While Richmond has a reputation as a metal/punk city, those who keep their ears to the ground will know that a lot of hip hop is being made here in RVA–especially over the past few years.
While Richmond has a reputation as a metal/punk city, those who keep their ears to the ground will know that a lot of hip hop is being made here in RVA–especially over the past few years.
Slapdash, the New Juice Crew, Broad St Elite, and quite a few other groups have been making waves in the local hip hop scene, but one group with deeper roots than most is Gritty City Records. Through their connections to Divine Profitz and other RVA hip hop veterans, this collective of MCs and producers has done a lot of great work to establish their name over the past few years. They’ve also endured more than their fair share of personal tragedy–Divine Profitz founder Chadrach, who worked extensively with the members of Gritty City, died in 2012, and Gritty City rappers Seap One and Joe Threat both passed away in 2013.
However, the group–which also includes Johnny Ciggs, Fan Ran, Pandemic, Delta Automatik, Skweeky Watahfawls, and Sirus The Virus–has persevered. They bounced back from their losses with the establishment of Rapper Monday, during which they released one new track per week on their Bandcamp page for an entire year, and followed that up with two new albums in 2014–See Us On The Dance Floor, a collaboration between Johnny Ciggs, Fan Ran, and Skweeky Watahfawls; and World Peace Motherfuckers, the first solo release from former Luggage MC Ben FM.
The following interview with Johnny Ciggs, Fan Ran, and Skweeky Watahfawls was actually conducted by Ben FM before he joined up with Gritty City Records, and the conversation that follows had a lot to do with his eventual decision to become a Gritty City artist.
Describe the Gritty City sound.
Skweeky: The shit that your daughter listens to that your mom don’t want her to listen to. The facts of life.
Fan Ran: It’s gritty but at the same time it’s clean as fuck. How does it do that? You know how Mobb Deep used to sound? It was clean but at the same time, goddamn, it was gritty. The personality is in the
lo-fi. It’s something that as a listener, you don’t know what it is, but you know [it].
Ciggs: It’s kinda fueled by that old Richmond party scene.
Party music?
Ciggs: In a way. It’s just grimy as shit. This city used to be real outta hand. It was that era that raised me, so a lot of what I talk about comes from those experiences.
Gritty City seems like a cohesive unit, but also an affiliation of individual entities. How do you view that structure?
Ciggs: It’s a group, but it’s a group of solo artists. We’ve done a ton of stuff together, and everybody’s kinda workin’ on their own things at the same time. Gritty City is just an umbrella for everybody who’s involved. I support everything they do, and I put it out to the best of my ability. I would say I’m the head of the thing. I started Gritty City. I got the business license and everything. Whenever it’s go-time to get some shit done, I’m always the one who has to light the fire.
Around here it seems like there’s a new rap group, a new label, a new crew almost every week. In this landscape, what makes Gritty City different?
Fan Ran: A lot of people say, “Oh I get drunk. I go to the club. I get turnt up. I always got $1000 on me.”
All kinda shit, like “38 bad bitches with me,” you know? Gritty City is talkin’ about maybe doin’ a couple rails in the bathroom, maybe crushin’ a Keystone 30 pack and shit. Like a glorified house party. That’s the way we started out, rappin’ at parties and shit. So it appeals to me on that level. I did the Divine [Profitz] thing and that will always be my heart too. That’s some political shit. That taps into a side of me. But this shit taps a side of me too.
See Us On The Dance Floor is the name of the new project. Is this a concept album, or is it dance music?
Ciggs: [None] of us are ever at dance clubs. I came up with the album title as a joke, and when I called Skweek to tell him I met some people that would like to hear us do a record together, I told him that’s what it should be called. It just kinda stuck. When me and Skweeks are rappin’ together, we’re just tryin’ to make each other fuckin’ laugh. That’s the energy of the album. We’ll rap about a bunch of dumb shit, and how we drink all the time, and talk shit.
And then the features on it… we got you on it, Ben. We got Devious Kanevil on it, Swerve36–just a bunch of OG Virginia heads. These are all artists that I looked up to when I was coming up. Now I make music with them. I dig it. We got a little more of a rock sound with the samples. Ran’s got a lot of heavier samples. But the shit’s funky, man, and it’s real tough. You could dance to it if you wanted to.
