MUSIC INTERVIEW: CHIDDY BANG

Mixtape Kings Remember Their Roots & Predict a Classic Debut Album

Chidera 'Chiddy' Anamege and Noah 'Xaphoon Jones' Beresin, collectively and increasingly well-known as Chiddy Bang, have carved out quite a name for themselves on many fronts. The duo has been building a buzz, first through a trio of massively downloaded and universally acclaimed mixtapes (The Swelly Express, Air Swell, and Peanut Butter and Swelly), then through an ever-evolving, energizing live show and an award-winning music video ("Opposite of Adults"), and topping it off with nothing less than a world record or two (for Longest Freestyle Rap and Longest Marathon Rapping). What is perhaps most impressive is that this has all happened over the past couple of years, and before they even released their debut album (yet). Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby sat down with Chiddy and Xaphoon in Austin, Texas to look ahead to that eventual first album and back to their first days as Chiddy Bang…

 

Stefan Goldby: Where did you guys first meet?

 

Chiddy Anamege: We met at Drexel University – that was our college…

 

Xaphoon Jones: In 2009…?

 

CA: Yeah, 2008-2009.

 

XJ: Yeah, 2008 leading into 2009, and we basically pride ourselves on being one of the last MC/producer duos to really survive. Like, we just lost Guru from Gangstarr, then there’s a lot of more old school groups like EZ Rock and Rob Bass, and just that whole kind of culture of having entire albums with a similar sound because there’s one producer, and then there’s the culture of freestyling and improvisation – that’s what we try to bring to the table.

 

We also do a lot of new-school stuff, like sampling and using a lot of electronic-bass sounds… we dig samples that are not your traditional sample bass, and we use a lot of electronic bass sounds that are not traditionally found in hip-hop, so old-school/new-school.

 

SG: Chiddy, like another of our recent interviewees, Tinie Tempah, your family is originally from Nigeria – his moved from Africa to London and into that scene, yours to New Jersey and into a hip hop scene. He talked about how his family is a huge part of who he is as an artist…

 

XJ: That’s the culture…

 

SG: What is it in that heritage and Nigerian culture in general that lends itself so inherently to making music?

 

CA: I definitely think that everybody I know is pretty much an artist, in Nigeria. Like, all of my closest peers. I’ve got a great homie named eLDee the Don, who’s a musician. We brought him in, we did a joint with him on our album, and that’s dope. And Tinie’s situation – I was seeing it at this aftershow, because we were there for the Brit Awards, and I met his family, and I was like, “Wow: In so many ways, his family is just like mine.” He has the little brother, he has the sister… the little brother that gets fly, dresses up…

 

XJ: …the mom that cares…

 

CA: …the dad that’s laid back, just overseeing it. I’m just like, “Wow, this is very much so similar to me.” And he introduced them to me, and they happened to be fans of what I was doing. They were like, “Oh, oh, oh! I like your video.” Like, his sister wanted a picture of me and stuff. They were aware, but at the same time, they were unaware. That’s how my parents are. They know what I’m doing, they see all this and they watch the awards shows and stuff, but they don’t really know what really goes on, like with the interviews and… just the minute little details of things that we do that comes with the job.

 

XJ: It’s crazy to see the culture clash, because when we were about to sign a record deal and my parents were like, “Yeah: Drop out of school, do whatever you want. Go nuts!” And his parents were like, “You’re dropping out of school?! What’s going on?!! Where’s the lawyer? I don’t trust this lawyer! We’re gonna get the family lawyer!” Just like wow, I mean, just the dedication is crazy! It’s also about me being Nigerian too. [laughs] People don’t see it so much because I’m blond. They don’t understand, but I’m just saying… No, I’m just messing… [Laughs]

 

CA: …No, but in many ways, Tinie’s family, I see so much of my family in his family, and it’s dope that he’s doing music and grinding. We’re both from the same tribe, we’re both Ibo - so that’s dope. I’ve just got nothing but love for him and his whole movement.

