Tag: hip-hop

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Arts

Live music venue The Ante Room folds for now

The Ante Room, operated by Jeyon Falsini, will close its doors on March 31, due to the demolition of the Main Street Arena complex. Falsini hopes to relocate the popular live-music venue and continue his support of local musicians, particularly hip-hop and metal acts, such hard rock and metal band Congenial Crime, pictured here. Photo by Tristan Williams

A music venue is a strange place to be in the middle of the day. A club is designed for the nighttime, with its dark walls, ceilings and stages meant to be illuminated not by the sun but by bright lights, coming alive when bodies are in the room and music is in the air.

This is true at The Ante Room, where, on a sunny Thursday, Jeyon Falsini sits in an office chair, wearing jeans and a black and white T-shirt bearing the logo of Richmond hip-hop collective Gritty City Records. Falsini crosses his arms and tips back in his chair.

“It’s been fun,” he says, looking around the room at the roulette wheel painted on the wall and the bathroom doors painted to look like king and queen playing cards. “It’d have been six years in July.”

The Ante Room will close on March 31, after an All Bets Are Off party. The building is set to be demolished this summer, along with the Main Street Arena ice rink and the iconic Charlottesville gay bar and bohemian hangout, Escafé. A retail and commercial office development, CODE (Center of Developing Entrepreneurs), will be built on the space that has held some of Charlottesville’s most vibrant and diverse cultural spots.

“It’s hard to think past unscrewing all these screws, taking all this stuff down,” especially after putting years of work into the place, Falsini says. But he has a request for those who have enjoyed the venue in its five years and nine months in business at 219 W. Water St.: “Say a little prayer, however you do it,” because he’s looking for a new space to keep the venue’s spirit going.

And it’s important that he does, say area musicians. “No one in Charlottesville [is] more supportive of local music than Jeyon,” says Nate Bolling, a chamber pop and rock musician who’s run sound and taken the stage at The Ante Room dozens of times.

Remy St. Clair, a Charlottesville hip-hop artist and frequent Ante Room event host, says, “We are losing a home when it comes to urban music and art.”

Jeyon Falsini hopes to relocate the popular The Ante Room and continue his support of local musicians, particularly hip-hop and metal acts. Photo by Eze Amos

Falsini got his start booking music at Atomic Burrito in the early 2000s, and eventually started his own company, Magnus Music, booking talent for restaurant-bars like The Whiskey Jar and Rapture and some local wineries and breweries. He opened The Ante Room (initially called The Annex) in July 2012 so that he could put together multi-act bills that would draw attention to the music itself.

Local musicians and music fans will tell you that The Ante Room has one of the most, if not the most, inclusive show calendars in town. Falsini books hip-hop, Americana singer-songwriters, alternative rock, moody rock, goth, new wave, metal, experimental electronic, jam bands, Afrobeat, go-go; salsa dance nights and Indian dance parties; karaoke nights and rap-centric social affairs. He’s served beers to curlers and hockey players who venture upstairs after games at the arena, too.

In particular, The Ante Room has been a haven for the hip-hop and metal scenes, two genres that are often unfairly stereotyped by—and thus not booked at—many venues in Charlottesville. Falsini says yes to both. There’s no reason not to, he says.

“The Ante Room was a welcoming place to genres that mainstream Charlottesville doesn’t seem to value,” says Kim Dylla, Fulton Ave. heavy metal vocalist. Recognizing various genres of music and cultures is an acknowledgment of “diversity of thought,” she says, something Dylla feels The Ante Room has supported more than other local venues.

Travis Thatcher, an electronic musician, agrees. He says The Ante Room has been “a really inclusive space that was kind of up for anything,” including his Frequencies experimental music series.

Falsini is quick to credit small DIY venues like Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Magnolia House and Trash House, which also welcome a wide variety of music. The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and Champion Brewing Company host occasional shows, as does La Patrona, newly open in the former Outback Lodge space on Preston Avenue. Falsini also hopes that the larger venues in town will begin to see the value of booking a wider variety of genres.

“If there’s one [good] thing that’s happening…with two nightlife spots closing,” people are dispersing and going elsewhere, Falsini says. “Other local businesses will be fortunate enough to meet our customers.”

