How Spirituality Led Richmond's King NTG Back To Hip-Hop

Spirituality and religion aren’t readily mentioned when discussing Bay Area hip-hop, but they’ve been present since the start.

In the ’80s, Too Short rapped that his city “couldn’t be saved by John The Pope.” The decade after, Richie Rich suggested that “if you’re scared, go to church.” The Jacka quoted the Quran in his early 2000s lyrics, Kamaiyah praised God in her uptempo party songs in the 2010s, and three years ago, Rexx Life Raj dropped an album called The Blue Hour about his path to spiritual enlightenment after the passing of his parents.

It’s just that the Bay’s belief in a higher power is often shrouded by heavy bass lines and lyrical game.

The music of Richmond artist King NTG is more directly devoted to the Lord. His latest album Salvation dropped March 16, a nod to the Bible scripture John 3:16.

Lyrically uplifting without being preachy or condescending, Salvation retains the mobb and hyphy energy of Bay Area rap, complete with wisdom-filled-wordplay. And it’s clearly made with God at the center of it all.

“Took out all the curse words, so I ain’t curing it / Entering my new reign, fully immersed in it,” King NTG raps on the track “No Industry Friends” — as a summation of this project and a window into where he is artistically.

Throughout the album, King NTG, formerly known as Nio The Gift, tells how he found his personal salvation. After experiencing a taste of rap stardom at a young age, living the fast life came to a slow end. He soon learned to focus on family, mentorship and God, and came back to hip-hop to share his blessings.

In 2006, just after China’s Ministry of Culture banned Jay-Z from performing in the country, a young Nio The Gift got the green light to perform and distribute his music in the Chinese providence of Guangzhou; the first independent hip-hop artist from the U.S. to do so.

“I got back from China,” King NTG tells me during a recent phone call, “and I hit the ground running … people started to find out what I had done internationally before I was even local.”

He dropped a series of projects, including his 2009 album H.I.P.H.O.P. (Here I Present a Hero of Poverty) and the 2010 album Super Hero. He worked with rising West Coast rappers of the era, including Fresno’s Fashawn, Richmond’s Erk Tha Jerk, Antioch’s Symba and Oakland’s Mistah F.A.B.

“I was the young gun on the scene,” he recalls of his early 20s. “I was getting so much love from everybody who was out there.” And then life started to catch up with him. “I was still kind of one-foot-in, one-foot-out of good and bad decisions in my life,” he reflects.

After the birth of his first son, King NTG was still trying to figure out life, let alone a music career. “And, you know,” he says with an exhale, “that was when things started to kind of slow down and take a turn.”

Violence and murder in his hometown of Richmond spiked in 2007 and 2009, and rapping was a way out. He began feeling the pressure to succeed as a hip-hop artist. His name was ringing bells, but funding a rap career is expensive business.

“The studio time costs, beats cost, you got to print up CDs,” he says. “When you find out that music and pursuing your dreams comes with a cost, you start hustling a little bit harder.” He even titled his 2012 album The Hustler’s Spirit.

But as Nio the Gift, he realized that no matter how hard he hustled, it wasn’t working. So he backed away from rapping and, discouraged and depressed, returned to the proverbial drawing board.

“I wanted to come back evolved, I wanted to grow,” he says of his personal reassessment. “Nio tha Gift is one person, but who am I?”

He got married and expanded his family, started coaching youth basketball and began mentoring young men in group homes. “I could identify with their struggle,” he attests. “I could identify with what it felt like to take chances, to be exposed to violence, to participate in violence, to grow from those things, learn from those things. And, you know, I turned my life completely around.”

On the new song “Not For Sale” (featuring Champ Green and D. Bledsoe), King NTG raps, “Neon in my aura, treating life like mi amor/ era of my second prime, like I’m Deion and Shedeur.”

It’s one of a few instances where he references the transition he’s made, and what he’s doing with his newfound perspective.

The clearest examples are the songs “Living My Truth” (Part 1 and Part 2), as well as “Flowers,” in which he discusses dealing with pistols, broken romantic relationships and emerging from the shadow of his brother, former NBA player Drew Gooden.

Over production from Ekzakt, F1rst Class, The Mekanix and Vidal Garcia, the album features vocalists Two14, Yung Semi and Gabby Rose. There’s verses from Mani Draper, Ian Kelly and T. Carriér, and even some bars from B*Janky of the Trunk Boiz on the hyphy era retrospective “You Had To Be There.”

In “One Life,” featuring 4 rAx of The Mekanix, King NTG speaks about a constant theme in his work: being a super hero.

“My gift has always been to be light in darkness,” he says. “To instill hope in people that seemed hopeless, and to inspire.” Noting that his mission is just to reach one person, he dreams aloud and says, “Imagine God greeting me with ‘Job well done.’”

Between the album’s 15 songs are three interludes that feature Pastor Tyron Carter, a childhood friend of King NTG. The two were born a month apart — they grew up in the same city, went to the same school, played on the same basketball team and had the same struggles, but took two different paths in life.

In high school, the friends separated as King NTG moved. While Carter went to college, King NTG pursued a rap career funded by the streets. The two reconnected as adults when Carter invited King NTG to be a witness for his wedding. (Years later, King NTG would invite Carter to be the officiant at his own wedding.)

Through this reconnection King NTG was reintroduced to the word of God. Inviting the pastor to participate in the album was less about repaying a personal debt and more about the listener: “If the people can’t make it to church, I want church to come to the people.”

In talking with King NTG, and listening to Salvation, one thing becomes clear: his spiritual path isn’t a solo sojourn, but something he’s done with the support of others, and he’s taken that momentum to reach the next generation of those who need inspiration.