Skweeky: Yeah, you get enough beers in you, you’re gonna dance your ass off to it.
In this era, when rappers wanna have a who’s who showcase of all the hot producers, what are some of the advantages of working with only one producer for an entire project?
Fan Ran: You get a whole developed album. Especially with somebody like me that can go different places with my production. It gives an album direction when you have one producer. It’s gonna have an overall feel. You get that core sound. See Us On The Dance Floor is a sound. I feel like that is the move for me right now. I like doin’ whole albums for people. I get my shit off, and they appreciate it enough to trust me to produce a whole album. I’m honored by that.
Explain what Rapper Monday was.
Ciggs: Rapper Monday is over, thank God, and we just got turned down by Guinness Book of World Records for most weekly releases by a rap group, so fuck them. Me, Joe, Ran, and I think Delta were talkin’ about releasing a song once a week a couple summers ago, so we released a song from June to June, 2013-2014. A new song that had never been heard before, every Monday for a year. We wanted to prove that we were harder workin’ than pretty much everybody. It was basically our message to the world, that we’re in here rappin’ all the goddamn time, and the producers we work with are makin’ beats all the goddamn time. Shout to Profound 79 and everybody else who gave us beats during that time.
To see it behind the scenes is totally different than the three minutes people took to listen to the song. People knew the songs were comin’ out on Mondays, but to wrangle all these fuckin’ alcoholic, weed smokin’ morons, bring ‘em together, and make a song every week? Are you kiddin’ me? You know how stressful that was? Please.
Ciggs, you’re the engineer, so in your position, at the end of the day, you’re the last one with your hands on it. How does that affect your relationship to the song?
Ciggs: If they don’t like it, fuck it. By the time it’s done I’m too fuckin’ drunk to keep mixin’ anyways. There was a night I pulled an all-nighter and mixed 45 tracks for the triple mixtape release back in 2012, and I didn’t hear a single fuckin’ complaint. So after that night, I always said to myself, “If they don’t like how it sounds, fuck ‘em.” That’s what cracks me up about some of these kids talkin’ about how they’re grindin’ so hard. I fuckin’ work 60 hours a week, get home at four or five in the morning, and that’s when I start workin’ on the rap shit. I’m still gettin’ it done, more than most.
Is the experience any different when you are mixing your own material?
Ciggs: Not really. I basically have the process of mixing everything down to a formula. With the amount of music we put out, I don’t have time to sit down and obsess over a mix. Plus I got a good ear so things just fall into place, for the most part. I’m actually working on mixing some new tracks for my upcoming solo album, Elegance, currently. They’re sounding good.
What’s Elegance all about?
Ciggs: It’s a statement about my life. I’m proud of the fact that 15 year old me would be proud of what he turned into at age 30. I still do exactly what I wanted to do back then, and on top of that, after years of being broke as shit, I am now financially stable. I bartend at a great bar and in my time off I do whatever the fuck I want. So I guess you could say Elegance is based on the fact that I’m living the dream. Even though my life is not as luxurious as what’s normally associated with the word, I haven’t lost sight of what makes me happy. I haven’t sold my soul for a dollar, I’ve gotten to where I am by staying true to myself.
There was a couple-year period in my life where I was miserable as fuck and living a life that wasn’t me. I never want to feel like that again. I guess this record explains the end of that era and what I’ve been up to since.
Talk about Chadrach.
Fan Ran: Chadwick in general was a lot of things to a lot of people. Probably the most humble guy you’re ever gonna meet in your life. Somebody that you thought was your friend before he was your colleague.
Always wanted to make sure you were doin’ good. Probably one of the most knowledgeable people spiritually that I’ve ever met, and not on that fake shit. That evangelical..”Gimme some money” shit.
Fan Ran: Yeah, “gimme some money,” or “I can drop fifteen bible verses in a row,” or “I can tell you what you’re doing wrong with your life, and how you need to be more like me” type shit. Never on that. He might give you a low key jewel. He was the king of droppin’ low key jewels. Whether you chose to listen or not was on you. He was a real guiding force in people’s lives outside of music.
