Sometimes, although probably not often enough, you go to a show and something unexpected moves you. You remember why you fell in love with music and with the spectacle, power and passion of live music. This happened to me recently at the Long Road festival in the heartland of the UK. Amongst the Country music, Americana, Folk and Alt-something stylings of the artists on offer we came across a live set from Grangstagrass in the Interstate tent.
Power. Passion. Harmony. Musical skill. Take your pick. Gangstagrass were one of the stand-out acts of the whole weekend and judging by the buzz on social media about them afterwards, I am not the only one who felt that way.
Born back in 2006 as a project conceived by Brooklyn-based producer Rench (Oscar Owens) the group attempts to meld Roots based music with Bluegrass and Hip-Hop. Their song, ‘Long Hard Times to Come’ was selected to be the theme song for FX network show, ‘Justified’ culminating in an Emmy nomination in 2010. The group has been through various line up changes over the years and received a notable shot in the arm last year when they appeared on the 16th season of ‘America’s Got Talent’, reaching the quarter finals. Promoting their current album, ‘No Time for Enemies’, we watched their awesome set and then got right on to finding a slot to talk to them all about it.
Sometimes, doing what I do, you become immune to the intricacies of music and maybe even a little complacent because of the sheer amount of music you have to write about and review that you wouldn’t choose to listen to for pleasure. I want to start by saying thank you for moving me with your performance today.
Yeah!! Gangstagrass in the house!! Thank you for noticing us and appreciating what we are trying to do.
The band has been going since 2006!!!!!
That’s when Rench first started experimenting with the sound in the studio and the idea that you could meld Bluegrass with Hip-Hop.
How has Gangstagrass evolved and changed since then?
We’ve got this settled line up that has been together for a while now. We’ve also got a lot more collaborative and we explore sounds and ideas a lot more together as a group, which makes us stronger and more creative.
We’ve all just made more of an effort to introduce what moves us and what we find interesting rather than it just being Rench’s project. He’s the granddaddy of this thing but the rest of us feel like we have a stake and a say in Gangstagrass now as well.
We each push each other further and we all strive to be excellent at what we do. We’re trying to fuse multiple genres of music into this thing and it’s important that everyone gets a say in that. Gangstagrass is now a thing that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Watching you live, that comes across in spades. Everyone gets their moment to shine but you are all working together to create something bigger.
We all have an ideological, vested interest in wanting this band to succeed. We all can see what we are trying to do, bringing all these influences together and we all want it to go somewhere and be successful.
We here for this band and the idea of throwing new things together and trying out new combinations of sounds and styles.
It feels like Gangstagrass is more than just a band or a group of musicians though. It feels like it’s also a movement and an ethos or idea as well.
Yeah. Absolutely. We’re not just trying to combine genres we’re ultimately trying to de-construct genres back to eradicate where some of the artificial divisions between the genres came from. Bluegrass, Country, Hip-Hop all came from the same influences and source material and we’re trying to create the idea that there shouldn’t be any division between them.
We are almost creating something in and of its own genre too.
Have you noticed a blurring or collapsing of the genres in the last few years? It certainly feels like things are changing in that sense.
With the audience and people who listen to music, yes, absolutely. However, even in the streaming services, which are meant to provide listeners with more freedom to curate their own playlists, the legacy of division continues because so many of those playlists, where people discover new music, are genre based!
We find a lot of our audience already listen to a lot of different things and so are quite happy to take on board what we are trying to do.
How do we bring down the genre divisions even further then?
That’s a great question! With fire!!!!! (laughing) Not enough people are actively asking that question of the labels and of the streaming platforms. The benefit of so much streaming is that you can go from listing to Post Malone to the Police to Public Enemy and even into Paula Abdul! It would help even more if artists were paid properly by those services, but that’s a whole other issue! (laughing)
So, at least a music fan has the ability and the option to go wherever they want to go now. That wasn’t the case in the 70s, 80s and 90s where everything was curated by the industry and the media and people were fed music rather than actively encouraged to seek out new things of their own volition.