 

XJ: Nigerians definitely go hard for each other. Chiddy can pretty much sense if there’s a Nigerian in the room! When he walks into a room, he’ll be like, “Hmmm… My Nigerian radar is going off right now!” He’ll see someone and he goes, “Boom. My brother, what’s going on? blah blah blah”. And if they work in the music industry, they’re immediately down to do whatever to help support us…

 

CA That’s what I’m saying: Instant support. I feel like the thing about us is – because we were doing an interview earlier and people were saying: How do we feel about the fact that we may or may not be underrated a bit, in some people’s eyes? And I’m just like, I don’t think it’s because of the music. I think we make dope s***. I think it comes down to the fact that the awareness isn’t there. And I said, “If we took a sample of Nigerians in America and each played them Chiddy Bang music – like the Nigerian youths – and they knew that I was Nigerian, ten out of ten would be supporters. Ten out of ten.”

 

XJ: I would say about 70% of my Twitter followers are Nigerian. It’s not like American Nigerian kids – it’s Nigerian Nigerian kids.

 

CA: Automatically. They love this. They’re gonna love it, I tell you!

 

XJ: Wale is Nigerian…

 

CA: Big shout to him… With me, to them, I’m very much so familiar with the whole culture. It’s not like I’m Nigerian and it’s just like, “Oh, my parents are there. I’ve never been there, I don’t know the foods, I don’t know the language.” I’m familiar with that from a first-person perspective. My parents took me there to see it for myself, and I’ve seen it for myself, and it’s very much so a big part of who I am.

 

 

SG: To an extent then, you grew up naturally learning how to blend different styles and different cultures. Is that part of how the music of Chiddy Bang has come to have really no sense of genre boundary at all?

 

XJ: Kind of, yeah. Our goal is to juxtapose two elements – to have Chiddy, who is like…

 

CA: Hip hop! I’m the hip hop standpoint.

 

XJ: Yeah, I mean, he’s coming from the culture of The Fugees and Redman and Joe Budden, and that New Jersey/New York kind of Hot97 era… Jay-Z and people like that. And then you have me, who’s coming from a really diverse musical background, and one of my biggest influences production-wise, besides classic hip hop producers like J. Dilla, and Just Blaze is people like Joe Strummer, whose albums are so… Joe Strummer worked with The Mescaleros in his years after The Clash and there’s absolutely no way to put a genre on that. It’s folk, it’s rock, it’s hip-hop, it’s techno, it’s bluegrass, it’s everything. So we don’t sit around and go, “All right. This is the club banger, this is the street song, this is the song for the girls…” We just make stuff, and we just express it, and…

 

CA: Spontaneously, we just create it and…

 

XJ: Our goal is to touch on as many genres as we can. On one mixtape - our first mixtape, we touched on Afrobeat and Baltimore club, and pop, and electronic music, and dance hall, and dubstep, and all kinds of stuff…

 

CA: It’s dope because I come from just a straight hip hop background like he said, and a lot of the music I was unaware of: Like MGMT, when we sampled them, I was unaware of MGMT. And Passion Pit, when we sampled them, I was unaware of that. So I’m also learning new music as we go along. And also sharing with him some of the hip hop cats that I came up on, that I would think were dope – we’re just teaching each other.

 

XJ: And I think that if he knew about MGMT, then he would be coming on to the track in a pre-planned manner, and we’d be much more of a very indie-rap sounding group. But because he literally has no idea who these bands are, he’s able to have a completely fresh perspective on it and, once again, it makes a juxtaposition that you just don’t see…

 

SG: You just mentioned your first mixtape, The Swelly Express. You guys really grew your reputation with a succession of mixes, from Express to Air Swell and beyond. How will your upcoming debut album differ from those mixtapes?

 

CA: For the album, I say we got into a lot of studios and began to utilize more original sounds.

 

XJ: It’s huge, man. It’s a two-year-old Chiddy Bang, in that sense. When all we had available to us was laptops and mics, it was like sample-chop, sample-chop, drum loop, mic. And then when we get more resources and we grow, and we work with people like Pharrell and John Hill, and a lot of amazing people, and I’m learning from producers and Chiddy’s learning from rappers and mentors like Black Thought from The Roots crew… And then we have, on top of that, new resources, so we’re like, “All right. We’re gonna have a string section on this song. We’re gonna have grand piano on this song. I’m gonna play real drums on this song.”

