Phil Green – C-VILLE Weekly

Ways and means: Inclusive hip-hop makes it to the stage at Nine Pillars festival

Hosting an all-LGBTQ+ hip-hop showcase has been on Remy St. Clair’s mind for a while now.

Over the past few years, while performing at various regional Pride events as rap duo Sons of Ichibei, St. Clair and Cullen “Fellowman” Wade kept hearing similar refrains from artists on these Pride bills:

“We’d love to…but we don’t have the means.”

“I’d love to…but there aren’t enough open artists in my city.”

And, perhaps most devastating, “it’d be great, but this kind of event wouldn’t be welcome in my city.”

It didn’t take long for St. Clair and Wade, who, along with a few other folks in town, book and run the Rugged Arts hip-hop showcase and the annual Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest (now in its third year), to realize that they have the means, enough open artists, and community support to put on this kind of showcase. On Tuesday night at Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Charlottesville’s first-ever all-LGBTQ+ hip-hop showcase will feature performances by Noah Page, Shamika Shardé, Torele, dogfuck, Sadeé, and DJ Angel Flowers.

This is the second year in a row that Nine Pillars and Rugged Arts have combined forces to break new ground in Charlottesville hip-hop: Last year, they hosted the city’s first-ever all-female hip-hop bill at the Music Resource Center. Artists everywhere are denied access to the stage or the recording booth because of their gender identity and sexuality, says St. Clair, “and that’s not fair.” In his opinion, it’s talent, the quality of the music, and the messages contained therein that matters. “We really want to be innovative and give those performers and those artists who are overshadowed,” or flat-out denied, the chance to perform, says St. Clair. “We want every artist to be empowered. And we want the community to take note.”

Rugged Arts has hosted regular hip-hop showcases in Charlottesville for nearly a decade now, and in that time, plenty of openly LGBTQ+ artists—including St. Clair, who hosts the showcase—have performed on the Rugged Arts stage. Torele, a local R&B singer on Tuesday night’s bill, is one of those artists. St. Clair saw Torele (who formerly performed as Not3s) at a Verbs & Vibes open mic a few years back and immediately invited him to the Rugged Arts stage. “It became like an addiction for me,” says Torele of the showcases. “I wanted to do it more and more. As an openly gay R&B artist, it was so nice to feel welcome, to have that space,” he says.

Not everyone is so welcoming. Torele says a few artists won’t work with him because of his sexuality, artists who “hold the stigma that it’s going to harsh their image if they work with someone in the LGBTQ+ community.” He wishes that weren’t the case, but his response is to “wish them the best and continue to do my own thing.” Prejudice against LGBTQ+ folks exist in our society, and so, by default, it exists in hip-hop. Artists like the ones on this bill, along with allies, are working to break it down and do away with it altogether.

Phil Green, a rapper who grew up in Charlottesville, now resides in Richmond, and performs under the moniker dogfuck, cites Richmond’s Ice Cream Social queer dance party as just one example. Ice Cream Social’s been going for about two years now (DJ Angel Flowers is a co-founder), and Green takes it as a sign that local music scenes are becoming more inclusive, even if that growth is incremental. The LGBTQ+ showcase indicates “that the [Charlottesville hip-hop] scene has finally sanctioned queer spaces,” says Green. What’s more, Green adds, it declares to artists and to the entire city, “hey, we want queer artists here. We want them to be seen and heard.” It’s an imperative message to put out there, says Green, who has a little something to add to it: “Respect queer artists, because it turns out, your heroes just might be them.”

Shamika Shardé will make her Rugged Arts debut in this particular showcase. Rapping has been a hobby of hers since she saw the legendary Lauryn Hill perform in Sister Act 2, but she’d never spit rhymes anywhere but her bedroom.

“I knew what I had to say was different from the rest,” says Shardé, and her music reflects that. Because of this, DJ SG and DJ Double U encouraged her to put her music out there, to share her talent and perspective with others. “I was told I have a talent, don’t waste it,” she says. And now that she knows she has a platform, she plans to make the most of it.

Make the most of Nine Pillars

Here’s what not to miss during the Nine Pillars Hiphop Cultural Fest:

Monday, April 22

CVille Freshman Class Youth Rap & Dance Competition

5pm, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, 233 Fourth St. NW

Tuesday, April 23

Rugged Arts x Nine Pillars
All-LGBTQ+ Edition

8pm, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St.
Downtown Mall

Wednesday, April 24

Sally’s Kids Vol. 2:
An Oral History of
Charlottesville Hip-hop

Time TBD, WTJU 91.1 FM Studios, 2244 Ivy Rd.