Much is still up in the air about the next iteration of The Ante Room, but Falsini’s hustling to find the right spot. He’ll book the same variety of genres, but it’s unlikely that his new venue would be downtown. “Wherever it is, we’ll have to blaze new territory,” says Falsini.

And he’s fine with that—it’s what he did with The Ante Room, after all, and the music community has benefited from his wager.

“We can’t give up now,” says Falsini. He’s all in.

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Arts

Listen up: C-ville’s hip-hop scene is on the rise

Louis Hampton and Damani Harrison of The Beetnix perform at the Nine Pillars Cultural Hip-hop Fest. Photo by Ron Paris

It’s a gray Sunday evening, 50-something degrees and drizzling when The Beetnix step onto the outdoor stage at IX Art Park. It’s been raining all day, but a crowd of more than 100 has gathered on the graffiti-painted concrete ground in front of the stage. Many of them hold their phones and tablets in the air, precipitation be damned, ready to capture Charlottesville’s most legendary hip-hop duo on video.

“Come closer,” Damani “Glitch One” Harrison says to the crowd as he picks up a mic. With his arms stretched out wide, Louis “Waterloo” Hampton beckons for everyone to move in closer.

For Harrison, 39, hip-hop has been part of his life since he was a kid. A military brat who grew up in Germany and Philadelphia, he remembers exactly where he was when the music caught him.

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Local rapper Keese envisions unity through compassion

Keese will perform with Gritty City Records on Tuesday at The Ante Room. Photo by Amy Jackson

Keese is a quiet guy. While growing up in Charlottesville’s 10th and Page neighborhood, he didn’t say much. But he paid close attention to everyone around him—his friends and family, his neighbors, what was going on in his city schools. English was his favorite subject—he liked to read and he loved to write stories.

When Keese started rapping at age 20, the words came naturally, but he says people were shocked. “Ask anybody—I was so quiet. I was in my shell, but hip-hop really gave me a voice to say what I want to say,” he says.

Keese, now 26, works at the downtown Key Recreation Center, but he raps in nearly all of his spare time. He’s built a following through energetic performances at Rugged Arts Hip-Hop Showcases at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and sets at Magnolia House. His EP, False Hope, dropped in December, and he opens for Milwaukee rapper Milo at the UVA Chapel on Friday.

When Keese hears a beat, he starts to envision a story—a friend’s struggle or something that’s bugging him, then pages through his lyrics for the verse. “I’m inspired all the time,” he says. “I want to take people into my world, let them know what I’ve seen: poverty, bullying, racism—how the world is. The world is a pretty bad place. It could be better, but people don’t want to come together,” he says. Conscious hip-hop, though, can unite people through compassion, sympathy and mutual understanding. This is Keese’s angle.

“Purpose,” on False Hope, takes on what Keese calls “another black hood story” of a kid who’s picked on at school for not having the “freshest shoes.” “His moms can’t afford, she already got two jobs, older brother too concerned with the block, he ain’t even got a pops.” Then his crush asks him to back off and he’s devastated. “He ain’t even really had nobody by his side, no one to call for help. / Fed up with himself, he went home, older brother had a gun on his shelf,” Keese spits. Then the teen, who believes he has no purpose in life, points the gun to his head, closes his eyes and pulls the trigger, only to find the gun unloaded and himself not entirely alone.

“You got a whole lotta living left to do,” goes the hook.

Keese wrote “Purpose” for victims of bullying, as a reflection on a friend’s suicide. As a stellar lyricist, he knows the power of words and how deep they can burrow in the heart.

He doesn’t condone violence, drugs or hateful behavior. He’s “not into that stuff,” but his most popular song is called “Crack.”

“Crack, crack, I got that crack motherfucker,” he starts. “Listen to my flows, put it in your veins. / I’m gonna take you high…give it one try, you’ll never be the same,” he quips, lyrics tumbling out easily over the beat. “One time for the young Trayvons, Mike Browns, pipe down ’cause you ain’t saying nothing. / All these lame-ass rappers scared to tell the truth. / But quick to hit the booth and sell these lies to the youth. / I don’t get it, they spit it but never live it. / My lyrics speak from the soul, paint a picture with my vision.” Then, he declares belief that “we’re gonna be all right” because he’s been playing with you all along—you’ve been caught up in the sick beat, not paying close attention to the words. “I got ’em mad ’cause they thought a nigga start selling crack. / What they didn’t know is that was the plan to reel ’em in. / Now I got your attention, don’t be so offensive. / I still got the highs for your lows, come and hit this.”

