Photo: TT the Artist by Olivia Obineme
When frantic Baltimore club DJ and producer Matic 808 remixed every track from Kanye West’s Yeezus last summer, it was the first time in a long while that Baltimore Club excelled on just its core fundamentals. On the mix, Matic took a piece of pop culture, keyed in on its most memorable moments, and mashed it up completely, all while serving as some sort of comic relief and a party starter.
The 23-year old Matic’s Yeezus: Baltimore Club Edition created a short-lived, yet exciting moment for Baltimore club music that was actually from Baltimore. The project garnered interest from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and caught the ear of producer Brenmar, who collaborated with Matic on a remix of The-Dream's "High Art". It was the first time that something from the city seemed to grab outsiders’ attention since 2009’s “I’m The Ish” by DJ Class, which got a Kanye West remix. Before that, it was the mid-2000’s “hipster obsession” moment fronted by local DJ and host of radio station 92Q’s “Off The Hook Radio," K-Swift. But the success of Matic’s remixstalled out. While club music in neighboring East Coast areas like Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia continue to have plenty of exposure, it’s the city that invented the frenetic dance music that appears stuck.
“Club music gave me something to be apart of,” says Matic. “Learning the dances, meeting the people that frequented the parties, and always checking for new tracks and CD’s gave me a sense of belonging.” When K-Swift was the face of club culture during the mid-to-late 2000’s, in Baltimore, club music was a soundtrack to the inner city. You heard it daily on the radio, it was danced to at every high school party. It was the preferred music at cookouts and it’s what made clubs pop. Outside of a few DJs who mix it into their sets today, club music, as a culture, is barely present in Baltimore.
“The music was fresh and people came out specifically for that music,” legendary Baltimore club DJ and producer Scottie B tells me as we sit in his basement and watch postgame highlights of the Pacers vs. Wizards playoff series. “That’s what sparked the clubs having nights for younger people. People over 21 would party with younger people because the scene was so vibrant.” As it stands now, there are no venues in Baltimore that dedicate a night to club music and club is condensed to a marginal 7:00-7:10 p.m. set every night on local station, 92.3 (Q), and an hour on Fridays from 9:00-10:00 p.m., hosted by KW Griff and Porkchop—best known for "Bring In Da Katz” (reissued by Night Slugs in 2012).
Photo: Abdu Ali by Diamond Dixon
Scottie and long time partner and DJ, Shawn Caesar own Unruly Records—a label that’s been in existence since club’s golden era in the early 90s and is responsible for K Swift’s iconic The Jumpoff mixtape series. It was through Unruly, too, that one of Baltimore’s first local stars, Miss Tony, a flamboyant and charismatic emcee whose tracks “Pull Ya Gunz Out” and “How You Wanna Carry It” are among the genre’s best known. Tony changed club music from a barrage of sounds to having someone vocally represent what relationship the people had with the music and the scene. “That’s why it took off,” says Scottie B. “People looked at club music as theirs. A lot of the music was shouting out neighborhoods and if you mentioned someone in a song, it was a good chance that your listener knew who that person was. There was a lot of ground support.”
With multiple venues to access, an audience eager to be apart of something authentically their own and club records being in high demand, Baltimore club’s biggest moment was the pre-Swift 90s. “The music got smaller with K-Swift,” says Scottie. “With her, it was bigger with kids but older people didn’t like it. It seemed bigger because it was on the radio, which didn’t exist at its peak.” As the audience that Scottie and his contemporaries spun for got older and stopped going to parties, Baltimore club was beginning to die until K-Swift remarketed it to school-aged kids. Club’s growing popularity with the city’s youth and out-of-town interest was on the upswing until K-Swift’s untimely death from a swimming pool accident at her home in the summer of 2008 casted a dark cloud that still hangs.
The easiest (and probably the most cited) reason for club music’s woes would be Swift’s death and the growing outsider interest in the genre—mostly associated with Diplo—around the same time, which many locals view as a leaching obsession that was eventually hung out to dry. “Just hearing it on the radio wasn’t sufficient enough for me,” says local DJ and party promoter, Cullen Stalin, in a cafe in midtown Baltimore. He moved to Baltimore from Philly in 1999 and after being introduced to club music, he realized that he wasn’t the only outsider of the culture eager to take part in ways other than being a consumer. That mindset for outsiders, he says, is in large part due to Jason Urick and his parties at Baltimore’s Floristree which would have club stars like Rod Lee (responsible for club hit “Dance My Pain Away”) and K-Swift play in front of mostly white, indie crowds—something that hadn’t happened before. Stalin became the middle man, essentially. Booking club artists to play for indie crowds and assisting M.I.A. and Diplo in working with club’s most promising talent at the time (Rye Rye and Blaqstarr), he represents a prickly chapter of Baltimore club’s narrative. “The day before K-Swift died, she introduced Diplo as the future of club music to the crowd at ArtScape,” he recalls. “That was prophetic in its own weird way but she was also vouching for him to the people of Baltimore.”