 

CA: It was adding more things to the arsenal…

 

XJ: So we’re not the most mature-sounding group, but this album sounds unlike anything from the mixtapes. It’s very new. We’re hoping to release it as soon as we can. We’re about 90% done, and it’s gonna be more developed…

 

CA: … we just let our minds run wild, exploring different sounds, like he’s making beats now that…even the sample beats are still crazy, but we’re doing a lot of original stuff as well.

 

XJ: Yeah, we’re trying to keep about 50/50 in terms of samples versus originals.

 

CA: So it’s dope, and now we’re bringing people in, like friends we have that we’ve made during our travels and during our journey as artists… bringing them in to the studio and collaborating with them, and just making it cool. Not necessarily people that are established or known, but people that are really close with us, that we think are dope, and just coming up with some great stuff.

 

SG: From the 90% that is done so far is there a session that stands out most in your mind from the recording of this album so far?

 

XJ: That’s a really good question… we had a lot of time on the East Coast and in Philly where I live, and in New York, where we were doing sessions, just to get a lot of data down on paper, and we did ten days on the West Coast just to organize what we had, and I think those ten days in Los Angeles were really key, because it let us be like, “Okay, this song is gonna be… here’s the theme. And this song is gonna be like this,”

 

We basically had all these beats and all these verses recorded, and he had tons of different lyrics recorded, and I had all these half-finished beats, and definitely working in LA… I mean, we got to work with John Hill, who has done the first Santigold album, and he’s done some stuff with Shakira, and he’s just a really smart dude. So that session was great. The session where we brought Shirazi in… he’s a lyric writer from West Africa, similar to Chiddy, and we brought him in and it was just like... we’d been working with different writers or whatever and it was just like, ugh… … squeezing out the song. But with him, it was like five songs in an hour. It was like boom, boom, boom! It was all about spontaneous energy…

 

CA: Channeling that, knowing when it’s time to go in…

 

XJ: Right. That’s what the first songs of any group are made of, and that’s what’s most often lost in the debut album – they had so much time to work on it and studio it out that it’s lacking the spontaneous energy, so we’re just trying to make sure we keep that element.

 

SG: How do you then go about translating that spontaneous energy in the studio into onstage live performance?

 

CA: On stage, I feel like I like to interact with people in general. I feel like, if I’m cool with you, we’re gonna be social…

 

XJ: ….he just raps to the pretty girls. He doesn’t perform to anyone else in the crowd. It’s just like, the whole crowd, one pretty girl…

 

CA: Not necessarily!

 

XJ: …if the whole crowd is dudes and there’s a pretty girl on the side of the side of the stage, during the whole show [makes a zooming in sound]...

 

CA: That may be a slight exaggeration! Some pretty girls, yeah, I may have done that once or twice, but…

 

XJ: … he likes to interact with the crowd.

 

CA: I interact with everyone. If I see you singing the lyrics, most likely you will get that interaction.

 

XJ: Fans who know the lyrics to songs besides the single, you can’t help but feeling a connection with…

 

CA: … and you feed off of the energy. That’s why I always say I love playing some of the college shows that we have because it’s live, versus playing certain other types of events where the crowd won’t be likely to jump or go crazy.

 

XJ: Chiddy does a freestyle every single show, I’m on the drums…. we have a very rock duo-y vibe because it’s just drums and vocals…

 

CA: And we vibe off of each other. And we do wildcard s*** too.

 

XJ: And I’ll come out from behind the drums, and there will be songs that Chiddy does with other rappers, and we won’t have those rappers with us, so I’ll come out and do their part while Chiddy does his part on songs, and leave the drums for a second…

 

CA: And that’s probably okay [Laughs]

 

XJ: Or, based on what city we’re in… when we did shows in Baltimore, my friend is part of a big Afro-Caribbean percussion ensemble, and we brought the entire ensemble on stage, so it was me on drums, and we had dudes on percussion and shakers and congas, and we just basically turned the show into a percussion orchestra. Our first shows we ever played were opening up for The Roots, and they have such a crazy live show that it put the pressure on us, definitely, to see what we can do to bring it to the same level…

 

CA: Definitely. And we sort of just recently feel like we’ve come into our own, as far as the live show, and it was exactly a year ago when we first started…

 

XJ: One year ago at SXSW…

 

CA: …implementing him on the drums.

 

XJ: I was just playing the tracks and he was rapping, and I’d be like, “Yeah,” and then occasionally, if I was lucky, I would have keys, because keys is my instrument…

 

CA: He was killing it, though, on the keys!