He would actually play you a record he was samplin’ before he played you the beat. He was more excited about the [crate] diggin’. That’s how you know Wick was a true producer. He’d wanna show you all 50 records he got from the spot, and let you know the science on the records, because he knew he had the cards. He knew you came over there to hear some shit, but you was gonna get life jewels, maybe a music history lesson, in the process. You felt honored just to be in that man’s presence. He was a light. And I’m not even a religious person, but he made you wanna be a better person when you left that house.
Talk about Seap.
Ciggs: Seap was a brother to me. He and I met as he was trying to sell drugs at a release party I was throwing. I told him to fuck off. Somehow from then on, he and I became real close. Maybe because I had the nuts to go at him like that–who knows? By the end of that night he and I were taking keg stands together and crackin’ jokes. He was a heroin addict who sold heroin, pills, weed, whatever–he would have sold you anything if he thought you would buy it. But he was one of my best friends ever–never did me wrong. I would’ve done anything for that man. I tried my hardest to keep him straight, but motherfuckers that wild are hard to tame.
He overdosed, died, and got revived the summer before his album came out. And when he got revived, he got popped with a whole bunch of drugs. After he spent some time in jail, he beat the charges and went home to Culpepper. I called him and was like, “Hey man, I want you to come down here to Richmond. You know if you’re livin’ with me, you ain’t gonna be doin’ no dope. Come down here and let’s fuckin’ make an album.” He was like, “Man, I been writin’ the whole time I been locked up. I got tons of shit.”
He comes down with some chick, we roll over to Ran’s house, and I buy him three beats. The second we get back to the house he’s like, “Oh, I got somethin’ for this.” That track would later be known as “Remastered.” So he’s doin’ it, writing the hook and recording. This is the first fuckin’ night! We got three tracks done on Fan Ran and Delta beats, and he’s got this girl blowin’ him, all shitfaced on shitty vodka. It was a wild night. That was just how it was, chillin’ with that dude. Always some alcohol involved, and probably a really crazy girl or two, but we put together a great, great album, [The Sickness Of Seap]. It was just a beautiful album. He was a legit dope boy, and if you listen to his side of the story, it don’t sound nothin’ like any of that glorified shit. He made that shit sound as ugly as it was. He died of an overdose, came back, wrote the fuckin’ album in jail thinkin he was lookin’ at 26 years, then beat that shit on some crazy technicality. Sadly though, once that album came out, he fell back to his old ways and it got the best of him. His release show was at Emilios in April 2013; his memorial show was a month later at the same venue.
Talk about Joe Threat.
Skweeky: Joe was the only motherfucker I know who would stay at my house to get fuckin’ faded ‘til five in the morning, sleep on my couch, then wake up at seven and be on the phone makin’ deals. He’d always be like, “Yo. Let’s make moves. Real walkie-talkie. I gotta work but fuck it, let’s do somethin’ before that.” He would shoot through. Don’t ask me how the fuck he got there. Don’t ask me how he left. I don’t know. Like good people status. I don’t really feel like anybody got anything negative to say about him.
Ciggs: Oh hell no. And when he passed, and me and NaNa put together the memorial show for him, we really wanted to please his moms. Shout out to Momma Threat, one of the strongest women I’ve ever met in my life. Cool as hell. But when the memorial went down, just the amount of people that showed up to that shit was crazy. There were people I was friends with that I didn’t even know knew him.
People I would expect to see separately at different things. Like I’ve never seen these groups of people all under one roof at the same time, ever.
Fan Ran: And that right there was a testament to how Joe operated. Joe was a nucleus for a lot of different people. He connected people. Like he always used to say, “I come and connect the dots.”
Ciggs: He had it figured out, man. He was a real smart dude. Anybody who knows him knows that. And he used to say “Oh I’m Harvard material, but I’d rather just hang out and smoke blunts.” That was Joe goddamn Threat, dude. He was one of the best to ever touch this city in my book.
Listen to and download all of Gritty City Records’ releases at grittycityrecords.bandcamp.com.
