“I’m gonna fall. Will you catch me?” asks Adam Arnone of the audience at Harlow’s Pub, an intimate venue with a stage that has seen far more folk musicians than hip-hop artists. It’s Arnone’s release show for his new album. Just like that, he drops off the stage into the crowd, who not only catch him, but they lift him up over their heads and take him surfing.

Arnone trusts his listeners and they, in turn, trust him and will follow whatever he does musically—which is important considering his ever-evolving sound. It comes not from the streets or the clubs, but from the rolling hills and country roads of his northern New England beginnings in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It’s where Arnone listened to his musical heroes—Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, De La Soul—drinking in every lyric and committing it to memory. It’s also where at 14, he began working with friend Shalem Bencivenga (then known as DJ MF Shalem) and two turntables, a mixer, sampler, four-track tape, and a microphone.

After a successful five-year tour, Arnone returned home to rebuild his local following and raise a family. It’s here he had the time to reflect—and create something new. Now in his late 30s, Arnone left behind his former stage name, Adeem, and became front man for his latest band, Adam and the Flood. His latest album (his 12th) will be released digitally Oct. 24.

In the album, which was inspired by his mother who passed away after he began writing it four years ago, Arnone has fused hip-hop with delta blues, gospel, rockabilly, electronica, and any other style he’s felt like experimenting with. He’s also picked up instruments and used his singing voice for the first time. Titled Move Toward Life, it presents the idea of his need to be present and honor his past while not being mired in it.

A group of friends took turns contributing in the studio based on Arnone’s cell phone recordings. He wrote most of the lyrics on the spot. Then Arnone and his three new band members took those recordings and re-recorded them for the album at Loud Sun Studio in nearby Jaffrey, New Hampshire, with the help of engineer and musician Ben Rogers.

The album is interwoven with stories of Arnone’s family and the connection he had with his mother, Nancy. One song includes audio of her singing to his young daughter and an ultrasound heartbeat of his unborn son she would never meet.

She’s a part of every show now—from the red sneakers Arnone wears onstage because she once told him she liked them to the shout-out he asks the audience to give his mother at the beginning of each performance.

That personal touch flows over to Arnone’s relationship with his followers. They are just as much a part of his experience performing as he is of theirs. At the end of the album release show, for instance, he asks them to help name a song he’d written that day. Later, he puts down the mic and talks to them directly.

While he appreciates the need for a social media presence, Arnone prefers this in-person connection. “People told me it was the best show they’d ever seen, and they’d seen me play over 20 years,” he says after the album release performance. “I’m still pulling from things in my life and making art. I still have stuff to talk about.”

Want to hear what Arnone listens to for musical inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. While you’re there, check out the playlists of other musicians we’ve profiled.

Adam Arnone, Musician, Adam and the Flood
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Top image: Adam Arnone. All photos by Jake Sebert.

The post Hip-Hop from the New Hampshire Hills appeared first on Take Magazine.

Nasir Thato Marumo and Alfred “Freddie” Kimani host The Rap Scholars podcast, an audio collage out of Western Massachusetts that seeks to facilitate “a new generation of rap criticism,” using “podcast as pedagogy.” As you can tell by the podcast title and tagline, both Marumo and Kimani are academically-minded when talking about hip hop and rap music. However, their approach to criticism and podcasting in general is quite inclusive. The Rap Scholars feels more like a conversation between learned friends rather than an elitist cacophony of buzzwords and academic jargon. Their scholarship and deep knowledge of hip hop and rap music is real, but never isolating.

The Rap Scholars podcast covers a broad range of topics and artists, analyzing everything from the current Jamaican trend in rap to the emotional side of trap. Soon, they’ll have even more voices on the podcast with a new feature called Reason Battles where the hosts and guests face off about pertinent topics in rap and divisive artists within the genre.

We chatted with Marumo and Kimani about their contemporary approach to rap music criticism, misconceptions about the genre, and the true origins of hip hop. This Q & A has been edited for brevity and content.

Podcasting as pedagogy: please explain.

NTM: For me, this means that we want to use the framework of a podcast and the casualness, tangentiality, and conversational quality of [podcasting] as a way to teach. I had a mentor who basically showed me that the way that I existed was already a form of study. I think black kids are always taught that we don’t know anything and that the knowledge we do have is not legitimate. So podcast as pedagogy is trying to legitimize a conversational study of hip hop culture that is accessible and not elitist, and prioritizes conversation.

Especially when talking about rap music and hip hop in academia, there’s certain ways you’re supposed to talk and certain kinds of things you’re supposed to say. To me, those are the least interesting things that are happening in rap. I learn the most about rap from the people who are actually creating this music, which is young black kids in high school and middle school even. Like 21 Savage—he’s basically a baby.