 

XJ: It was nice, but the energy was still just a track and vocalist, and then we were doing a Billboard show with Estelle last year, and I think someone… it was supposed to be Gym Class Heroes, and they pulled out, and we got asked to step in. One year ago, Chiddy Bang… no one really knew who we are. But there was still a drum kit on the stage, so our manager was like, “All right. Why don’t you just play the tracks and play along?” … I mean, I grew up around musicians, I like instruments, so I could play the drums, but not well! I was very Ramones-y in the sense that I was like…Oi Oi Oi!... just banging on it… But you play the drums with the tracks every day for a year, and you come back in one year and it’s just like, whoa!

 

CA: You just get better at it.

 

XJ: Like a different person!

 

SG: The two of you clearly do what you do and have your own energy. How did that change and have you learned from bringing established artists with their own styles like Q-Tip, or Killer Mike into your mix?

 

XJ: Always.

 

CA: Definitely.

 

XJ: You learn from everyone.

 

CA: A year ago, also, when we were out here at SXSW, one of the dopest things was we had this bus which had a studio…

 

XJ: Well we didn’t have it, we stumbled upon it.

 

CA: Well, we stumbled upon it, and there was this bus where you could just record, and it was really really dope, and that was one of our first, I guess, collaborative experiences with artists…

 

XJ: … because we’d go see showcases and be like, “Hey man, what’s up, what’s up? Come kick it on the bus with us. We have beer and electric scooters.” That’s what they had on the bus, and we’d come and the dudes on the bus were awesome, and we got to make a record with Killer Mike, which turned into this song called “Neighborhood,” which is…

 

CA: …which is one of my favorite songs. [Laughs]

 

XJ: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite songs. We were trying to put the album out in the fall, but it wasn’t fully developed, so we decided to combine the old songs like “Opposite of Adults” and “Truth” and stuff, with a few new songs, like “Neighborhood” with Killer Mike that we did at SXSW, and put it out as [The Preview] EP. It was good because I remember after we signed our record deal, turning to our manager and saying, “Man, do we have to put “Opposite of Adults” on the album? I love the song, but it’s two years old. It’s not us anymore. We’ve grown, we can do new things, and we want to show that”.

 

To put “Opposite of Adults” along with all the new things would just feel like a piece of painting with a different image plastered on top of it. It just wouldn’t feel complete, and when we do the album, we want to deliver it as a complete picture, so the EP was a really great way to release those songs that needed to have an official release, but never got one.

 

SG: And I’m glad you brought up “Opposite of Adults” because I can hardly talk to you this week without at least mentioning your award-winning music video… [Laughs]

 

XJ: This week, we came to Austin with a much more laid-back schedule than last SXSW, where we were on the grind…

 

CA: Really chill, yeah.

 

XJ: Yeah, but this year is a lot more chill, and we knew we had to come to Austin for the MTV Woodie Awards, and we knew we were nominated for Best Video, and we were presenting another act. We were presenting Breaking Woodie, which was fun. But we had no idea the kind of response we would get from the crowd when they were doing the nominees. It was like, “Here are the nominees: Black Keys, and Duck Sauce, and Chiddy Bang…” And everybody was like [yells]. And it was like, whoa! Just to be at that table and you look over and you see Wiz Khalifa and you see Matt and Kim, and you see... Sleigh Bells…

 

CA: Sleigh Bells killed it.

 

XJ: Yeah, Sleigh Bells – amazing. And just to be in that…

 

CA: Atmosphere…

 

XJ: Having those big names as our peers is just something that is so beautiful to me that I still can’t even get my head around it. It’s just a really big honor, and to even win was crazy.

 

CA: Yeah, it was a real big honor, and I definitely didn’t even… I honestly thought Duck Sauce was gonna get it for “Barbra Streisand”. [Laughs]

 

XJ: Yeah, Duck Sauce is great. But it does make sense. If we deserve to win an award for anything, it would be the video.

 

CA: Definitely.

 

XJ: It would probably not be for cleanliness or punctuality. It would probably be for the video.

 

CA: Yeah, definitely.

 

SG: Now that it is officially a great music video, talk to us just a little about how the idea came along, and set up that clip for us.

