When he was a kid, Sideshow wasn’t particularly interested in music. He and his friends would scatter across the Arat Kilo section of Addis Ababa, happily unsupervised, playing marbles and riding bikes; the songs he heard, many of them mezmur numbers intended for the church or pop standards about stuffy romantic ideals, seemed decidedly for adults. “They’re singing about God and they’re singing about love,” the 28-year-old rapper, born HaileMariam Kassa, says from his Virginia home, “and I thought to myself, I’m not in love with anybody. I’m young. I don’t even care about that.”
But after he, his father, and his two siblings followed their mother to America (a journalist, her work had rankled the Ethiopian government at the time) he began inching toward hip-hop. Through his adolescence in D.C. and Arlington and early adulthood in Los Angeles, Sideshow would learn to craft songs of his own that deal with contemporary ills—prescription pills, semilegal firearms—as if they’re eternal evils.