Zotiyac

Crowlife (formerly)

Midnight Society (formerly)

Cortez Young, known professionally as **Zotiyac,** is a 23 year old rapper from Las Vegas, Nevada. He started his musical career in 2015, and he has since become one of the most influential artists in the underground.

## Early Life

Young was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved to Las Vegas very early in his life, but the exact time period is unknown. He has described his upbringing as difficult.

> *"I was a youngin' and we barely had food, whole time my momma and 'em tryna stack blue"*
> - Zotiyac, "Escape Room"
>
>

He was a self professed troublemaker in school, often disobeying his teachers and sometimes refusing to show up to class. He eventually dropped out of high school entirely.

## Rap Career

He started rapping in 2015. He initially went by his real name, Cortez Young. However, he eventually switched to his current alias, Zotiyac (which was stylized as **ZOTiYAC** until 2019). In a interview with Vibes Forever, he stated that he came up with his name by reversing his initials (C. A. Y.) and drawing inspiration from the Zodiac Killer.

His early music was very lyrical and boom bap inspired. One of his earliest songs is a remix of J. Cole's song "A Tale Of Two Citiez" in which Young raps for over five minutes. He has many mixtapes which he exclusively posted to Audiomack. He would then move to SoundCloud because "it was popping".

In late 2016/early 2017, he would join the budding underground collective known as the Midnight Society. He would then go on to release many collaborations with the Virus and Antidote, one of the producers in the group. However, Yac has since said that his objective of joining Midnight was to make music with a select few of the members, and that he didn't associate with the majority of the group. "I never spoke in the chat," he said in an Instagram Live in 2020.

In March 2017, Zotiyac would attend SXSW in Texas with Midnight. During the event he would finally meet Swerzie in person. A few days later, they would release their first collaboration, "Misbehaving"*.* Later that year, Swerzie would add Yac to the Icy Rotten roster.

During this year Yac would start making horrorcore music, which was comprised of intense screaming and distorted instrumentals. In March, he released ***CONTAIMINATED***, which was a full horrorcore project entirely produced by Russian producer Lunar Vision. Throughout 2017, Yac would release more and more screamo tracks such as "Kaioken x187", "TOOLATENOW", and "BRAiNFUCK" all of which would do significant in the underground and establish Yac as one of its most prominent rappers.

In 2018, Yac would announce that he was done with horrorcore and screaming and he would "never do it again". He also removed all of his songs in that style from his SoundCloud page. This sparked outrage among his fans, most of whom had become accustomed to the style. However, this would prove to be beneficial for Yac, as he would see even greater success after abandoning screaming. With the release of tracks such as "Talk Shit", "Laps", and "Jungle Book (Freestyle)", he would gain a reputation as one of the best lyricists in the underground.

***For more info, check out the ZOTiYAC Wiki!***

## Trivia

* Despite Yac taking numerous songs off of his SoundCloud page, nearly every track he deleted has been reuploaded.
* To this day, Yac still gets questions asking if he's ever going to do screamo rap again, to which he simply ignores or laughs off.
* Yac has gotten numerous co-signs from bigger artists, such as Craig Xen and Pouya.
* Throughout the entire time he was doing horrorcore, Yac was constantly compared to XXXTENTACION, which he hated, considering he was doing the style before X's come up. Despite not being a huge fan of him due to this, Yac paid his respects to X when he died.
* Even though Yac left the Midnight Society in July 2017, he is still friendly with Yung Bambi and the Virus and Antidote. In fact, he participated in "Midnight Fest" in August of that year.
* In March 2020, Swerzie announced he was working on a collab EP with him, downtime, and Zotiyac. Later that month he dropped the first song from the EP, "Nothing To Me".
* This is actually the second time an EP between him and Yac has been teased, with the Icy Rotten account on Twitter announcing "1-800-187" in 2017. This was never released, however Swerzie confirmed at least some of it was recorded. Unfortunately, the majority of the songs were lost due to Swerzie's laptop being stolen in 2019.