ADAM IRVING MEETS THE MANCUNIAN HIP HOP ARTIST
NOVEMBER 2009
WORDS : Adam Irving
PICS : Courtesy Sylence / Locally Known Productions
Pencil Portrait by Sylence
MANCHESTERMUSIC.CO.UK
(c) (p) mybigmouth for manchestermusic.co.uk 2008
THE SOUND OF SYLENCE
I meet Sylence in a bar on Oldham Street. He wanders in from the endless rain, declines my offer of a drink and we get straight down to the interview. As gigging musician myself, I have to admit that after about three hundred gigs in venues including bars, cafes, clubs and shops I've yet to share the bill with a rapper, cue the first question.
AI: What’s the gigging scene like for rappers in Manchester, to be more specific, does a scene even exist?
Sylence: Well, it’s tough right now. The gigs I’ve done, there have been a lot of bands there and just a few rappers. It’s underground, there's nothing regular, there are places but I’ve had to go outside to Leeds or Preston. Manchester’s very quiet.
AI: Its not because of lack of venues though surely, if you have a band of any genre you can play in at least thirty places on any given night, why is rap neglected?
Sylence: Manchester just isn’t the best place, there are no regular gigs. It depends on what position you put yourself in though, if you get a bit of exposure, make a video, get your name around, then people are more likely to book you. Because my stuff is out there, on iTunes and I’ve because I’ve got a CD out, now people are taking me more seriously. Everyone’s doing music though, (he indicates to someone passing our table) if you stop this girl here she'll probably say ‘I do music’ too.
AI: Yeah, Myspace is a bit of a double edged sword and everyone suddenly thinks they are an artist.
Sylence: Exactly, there are a lot of so called rappers who have three of their songs on their Myspace profile but that’s it, they only have three songs.
AI: -and they’ve probably been on their page for five years.
Sylence: So the live scene isn’t too good.
AI: This is something which doesn’t make sense though, Rap is the biggest selling music in the world but we're sat here in a bar and tonight there’ll be maybe four or five bands on and I’ll bet none of them will be just Rap. Why is that do you think?
Sylence: Hip-Hop just has bad reputation. Grime especially. Anything that’s associated with it doesn’t look good for venues. I’m trying to get out of Manchester and also I’m trying to get a band together. I’m gigging with just a backing track at the moment.
AI: Maybe venues see it in a way that a backing track isn’t good enough for them and they want something visual like a band. So if gigs aren’t the way to get your music heard, what’s the procedure to get yourself known as a rapper in the Northwest?
Sylence: I made a mix tape, but that’s only going to get you so far. I’m concentrating on promoting my stuff to get it out there. I try and avoid selling CDs to individuals. It doesn’t look good pestering someone to buy my CD. It doesn’t mean you’ll buy my next CD. If I give you a flyer and you check my stuff out for yourself though then you might buy the CD. You’ve got to keep trying, I do the flyers and marketing myself so I keep the costs down, a lot of people pay for that kind of stuff.
AI: Despite the lack of a gigging scene there are always people like you who persevere and keep at it because they know that what they are doing is important. At what point in your life did you realize you were, or wanted to be a rapper?
Sylence: I was in Ch’ill Cru when I was sixteen but writing rhymes since I was about fourteen, I never took it really seriously. When I was nineteen or twenty I thought I can really make music and take this seriously”.
AI: The bad reputation thing counts for a lack of venues, a lot of people will say they don’t like rap but I think most people don’t realize it covers so much ground. If you’re starting to get into Rap though, you can be put off hearing one artist who represents a different aspect of Hip-Hop. So, if you had to suggest a bunch of albums to get someone into Hip-Hop what would you pick?
Sylence: I'd probably start at the beginning and people like Big Daddy Kane. There are so many kinds of Hip-Hop… Common, NWA, Public Enemy, the preaching kind, I’d throw my CD in there too. At the same time, I’d choose some Soul too though because that’s what influenced those rappers. My all time favorites have to be the Wu-Tang and all the affiliates. I can name members who people don’t even know. People say they fell off with Killa Bees but there’s still no other group that comes close to them, if I could work with one person, it would have to be Ghostface. There’s just so much stuff out there, each individual, Method Man, Redman, they inspired so many people, I can’t fault them.