Friday, April 26

Make the Cut DJ Battle

8pm, Music Resource Center, 105 Ridge St.

Saturday, April 27

Wargames Rap Battle

7pm, Champion Brewing Co., 324 Sixth St. SE

Sunday, April 28

Nine Pillars Annual Block Party

3pm, Champion Brewing Co., 324 Sixth St. SE

Right angle: dogfuck shapes music around realism

Sitting on a cushioned bench in the back room of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Phil Green takes a drag from a hookah hose and exhales a stream of hazy smoke that hangs in the fading afternoon sunlight before recalling an early memory.

In that memory, Green’s about 6 years old, riding around in their mom’s car (Green identifies as genderqueer), and a Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill cassette belonging to Green’s older brother is playing on the stereo. “Most illingest b-boy, well, I got that feeling / I am most ill and I’m rhymin’ and stealin’. / Ali Baba and the 40 thieves / Ali Baba and the 40 thieves,” goes the first track, “Rhymin’ & Stealin’.”

The increasing volume and attitude of the repeated line “Ali Baba and the 40 thieves” snagged Green’s attention, and in that moment, Green understood the power of music. “It was getting me hype, even when I was little,” Green says, chewing on a white-painted fingernail between puffs of hookah.

dogfuck
Rugged Arts
December 7

Green, 27, who makes electronic-, metal- and punk-influenced hip-hop under the moniker dogfuck, has since realized that music is the only thing that has consistently made sense. Don’t ask Green to explain exactly how or why music makes sense; it just does. “Trying to describe a song is one of the dumbest things a person can do. Music is good because music is good,” says Green with a blend of sincerity and sass; music is something that speaks directly to the intangible within us while facilitating an understanding of that which is outside of us.

Music can move people to do just about anything, Green says. “You can sing someone to sleep; you can try to comfort yourself. Also, potentially, it can start revolutions and shit. Music well-applied can do all of these things.”

For the sake of those who might want to catch Green’s Rugged Arts set at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on Thursday night, this reporter will attempt to describe Green’s application of music so that listeners can tune in to what Green’s doing on stage.

“My music is heavily motivated by things I’m afraid of,” says Green. Things like Nazis, the government, disease, dying alone, being put in the proverbial box, leading an unaccomplished life, being an asshole and making mediocre music, among other things.

Most dogfuck songs say something similar, but in different ways, Green says, and what they say is that, “you suck; that’s okay. The world’s pretty awful; that’s okay too. Don’t take bullshit from people; don’t let them lie to you.” Be alive and be aware.

Green says that a lyric off of “Delusion,” a track on Triangle, a forthcoming dogfuck album, sums up dogfuck’s musical intention pretty well: “Whatever picture depicted is aggregate / When I stand up, all you ever see is you starin’ back and shit. / My love is vast as that chasm is / Art is the act of collapsing it / But life is expectation management.”

Green began writing lyrics somewhat accidentally; rhyming is a musical act that requires no equipment whatsoever. But good lyrics are hard to write, and Green is seemingly never satisfied by what they’ve produced. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, but I’m a fairly intelligent dude,” he says. “I’m aware that I have talent for this shit. I just feel like I should have been applying myself for years up until this point. I make decent music; I could be making really good shit. It gets frustrating, witnessing the gap.”

What does come easily to Green is beatmaking. So far this year, Green’s released six different instrumental-only beat tapes on dogfuck’s SoundCloud page, including a 26-track concept beat tape, The Alphabet (or, The Entire Fucking Alphabet, as it’s called on SoundCloud), where Green created a beat for each letter of the English alphabet. A letter is a symbol that represents a specific speech sound; letters are building blocks for words, for languages. But Green imagined a deeper, more complex sonic landscape for each letter—if A were a song instead of just a single sound, what would it sound like? What about B, C or X? It’s an assertion of “that’s what it sounds like now, [because] I made it that way,” Green says of the tracks, named “Number A,” “Number B” and so on, conflating letters and numbers when normally, they’d be separated into two different spheres.

“I don’t know how much I believe this, but, [maybe] people are only free when things are going ‘wrong,’” says Green through a cloud of smoke. “Seeing this hookah on the table, I probably wouldn’t register it as anything in particular,” because it “belongs” on a table in the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, says Green, but see a hookah in a cemetery and you’d wonder what the heck it was doing there. “Those rule-breaking moments, that discloses the world,” says Green.