The Nicest: A Literary Portrait by Brenda Hartley

Sydney-based rapper James Dean Boserio, professionally known as Jimmy Nice, has gathered a collection of items that hold significance to him on his dining room table. The only evidence they belong to a 30-something, ARIA-award nominated rapper is an A4 piece of paper containing set-list notes from a national tour in 2013. One note reads ‘AMAZING: INTRO – SCRIPTED SHIT TALK FOR DIXIE.’ Nice has handwritten the page of notes entirely in uppercase letters, which would render them brash if not for their italicised slant. This sustained but controlled emphasis waxes across his speech; words are strung upon a line pulled taught between a performer’s impulse to share and a poet’s vigilant intentionality. Throughout the afternoon he moves along this line like a cautious a driver, tirelessly alternating between accelerator and break.

‘So where do you want to begin?’ Nice has laid the collection of items at right angles, evenly spaced across the glass art-deco table of his inner-west Sydney unit. The red brick and mortar of Nice’s home is congruous with his own sturdy build; deep crevices contour his nose nestled beneath the shelf of his brow bone. Nice’s eyes dart to attention when he sees me handle a small box on the table. The box has an illustration of a scene from Goldilocks and Three Bears and is embalmed with the honey-hued nostalgia of a retro Women’s Weekly magazine. ‘That was my favourite puzzle as a kid!’ The puzzle is made of 12 wooden cubes with segments of different illustrations on each of their six sides. The puzzle is actually six puzzles - each completed version depicting a different scene from the fairy tale. ‘If I was to think about childhood toys, there’s probably two or three that stick out. And that’s probably the one I played with most,’ he hesitates, ‘or at least, my Mum told me I played with the most.’

The puzzle has only recently found its final home here with Nice. ‘Up until last year it was stored with my Mum. But for now, it’s usually within a chest – a huge wooden chest in the garage – and it’s kinda full of everything that my mum kept.’ Nice moved to Terrigal in February 2019 to spend more time with his mother, Janet, who was in treatment for lung cancer. Shortly after the move her condition took a sharp turn for the worst; scans revealed the cancer had moved to her brain and her spine. From that point on, Nice was her primary carer.

Nice is cautious but thorough when he shares the details of his time with his mum. Taking a sip of whiskey, he tells me about his duties her carer. ‘It could just be like, gardening, cooking, cleaning. Or it could be, trips to the hospital, or trying to stay on top of drugs and dosages and I mean – the amount of stuff – I had to learn how to administer all these drugs. We had like – you see the pill charts, where it’s like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, different times of the day, and it was just, filled, you know. But that – that’s just the surface stuff.’

‘At the end, there was eight days without any water, or food. She couldn’t take any fluids. She just couldn’t. Just – the function – you just can’t. And, there was one night where I just couldn’t take it anymore… This is after six months of staying in the same room… It was – there were just some sounds, her breathing – and it was really hard for me. But at this point, you’ve been watching your Mum try and die for ten days, and you’re sleeping right next to her – it’s pretty hardcore. So at this point, I was like, “I’ll sleep next door. And I’ll be back in the morning,” and that was the night she left.

However, Nice does not indulge his grief. ‘I think the process of that whole chapter with her, we did heaps of shit that we usually wouldn’t do, like watching old cartoons, eating things that I did as a kid – like cereal,’ he says, as a smile melts across his cheeks. ‘I hadn’t eaten cereal in forever and I felt like cereal and we just did it cos it was something we would always do. I made all the meals that I loved as a kid – things like that. Comforting stuff.’

While at home Nice found himself distanced from the ‘cycle of writing, making, and touring albums on repeat’, and was able to return to the rap that first hooked him as a child. ‘I went back to all that type of old school rap as comfort food – this like, nourishing, thing. And I was thinking about the most random and rare, niche, rap songs, from when I was a kid. No one would fucken think about it or be playing it in 2020, but I’d just be in there, remembering where I was when I first heard that song and just going back through my musical childhood.’ The drives between the inner west and Central Coast was where Nice recalls the beginning of the writing process for his new album, MADIDEA: a rap motion picture, which at the time when we met, was due for release in a fortnight. ‘So I wasn’t making any music, but I would write things down and started that process, and on the drive from here to Terrigal, I would fucken write whole versus out of, no music,’ swiping his hand through the air, a tattoo reading ‘VIRGO BOY’ on his arm peeping out from beneath the sleeve of his white t-shirt. ‘I had some imaginary metronome in my head and I would just write it. Sometimes I could just speak it, and not have to write it down. Or have to pull over and sit there for 20 minutes and write it down. And I’d have a whole – ’ shaking his head, ‘ – like, Janet’s Son. That was written with no music.’