AI: Where do you see Rap going in the next few years? I’ve hear a lot of albums this year which are trying hard to sound modern, but in a few years I think they’ll sound really dated, you did the production on your album and it doesn’t appear you felt any pressure to make it have the sound of 2009
Sylence: That’s the problem with the a lot of artists though. They try and copy what’s ‘in’. I think it’s always going to be like this though. Auto-tune at the moment is everywhere, Kayne West uses it because he heard Stevie Wonder use it, but young rappers will want to sound like Kanye and for some it’s working, it sells a lot now but how long will these new artists be around? We’ve got people like Tinchy Stryder rapping over dance beats and I just think Hip-Hop will continue to branch off like it did with Garage, but eventually after all this, it will come back round to a beat and a rapper.
AI: Do you have a mental list of song subjects you want to write about or those you won’t touch?
Sylence: Yes, I’ve got a long list, there are so many things and so many concepts to cover. I recorded about twenty tracks for this album and chose the ones which fit a certain category.
AI: You had a specific listener in mind then?
Sylence: Me and my daughter. Me because I want to be able to listen to this in ten years time and be proud of it. I don’t want to look at it like an old photo and think what was I wearing? I want my daughter to listen to it and be proud too.
AI: What was cut from the album then?
Sylence: Things which were too harsh, political or negative.
AI: So it could have been a double CD with a positive and negative disc?
Sylence: Yeah, but for a new artist, a double album is too much. The way I see the album is this, it’s how I was feeling at the time. It’s from one stage to the next, from a boy to a man. It means more than one thing to me.
AI: It’s a very cohesive album, it sounds like all the pieces are meant to be there, whereas a major label release, like the recent Chipmunk album for example, sounds like he’s chosen half the songs and then the record label have made him do some chart friendly shit to make it sell.
Sylence: This is the problem, some rappers use R&B singers on every hook and lots of guest rappers until it’s not their album anymore. My sister’s a singer and I could have used her on every track, but it wouldn’t have been necessary. There aren’t many people featured on my album because right now people should get used to my voice and me.
AI: Being yourself is important, there’s a lot of UK rappers who talk about the hood, ho’s, bitches, low riders and drive-by’s, do you think that they are under pressure to say these things as that’s what’s expected from rappers?
Sylence: I’m kinda shocked the way people feel the need to do that. We’ve been through all that. There has to be a better way of saying hood and bullets, people think it works so they do it. I went through that when I was sixteen but people like Jay-Z put it in a different way, it’s the younger rappers who want to say those things.
AI: It’s clear that you’ve intended the album to be heard as a whole and not just a collection of random tracks, do you think the concept of album is vanishing in this iPod generation where everyone has four songs by a hundred artists instead of full albums?
Sylence: That's something I thought about. You can’t get an impression of me from a single track, it flows together as a whole. You can’t really understand someone by one song from their fourth album, you need to go back and hear it all.
AI: Another think I noticed when listening to the album was the lack of swearing, was that intentional?
Sylence: It wasn’t planned no. I don’t swear a lot because I’m around my daughter a lot. It’s not about what you say, sometimes it’s about what you don’t say. I just try and be myself and that’s how it came out.
AI: What do you have planned for the future?
Sylence: I’ve started on another album, I want to work with more producers and musicians but it depends on the response to this one. The tracks people selected as their favorites are not mine, it’s surprising.
AI: A perfect song is a delicate balance though, you want to be impressed by the lyrics and the music.
Sylence: I’m a very lyrical rapper but I put a lot into my mixtape and got little back from it, so I toned it down a bit because most people don’t want to listen too deep, the chorus for most people is all that matters. Which is a shame. Look at the most lyrical rappers: Killah Priest, Canibus, Immortal Technique, these guys have probably got part-time jobs, but someone who is so simple like Lil Wayne gets all the fame.
AI: That’s because most people think guys like Pharrell and Usher are actually rappers.
Sylence: Yeah, I read an article the other day which said ‘Akon, the rapper’, since when did Akon rap?
AI: He can barely sing, let alone rap.
Sylence: Yeah, I think people generalize all urban music as rap.
Bitching aside, we wrap up the discussion. This is the point where musicians usually plug their upcoming gigs. Other than the album, Sylence has no gigs to plug, he tells me he’s arranging a city to city tour in the next few months to promote the album though. We shake hands and its back out into rainy Hip-Hop starved Manchester.
Sylence’s album Out Of The Darkness & Into The Light is available from iTunes, Napster and www.sylence.co.uk