 

XJ: We need to shout-out Ben Dickinson and Duncan…

 

CA: Yeah, shout to Ben Dickinson and Duncan Skiles!

 

XJ: Big shout to Ben Dickinson and Duncan Skiles. They are two of the most gifted directors and friends we have ever been able to come into contact with, and what they do that a lot of directors don’t do is, if you have an idea right on the set, they’re just like, “Yeah, let’s do it.”

 

CA: And they give you the leeway and the freedom, like if you’re not feeling something, they’re not gonna force you to do something.

 

XJ: We all went drinking in New York the night before at some bar, and they showed us their ideas, and we had some ideas, we saw their ideas, and at the end of it, we were just like, “This is it. Little kids’ bodies: Our heads. They will look really big. We’ll do it: Boom.” We shot it in one day, edited it the same couple of weeks. And we’ve gotten a lot of people who have not really been a fan of the song, like radio people, have seen the video and been like, “Oh!”

 

We wanted to come out with that and not take ourselves really seriously, because that’s something that, in our world… even though we’re in the music world, we see ourselves in the hip hop world, and the hip hop world is probably the most guilty of taking themselves too seriously.

 

I mean, they’re neck-and-neck with the tight pants, rock-and-roll indie world on taking themselves really seriously, but it’s still a tight race, and hip hop dudes are guilty of that very much, and we wanted to show people that we’re having fun, we’re very young, and…

 

CA: There are little kid bodies and our…

 

XJ: … how can you make fun of that? It’s little kids. We’re too busy laughing…

 

CA: Jumping on beds: Little kids.

 

XJ: Yeah, and then Jim Jones is in the remix, which is even funnier. Jim Jones from Dipset, with his head on the kid. “Better duck when I text you. Bow!” Which is like, “Oh My God”.

 

CA: We knew we was gonna get an award when we had Jim Jones on it. It was like, it’s done. It’s done.

 

XJ: That video needs to circulate.

 

CA: The Jim Jones video really needs to circulate. We need to re-circulate that.

 

XJ: We need to get that on YouTube, yeah.

 

SG: So now the EP has delivered an award-winning music video. Which sets up the album even more. So what can people expect from that next release?

 

CA: I say it’s like Chiddy Bang 2.0. Like he was saying earlier, things are stepped up, we’re bringing more instruments in… Flows – I’m trying to get a little more elaborate with how I’m delivering things while keeping that same… like how my voice just cuts through the mic by keeping that, as far as on the rapping end. As far as lyrically… it’s the same script.

 

XJ: Not to overdo a Kanye analogy, but because of our situation and how quickly we rose, and by putting out the EP first, we never really got to make our College Dropout entry album, so this album, for me, is like jumping to a second album, even though it’s our first album. We’re basically putting out a Late Registration, in the sense that it’s very textural, there are string sections… a lot of the songs are not necessarily about partying and having a good time.

 

It’s basically skipping the first album and coming out with the album that’s balancing the yin and the yang of where we are in our lives right now, which is all the great stuff we get to do, and all of the stuff that we don’t specifically like but comes with the job.

 

CA: Yeah, and this is honest and true to us.

 

XJ: I’m proud of it.

 

CA: Ultimately, we would hope that people enjoy us.

 

XJ: And I know there’s a lot of expectations or pressure on us for it to be a very commercially successful album, and I don’t know radio and how much you sell, cos’ there are a lot of albums, to me, that are amazing that have come out recently that haven’t done so well, but are still great albums to me, so I don’t know whether our album will do well commercially or not. I hope it does. I think it will, but I will be proud of it either way.

 

CA: It’s our actual first album. How many people get the privilege of being able to do that? So, with that being said, we’re just happy. We’re still just happy to be here, regardless. So it’s dope. We take it in stride. The pressure about album sales and all that, at the end of the day, you could worry about it, but you can only worry about it so much. There’s a certain point where we’ve done what we do…

 

XJ: I mean, as long as my mom likes it, and my two little hipster brothers – they’re like 14 and 16…

 

CA: ..and I know my little brother will like it.

 

XJ: And they are like, “We only listen to Miles Davis.”

 

CA: Then we’re good!

 

Chiddy Bang’s much-anticpated debut album, ‘Breakfast,’ will finally be released February 28, 2012 on Virgin Records.