A Quote by Riz Ahmed
Growing up in the mid-to-late '90s in London, you start seeing the explosion of drum'n'bass and then the birth of U.K. garage and grime. I decided to focus a lot of my energies as an aspiring MC. It was a very natural way to express yourself as a kid from a certain kind of neighborhood.
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In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks.
Amon Tobin has been producing electronic music since the mid-'90s, and was a key figure in the rise of drum-and-bass. He's also written some of the genre's most compelling tracks, in the process delving into jazzy breakbeats and bass lines.
I learned to MC over drum 'n' bass music.
The idea of using media for expressing yourself artistically is kind of something I learned from my mother and my father. So for me, I think growing up wanting to be an artist, I always imagined myself sort of crossing over or mixing media and so it was a natural evolution for me to try to express in a filmic way or in a visual way. It just kind of seems like a natural sort of progression for me in terms of what I'm trying to do as an artist.
I grew up on the pirate radio scene which started out as drum 'n' bass music. U.K. garage picked up and got bigger on the back end of that.
I think oldest children have a different mentality or know that there were different expectations of them, and I was not only the oldest child - I was the oldest grandchild of 18 grandchildren. I definitely grew up feeling like there were a lot of people who expected me to do something. But it was a very conservative family, very conservative neighborhood. I'm talking mid- to late '60s when I was growing up there, and so if I had stayed in the Boston area, I think my life would have been radically different.
The political vibe of late-'40s Hollywood through the mid-'50s is something we're seeing a lot of echoes of right now, and in a scary way, where I'm wishing for an Edward R. Murrow to stand up and start somehow calling people on stuff. But as far as the way the industry works, I feel like we're in a place where you see companies slowly moving back to only doing their own stuff.
I demo all of my songs on Garage Band, where I pretty much play everything - not very well, but I manage to hammer out a drum beat and a bass idea.
When I was growing up in the 1980s in the Midlands, I felt abandoned and misunderstood. Then I chose drum 'n' bass and graffiti as my subcultures - which didn't really help.
London is the most multicultural, mixed race place on Earth. And I love that. I grew up in a neighborhood in London where English wasn't necessarily the first language - maybe because of that, I love to travel. Every penny I've ever saved has been spent on airline tickets to different corners of the world. I think that's partly from growing up in London. I've taken that bit with me - this ability to fit in with any culture and be fascinated and respectful with any culture all started from growing up in London.
When I first started writing lyrics and stuff, I was writing it to garage, and obviously garage kind of progressed to grime.
As a writer, I was deliberately creating an alternate world, and then populating it with experiences and people that I knew in this world, but I'd shake up the mix considerably. And about the same time that the memoir was becoming the dominant popular literary form in the mid to late 90s, I started reading writers who were deliberately playing with the notion of "truth" and "fiction" - that struck me as a much more interesting way to tell certain stories, particularly in the realm of comedy.
Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It's less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.
I normally start at the computer with something really simple like a four-bar loop of a drum sample or a bass line. And then I just start adding layers of synthesizers.
I never try to be religious. I never try to be any type of religious cat. Spiritual, yes, but religion, when you get into that you get into a category where you lock yourself in and people look at you a certain way and then they become that way. Nah, I'm still an MC, I'm an MC first. People try to figure out my origin, at the end of the day it's just clever songs.
As a kid, I was always very shy growing up - I wasn't very good at articulating my thoughts or my feelings. Now that I'm older, I found acting to do that. So it's been an amazing way to sort of express who I am.
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