Meet Gangstagrass, The Bluegrass Hip-Hop Band Bringing America Together From The Roots – Forbes

At this point in American history, it’s almost trite to point out how divided the United States has become. Across lines of politics, race, class, urban/rural geography and more, Americans are deeply polarized, and increasingly view their differences as fundamental and irreconcilable.

Enter Gangstagrass, a bluegrass hip-hop band weaving together styles of music—and strands of American society—often thought to be polar opposites. When I had the chance to sit down with the band, I learned how much these musical genres, and their audiences, actually have in common—and how music can help us hear, and amplify, our shared roots and experiences as Americans.

The following interview with band members Rench (vocals, guitar, and beats), Dan Whitener (banjo and vocals), Brian Farrow (fiddle and vocals), R-SON the Voice of Reason (vocals), and Dolio the Sleuth (vocals), and band manager Sleevs, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q: What was the initial thinking behind Gangstagrass, and how has it evolved?

Dan: This wasn’t started as a social equity project. That wasn’t the thought—“We’re going to bring people together”—it was a musical concept. Rench wanted to try these songs together. But in the process of putting bluegrass musicians and hip-hop musicians together and getting the fans to come out to the shows, that’s what revealed to us over time that, “Wow, there might be a conversation here to talk about.” It’s actually interesting and healthy to do what we do, in ways that were surprising to us.

Rench: It’s been a lot of learning for me too. Initially I was thinking, “I’m putting white music and Black music together”—but actually, country music has had so much Black music from the beginning. The separation has been in white and Black spaces.

Q: If these musical traditions have common roots, what led them to grow apart?

Dan: The artificial segregation of spaces was imposed by record label marketing branches; it’s a whole microcosm of the history [of the music industry]. They want to put it in a box and sell it as a product. Initially, putting white and Black musics together seems like this new thing, but the more you look into the context, you see that we’re really reuniting things that have been pushed apart.

Brian: Look at Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. There aren’t a lot of people who are carrying the Black folk music tradition that way. I heard their music in college, and I thought, “Who are these white folks?” and then it blew my mind. I didn’t realize we [Black folks] did that.

Rench: There are actually people who are not living in the boxes that the music industry is trying to define—urban, rural. You get this impression that you have totally separate audiences. But you have people who are totally ignoring that division whose playlists are full of everything. It’s terrible marketing-wise: you want to have a niche demographic that you can market to. But for us, it’s a challenge we’ve taken on.

Dolio: The industry is treating art like it’s some sort of commodity that can be traded. But each fruit is going to taste different—this is not some sort of concentrated orange juice.

R-SON: You’re taking the ingredients that you have in your kitchen and putting them together into a dish that you didn’t know could taste like that.

Q: What would we see if we weren’t used to thinking of these musical traditions as opposites?

Dolio: The type of reception we get when we go overseas is ridiculous. Our audiences in other countries aren’t beholden to those genre boxes that we are stuck in here. They just say “Wow, this is American music—does all American music sound like this?” Being beholden to those boxes is a burden. But we live for breaking that mold.

Brian: When we’re over here in the US, the conversation about who we are as a country is ongoing. But when we go overseas, people see that we are a strong argument for a more unified story. Frankly, people see this is hugely fucking American.

Q: What about your listeners in the US?

Dolio: We get a lot of people on the outskirts of society—we’ve had straight-up biker gangs coming up; the security would say “We’ve got a whole band of bikers out here.” We tell a lot of the stories of the unheard, and people feel heard when we play and say “Wow, that touched me.”

Dan: I like that we appeal to folks on the fringes of society. We defy categorization: we don’t fit nicely into the algorithm or genre, and that can hamper us in a lot of ways, but there’s an element of that that appeals to people—who say, “Wow, I don’t feel like I fit in to a lot of stuff either.”

Dolio: Because everybody has that piece of them, we connect with people of all ages and demographics. Depending upon the town we go to, that mixture would be different, but because of them coming together at a Gangstagrass show, they might follow us to the next city. They end up connecting with each other.

