SLUM VILLAGE (BAATIN) INTERVIEW
Fantastic Volume 2- That’s the album, go get it. The group (made up of T3, Jay Dee and Baatin) is Slum Village, the sound –“female friendly hardcore”—That’s how SV member Baatin describes his crew’s debut. I recently caught up with Baatin at the Okay Player show (which also featured The Roots, Guru, Dead Prez, Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek). Of course, the show at The Pageant (St. Louis’s newest music venue) was incredible. Here are some of the highlights of our build session.
Lyfe- “Peace, yo. How long have y’all been on the Okay Player Tour?”
Batn- “Umm since the middle of September, but we’ve been on the road since the beginning of this year.
Lyfe- “How have the different audiences been responding to you?”
Batn- “Ah, man it’s been superb, I don’t have no complaints.”
Lyfe- “Did y’all play Detroit?”
Btn- “Yep, Detroit was off the hook. That was home for us man so it was nothing but love.”
Lyfe- “What’s the hip hop scene like in Detroit? Did you feel a need to carve a certain niche for yourselves to avoid being typecast?
Btn- “Actually we just do what we do. That the good thing about Detroit; there are so many communities. There’s hip-hop, which is a small percent, R&B and mainstream. And everyone wants to be mainstream. Every body wants to be like what they see on TV. As far as doin’ show when we were coming up, it was kinda hare. I mean Detroit had been like dead since Motown. When everybody moved out and went to L.A. everything went fuckin’ dead. But it’s been like a underground, reeeeeeeel deep underground that ain’t nobody know about, jus makin’ some other shit. We kinda wanted to be on the low budget shit, that cheap shit cuz that what people expected from us – cuz back in the day there were some groups that came out with low budget videos and cheap sounding drums sounds and music on the tracks. Some of the older groups had a cheap techno type sound We were like fuck it this is our sound we’re just gonna feel that shit and make it fat. Some people used to front on us because we weren’t from NY or LA but that only made us stronger.”
Lyfe- “If you had to give someone a reason to pick up Fantastic?”
Btn- “You got tracks that’s on there that, ya know, have a female mood and are more female oriented. And there’s also the hardcore. There’s some thing for everybody, even Grandma. Ya know what I’ m sayin’ even Grandma can listen to it and feel it. We just try to give everybody a feel for the album
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