“This” is his music, not rocks of cocaine. With its timely references, vivid images, killer rhymes and playful ruse, the song is clever and establishes Keese as a lyrical mastermind.

“Sometimes you have to disguise messages in certain songs to get people to listen,” Keese says, noting that the song warns of the dangers of selling and doing drugs. Opt for music instead, because it’s just as addictive and good for the soul. “Give you one track, you’ll never be the same.”

If a message isn’t something he believes in, he’s not going to put it out there. “I live what I write. I could easily say that ‘Crack’ is about drugs” to maintain a certain image, Keese says. “But I don’t want to be something I’m not. I’m sensitive. Everyone is sensitive; the world is sensitive. If that wasn’t the case, then we wouldn’t react to certain things,” he says.

People are getting his message. At Rugged Arts at the Tea Bazaar back in September, an eager crowd sang the lyrics to “Crack” at the top of their lungs—for Keese, who loves to perform live and feel that energy, the fact that people connect with his music gives him momentum.

“It feels like people are counting on me,” he says. “I want people who come to my shows to be inspired, to feel good about themselves, to want to do something better. I want to put this town in a position where everybody can do what they love.”

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Audio engineer Finn Downey is the area’s hip-hop go-to

Sound wizard Finn Downey has been working with local hip-hop talent since his mid-teens. Photo by Keith Alan Sprouse

Finn Downey is the first person to admit that his home recording studio is a modest setup. Downey has nailed egg crate foam mattresses to the wall and set up a couple of professional-quality microphones, a mixer, turntable, preamp, keyboard and a pair of equalizers. He has a computer equipped with digital recording and production software, and a drum kit in the living room, right outside the studio door.

The small room in his Belmont house is transformed when Downey, an audio engineer and occasional producer who’s making a name for himself with local hip-hop and rap artists, starts clicking around in LogicPro.

“You’ve gotta talk to Finn,” at least five people told me at a Rugged Arts hip-hop showcase last year. “He’s doing cool stuff.”

Downey, 20, says that while an audio engineer’s work is “incredibly technical and super boring, unless you’re an engineer [yourself],” it’s ultimately important to how an artist is received by the public. “If all the rappers in town were just recording on their computer microphones or whatever, they could be incredible [rappers], but no one would listen to it” due to crappy audio quality, he says. If something sounds scratchy, pitchy, hollow or if it’s boring, we tune out or turn it off.

That’s not what he wants for local talent. “Hip-hop is my favorite genre,” Downey says. “It’s incredibly honest. A lot of music tends to have this escapist side of it and hip-hop is very much the opposite of that. It’s about real things that are happening.” He wants that music out there.

Creating a good mix and master recording is all about contrast. “There’s a tendency to have everything at the same level”—radio pop, for example—but “deciding to have certain parts really, really quiet, or surprisingly loud, I think that’s really important to keeping things interesting,” Downey says.

Reagan Riley, an emerging neo-soul and hip-hop artist who grew up in a classically trained music family, worked with Downey on her debut EP, Summer Complex. She says he’s very intuitive when it comes to engineering. It’s part gift, part experience—he’s been doing this for a while.

Drawn to hip-hop music by Gorillaz’s 2001 eponymous release—which he first listened to at age 6 in his dad’s record store, Spencer’s 206—Downey started using GarageBand, a basic (but still fairly complex) music software program—when he was around 10 years old.

By age 15, he had his own studio in an office building behind C’ville Coffee. “I couldn’t record during the day, because there were people doing paperwork all around me,” Downey says with a chuckle. He’d head over to the studio in the evening after working at his family’s business, Carpe Donut, which was right across the street on Allied Lane.

The first rappers Downey worked with were guys from his neighborhood “who just happened to rap.” He remembers recording a kid who’d mowed his parents’ lawn.

Last year, in addition to Riley’s Summer Complex, Downey engineered a number of other local projects, including electropop, funk and hip-hop act Ammon Winder’s Turquoise Transcendence’s Dayz in the Moonlight, dogfuck’s hip-hop record Rectangle and Keese’s False Hope EP.

