Enter Antwon, the Californian rapper that used to play in hardcore punk bands way before he’d even thought about showing off his mic skills. As drastic a change as it was, Antwon says he never forgets his musical roots, and embodies both the spirit and tradition of the punk scene into his new style.
“I don’t think I incorporate the style as much, just the tradition,” Antwon says. “That’s what I grew up with, so it had a huge impact on me musically. But I make aggressive music, so I guess it’s like the spirit living on through a new musical medium.”
As the old saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth, and after becoming fed up with the lack of direction and focus from his former bandmates, Antwon decided that it was time to make the switch to hip hop and have more creative control over his art, while giving up basic day to day necessities to launch a career in music.
“I didn’t really want to play in a band anymore,” he says. “The people I surrounded myself with at that time weren’t on the same page as me. Music to me is really important, and I just wanted to figure out how to do music all the time and live off a little bit. Those people all had jobs that were more important to them than making music, so to cut out the middle man, I stopped doing stuff with bands and did it all by myself.”
But having fame comes with tiresome comparisons, especially within the hip hop scene. From his inception, Antwon’s flow has been compared to arguably the greatest rapper of all time, The Notorious B.I.G. While some may consider it a massive compliment, Antwon sees it as nothing more than an annoyance that takes away from the artist he is really trying to be.
“I get compared to Biggie all the time because of my flow, but I feel like it’s not a real opinion,” he says. “It puts me into this box as an artist. He doesn’t even have that many albums, and I don’t really see him as one of my biggest influences. I guess it’s just an opinion, but I feel like it’s a lazy comparison. I like rap that’s hard as hell with real crazy production, and Biggie never had that. When everyone hears the new shit I’ve been doing, I don’t think that opinion is going to be around much longer.”
Antwon’s latest EP Double Ecstasy is a five track dark exploitation of his inner mind, and focuses on the downside of the party atmosphere that most rappers would normally brag about. Having earned praise from critics and the online community for its experimental production and its distance from hip hop stereotypes , Antwon claims that the EP is only a taste of what’s to come.
“That EP and the way it was received was tight,” he says. “We recorded it a while back, and just stuck to the songs that fit right together. I was working with a lot of different producers like Shlohmo, but I feel like it’s just a trailer to the movie.
BY BENJAMIN POTTER
