was getting the clothes for so long and hearing these tales about him and then finally meeting him in Japan was crazy,” Pusha T told me.
These tales often revolved around the fact that Nigo, born Nagao Tomoaki, collects everything, or at least all the best things — stacks of century-old Levi’s jeans, Eames chairs, Jean Prouvé tables and vintage Louis Vuitton trunks by the dozen, and one-of-a-kind items like Pee Wee Herman’s iconic suit. (And, of course, a breathtaking array of diamond and ruby encrusted necklaces made by his good friend Jacob the Jeweler.) “When I worked at his studio I realized it was a whole world,” Pharrell told me recently. “One floor was a [recording] studio, another floor was like a showroom for apparel, the next floor a showroom for footwear, and the next floor a photography studio where he shoots all his campaigns. I mean, the guy was just unreal.”
In that recording studio, Nigo had already crafted the first chapter of his own singular musical journey. His debut album, Ape Sounds, very much reflected his place in the culture at the time of its September 2000 release: an experimental, genre-bending pastiche of trip-hop, pop, and psychedelia, put out on the British Mo’ Wax label founded by James Lavelle of UNKLE. The album also reflected its maker’s custodial style of working, with Nigo curating beats, samples, and song ideas which he then realized through collaborators like Money Mark, DJ Shadow, and a range of other guests from throughout the U.S. and Japan. Occasional singles featuring luminaries like Rakim and Biz Markie presaged Return of the Ape Sounds, and in 2005 Def Jam released the debut album for Nigo’s own hip-hop group, Teriyaki Boyz, which featured a roster of producers for the ages: DJ Premier, Dan the Automator, Just Blaze, the Neptunes, Mark Ronson, and Cut Chemist, to name just a few.
In the years since, Nigo set his music career to the side as he established the boutique streetwear brand Human Made (2010), sold Bape (2011), and grew his legend and his circle of hip-hop friends. His return to music, he told me, was a kind of pandemic project born out of the persistence of Victor Victor record label boss Steven Victor.
“I was already friends with Cudi and Pharrell and all these guys, so it just felt very natural to do it,” Nigo said.
One of the most appealing things about his return to music is the fact that I Know Nigo’s superstar collaborators range from Gen X to Gen Z, which lends the project some of the dynamism that makes it more than just a very expensively produced mixtape. That said, it was very expensive according to Victor, a Nigo superfan, who told me the album ended up costing seven times more than its original budget. (A good chunk of the spillover went toward music video shoots in Paris, where Nigo has made frequent work trips since taking over as artistic director of Kenzo last September.)
Like Ape Sounds, which could only have been made at the turn of the last century, in those wild days when Dan the Automator, Steve Albini, and Alec Empire could share production credits on an album by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, I Know Nigo is very much a reflection of its maker at this particular moment in time. And while it is by far less adventurous than Nigo’s classic debut, collaborators like Pusha, Tyler, and Cudi brought their A-game for the man they call “The General.”
That I Know Nigo didn’t collapse beneath the weight of its swelling budget is a testament to Victor’s clout and his passion for the project, which was one of the first he conceived after leaving his job as COO at Kanye West’s GOOD Music label to run his own imprint at Universal. It doesn’t hurt that he has a side gig working as the manager for Pusha T (and for the late Pop Smoke), whose contribution to I Know Nigo comes amid a flurry of hit singles (“Diet Coke”) and hit jingles (“Arby’s Spicy Fish Diss Track”). “It’s a family affair,” Pusha said of his involvement in the album. “Nigo, Steven, Pharrell and I have known each other for 20+ years.”
Pusha and Pharrell had both told me they thought of Nigo as a master curator and tastemaker, which got me thinking about his influence on culture throughout the years. In particular, I wondered whether his Bape aesthetic might have laid the groundwork for the overnight success of the NFT brand Bored Ape Yacht Club. Near the end of our conversation about I Know Nigo, I asked him whether he’d given this question any thought himself, and he made it clear that he hadn’t.
“I’m not really interested in collecting anything I can’t hold in my hand,” Nigo told me.
He had heard of Bored Ape Yacht Club, however, from Guy Oseary, the manager for Madonna and U2, who had recently signed the NFT brand’s owner, Yuga Labs, as clients. Oseary, who does not know Nigo, proposed a collaboration between Bored Ape Yacht Club and A Bathing Ape—unaware, it seems, that Nigo had sold the Bape brand more than a decade ago.