Keese, one of Charlottesville’s most promising young rappers, says that working with Downey has improved his songwriting and his live performances. “I used to record and engineer my own music for a long time, but it was very exhausting and time-consuming,” says Keese. “It sounded good but I was missing someone who had the knowledge and experience—Finn is that guy.”

When Keese went to Downey’s studio for a fellow rapper’s session, he was impressed with the engineer’s passion for hip-hop music and his ability to lay down a beat. Keese booked his own session with Downey a few weeks later, and they’ve been working together ever since.

“Finn was eager to do whatever it took to make [the songs on False Hope] sound as good as possible,” Keese says. “It’s fun working with Finn because you learn a lot. He inspires me to go harder and make the best music possible.”

Riley credits him with bringing her out of her shell musically. Though she’d played music all her life, she was shy about it.

“Finn heard the potential in my voice. ‘Just sing a little louder; I’ll make a beat for you,’ he said. It was very nerve-wracking for me, but eventually I got it out. It laid my foundation.”

Downey says he listens to a lot of records “and just tries to copy what they’re doing.” Nas’ Illmatic, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange and the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East are some favorites, and he marvels at the engineering on Television’s Marquee Moon.

“That era, the mid-1970s, they were so into the pan, and those records are so fat. They’re so wide. I love putting speakers on opposite ends of the room and listening” to all the space between. It’s an example of how audio engineering can alter the listening experience and make (or break) a record, and it’s something Downey keeps in mind as he works in the studio.

“You have all these rappers who are like, ‘Finn, let me get a verse on that. Let me do this, let me do that,’” Riley says. “People come to him with music, but he also puts out music that people [want to] throw verse on,” says Riley, adding that “when it’s done, it’s perfect and it’s cool.”

Downey’s much more humble about what he’s doing. He jokes that as Charlottesville’s hip-hop scene grows, it’d be great if everyone in the scene could be driving a Bugatti in a year or two. But he knows that’s a way off, so for now, he says he’s keeping things simple: “All I’m trying to do is give beats to rappers.”

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Rugged Arts nurtures a thriving underground scene

Spititout Inc. founders MC Remy St. Clair and FellowMan work with DJ Double-U to close each Rugged Arts showcase with a freestyle group cypher. “It’s like walking on water, not having a limit,” St. Clair says. For every MC, says Fellowman, when you’re ready to be heard, “you know it, and you grab that mic.” Photo by Eze Amos

When R.U.N.T.215th was growing up in Philadelphia in the mid-1980s, he routinely stayed up late and recorded Lady B’s “ Street Beat” Power 99 FM radio show, taping it on his boom box. He’d listen to the tapes over and over—the sets were packed full of Public Enemy, MC Lyte, Audio Two and Melle Mel tracks, plus in-studio rap battles and the music of the Bridge Wars—a track-for-track rivalry between the South Bronx’s Boogie Down Productions and Queensbridge’s Juice Crew over the birthplace of hip-hop music.

One night, Lady B played KRS-One’s “Criminal Minded,” and R.U.N.T. was hooked. Captivated by the wordplay, the sense of individuality and social consciousness expressed in song, he recalls thinking, “I’ve gotta do this.” He started rapping at home and in school, in the upstairs room of a neighborhood Episcopal church. He filled rhyme books and stacked them in his closet; sometimes, he says, his mom’s abusive boyfriend would tear up his rhyme books, but R.U.N.T. kept writing and rapping. He emceed, performed at block parties and the local Boys & Girls Club. He got into graffiti art, which, in addition to emceeing, DJing and breaking, is one of the four original elements of hip-hop culture.

R.U.N.T. began planning his future around hip-hop, but then his mom finished nursing school and they moved from Philadelphia to Charlottesville, a small city with an even smaller scene.

He’s been working on growing that scene ever since. After participating in a few different projects in town, including Burnt Bush Productions, R.U.N.T. formed his own hip-hop collective, Spititout Inc., in 2005, with the intention of cultivating an underground hip-hop circuit.

