Hardwood Blacktop Presents… Raider Klan – No Fakin’ Tha Phonk and Rvidxr Psvlms, Prvyxrs, & Incvntvtixns

SpaceGhostPurrp – “Tha Phonk”

There’s been a serious drought of Raider Klan material over the last month (despite these two releases this week) – which has to be something strategic given their propensity to release music at a pretty rapid pace.  Perhaps they’re gearing up for some new solos (Amber London and SpaceGhostPurrp both have new projects on the way in the next month or so), but perhaps they’re gearing up for the Raider Klan’s official group mixtape, which has been discuss a lot in my interviews with them, despite the lack of any official word.

This week I’ve decided to go with two new Raider Klan mixes highlighting one area of their work which is probably over discussed with relation to their catalog – their 90’s themed phonk music – and the other which is under documented – their more ethereal, spiritual, and occasionally socio-political music.  Everyone, who has any sense of the Raider Klan, has a pretty good sense of the fact that they’re 90’s babies who frequently recall the music and imagery of their birth decade and reimagine g-funk, Memphis underground, and DJ Screw – along with many other subgenres – themed music into a modern context.  The reality is that looking at them as a collective (something which is somewhat problematic given their diversity of styles) they really don’t create “90’s music” that often when compared to some of today’s revivalists, especially as a percentage of their overall catalog.  It’s certainly not an insubstantial portion of their catalog and there are individual artists like Amber London, Ethelwulf, and Key Nyata that more frequently access those themes in their music, but on the flip side there are members – like their leader SpaceGhostPurrp for instance – who rap over tracks that sound distinctly 90’s relatively infrequently.  Having said that, some of Raider Klan artists do make great music in that vein and the influence of 90’s music and 90’s rap artists is certainly apparent throughout the music of the collective.  No Fakin’ Tha Phonk is a collection of selected pieces of classic Raider Klan 90’s phonk.  In contrast to KLVN MENTALITY, which highlighted the group’s collaborative efforts and diversity, No Fakin’ Tha Phonk focuses on many of the Klan’s best solo acts, in some cases the usual suspects crossover to show up again as Amber London and Ethelwulf for instance are most heralded for their guest spots and their 90’s themed tracks.  There’s also a good dose of artists here who didn’t show up on KM (or only showed up briefly), such as Key Nyata, Young Renegade, Yung Raw, Harvey G, Dough Dough, and Grandmilly.

Hardwood Blacktop Presents… Raider Klan – KLVN MENTALITY

During my time covering the Raider Klan I’ve had a lot of people ask me “what’s so exceptional about them?,” or “why are you wasting time covering teenagers when there are great artists, more seasoned artists, putting out high quality projects in 2012?”  My initial response to those people is, well, I cover them too.  I have written reviews and lauded praise on the likes of Ka, Billy Woods, Illogic, El-P, Killer Mike, Jackie Chain, SL Jones and many others this year who have years in the game and release a refined high quality product.    Actually, the only Raider Klan related album that I’ve put up for “Best of a Quarter” honors was SpaceGhost’s Mysterious Phonk, hardly a lo-fi bedroom studio endeavor.

However, with Raider Klan my interest goes a little deeper than just the quality of their product.  Raider Klan represents a group of young people across the country who feel they fit outside of the general rap aesthetics of the mainstream, some of their music – though admittedly not all – attests to this.  I admit there is a lot to sift through with Raider Klan, there are a dozens of members, a t least a couple dozen of whom make music, dozens of mixtapes, thousands of tracks on youtube, lots of klvn, 2.7.5., & BRK handles to sift through on twitter to figure out who’s in, who’s out, who’s really in, and which rappers are the rappers one needs to pay the most attention.  The other aspect that won’t intrigue many of my normal readers is that the Raider Klan as a collective are, generally, fairly disinterested in lyricism for the sake of lyricism.  While it’s hard to speak on them collectively – since there are at least twenty five or thirty of them making music – most of them prize style over substance, and most of their substance strokes are broad and indefinite.  Their primary concern musically is the ultimate quest for the phonk, the ability to convey the appropriate musical vibe the marriage of the vocal performance and the beat.  In an era when so much rap is devoid of a strong relationship with it’s musical ancestry, the Raider Klan members are hyper conscious of their roots, and paying homage to those who came before them.  Where else in 20120 can you hear a Bone Thugs influenced rapper, alongside an Ice Cube influenced rapper, alongside a Boss influenced rapper, over a g-funk track fashioned by a midwest producer and have them all be open and honest about the rappers they’re channeling and who truly influences them.  What’s more impressive is that they manage to do this without sounding like a bunch of dinosaurs trying to revive their youth or a bunch of new jacks sharking an aesthetic without any sense of the history behind it.  For those with whom the 90’s shtick may wear a bit thin, especially those of us who lived through the 90’s first hand, they actually make some very good music that competes with their contemporaries quite well on a modern playing field.

