Interview with Squadda B (Main Attrakionz)
OK, here is finally the English translation of the interview with Squadda B from Bay Area underdogs Main Attrakionz – one of the worlds’s hungriest, most interesting rap groups at the moment – that I made some time ago. Felt good to salvage some of the Bay Area slang butchered in the translation to Swedish, too.
Before you continue, I recommend that you download and blast this exclusive track that Squadda B sent over to the faithful readers of Brytburken:
Main Attrakionz – Last Bars Of 2010 (BRYTBURKEN EXCLUSIVE!)
There’s something in the water in The Bay.
Main Attrakionz’ mutant rap from the past few months is a logical continuation of the cyborg music that Rick Rock, Droop-E, DJ Fresh and others have unleashed from Bay Area 51 in recent years – but as much as the Bay Area ignores how the rest of the country think that hip-hop should sound, as much 19-year-old Squabba B and Mondre Man ignore regional conventions. They flow as comfortably over Alchemist instrumentals and screwed out 80s soul as the thundering 808:s of their native city. Or like in their youtube meisterwerk Legion Of Doom – over little more than distorted cut-up indie pop vocals. (After ten-fifteen listenings I realize that something is missing: snares, claps. They have removed number two from the classic one-two Boom Bap formula. Everything is on the one. There’s just boom left. Has this even happened before?)
It’s easy to argue against the combination of smoking weed and making music when listening to a Main Attrakionz tape – the standards suffer at times. But without a blunted aura of couldnt-give-a-fuckisms it would perhaps be impossible to travel through these keyboards and backstreets like a late Amercan Pink Floyd.
Sometimes they make me think of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, sometimes Dark Side Of The Moon – and sometimes they switch mode halfway through a song. Young As Fuck begins as a melancholic coming-to-age tale over spastic drum patterns and a childishly chopped piano-loop (Syd Barret of the early Pink Floyd singles is definitively in the building), and three minutes and 26 seconds into the song someone cocks back a shotgun, and the mightiest piano chords hurl the listener a thousand feet in the air. Booming kicks blast us further away from Earth’s surface, and behind the constantly expanding piano frenetic claps and hi-hats lift us higher up, up through the clouds.
“I kiss the concrete, how much I love my turf … So many niggas died around here you think this bitch done had a curse (…) As I look out my window, I smoke, blunt in mouth. I’m stupid high, feeling like a bullet couldn’t beat me, feel the world is mines… the world is mines ”. I’m stupid high, feeling like a bullet Could not beat me, feel the world is mines … The World is Mine “.
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