Nxxxa Ace shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.
Nxxxa, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What battle are you avoiding?
It’s a daily battle, honestly. Every day is a battle against myself and mediocrity, to put it simply. I feel like I’m doing the bare minimum. I always feel like I’m doing the bare minimum, and I know to succeed at my full potential, I have to go way beyond that bare minimum and really push myself to an uncomfortable amount. And it’s almost like I want the best of both worlds. I want a balanced life. My pursuit of a balanced life seems incompatible with success. Deep down, I feel like I know that to achieve the success I desire, I’m gonna have to sacrifice comfort. I might have to sacrifice the routines that I’ve become accustomed to. I don’t even want to sacrifice sleep, honestly. It’s all about balance. I want to be healthy. I want to maintain mental health, physical health. But in our current climate, to chase financial wealth we have to sacrifice something, and that’s like a constant battle, a battle of balance.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Ok. I go by Nxxxa Ace. I’ve been called the King of Slow Jazz, East LA’s Most Eligible Bachelor, and the self-proclaimed luckiest man alive. I’m also the founder of Grow or Die, a brand I started in 2018 that just celebrated its seventh year. Under the Grow or Die umbrella, we create not only clothing but also shoes and accessories, all now sold exclusively through my senior company, DigiWish.
My creative journey started in music. For me, music was always about capturing emotions. I never cared about genre, only whether the emotion being conveyed resonated with me. That same philosophy carried over into Grow or Die and now I express emotions not only sonically, but visually and physically through design.
A good example is our ‘Heartbreaker’ windbreaker. I designed it after a breakup, with a heart in the middle that splits when you zip it down. Our Lucky collection was about gratitude, celebrating the near death experiences I’ve survived and turning that resilience into wearable good fortune. Most recently, I finished our biggest project yet: the Flavored Feelings collection. It’s 44 shirts, each one designed to capture a specific emotion or mood, from clingy to anxious to greedy to lazy. The idea was to make people look like a snack or something appetizing while also expressing the full spectrum of human feelings.
This collection was also my response to the rising costs of overseas production. I wanted to keep quality high while shifting production to the U.S., and I think we succeeded. At the end of the day, Grow or Die is about survival, evolving, and creating pieces that let people wear their emotions with pride.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
When I was younger, I found myself in a criminology lecture. And during that lecture, a statement was made that gave me an epiphany. They said a crime is any act that is against the law. And up until that point, I had been under the belief that we had laws that were loosely based on religious cues or religious teachings. And these laws were put in place to punish bad people and tell people what the rules are and keep them on the path of being good. But then when I heard that a crime is any action that’s against the law, I don’t know, something just clicked inside me and I realized, oh my god, being a criminal has nothing to do with being good or evil. It just means you broke the law and that’s arbitrary. That’s something someone made up. A law is just something someone made up. Crime is not an act of evil, it’s just an act of defiance. Criminology is the study of crime. We’re actually studying why people break the rules. Why are we studying why people break the rules? Because we live in a society where people don’t want rules to be broken. So it’s about control. It’s about how can we control people so they don’t break the rules. We study why they break the rules in order to prevent it. So it just changed how I see things and I became somewhat of a moral nihilist after that. I find myself more aligned with the teachings of Taoism in regards to yin and yang. Yeah, I’ll never forget that. It completely changed how I see the world.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
I started using my pain as power when I began making music. The second song I released, ‘Perfect,’ touched on the struggles I was facing as an immigrant in England. At first, I did it just to try and capitalize off my pain, but I found it to be deeply therapeutic. Almost like time stamping my state of mind. Eventually, I began expressing pain visually through design. The Heartbreaker jacket is one example, but honestly, most of my collections have come from pain. My 3HP shirts, which let you customize how much ‘health’ you display, were a way to express emotional exhaustion. And my World War 3 collection was conceived during a time I truly felt like it was me against the world. That era inspired both the music and the clothing. So pain became more than something I survived. It became creative fuel.
Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. What do you believe is true but cannot prove?
One thing that I believe is true, but I can’t really prove is that everyone is three people. Everyone. Every single person is three different people. You are who you think you are, you are who other people think you are, and then you are who you really are. And, you know, this is kind of similar to how I see reality or truth. Like, there’s three truths that matter, what you think, what other people think, and then what’s objectively true.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. What do you think people will most misunderstand about your legacy?
I think the thing about legacy is you can’t control it, unfortunately. I always think to myself, people are definitely going to misunderstand me. Like, people don’t understand me now, and I’m alive, and they can ask me questions. I’ve seen people misquote my lyrics on songs where I provided the lyrics. It is what it is, and I have to accept that. So, yeah, I think about that a lot. Once I’m gone, I’m truly going to be gone, and nothing I leave behind is truly going to encapsulate who I am as a person. At least as it stands now, maybe one day I can change that. We’ll see.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://digiwish.org/
- Instagram: @growodie
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nxxxaace
- Other: https://instagram.com/digiwish/
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