If it weren’t Diplo, another non-Baltimorean would have likely found their way into the culture. “It’s a part of growth and wanting to expand,” says Blaqstarr, whose warping, tribal chant-like vocals and songs like “Rider Girl” and “Get My Gun” landed him work with M.I.A. “I wanna stay open so I could do all that I imagined I could do. Club music isn’t limited. I can play a harp or a guitar to club without having it seen as sampling a cartoon or a snare and kick.”
Baltimore club’s decline is glaring once you consider how lively club scenes are in places like New Jersey, where DJ Tameil was one of the first outsiders to come to Baltimore before taking it back to his hometown and adding elements to create Jersey club. “I grew up on a lot of Rod Lee, DJ Technics, K-Swift, Blaqstarr, DJ Tameil, and Tim Dolla,” says Jersey club standout, DJ Sliink via email. “Once you lose the love for something, it's over. You can try to gain it back but that's work—hard work. Jersey club is like the new growth of Baltimore club. They were supposed to grow with us."
In an effort to bridge the gap between club artists from other cities, local radio host, DJ Angel Baby’s Get Pumped Vol. 2 mixtape features Sliink, Philly’s DJ Sega, Jersey’s Nadus, and expected Baltimore club DJs like James Nasty, Mighty Mark, and Matic 808. There’s something slightly revolutionary about Angel Baby’s decision to not be city-specific in curating a club record in 2014. “Even if club DJ’s outside of Baltimore don’t say it’s Baltimore club, we know where it comes from,” Angel Baby tells me over the phone. “Good music is good music. I like where the other club artists are going. You can’t deny how good their tracks are.”
Arguably, the most inventive artists in Baltimore that fall under the club music tree are ones that are considered to be bastard children of the genre as they use it as a backdrop to more complex and expansive sounds rather than taking the club-purist route. While Matic is somewhat traditional in his formula, his mixes have industrial elements and are often more trippy than club has ever been. Abdu Ali’s 2013 release Push + Slay—mostly due to Baltimore-based Schwarz’s production— took as much from Baltimore club as it did hip-hop, ballroom, and punk which, he says, all have an expiration date, just like club music. “Just like any music genre these past 100 years, they come and go,” he explains in his Central Baltimore bedroom. “Even though it may not seem like it, one day hip-hop is gonna go away and not be a thing anymore. I bet people thought jazz was gonna be here forever. I think music is suppose to transform. I don’t get mad about that.” Go DDm, an occasional club-utilizing rapper says that club music isn’t as compelling to those who’ve grown up absorbing it: “It’s not new to us. People in others places can get excited about it but it’s what we’ve been hearing our whole lives.”
TT The Artist is one of the more visible club artists. having worked with local new-age producers like Mighty Mark and better-known producers like Diplo and Brenmar. Moving to Baltimore from Florida, her youthful obsession with 2 Live Crew and Uncle Luke smoothed an easy transition to the dance-focused club music of the early-to-mid 2000’s: “There was more of a vibrancy when I came,” she says on her living room couch. “You heard it more—both on radio and in clubs. At Paradox (a venue that catered to club crowds from the early 90’s through K-Swift’s era), when Baltimore club came on, everybody ran to the floor. Nobody was standing around.”
With tracks like 2013’s “Pussy Ate”, TT channels the vulgarity of vintage Baltimore club while connecting to Mad Decent the entity largely responsible for the genre’s short-lived global popularity. Along with Abdu Ali and DDm, she openly represents queer culture and regularly fuses outsider sounds with Baltimore club—both of which could be instrumental in the genre’s attempt at a resurging statement. Realistically, club music in Baltimore may never get to where it was over a decade ago, but does that even matter? People like Matic, TT, Abdu Ali and a handful of other Baltimore artists are trying to, once again, build a ground-up attraction for the city and even though the way to that destination is foggy, they aren’t letting up until people stop standing around.