AFM: I love the diasporic aspect of the podcast. Tying all these conversations back to its roots either from an African Diaspora or Jamaican Diaspora. I think when people get to see where these roots and diasporic vibrations are coming from, it can maybe lead to a more interesting conversation.

Why use podcasting as a primary medium for your message?

AFM: I firmly believe that hip hop is mainly an audio format. I didn’t see any video format being able to highlight hip hop as well as a podcast. Also, podcasting gives us the option to throw in music, dedicating time to the entire audio of a song and being able to speak on that. Listeners can enjoy the song and listen to the narrative we’re building around it. [Podcasting] just seemed to be the clearest way to present these topics.

NTM: I want to be a rap critic and a cultural critic. Podcasting, to me, is the most contemporary way to engage in that kind of analysis. It’s really important to me that we play the entire song we’re talking about and that we bring in other voices, and podcasting allows us to do that.

Once I realized performing was more a way for me to think about and understand what rappers are doing, rather than my personal career path, I immediately jumped to podcasting. For me, it was the next logical step after realizing I didn’t want to be a rapper, because I had the skills to do it. Also, I was having so many in-depth and inspiring conversations with scholars around me who think about rap. There’s not a lot of millennial rap critics; it feels like there’s a hole in the criticism. For example, most of the people talking about trap music in media are shitting on it, calling it “mumble rap,” and saying it’s meaningless.

What are the biggest misconceptions about hip hop and rap music that have prevailed since the beginning of hip hop? Also, what new misconceptions are starting to grow that you have to battle when talking about hip hop and rap music?

AFM: Right off the jump, throughout the decades there’s been this misconception, [spun] by a lot of media outlets, that hip hop leads to violence. It’s pitched as a clear correlation by so many representatives and so many leaders. It’s wrongly become this harmful visual and that misconception itself can cause harm. If you’re a person who truly loves this music and sees yourself identifying with a lot of the verbiage behind it, then it’s hard to see yourself fitting into a society that sees this thing you love, and so many do love, as leading to violence. That’s something that’s a constant struggle and has been perpetuated throughout the decades from rap groups like N.W.A. and films like Boyz in the Hood, to rappers now like Kendrick Lamar.

NTM: I feel like there’s so many misconceptions. For me, every time we talk about the origins of hip hop, it starts with DJ Kool Herc who was Jamaican, but that’s where the story always begins and ends, which to me is so false. Hip hop and more generally Black American music and Jamaican music have been in this really interesting cultural conversation since at least the 1940s. Part of my mission is to do a little bit of a revisionist history of hip hop to give credit to Jamaica where it’s due, which is all throughout the entire culture and especially in the history of rap.

In terms of new misconceptions, rap is still a pretty young genre and is made up of so many sub genres. Every five or six years there’s a new kind of rap being made. A new misconception is that the priorities of hip hop are always going to be the same or that the things that make you a good rapper are always going to be the same. But those things are changing as our culture is changing, as new young people are innovating in our culture. There’s a disconnect between what critics expect rappers to do and what their priorities actually are. With the podcast, we want to usher in the new generation of rap criticism that meets contemporary rap music on its own terms.

Want to hear what Nasir and Freddie are listening to? Head to our Take A Listen Spotify channel for a curated playlist from Nasir and Freddie.

Nasir Thato Marumo, Alfred “Freddie” Kimani, co-founders, The Rap Scholars
Massachusetts
Website
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Top image illustration of Marumo and Kimani by Madda Illustrations

The post Rapping with the Rap Scholars appeared first on Take Magazine.

“I’m 19,” says Dylan Rhode, one of the three frontmen of Flower Shop, a music and arts collective based in Portland, Maine. Dylan drifted around New England, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey through his upbringing, finally settling down in the Greater Portland area he now calls home. “It all kind of happened organically,” says Rhode, who goes by the moniker Monk, of the advent of Flower Shop. “We didn’t have anything else to do except get in trouble and do stupid shit, so turning this common interest into a business seemed like the most productive use of our passion.” In nine months, that passion has flourished into a hip-hop collective, studded with rappers, vocal artists, producers, videographers, beat-smiths, and musical magicians—most of them under 21—who are pushing out unique content by the day. A quick visit to their Soundcloud gives a sense of their musical range.

Mhon Griot & Monk | Photo by Justin Hardesty

Passion doesn’t always express itself in a pleasant way. “It’s different up here,” Monk explains. “It’s cold, everyone has seasonal depression, and the summer is fleeting. The summer is almost like a feeling as opposed to a time. It’s a different culture—everyone is collectively sad. We’re trying to bring the essence of that culture to our music.” Since August of last year, Monk and the other two frontmen, Trevor Tucker (THT) and Mhondoro Richards (Mhon Griot), have been pushing out masterful products of visionary talent steeped in sadness. However, this tripod of hip-hop wunderkinds couldn’t stand without a thriving community of audiovisual colleagues to lift them out of the perpetual sludge. The most powerful manifestation of that is their first music video for their track, FACES, which features the work of many talented collaborators.