R.U.N.T. and his current Spititout Inc. collaborators—Rose Hill native MC Remy St. Clair and NOVA-raised producer and poet FellowMan—have organized Rugged Arts hip-hop showcases since summer 2013, first at Eunoia and now at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. Rugged Arts is a unifying, artistic outlet for underground artists from Charlottesville and the surrounding areas, and Spititout Inc. emphasizes that it’s a safe and welcoming space for hip-hop culture. It’s the place to go to be exactly who you are.

St. Clair says Spititout—made up of a second-generation Philadelphia hip-hop head, a white man and an openly gay black man—is “a blueprint for unity within the hip-hop community.”

Every Rugged Arts event tells “the story of a struggling city that never really gave our art form a chance,” says St. Clair, who hosts the showcases. When certain venues would host hip-hop, the organizers would have to jump through hoops—hiring extra security guards, purchasing extra insurance on the building— and that makes holding a show fairly difficult, financially and otherwise, St. Clair says. (Other venues currently hosting local hip-hop shows include The Ante Room, Milli Coffee Roasters booked by Camp Ugly and Magnolia House.)

Spititout Inc. feels that the stigma against hip-hop, especially underground hip-hop, is unwarranted. It’s all about peace, love, unity and having fun—those are the core values, R.U.N.T. says; it’s not about violence and hatred.

That’s not to say that the showcases are soft. “Rugged Arts is a place where you can talk about social issues and plan events to confront certain social issues,” R.U.N.T. says. The music addresses poverty, oppression, racism, sexism, politics and so much more, but there’s a social activism component to it as well: There’s always a donation box on the merch table, raising money for causes such as the bail fund for those arrested during the protests in Charlotte, North Carolina in September.

“What we stand for [at Rugged Arts] is what hip-hop stands for and has always stood for,” FellowMan says, and that’s for equality and voice and against exploitation and oppression. “It’s important that we continue to make politicized art because…art is maybe the only tool we have [against suppression], so it’s vital that we encourage it.”

Spititout Inc. looks for genuine, individual and entertaining artists with a social conscience who are pounding the pavement in search of a platform. They book around five artists per showcase; each shares his music with Rugged Arts’ DJ Double-U, who fires the beats at the right time in each artist’s set.

The promoters have plenty of goals for the future of Charlottesville underground hip-hop. R.U.N.T. hopes the scene diversifies while continuing to offer socially-conscious entertainment; he wants local artists to tour and touring artists to stop in Charlottesville. St. Clair wants area hip-hop acts to play Fridays After Five, and FellowMan wants to see hip-hop at the Tom Tom Founders Festival. “I would like to see a ‘community event’ actually accept us fully and not just tolerate us,” St. Clair says.

Every Rugged Arts event ends with a cypher, a group freestyle where anyone in the house can grab the mic and spit it out. DJ Double-U plays the beats—often made by local producers—and the mic is passed around. Everyone knows when an MC is ready to talk—you can see it on his or her face, St. Clair says—and when the hand touches the mic and the words start to flow, it’s an audible emotional exhale. It’s relief, the remedy for whatever ails them that day.

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The Ante Room bets on local hip-hop with new showcase

Louis “Waterloo” Hampton of The Beetnix is on the bill for The Ante Room’s next Round Robin Hip-hop Showcase on Thursday. Eze Amos

Go to a hip-hop show in Charlottesville and you’ll see a rapper spitting lines to a crowd full of people giving him their full attention. They’ll be standing there, hipsters and hip-hop heads alike, stroking their chins, heads nodding to the beat. “They’re listening to every single word,” and when the rapper “says something dope, people fucking cheer,” says Mike “Mike Bizarro” White, a local rapper who performs as one-half of the duo Cognitive Dissidents.

“People go because they admire the craft, both in the beat production and the lyricism. It’s almost like going to see beat poetry,” White says. “Everybody’s there wearing their heart on their sleeve,” and with events like the newly established Round Robin Hip-Hop Showcase at The Ante Room, local rap artists are being given more chances to gain new audiences.

Jeyon Falsini, who owns and runs The Ante Room, noticed that rappers brought in by local promoters to perform during the last hour of his venue’s dance parties had more talent to share. The rappers needed a stage to themselves, so he started building hip-hop bills.

