$avvy is WNXP’s Nashville Artist of the Month for April 2022. He first tested out his artist moniker in high school in Huntsville, Al. by applying his eye for style to an Instagram account with that handle. Back then, he took up just about every creative pursuit that his Seventh Day Adventist upbringing allowed, from church praise team to a theater troupe and, once his brother showed him the ropes, producing a handful of his own tracks. $avvy envisioned a career in videogame soundtracks when he enrolled at Middle Tennessee State, but what he found most instructive after he arrived was the flurry of activity around a hip-hop collective of college seniors. He started shadowing their every move, and also learned from the models of self-sufficiency that Nashville rap stalwart Mike Floss and West Coast collective Odd Future had put into practice. From then on, $avvy went all-in on grassroots networking, using his own off-campus apartment to host gatherings of creative peers, and following a path of possibility, risk-taking and hustle to forming his own collective, known as The Database. In early 2021, he properly introduced himself as an artist with the Boys Wear Pearls EP, featuring production from friends, a singing and rapping approach that’s deliberately sly and slouchy compared with classic R&B and hip-hop vocal precision and a casually rebellious take on personal style and swagger that spun his thrift store finds into grounds for boasting. That was enough to establish him as someone with a voice and vantage point worth watching in Nashville’s most with-it circles. Still relying only on his own imagination and his Database collaborators, $avvy experimented with starting a small clothing line called POOR and he’s expanding on that class-conscious theme with his forthcoming independent album The POOR Tapes (out April 22), the guerilla-style documentary “POOR TV” and his POOR Radio DJ sets with his fellow Database member, roommate and producer Enigma in the duo GAS.