Boston Hip Hop

Photos: Mick Murray. L-R: Peaches, Melanie Bernier, Ryan Major, Jenny, Ryan Durkin.

Durkin and The Fagettes discovered they had a bit in common rather quickly when we met up on a rainy Saturday afternoon in a Central Square parking lot. For one thing, the hip-hop producer/DJ/hype man hybrid and the sassy, lo-fi garage rockers both love playing dance nights. For another, we tapped into some rage related to the apparently unforgiveable track “Gary Glitter Part I.” Though they come from completely different backgrounds and scenes, both Durkin and The Fagettes specialize in getting a crowd moving—whether they’re ready or not.

ON THE INTERNET:

Durkin: Stuff that’s not just a straight hip-hop show is the best situation for us—one band and us and DJs.
Melanie Bernier: Why do you think that is for you guys?
Durkin: I don’t know. People’s tastes change. When I was a freshman in college, underground hip-hop was really big. There was a big scene and there were big names, nationally, that were from Boston. When I was in high school, I would drive down to the Middle East and there would be a sold out show with all local acts—E-Don, Esoteric, Mr Lif. In terms of people and new fans now, it’s just not really happening.
Ryan Major: I find that interesting, from an outsider’s perspective. If you look at blogs and stuff—you don’t hear anything about radio rock. That band, Foster the People? Apparently they’re huge and I hadn’t heard about them until about a week and a half ago. You don’t see Pitchfork writing about it—they’re covering Kanye and Jay-Z. Indie rock seems to be focused on Top 40 Rock.
Durkin: I think with Pitchfork, they cover hip-hop and half the time it’s a tongue-in-cheek review. They’re not interested in finding out what a new, independent artist is doing. At the same time, independent artists in hip-hop are trying to make names. If you go to a mainly hip-hop blog or a site like Pitchfork, their emphasis will be on how many posts they can get up in a day—“I’m going to post seven reviews or seven videos!” or something. They’re going to post about guys like Drake or Jay-Z because it’ll get them more traffic. It’s just this game. When we put out Color Commentary, we put out one song at a time. If we just put our whole record out, it’d be there at the top of the page. At the end of the day, it’d be at the bottom of the page, and by tomorrow it’s going to be two pages out. To have somebody listen to it as a body of work and think about it and write something, even if they hate it, it’s not the world we’re dealing with. The marketing side of it is kind of a nightmare to plan out. We’re trying to be really thoughtful about this next record, just in terms of writing everything out. I read somewhere that once you drop the album, it’s over—the buzz, the relevance of covering it from the perspective of a blog. If you postpone that for as long as possible and just keep putting out bits and pieces, that’s how you can do it. From an artist’s perspective, that sucks! I don’t want to do that!
Major: The Fagettes is the first band I’ve been in where we really have tried to play the Internet game—but we’re more interested in getting something physically out and shows and stuff. We’re not very good with computers.
Peaches: I’m good!
Major: He’s okay. Our long-term goal is to get some vinyl out.
Durkin: Well, that’s something people want to buy. It’s something they can hold.
Major: That’s exactly it. It’s a physical representation of our music.

ON … BALLOON ANIMALS?

Durkin: Hippie ravers are the hands-down best crowd for any type of music. It’s like the Camp Bisco crowd. I’ve done a couple of shows to that crowd and they were great.
Major: [laughs] The nitrous brothers.
Durkin: Oh my god, yeah! I was opening for The New Deal. Some kids who came to the show were in this van with balloons in front of the Middle East, and I was like, “What is going ON right now?!”
Major: Wait, they were making balloon animals?!
Durkin: Uh, balloon animals that people could inhale.
Melanie: … We should make balloon animals.
Major: With NOT nitrous oxide.