“I was noticing that rappers’ fans that came out for just their one friend wouldn’t stay to see the other acts,” says Falsini. After hosting a singer-songwriter round robin, where each artist played a song before passing the mic to the next artist, Falsini thought a similar format would work well for hip-hop. Each rapper performs a short set before passing the mic to the next MC. The mic makes two full rounds—each rapper performs twice.

Falsini expects the performers to come prepared, to know their lines and spit them out over their backing tracks—“warts and all”—no lip-syncing. “The energy, ‘the vibration,’ as I’ve heard it put, comes from performing live,” Falsini says.

The next showcase takes place on October 6 and features three individuals and one duo, all from Charlottesville, with each offering a slightly different musical style (it’s a broad genre, after all) and a different perspective on life. But they all agree on two things: Hip-hop is important, and it’s on the rise in Charlottesville.

Danny Lz, one of the youngest rappers on the scene, delivers straight-up hip-hop, with rhymes and beats heavily influenced by ’90s rap (think Jay-Z and Nas). He tends to tell stories about himself, and about his life, to relate to his audience. The genre, he says, “keeps your ear to the streets, to what’s going on in the world.”

That’s precisely what drew Louis “Waterloo” Hampton, member of The Beetnix and one of the scene’s most established lyrical artists, to hip-hop when he was a teen in the ’90s. “At the time, I didn’t have a dad in the house, and I was the big brother, so I didn’t really have anybody to look up to,” he says. “Music let me know what was cool, what was hip. It let me know what to keep my eyes peeled for, gave me the advice that I needed.” Plus, it “let me know it was okay to be who I was.”

Hampton cites Ice Cube’s “Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself,” off of 1992’s The Predator, as particularly important to him. Not only was it musically and lyrically fantastic, it offered good advice: “You better check yo’ self before you wreck yo’ self,” Ice Cube insists, warning of the pitfalls of the street.

“Ice Cube really spoke about the ills of the system and police brutality,” Hampton says, sighing heavily before pointing out that incidents of police brutality toward black men is, 24 years later, still an issue. Hip-hop, he says, can provide sound guidance.

For White, who played in jam bands before forming Cognitive Dissidents with Phil “dogfuck” Green, rap is an emotional and mental release that’s open to audience interpretation. When he spits “My thoughts sink distantly, consistent as barflies / Stand guard for epiphany, turn rosary to barbed wire,” he expects the listener to find personal meaning in his lines. “It’s not up to me what my words mean,” he says. He’s all about metaphor and simile, allusion and allegory.

Green, on the other hand, goes for specificity. He raps: “Your mom’s so white, she said ‘Hey’ I said ‘Hey.’ / I said ‘Goodbye’ and she said ‘Namaste.’ / Then she dove in her Volvo and drove on her way / To practice her Spanish down at Chipotle. / Your mom’s so white she almost makes a white dude’s pay / But if she stayed at home and raised you then that’d probably be okay / and Hannity and company, they wouldn’t have shit to say about the welfare state of America’s decay.” He calls out his own whiteness, gender and race politics, big business and more all in a few lines.

Lalo Lloyd, who lived in Washington, D.C., New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia before moving to Charlottesville about a year ago, blends old-school hip-hop with a little R&B. “I base everything off an emotion,” he says, beats and lyrics alike. His songs are about relationships. As a child, he watched his stepfather abuse his mother; he’s lost friends and family members to drugs, to disease. “Most of it is stuff I’ve seen with my own eyes,” he says. “When people listen to [my music], I want them to feel like they know me. What you see is what you get; there’s no smoke and mirrors here.”

In addition to The Ante Room, Magnolia House, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and Milli Coffee Roasters host local hip-hop shows. But while the scene is emerging, it can only grow and deepen if people start to come to shows and if more venues begin supporting the hip-hop community, says White, who insists Charlottesville needs that musical diversity.

But no matter what, “Hip-hop is never going to go away,” Hampton says. “It’s a part of music—it’s a genre of music that’s in every city, everywhere you go. So, to have hip-hop in Charlottesville is totally normal,” he says. Not only that, but it’s necessary. “There are kids, who grew up like I did, who need that outlet like I did,” kids from all backgrounds who need their version of The Predator, he says. Maybe he—or another local rapper—will be the one to provide it.

Contact Erin O’Hare at arts@c-ville.com.