CityLife

Pilot: Going Down - when hip-hop meets folk

Folk meets hip-hop - the collective

‘WHAT'S the difference between folk music and hip-hop?’

It sounds like the beginning of a joke found inside a particularly cheap box of Christmas crackers, but here, a Manchester-based Jungle MC and a human beatbox artist were considering the question very carefully.

“Hip-hop is an art form of free expression,” beatboxer and musician, Jason Singh begins, “It’s not a typical beat or a typical dance move, it’s about commenting on the things going on around you. That’s what folk music is.”

So when Will Lang, bodhran player and percussionist with folk group Park Bench Social Club, approached Jason with the view to a collaboration between hip hop and folk artists, Jason thought it made sense.

In their own bubble

 “It’s a hip hop project, it’s folk music – it’s a music of the people. In essence, I think hip-hop is folk music.”

Crystalize, an MC who, alongside performing, works as the Creative Partnerships Officer at the Zion Arts Centre in Hulme, wasn’t quite as certain.

“Me, personally, well, everyone lives in their own bubble at certain points in their lives. I didn’t know anything about the folk scene until I was introduced to it by Will and the guys, and I didn’t even know how big the tracks were we were working on in our first collaboration until I was looking for our performance on You Tube.

''And I’ve been living in an urban bubble for the past 16 years, where I’ve got certain ways of looking at life.

All styles of music

''But since I’ve got older, I’m looking at the scene and I’m going back to the roots of hip hop which is coming to realise that hip-hop came from all styles of music.

“It’s not all about writing a piece of music because you know how to write music, although that is a great skill which I am still trying to learn. It’s about being able to put a product out there and saying what ever you want: socially, sexually, whatever.”

And for Jason, that’s where the link to folk music comes in.
“I think that MCs and rappers use hip-hop as a catalyst to comment on issues like drugs, war, peace, and so on. It’s similar to the folk singers of the 1960s and 70s, if you think about it.”

To try out the project and see what audiences made of this folk-hip-hop dynamic, Jason and Crystalize joined Park Bench Social Club for some festival slots last summer.

“When you got on the mic,” Jason enthuses, “everyone just got it, didn’t they? It didn’t matter if you were black, white; 50, 20; or how many people were in the venue. They just got it.”

Represent my corner

And the project, dubbed Pilot : Going Down,  is proving to be exactly the kind of challenge that Jason and Crystalize need.

“I’m asking myself ‘how do I represent my corner on this?’ or ‘how can I relate to these songs that these guys have covered?’” Crystalize muses,

“Some of these tracks are 500-years-old. That’s mad to me – I didn’t realise that some of these songs have survived all that time, or some have transformed into something completely different.”

Different signatures

“What’s great about this project is that you might suddenly hear someone on a fiddle,” Jason adds, “like when we were doing ‘Cuckoo’ and there’s all these different time signatures.

''We’ll start in 4/4, then there’ll be a fifth beat dropped in there somewhere, and then it’s 9.”

“And I find that really difficult,” Crystalize nods his head sagely, “I’m a 4/4 man.”

Crystalize and Jason Singh feel that the Manchester hip hop scene is still the innovative, pioneering one that it once was, but faces the difficulty of getting regular nights that stand the test of time.

Combining art form and music

The artists hope that projects such as this will open the minds of young people and revitalise its performers into combining art form and music. 

“When hip-hop showed its beautiful face to us, back in the Seventies, Eighties, it was young people getting together to express themselves with new found music and moves, as do the youths of today with grime niche and moshers sharing stages,” Crystalize explains.

“We need to get back to getting communities working together to support each other.

''The bling era is soon gone, and hip hop will transform itself as it is currently doing – away from the mainstream, similar to how we’re transforming folk music by adding the MC beatbox elements.”

Traditonal accordionist

''We'll have some beats and then suddenly you’ll hear a fiddle,” Jason adds, “but it won’t have a concept, or a package. It’s a sharing of what we do.”

Alongside the two Manchester-based musicians, there will be a traditional accordionist, a guitarist and producer, and a host of Australian musicians, recorded and sampled when Lang visited the country earlier this year.

The next stage of the project sees each musician bringing their own track to the group for collaboration from start to finish.
However, there is an educational aspect of the venture which is close to the hearts of Crystalize and Jason Singh.

Both are accomplished workshop leaders, and feel that their music can bring a great number of different skills to participants.

Exchange ideas

“The workshops combine lifeskills using respect and discipline commitment to achieve your goals.

''But in this project, we’re keen to show that it’s not a bit of this music, with a bit of that. We just want to share skills, exchange ideas, musically and creatively,” Jason explains.

“For me, it’s not always the music that’s the medium. They might not know anything about hip hop; they might not like folk music.

''And the fact that we can engage in schools and have a conversation with one person that might make a difference, inspiring them into music or what ever art form is used in the sessions,” Crystalize stresses.

So what’s the difference between folk music and hip-hop? Seemingly, not much.