The concept for the music video was dreamt of and engineered by Flower Shop visual artists, Dillan Hodak and Charlie ‘Buckets’ Mayforth. The Champlain College senior and SCAD graduate, respectively, pursued futures in visual media and connected with the collective through Flower Shop’s multi-talented booking manager and graphic designer, Tim Dubois. “They really liked the song and we wanted to do a project together,” says Monk. “They have all the equipment and happen to be incredibly nice at what they do.”

The Flower Shop crew whipped up an audiovisual gem in a single day. “One of our sets was in Tim’s little Burlington apartment. We had so many kids jumping up and down in the room with all this heavy equipment, the downstairs neighbors came up and said their ceiling was flexing in. They said, ‘The song’s really cool, but we’re afraid you’re going to collapse our ceiling!'” says Monk. While they claim the video was “thrown together,” the polished outcome can only be credited to expert work. Note the spray-paint jumpsuits that make appearances throughout the video, created late night on a whim by Mayforth. Talk about whacking it out of the park on your first try.

THT | Photo by Justin Hardesty

The Flower Shop members are not without pleasure nor plight. “Living in Maine has shaped my art because people think that a rapper has to come from a hard place and a crooked, dangerous city,” THT says, “and when people hear about rappers from Maine, they think the worst. They call us soft, but it doesn’t mean a thing—we all have been through a lot. But ah well, that’s just another person we have to prove wrong.”

FACES | Still shot by Dillan Hodak

Flower Shop – Music and Arts Collective
Portland, Maine
Website
Soundcloud
Instagram

Monk
Soundcloud
Instagram
Twitter

THT
Soundcloud
Instagram
Twitter

Mhon Griot
Soundcloud
Instagram

The post Maine’s Hip Hop Flower Shop appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our November 2015 print issue. 

When he was a little younger, Peter Reynolds worked in the mail room at the Hartford Steam Boiler building, one of the tallest office buildings in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, abutting I-91. He often worked solo at the end of the day, and he says that if you could have watched him, between organizing stacks of packages and envelopes, you might have seen him popping, locking, and vibrating, working on dance moves during the downtime at the end of his shift.

Peter Reynolds (left) and Jolet Creary grew up dancing in Hartford and founded Studio 860 in 2012.

“I was the last one to leave, so by five o’clock I was in there jamming out,” says Reynolds.

Reynolds, 31, also known as P-Boogie, is a dancer and an educator, and one of the co-founders of Studio 860, a dynamic studio that teaches young people the arts of hip-hop and street dance. Reynolds helped launch Studio 860 in 2012 with Jolet Creary, the artistic director, in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood. The second-floor studio is in a converted mill complex, a few buildings up from Real Art Ways, an arts and performance space with a movie theater and gallery; just a block or so away from a new CTfastrak rapid transit station; and up the road from thriving Puerto Rican, Portuguese, and Brazilian communities.

The area code for most of Connecticut is 860, and, as the name suggests, those behind the studio take pride in its connection to the region and particularly in its Hartford roots. Reynolds and Creary, who both grew up in Hartford, have put a lot of themselves into the studio—pulling up carpets, scraping off glue, and making the floors ready for the stomping and sliding of dancers’ feet. Their lives have been transformed by dance, and they work to inspire transformation in the dancers they teach and share the stage with. Their instruction focuses on fitness, artistic expression, community, and self-possession.

Dashawn Davis is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860.

Creary started dancing when she was a toddler, at the feet of her grandmother, who danced around the house and at practically any time. From there, Creary studied Caribbean dance traditions at Hartford’s venerable West Indian Social Club, a cultural hub in the city’s North End. Soon she was watching Nutcracker videos and taking ballet lessons as well. Videos of Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul left their mark too.

Reynolds had formative exposure to hip-hop dance as a kid at summer camp. “I had an instructor—his name was Tommy Hill, so even his name I thought was cool, because of Tommy Hilfiger,” he says. “And he was from England, so he also had an accent and everything. He was real cool.”

Reynolds remembers Hill demonstrating some moves as the two were up early one morning waiting for the day’s events to start. The counselor broke out some eye-catching tricks, isolating body parts and letting the movement ripple through his arms and shoulders like a visible energy current. “He had all these chains and bracelets on, and I remember him vibrating and ticking,” he recalls.