Have record labels lost a little grip or sway on the industry now because of that then?
Record labels have lost some of their influence, for sure, but other third parties have just come along and replaced them as influencers and gatekeepers. Spotify is now one of the big ones meaning that people have just replaced a middle-man with another middle-man! (laughing) Spotify is even more jankier than the labels, man.
And Instagram are setting up their own record label, apparently!
Fuck them, man. You can put that in the interview!!!! (laughing) Fuck all the intermediaries and companies because they are the ones stopping money from getting the artists who create the music. With Instagram, the focus will be purely on them earning money! Their focus won’t be an equity or creativity or anything loftier than just making money.
As we’ve seen throughout human history, they will inevitably perpetuate a system in which some small group of people will have the money and the power and they will do everything they can to maintain that!
You ask a great question in how can we counter that. The answer is simply to be who we are. That’s been our goal since the very beginning. We take music as a really discerning way to get out message across, that’s gotta be step 1.
Most of the divisions that come down the pipeline in terms of music genres are just manufactured by the labels and the industry for marketing and sales purposes. Back in the 20s and 30s Jimmie Rodgers sounded like a jazz band with that walking bass line and the violinists and fiddle players were hanging out together. You know guys like Stuff Smith were hanging out with Bob Wills, there was huge cross-pollination between genres but it was sold to different folks in different ways by the emerging record companies because of their fear of prejudice and racial division. That’s what we need to change.
On a weekly basis how often do you get told on social media that you can’t be in Country music because of your look, sound and style?
Not as much as you’d think. We have done and it happens every now and again. We do like have to have some fun with them when they do appear. The last guy that came at us just seemed to have racist Tourettes syndrome! (laughing) He was all ‘Gorilla, gorilla, gorilla, middle-finger, gorilla’ (laughing) so we took a screenshot and just re-tweeted it back out there. It was hilarious. We were on the road reading it out and it cracked us up.
I imagine you’ve got some very loyal and fierce fans who protect you guys and love to tell everyone else about you?
Our fans are the best, they are fierce ambassadors of our church and they won’t put up with stuff like the trolls! They spread the word for us.
We are the type of band that as soon as you come along and see us, you get what we are trying to do. It’s almost a visual thing as much as it is a listening thing. Our fans are our strongest weapon we have in spreading the word and getting out music out to new people. We have had people come to our shows as trolls, they purposely have come to try and put down or ridicule what we do and they leave as fans having bought our CDs!
The people of the south of America love Country music and they love Hip-Hop. Many of the big Country stars also listen to Hip-Hop. So why can’t the two worlds co-exist with each other in the eyes of the media or industry?
There’s definitely an issue with the way labels want their artists to be perceived to certain demographics and often Hip-Hop isn’t part of that image. Behind closed door and at the club you’ll see people enjoying both types of music.
The origins of Hip-Hop and Country music started with the same people in the same places. They both have the same twisted roots!
If you look at where both genres came from and what’s happening in those spaces, you’ll have a bunch of kids sitting on a porch or in the woods and one dude has got a banjo and one has a fiddle and one has a box or drum and they are just telling stories about being broke, man. Take that to the streets of New York and the Bronx, it was just a bunch of cats beating on lunch tables – somebody had a couple of records that they just started scratching and they were also telling the same stories about being broke! The stories are just the same: I’m broke but I’m cool as shit, you know?
Both genres were created out of poverty on instruments that could just be made or found. There were no venues because that needed money so both are just the music of the streets or the woods, which is the same thing, just in different geographical places. Both Bluegrass and Hip-Hop are very improvisational in terms of the jam sessions that develop as people are playing and the places the musicians go in terms of creativity too and we want to bring that idea and sound to as many people as we can.
Check out Gangstagrass now and stream (but try and actually buy) their current album ‘No Time for Enemies’
