IDK, the hip-hop artist featured in Swagger on Apple TV+, hails from the DMV area that includes the metro area around Washington, DC. “It’s a melting pot of social classes that somehow all come together,” he says. This is his list of favorite places.
LessVisit this spot to have fun. It’s one of the main locations where tourists and visitors go. We don’t have many places like this in PGT County, Maryland, where I’m from. I’ve only been there once, but it’s an important part of building the economy in Prince George’s County. A lot of tourists and visitors go there, which brings money to the county. It’s important to me because it helps build the economy in Prince George’s County.
Bowie Town Center is where I remember buying my first pair of shoes with my own money. I took a bus there and went into a store called Famous Footwear, where I bought a couple of pairs of sneakers and some laces for my ninth-grade year in high school. They were a pair of Vans. It’s a gathering spot for kids in the area—at least, growing up for me in that part of town it was.
Oakcrest Park is where we hosted the first KKID event. We built a basketball court that I designed and had an event for the community. The goal was to bring everyone together like a family reunion.
Tysons Corner is actually another shopping [mall], but that’s where you go when you get a little bit older and start making money. That’s another area where shopping is probably the best. I think it’s Tysons that has all the luxury fashion companies like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Saint Laurent. There aren’t very many places that have that concentration of luxury fashion, so that’s the spot that you go to for that.
This place is very special to me because it was one of the first expensive meals I ever had. My lawyer took me there to celebrate when I first signed with him, and I had the butter cake which was extremely good. It quickly became my favorite steak house due to its sentimental value as my first expensive meal.
That is the high school [I referred to when I talked about] Bowie Town Center to get those Vans, so I could look good when I went to high school. That’s where I grew my wings. Recently, I did a project with Nike where we designed some stuff and gave it to the students for the Duval Tigers team.
University of Maryland is a school where I had my very first performance. It was at the Juke Joint, where you would have an open mic for performances. I remember getting ready to perform and they almost didn’t let me because I arrived too late. However, someone spoke on my behalf and said that I was really good, so they let me perform. It was my very first performance. I was so nervous.
The Hamilton is a place I love to go to all the time right now because they have amazing crab cakes and what they call District Wings. It’s a bougie representation of one of the foods we love to eat there, which is chicken wings and mumbo sauce. It’s a sit-down restaurant where you can catch a good vibe, have the chicken wings and mumbo sauce, and it’s actually really, really good.
Georgetown, which I mentioned in my album, is where many slaves were brought and sold during the transatlantic slave trade. Today, it is a place with many luxury fashion stores. When I was younger, I used to skip school and go there. When people had some sort of financial success, Georgetown was one of the places you would go to spend money. It was like the mecca or holy grail of places to shop.
Prince George’s Community College is a school that I got into after high school with the hopes of transferring to the University of Maryland. However, it was there that I realized music was the thing for me because I had trouble paying attention in class, so I didn’t focus the way that I needed to. Despite this, many people who attended the school were able to transfer and achieve success through academia.