Q: Is class an important part of this equation?

Sleevs: A lot of people say “I love hip-hop but hate country,” or “I love bluegrass but hate rap” or “I hate rap and country.”

Dolio: But all those people love us.

Dan: It’s a popular thing to say “I hate country” or rap, and people say “Good on ya”—but that’s a class element; these are generally lower-class musics, as are the people who are making and listening to these musics. So you’re basically saying, “I hate lower-class people,” and people say “yeah, dump on them.”

Dolio: Being passionate in hatred and being passionate towards love elicits the same dopamine response—you just need to figure out how the switch gets flipped. The idea is taking this energy and turning it into something that can be shared.

Q: So how do you take this antagonism and turn it into a shared story?

Rench: Look at the rural and urban divide, where you have rural people for whom welfare means you’ve taken advantage of the system and you have it on easy street: city means rich, you have all these resources while we’re getting screwed over. And the opposite way. But you don’t recognize how many challenges you have in common, and the ones you don’t have in common you don’t see as things you want to fix too, for the sake of the other person. We are trying to meet in a space where the goal is for everyone to thrive. If we all have that basis, we may have disagreements on policy, but then you can say, “I don’t think that leads to a place where everybody can thrive” and come back to the conversation.”

Dan: You could say we talk about political issues, but we talk about them in music because music is a disarming way for people to rethink things and each other in a different way. It’s not a debate, not a fight, we’re getting people together in a space and freeing things up. People often prejudge us as a bluegrass hip-hop band, saying, “That’s not going to be good, I’m not going to like that.” But you see a lot of facial expressions in the room of “Wow, I need to rethink some things.”

Dolio: If it makes you feel comfortable being in a space with someone you’ve never been in before, the next steps happen. When you come to a Gangstagrass experience, I guarantee this won’t be the last time you see us, it’ll be even more diverse next time, and you’ll meet someone you didn’t know.

Q: Your new album is called “No Time for Enemies.” How do you cultivate that collaborative spirit within the band?

Brian: It seemed like when we were making this, there was a lot of stuff to wedge us apart in terms of national narratives and community narratives. R-SON came up with the name of the album. He just said, “I got no time for enemies” and Dan said, “That’s the album name.” That’s indicative of the sentiment that travels through this band pretty strongly. We talk about the racial thing all the time, and our brothership is part of the story of the national trauma that runs through our country.

Rench: The recipe for this is to have the bluegrass players and the MCs collaborating on an ongoing basis; it’s not a one-off.

R-SON: What made our sound evolve into the animal that it is now is the simple fact that we’ve spent so much time together. Not just on the road, but living in each others’ spaces, cooking together, sleeping in the same…houses, sharing meals, sitting around the campfire. This type of music is communal music: both hiphop and bluegrass. It’s all folk music, it’s the music that comes out of gatherings. We’ve been gathering together as a unit, having the conversations, and out of that come the stories, the tales of woe, the expressions of the emotions, the feelings that you’re trying to express on a record; all of that comes out of this communication, this sharing of energies that we have. We might be out fishing and something comes into our heads and by the time we come back we say, “Let’s do this!” Each album that we put together we’ve taken it a little bit further; from something woven together to something melded together.

Q: What do you want your audiences to take away from a Gangstagrass encounter?

Dan: As Gangstagrass, we do a lot of talking to people, and the more you’re in it, the more you need to remember that other people are in different places in the cave, and you need to restate things that may seem blindingly obvious to you. In this group, we get to experience this shared life, and then you have to tell people about it, because they don’t get to do what we do.

Dolio: When we perform, we get conflicting notions of what we are; someone could see us and say “See, racism doesn’t exist,” but we do this in spite of racism. Our existence doesn’t prove that the problem doesn’t exist—it shows that there is hope to get past it, and do the work to fix it. That’s why we address those things in our music: we talk about racism, and classism, suicide, depression, water rights, workers rights. But we also get people to shake their butts; revolutionaries gotta party too.

Gangstagrass is on tour in the US through mid-April.