Some tasty blues country hick hop for y'all!
Gangstagrass is the bluegrass/gangsta rap mashup project of New York producer Rench, which my flatmate and I recently discovered while watching her new favorite show in Edinburgh.
"Justified" is a great wee drama full of good ol boys, drinkin n shootin, meth lab intrigue, religious nuttery, n a suave cop with a great smile and sure aim. Go see it on Five.tv if you can. Best thing about it tho is prob the Emmy-nominated theme tune, 'Long Hard Times To Come'.
A whole album of of this stuff was apparently released for free around 2008 on gangstagrass.com, but the site now appears to be dead. The torrent is still available on TPB.
As Rench admits in a Bluegrass Blog interview, he's not the first to combine country music and hiphop, but having been steeped in honky-tonk and bluegrass before getting into the hiphop scene makes him a good candidate to put together the two!
We get a flavor of the creative process as he explains why the rhythmically straightforward and melody-driven licks and riffs of bluegrass make it particularly rich pickins for a hiphop sample bank:
"I started experimenting with sampling pedal steel guitar licks for trip-hop songs maybe 9 years ago, which gradually grew into writing full country songs to hip-hop beats and recording live fiddle and pedal steel over them. The style drew mostly from 60′s honky-tonk, but it struck me that in some ways bluegrass was better suited for mixing with hip-hop because straight 4/4 with no swing is more common and there is much more of a choppy rhythmic drive to the style. It’s also very instrumentally driven with very little percussion, which leaves room to add beats over it when you sample it."
Rench also makes it clear that he makes no mainstream compromises despite risking alienating the hardcore fans of each genre:
"Someone doing this to make it more accessible might have watered down the hip-hop, or used more cliche blugrass riffs that would sound cartoonish and sterotypical, but I am not about to offer people MC Hammer meets Hee-Haw."
So it's for the open-minded. But isn't that the essence of the mashup? If it works, why not? And this does, very well. This is gonna fit in very well with a mix of Mos Dub and Magical Mystery Chambers, I'm sure.
Check out the Myspace for a taste of his latest hick hop installment, "Lightning On The Strings, Thunder On The Mic". My flatmate is shopping for a copy tomorrow :)
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