ON LIVE SHOW ENERGY:

Melanie: What’s the preparation for the set versus when you’re playing in the moment live?
Durkin: Being organized allows me to improvise a lot better. The hip-hop shows are pretty carefully choreographed. EL knows the moves I’m gonna be pulling.
Melanie: That’s awesome—and that way you’re able to gauge the temperature of the audience … The thing about recording to me is that it’s so hard to get the energy into it that you can with the live show. I don’t know. I’m interested to hear about that aspect of your work, the live realm and how you translate that to a record.
Durkin: It’s difficult—people do it in a lot of different ways. Unfortunately, the main way people often do it, and especially people that have never seen what I would consider a real hip-hop show—young people whose first introduction to the music maybe wasn’t through live shows. They’ll often perform by just hitting “play” on a song they recorded and then shout over it. It’s like bad karaoke of their own music. When Black EL approached me to do some live shows, I said that I didn’t want any backing vocals in the songs if we were performing them, and I wanted to do more than just press play. When I’m DJing, I’m always working really fast and I’m trying to blend together songs that make sense, so I’m always doing something. I have a mic in my face, I’m doing all his ad libs and I’m usually cutting or juggling or repeating the same track and then cutting them back in while he raps, and I’m doing it all live. We’re trying to do it so that people say “These guys are putting on a show! These guys are trying hard to entertain us!” We’re psyched to be there and we want people to see the energy we’re bringing to it, because they’ll give it back. Some of the best situations we’ve had were small shows with people right in our faces and they can see what I’m doing. One of the best shows we did was at Wadzilla before they closed it. It got shut down two weeks after we played. We played with Bad Rabbits and this guy Outtasight. We just had this great show where people may not have been there to see us or to see a hip-hop show, but by the end of the show we won them over and had a great time.
Major: That’s another thing that’s great about basement shows—you’re not paying $3.50 for a PBR at the bar and you appreciate it.
Melanie: Well, anyone can show up to it, and that’s the joy of it. I feel like a lot of times when people go to a concert they expect to see some rock—mixing it up with new people because it’s free or mixing up with other bands draws the best reaction.
Major: You can’t book a bar show like that. You can’t get people to show up and pay 8 bucks when they only know one band.

ON THE PERKS OF PLAYING DANCE NIGHTS:

Durkin: You look at someone’s iPod and it’s not just one genre, for the most part. Why shouldn’t shows be like that, too?
Melanie: Mmhmm!
Durkin: Another good format for us is doing something where it’s a couple acts where it’s us and a couple acts or a dance night or something.
Major: We love dance nights—you’re not yelling at people the whole time and worrying about when you play. You play and you get to hang out and dance!
Peaches: And you can set up your stuff onstage and just leave it!
Major: Oh God yeah.
Durkin: It’s just so much easier. “When are you guys going on?” “I don’t know. When it feels right!” because there are just two of us! Whereas at a regular show they’re like “NOW! GO NOW!” and you’re like “But hey, I gotta tie my shoe—“ and they’re like “YOU ARE MISSING TIME OUT OF YOUR SET! IT’S OVER!” That sucks. We opened for Curren$y once—we  were psyched to be a part of it. I’m going through my laptop to make sure we’re all set and it just crashes. As soon as it crashes, the promoter came in with a five minute warning. I was like “But I need five!” and he was like “Listen, you need to be standing out there in five minutes.” It literally came together at the last moment. Stuff wasn’t hooked up. I’m playing the song on one of the turntables and doing back ups and plugging stuff in.
Melanie: I just have this image of you plugging this final plug in at the last moment.
Durkin: That’s where I’m lucky—a lot of guys keep their live shows simple so that you have to know what to do if something goes wrong. If something goes wrong, I can come up with ten different reasons as to why that’s happening in my head and not freak out. Playing a place like ZuZu, if you can play there and make everything work you can pretty much do it anywhere. Everyone’s in your face and you have to do everything yourself. It’s a delicate balance. I wouldn’t spend my Friday nights any other way. That’s gotta be so difficult for you guys, with shows—we do a hip-hop show and we split it in half with the DJ. It must be rough to find fair money when you have a bigger band.
Major: We lose a lot of money because we’re paying for drinks at bars. [Laughs]
Melanie: I’m very scrooge-y with the money and it goes directly into a sour cream jar on my shelf.
Durkin: It’s way more fun than just going to the bar!
Melanie: Totally. I was a spectator of music for so long, and it was definitely a huge goal of mine to be onstage. And finally now doing it, it’s like, why would I ever not want to be doing this?