Street dance, hip-hop dance, contemporary African American vernacular dance—this genre has been steadily dominating mainstream American culture for decades now, maybe just slightly behind its musical counterpart. Think of the Fly Girls dance troupe from TV’s In Living Color or the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, about the largely gay and black New York City voguing scene that inspired Madonna. More recently, look to Rize, the 2005 documentary about the LA krumping scene, or to the high-profile status of Memphis jookin’ dancer Lil Buck, who has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, at a TEDx conference, and with the New York City Ballet. Or just watch hit shows like Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance.

The increased prominence of dance means more people are interested in the subject, but it may also mean there’s a greater gap between pop culture representations and real-world connections. “Over the years, dance has become a lot more commercialized,” explains Creary, “but there’s still a lot of dance that hasn’t been seen on television in its fullest form. There’s been a lot of commercialization of hip-hop, and not just hip-hop, but also jazz, modern, ballet—everything—and even African dance.”

Creary teaches West African dance at Trinity College in Hartford. She is also the choreographer and artistic director of EQuilibrium Dance Theatre, Connecticut’s first hip-hop dance company. Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent, a hub for traveling dance instructors and performers, and a supportive community of creative young people.

In late summer, student dancers gathered at the studio before heading down to an open-air jazz series at Bushnell Park, the majestic park abutting the state capitol at Hartford’s center, to raise funds for a trip to Atlanta for World of Dance, an international dance competition. Twenty-two student dancers performed on the team. Sixteen-year-old Jasmine McPherson of Hartford was one of the competing dancers, and one of the fund-raisers. The 11th grader, who’s been studying ballet since she was five, plans on pursuing a career in dance. McPherson appreciates the perspective she gets at Studio 860, the ways in which Creary and Reynolds and other instructors orient dance within culture, and how the studio is a model of a viable livelihood within the arts.

Twenty-two of Studio 860’s student dancers competed in the international dance competition World of Dance in Atlanta in August.

“It’s not that we’re just taking a class to dance; we also do a history lesson on how things started and how things progress,” says McPherson. “I’m not just learning about dance, I’m learning about the business aspect, about how you run your own studio. What it takes to fundraise, what it takes to get a business off the ground.”

Those bits of history might come in the form of a mini-lecture from Creary on the origins of some of the traditions taught at the studio, but it might also come in the form of firsthand exposure to guest artists who are foundational dancers within the genre. “Because hip-hop is so young, in reality a lot of the people that invented the style are still around,” says Creary. “So it’s easier for us to access it, to actually get some type of oral history.”

History aside, students at Studio 860 are learning serious dance. Rooted in street dance and hip-hop, the movements demonstrate a grace, control, and creativity that helps explain why this art form is captivating new audiences. Hip-hop dance, like the music, pulls from unexpected sources. Hip-hop music was built on a foundation of funk and soul rhythms, deconstructed—chopped into pieces and reconfigured with added elements. Everything from jazz, classical, film soundtracks, rock, and found sounds got stitched in, with percussive rapping in complex phrasing layered over the top. It’s an avant-garde collage of sly and high-contrast reappropriations.

The same is true of the dance. So many of the genre’s eye-grabbing moves involve a marked juxtaposition of near-stationary body parts with other body parts isolated in extreme motion, or a tendency to cultivate a series of dramatic slow-motion movements jammed against a few fierce and rapid articulations: a jutting of the head, a pivot of wrists and hands, a quick sideways bend of the knees and ankles to approximate a kind of broken-boned slump. Other moves seem to depict powerful surges of energy coursing through the body, making it ripple and bulge at the edge of what can be contained by muscle, bone, and skin. And virtuoso variations on timeless moves like the moonwalk, the wave, and the robot can still astonish audiences.

Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent.

Creary and Reynolds point out that hip-hop dance uses a vocabulary of movements plucked from sources outside of dance. Elements inspired by silent films, mime, sci-fi, martial arts, animation, and stop-motion flipbooks have all worked their way onto the dance floor.

Beyond the physical skills, the sense of cultural history, and the insight into arts administration, many of the students at Studio 860 experience something deeper and more basic, notes Creary.

“A lot of our students are getting a sense of self-confidence out of this,” she says. “It’s definitely therapeutic. We have some people that come in here . . . whatever’s going on outside, when they come in here they feel an acceptance. We have a lot of people that say this is their family. There’s a sense of belonging. Even if they’re not going to become professional dancers, they’re given that opportunity to perform. They’re given that opportunity to be seen being taken out of whatever their environment is. I always say that you can do whatever you want when you’re dancing. It’s a crazy high that you get from dancing.”

Top photo Linda Miller is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860 | All photos by Ian Barnard

The post Fly Moves appeared first on Take Magazine.