Back then, they didn’t even really have any intention of pursuing music. “Even in our own crews back home in New Jersey,” begins theOGM, “there was homies who was like, ‘ Damn, this a different approach!’ Because we come from the hood, where it’s, like, rap – nobody really listening to no metal, no thrash, no nothing.”īefore they started making music together, Yeti Bones and theOGM – bonded by both their similar outlooks on life and their ‘unusual’ taste in music – would cross the Hudson River to take in the countless punk and hardcore shows that were happening all over New York City. Their songs are heavy and dark and violent, an unrelenting mix of hip-hop and hardcore punk that combines to create something uniquely different and wilfully inaccessible, gleefully working against the grain in a scene that’s predominantly white. They’ve refused to make the kind of music that was expected of them, instead embarking on a journey of utter freedom, flaunting the rules and instead just doing whatever the fuck they wanted. This is a band who don’t play by the rules, who never do what people expect, who have forged their own path – and essentially created their very own sound. But it also encapsulates their attitude towards the world around them. That contradiction – between hard and soft, violent and gentle, threatening and welcoming – has defined Ho99o9’s music since the pair started the band in Newark, New Jersey in 2012. You don’t know what the vibe is, but we set the tone, like, ‘Yo, just so you know, this is what I’m on.’” “Or I might share my spliff with you!” offers theOGM. He looks down through his half-frame horn-rimmed glasses, a smile stretching across his face just below his large nose ring, his voice and eyes gentle, both at odds with the words he’s just said. “You might get beat up, you might die, you might end up in the hospital, you might end up with a broken leg. “It’s unpredictable, and you don’t know what might happen,” adds Yeti Bones. “Yeah, that type of shit, that’s the tone!” the other half of the band, known as theOGM, laughs warmly. And that was the energy we had to bring, like, ‘You gonna fear us.’” “When we heard it, the instrumental was so brutal that our attitude was like Suge Knight in the ’90s. “That was the first track we recorded,” says the man who goes by Yeti Bones, smiling kindly over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. It’s not about him, per se, but it’s such a brutal and intense track that the hip-hop/punk crossover duo felt it just captured the former music executive’s terrifying essence. It’s for all those reasons and more that Ho99o9 decided to open their second album with a song named after Suge Knight. Suge survived, but controversy has followed him ever since, and in 2018 he was sentenced to 28 years in prison for voluntary manslaughter after deliberately driving into two men and killing one of them three years before. On September 7, 1996, Suge Knight was sitting in his car next to rapper Tupac Shakur when the latter was shot four times from another vehicle. There’s the infamous (and probably apocryphal) time that Suge Knight held Vanilla Ice by the ankles from the balcony of a 15th floor hotel room, but there were also many darker occurrences involving gangs, incarceration and even murder. The stories are both entertaining and harrowing. The label’s reputation was mired in a constant cloud of controversy, becoming synonymous with violence. Co-founded by Dr Dre, The D.O.C., Suge Knight and Dick Griffey, Death Row Records helped gangsta rap take over the world, thanks in part to the first two albums it released – Dr Dre’s The Chronic at the end of 1992 and the following year’s Doggystyle, by the artist then known as Snoop Doggy Dogg.īut Death Row wasn’t just well-known for its music. In February 1992, one of the most influential and important hip-hop labels in the world was born.
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