ON GEOGRAPHIC SEPARATION:

Major: We’re a rock and roll band from Allston. We play in a lot of basements and a lot of bars.
Durkin: I’ve lived in Boston six years, been DJing in Boston and Cambridge for three. My main residency is a biweekly Friday at ZuZu called Solid—it’s my home base as a DJ. For production I do some remix work, and I’m in a hip-hop group where I’m the main producer and the DJ. It’s called Black EL and Durkin—we put out an album last summer called Color Commentary and we’re working on new stuff now.
Major: I listened to some of those tunes. I don’t have a great frame of reference for hip-hop, but I enjoyed it.
Durkin: Thanks! I’m excited for the new stuff we’re working on. I produced it on an old shitty program on my old laptop. I didn’t really know what I was doing. We kind of fudged our way through that record as more content to do new shows. I was a DJ first, so I started applying how I DJ to how I do shows, and I was like, “We just need more music.” That turned into that album, and this whole thing.
Major: That’s not too dissimilar from us. In this day and age it’s difficult to get gigs and to get out there without something recorded. It was really early on when—we had been together six weeks when we started to record with Andy Maher. He did a lot of it analog. He hadn’t really recorded other people either. I think it came out really good, but things have definitely changed since then.
Durkin: Yeah. We’re lucky enough to have a better production set up now. It still turns into me producing something in my apartment and bouncing that to Black EL, who’s recording in a basement in Hopkinton. The main engineer we have is a good friend in Harlem. We bounce all our stuff to him and he mixes it and masters it, so it’s this triangle of digital stuff. It’s kind of a frustrating way to work sometimes, but we’ve being doing it more face to face as we’ve had more access to studios with better gear.
Major: That’s a lot of geographic separation! I don’t even know where Hopkinton is.
Jenny: It’s near me …
Major: I still don’t understand where you are.

ON WHY GARY GLITTER IS AN ASSHOLE:

Melanie Bernier: Last night [at ZuZu] while you were DJing I was talking to you about how you went from Depeche Mode—
Durkin: I went from Depeche Mode to Gary Glitter—
Ryan Major: WHAT?
Durkin: —And from Gary Glitter to “Howlin’ for You” by the Black Keys, which is the same drum track. And then from that I went to The Who’s “Can’t Explain.” They’re all the same tempo and they’re all have a similar vibe and they’re all drum-driven tracks. I have, like, a little crate of shuffling tracks.
Ryan: I like songs that sound like they’re taking parts of Gary Glitter songs.
Durkin: One important thing to note is that song is called “Gary Glitter Rock N’ Roll Part II,” and it’s instrumental. “Part I” has lyrics. You do not want to hear “Part I.” It is fucking terrible. Gary Glitter is an asshole. It’s hard to even want to play his music but that one song is so good, so I’ll play a minute of it and go into something else.
Ryan: Ten years ago when he got arrested in Southeast Asia there was a possibility that he was going to face a firing squad …
All: Ohhhhhhhh…..
Durkin: Come on! I don’t want to get into this.
Ryan: There are not a lot of glam rock people left! You can’t shoot them!
Durkin: I did some solid Wikipedia reading on him when I was like “Oh I should play this song”—
Ryan: —On whether or not it was morally reprehensible to play a Gary Glitter song. [laughs]
Durkin: I can set aside personal issues for an artist! Come on! You don’t know what Hanson is capable of!

YES.

NO.