H
ip hop is being bastardised. And about time too. For a while, it was concerning that new hip hop from
all factions was being boiled down to its lowest common denominator; dilute and derivative. For such an incendiary genre, it’s taken bands like rule-breakers Death Grips, Scotland’s Young Fathers and their label mates Shabazz Palaces to take certain old form and function, then tear up the rulebook. Young Fathers both court and abandon melody with no apology, and have a reputation for musical aggression. With ‘Tape One’ and ‘Tape Two’ already providing enough sounds for a generation, we await their full-length, ‘Dead’ like the hip hop second coming.
I've read a few articles about you guys now that concern themselves with the notion that hip hop doesn't come out of Scotland, which is peddling two incorrect notions; one: that you're hip hop through and through, and two: that Scotland has any different a kind of youth culture to anywhere else. How do you feel about that? Well it's kinda patronising, people saying that. We don't class ourselves as anything, but to say that certain genres can't come out of somewhere, it's just a patronising thing. "Oh, you've done that up there? Well done!" [Laughs] D'you know what I mean?
Te boundaries are just not there anymore for music, and they're certainly not geographical. You signed
16 / February 2014/
outlineonline.co.uk
to [American label] Anticon and put ‘Tape Two’ out with them. Did being signed in the US give you a bit more kudos at home? Yeah, I think it works everywhere, not just at home. Maybe in Edinburgh because there's no so much a scene - like a really big music scene - so you really have to have quite a name for people to turn out to see you. I think everywhere though, when you sign to a label anywhere you take their crowd. Tat's always the mentality with us, that you get that extra tick from someone and they get you out to as many ears as they can. But we keep trying to do that too, just so we get to as many ears as possible.
Because 'Dead', your upcoming
album, was historically not meant to be your debut - 'Inconceivable Child… Conceived' got close, but never made the light of day - what has that meant for how you feel about this one? Well we've known each other since we were 14, so we're gonna celebrate it a bit, definitely. Because of the nature of 'Tape One' and 'Tape Two' before though, we kinda seen them as albums, even though they werenae classed as albums. But this is a different thing altogether; it got put together in the same kind of process, but with the nature of us not being able to sit still for more than two minutes because we get bored, it was a whole new thing. When we listened back tae everything we'd recorded for the album, it definitely sounded
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