Nice chuckles when I point out that driving appears as a motif throughout the album. In the first song At A Glance, one bar reads ‘If my Mazda gets totalled this acts as my testimony.’ ‘That’s me driving up in Penny’s [his wife] Mazda. Like if I die trying to,’ laughing at the absurdity, ‘fucken, write these verses down – cos I’m literally on a freeway going one hundred k’s – and it’s stupid, I shouldn’t do it but like, this is what it was. I’m driving at one hundred k’s and tyring to write bars down. Because I’m thinking “I need to get it down”. That’s literally what I’m saying: if I die here, then whoever finds this fucken phone, this is going to be my last word.’ Taking another sip from his whiskey he recalls, ‘I was aware that something was happening. On those drives up and down, I was aware that this shit is not normal.’

While Nice has tapped into nostalgia and grief as inspiration for the album, his influences are varied and textured. Before his duo act Spit Syndicate started to climb the rungs of the rap ladder, Nice was a student in Fine Art at the National Art School. ‘I went to art school straight after school. I went in there for painting and came out doing photography,’ he says. ‘It was a nice three years, and I learned a lot. Things I didn’t know that I liked – like architecture, and art history – I was just soaking a lot of that shit up. And that influenced a lot of the stuff that would come later. Actually,’ jumping up to grab a large, yellow book on a display unit in his lounge room, ‘I take more inspiration from shit like this than rappers.’ The yellow book, Sleeping by The Mississippi, is a collection of photographs published by award-winning photographer, Alec Soth. Soth’s images track a ten-year period where he interviewed an eclectic mix of Mississippi locals, capturing the detail of their lives in large-format portraiture. As we navigate the pages together Nice tells me, ‘The thing that I respect about photo projects is that they can be over like, ten years. That is extreme, extreme dedication. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in film and time and trips and fucken hotels and petrol and talking to people and so many shots. Just crazy.’ Nice stops at one picture, which might be his favourite. The photograph captures a grassy landscape shrouded in white fog, with a Protestant cross monument in the background. Four convict workers in orange uniforms stand in the foreground bearing rakes and brooms, alongside an old maroon car which you can see into, because the door has been left open. ‘It’s all just composition,’ pointing to the car, ‘And I know that door would have been closed and he would have opened it. Just that kind of attention to detail.’

Nice cites Frank Ocean’s album Blonde as a key influence on how he created the narrative journey in his own album. ‘Not only did I listen to it in the dark, I listened to it all the time. Probably 50 times, from front to back. I listened to it as it should be listened to,’ he asserts. Nice had always enjoyed the album, which was released in August 2016. It wasn’t until moving back home that he unravelled its meaning. ‘I revisited it last year and it gave me a whole different –‘, correcting himself, ‘I just heard it differently. And it blew me away. The attention to detail, and the little layers – some weird sound comes in but never comes – it’s just incredible. And this is all without the lyrics. It was just the layers of paint.’

When I confess to Nice I haven’t heard the album, he jumps for his laptop and brings it up on Spotify – ‘you gotta hear this shit’. He directs to the song Nights and fast-forwards to a section where the track shifts from the smooth, melodic tones synonymous with RnB, into a distorted electric guitar playing disconnected, searching chords for 25 seconds. ‘This is not nice to listen to,’ he laughs, ‘and it just keeps going! But it’s just that tension and release. All these songs have these extra, subtle, little layers, that take a lot of thought to build up, but just make the experience different in the end. So that’s just informed how I made the album. More than any rap record. How I approached painting, on top of the music – that’s that,’ pointing to the laptop, ‘heaps.’

Among the items Nice has prepared on the dining room table is what at first appears to be a large, thick, hardcover book titled The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. When he opens the book, another, smaller book is revealed, seamlessly embedded within a cavity Nice has cut. Nice has painted the cover of the small book and printed the song titles of MADIDEA: a rap motion picture – ‘This is like a secret compartment for all these mad ideas.’ He brings up a black and white photograph of the books on his phone, ‘So this is the artwork for the back cover.’ He zooms in to the corner of the photograph on his phone, showing another photograph peeping through. ‘So this,’ then pointing to a photograph on the dining table, ‘is this’. It’s a photograph of him as a child with his Mum, beaming beneath a woolly beanie. ‘Trying to paint this world is definitely is something that I’ve tried to do with my music. Not just let people in on this hectic year that I’ve had dealing with family stuff, it’s not that. It’s everything. I’m painting scenes for you, just as an artist would do, just like all these other artists that I idolize. But’, he emphasises, ‘this time around, I was making it for no one. Absolutely no one. Just me. Just satisfying the child in me.’