Interview: Raider Klan | Rvidxr Klvn Part 1 – The Memphis Edition (Chris Travis, Ethelwulf, & Yung Raw)

“Black Magic” Ethelwulf & Yung Raw

Since “Nostalgia Rap Surrealism – Decoding the RVIDXR KLVN” was published here on hardwoodblacktop.com I’ve been working to put together an interview with all of the Raider Klan members.  Initially, I planned to interview every member individually, combine their answers, and create one collective interview for the entire Raider Klan.  While this is still the intention of the project, having finished about eleven of the interviews, with plenty still to go, I realized that there’s way too much material to publish in one interview without severely editing the material down.  It also became clear to me, that with the fast moving pace of music today, and the Klan’s development, that by the time I got around to interview each member, the earliest interviews would be extremely dated.  The Memphis interviews were three of the first ones I did on the project so I thought it made sense to share them now.  And then share each of the group’s regionally, as I found throughout the process that like their music, the attitudes of the Raider Klan members is often strongly influenced by their locality, despite the group’s geographic diversity and diversity of musical influence.  It is important to note chronologically that the interview with Chris Travis was done over two months ago, Yung Raw was interviewed in the middle of June, and Ethelwulf was interviewed in mid-July.  If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out Chris Travis’s Codeine and Pizza, Yung Raw’s The Trill OG, and Ethelwulf’s The Wolf Gang’s Rodolphe as they undoubtedly represent three of the finest Raider Klan projects to date.

Link here to Part 2: NYC (Grandmilly, Matt Stoops, & Big Zeem) and Part 3: Southwest (Amber London, Eddy Baker, Sky Lex)

JB: What projects to you have coming up?

Ethelwulf:

Well actually, right now, I don’t really have anything coming up really.  Well, actually I might do this mixtape with this producer named DJ Manny Virgo.  I’ve been working with him so that’ll probably be the next thing popping up if I get to it real fast.  I don’t know what it’s going to be called yet.  I’m just waiting on him to send me the rest of the beats, it’s going to be a five track EP.  Once he sends me the rest of the beats I’ll be working on them and we can crank something out.

Chris Travis:

My next project is gonna be, I don’t know what I’m going to call it yet [editor’s note: it ended up being this past week’s Codeine and Pizza mixtape], but the theme is going to be underground horror.  I’m trying to find a producer.  I’d like one producer to producer the whole mixtape if possible.

Yung Raw:

My next project will probably drop in 2013.  I don’t know the exact time.  Most likely around Spring Break if not before Spring Break, because I want to make sure everything is down packed again, everything is perfect.  Because if your work is not perfect, if you got one bad song, and everybody can have one bad song, people can say you’re not a good rapper.  You want to make sure everything is at a good point, or your buzz can fall all the way down.  So I’m not going to rush it.  Also, you don’t want to give out too much free music, because you’ll be over and done with before it’s time to release your real album and people won’t have time to crave it and build that buzz.

Nostalgia Rap Surrealism – Decoding the RVIDXR KLVN

Historically, Rap crews generally tend to develop locally, but groups of like-minded artists coming together through the internet has been in practice for well over a decade now, as archaic forms of internet communication like AOL chatrooms and hip hop message boards gave emcees and producers a way to collaborate at a distance and form new duos, groups, and crews, sometimes without having ever met one another.  The dawn of Myspace only made this type of remote collaboration easier and more common, and developments like facebook, youtube, twitter, dropbox, tumblr, and soundcloud have made it commonplace.  Still, it is unusual to find a crew as large as SpaceGhostPurrp’s Raider Klan, with so much interconnection in their music, and so many remote outposts and crew members so dedicated to a similar purpose.  Furthermore the Raider Klan like one of their early influences NWA has shown an early ability to influence the development of similarly themed rap crews all over the map.

The Raider Klan’s inter-regional membership accentuates their most interesting sonic characteristics – their post-regional surrealist nostalgic phonk, made up of a concoction of mid-90’s Memphis underground, early 90’s diasporic G-funk, RZA’s early 90’s layering of film sound effects (in this case often video game samples from Mortal Kombat or the moans of female porn stars), and occasional hints of Miami Bass.  Listening to Raider Klan is like listening to rap in a bizarro alternate dimension where the dominant influences on the commercial rap scene were Screw tapes, Memphis underground tapes from artists like Three 6 Mafia, Frayser Click, Kingpin Skinny Pimp, double time midwest artists like Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Crucial Conflict, early nineties West Coast NWA, D.O.C., Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and Texas hardcore rap, hints of early 90’s 5%er influenced Afrocentricity, Mortal Kombat arcade games, codeine, and robitussin and they all arrived hermetically sealed in a time capsule in the basement of each member along with a bag of OG Kush and a SpaceGhostPurrp decoder ring.  While chronologically many of those things occured during roughly the same time period, Raider Klan is made up predominantly of 90’s babies, who either absorbed much of this era through the passion of their parents and older family members, or through thorough research of youtube archivists who have made so many things from the early and mid-nineties readily available for nostalgic 30/40 somethings, or intrigued youth.