Back in elementary school, Trippie Redd was in math class wondering about the greater significance of what he was adding up. “I figured numerology was more than numbers,” Redd says, leaning into a laptop camera from his Calabasas, California, studio. “Having a computer in class with Google made it easy.” Redd lived off 14th Street in Canton, Ohio, and looked up the significance of the number 14—which became his first tattoo five years later, on his forehead—as an angel number, or a number that people repeatedly notice and interpret as a message from the universe. “It elaborates on being balanced in life,” he explains. “Having and being one with balance is being very successful. It’s a number that keeps you knowing that you’re in good spirits and you’re on the right path.”
Most recently, Redd’s quest for balance manifested by way of two rap albums-turned-genre experiments: last October’s
