Stunt At The Cornerstone: One Night With ezcodylee

Photos by Dylan Nguyen

It’s a Tuesday night at the Cornerstone in Berkeley, California. First in line is a 14 year old kid who brought his mom as a chaperone. The line behind him goes almost to the end of the block.

This past Sunday, ezcodylee made his Rolling Loud debut in front of thousands. Two days later, the ceiling is low and the stage is close enough to touch. Max Vukovic, 23, came with his ezcodylee shirt on, listening to the artist long enough to have an opinion about what it means to “stunt and die.” “It’s about commitment more than anything,” he says, “doing something with 100% of your being as opposed to half-assing it.” Nearby, Devin Tai is 19 and skipping studying for his final exam to be here. He texted ezcodylee about it who responded and gave Devin a free ticket. Luke Macaraeg is 14 and this is his first ezcodylee concert. He’s seen the clips from Rolling Loud and he came ready for the moshpit. “I’m not nervous,” he said outside before the doors opened. Christian Ochoa, 26, found the music about a month ago yet drove out to Berkeley anyway. “You see someone really happy doing what they’re doing,” he says, “and it makes you happy.”

ezcodylee, whose real name is Ethan Codylee Graham, is from Los Angeles, California, where the one constant in his life was music. His mom sang and danced. His dad rapped. His grandmother studied music in NorCal. His uncle was a finalist on The Voice. By the time he was old enough to hold a microphone, the family tradition became his destiny.

The “stunt and die” philosophy that defines his creative universe came from the opposite of that environment – a period as a teenager when he was suicidal, watching “Jackass” and “Kick Buttowski.” Ethan saw people living dangerously and fully, giving him a reason to stay. Stunting, as he defines it, is not recklessness. It’s the willingness to attempt. To try the trick. To not wait for better conditions that may never come. “If you try your hardest to go after what you want and desire, the stars will align and make it happen,” he said after his set at the Cornerstone, “but you have to be willing to go through every moment of doubt that will come with that.”

At 21, ezcodylee morphed this mindset into a series. Stunt 2 Die. Stunt and Die 3. STUNT 4 LIFE. STUNT 4 EVER is still forthcoming. Four projects built around a single idea that started as personal survival and became, somewhere along the way, something other people needed to hear too.

ezcodylee doesn’t walk out. He sprints. The same person who said he wants to throw up before every performance hits the stage hard. The room who waited impatiently goes unhinged in about three seconds.

STUNT 4 LIFE, released in March, folds punk music into contemporary rage rap in a way that shouldn’t work as cleanly as it does. The record draws from Turnstile, Bad Brains, and Title Fight as much as Playboi Carti, Ken Carson, and Lancey Foux. Everything is original though, and on Tuesday night the guitar is played live by Tejas Mathai, a local UC Berkeley student.

In the intro on his album, ezcodylee uses the monologue from “SLC Punk!” to show he’s less interested in who started punk than in who’s doing it with the most love. On “VOMIT!” he goes directly at artists using punk as an aesthetic without the authenticity to back it up. “Anyone that’s not honoring that ethos and heart of what it’s supposed to be feels like a mockery that I can’t stand for,” he said after his set. “But I’ve learned to make it my mission to ignore it and just focus on the goals and message that I set out for myself to preach instead of what other people were doing wrong.” The charge carries weight coming from someone who spent his time attending shows and talking to venue staff and band members before he made a single track. “Punk culture and rap culture are both very important,” he adds, “because at their heart and base they’re ways for the oppressed to express themselves and ways for people to connect through music.” On “FAMILY FIRST!” that sense of community becomes literal, name-dropping every person he stands beside. On “FEEL ALIVE!” he reduces the entire mission to something simple and human: he doesn’t want to be dead, he wants to feel alive.

Then comes his most popular song “HEY HO!” from his project Stunt and Die 3. The room recognizes it before the first bar lands. When the On The Radar version dropped, both the punk community and the underground rap community pushed back. Both scenes, for different reasons, didn’t want to claim it. In the Cornerstone on a Tuesday night, none of that matters. The chorus is catchy enough that everyone knows it within seconds. The room doesn’t need to settle the debate, it already has.

What opens up in the middle of the venue is chaotic but not dangerous. Bodies colliding not out of aggression but out of something closer to camaraderie, like everyone in the room decided that the music was too good to just stand still for. “You’re not really going to see anybody getting hurt or disrespected in my mosh pit without it being out of love,” ezcodylee says. “I make sure that as fans of mine, we all treat each other like family.” That family is not limited to the kid who’s been there from the beginning versus the one who found him through the algorithm last week – he refuses to draw a line. “As long as you’re part of the big hug that we like to call the mosh pit, I appreciate you for even being in the building and giving me a chance.”

Luke Macaraeg, who said he wasn’t nervous outside before doors opened, ends up on stage mid-set. ezcodylee pulls him up and throws him into the crowd. The pit catches him clean. It’s the whole philosophy made physical – a 14 year old kid at his first ezcodylee concert, airborne in a moment he’ll remember forever, held up by people who were strangers an hour ago.

The stunt and die series will end eventually. ezcodylee has already pointed to a planned collaborative album as its closing chapter, but the motto will always be permanent. “Stunt and Die is just a message forever,” he says. “The message, the moral, the sound, the family we built – that will never die.”

After the set, ezcodylee disappears backstage. He comes back out asking for water, then immediately heads toward the exit looking for the fans who already left – walking around the block, taking pictures, saying hi to every single one. Just ezcodylee, still sweating, making sure nobody left without getting a moment.

Christian Ochoa got his moment. He tells ezcodylee directly how much of an inspiration he is and hands him a gift: a Tung Tung Tung Sahur figurine. ezcodylee accepts it, showing an ecstatic smile.

“Whenever I’m on stage it doesn’t really matter what the crowd looks like,” he says. “It can be 10 people, it can be 10,000. I’m here to give a performance to anybody who comes to witness it. It means the world to stunt with anybody at all.”

You can tell he means it because there was almost a world where we didn’t have ezcodylee at all. “I think about it every day,” he said. “I was on that Rolling Loud stage thinking about the fact that I almost didn’t make it to that stage that exact day.”

He did though. And then he came to stunt in Berkeley.