

If hip-hop has lost its creative way of late, Odd Future are pitching a whole new direction. Watching people go buckwild to tunes like “French” and “Sandwitches” truly was something to behold.Īnd this is where it gets interesting. This is hip-hop rebooted and retooled by kids who are smart enough to know that the sound needs a new lease of life and a kick up the backside. Odd Future’s music is genuinely on another level. But the shows were also exciting for reasons other than watching a bunch of kids get their kicks. These shows were exciting because you genuinely didn’t know what the lads onstage were going to do next and no other act in the SXSW bunch demonstrated as much exhilirating energy. Few could have been disappointed because these shows were real slam-dunks, hugely punk rock performances where stagediving, chaos, broken noses, broken cameras and mayhem were the norm. It’s hard to know if the crowds who turned out for the Odd Future shows at the Scoot Inn (where the crowd bumrushed the venue), the Fader Fort (where a mass beer and water fight broke out between band and audience), the Mess With Texas party (5,000 kids going nuts) and the Vice bash were attracted by “authenticity”, but they definitely wanted to check out the buzz. And in today’s world, I guess that is odd.” Emotion attracts emotion…Nothing will ever be more important than staying authentic. If it’s coming from a real place, it will stick – maybe not immediately – but if you hang on long enough and keep exposing it in an organic way, kids who feel the same will slowly find it. Clancy contributed an interesting sidebar to the feature on how Odd Future represent a new model for the music business: “what’s the new model? Find authentic artists and let them be themselves, let them create the music and art they want to.

The Billboard piece also introduced some of the behind-the-scene players, such as co-manager Christian Clancy, a former marketing dude at Interscope who had worked on campaigns with Eminem. More mainstream coverage followed, including the cover of music industry mag Billboard. Suddenly, it was no longer just clued-in music fans and hip-hop bloggers who were wondering what happened to Earl or why the group hated Steve Harvey so much. It was a show-stealing performance on the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon show a month ago which sent the Odd Future buzz rocketing out of the underground. The beats, though, are low-slung, dramatic and deep, with the Odd Future members (and especially in-house producer and sole female member Syd) displaying a lot of vision and imagination when it comes to what they’re doing on record. Yes, many will find the XXX-rated rhymes to be rough, ferocious and offensive and there are surely a slew of moral outrage opinion pieces to come provoked by those lyrics. Many albums are given away for free, but what made the Odd Future mass giveaway stand tall was that the material was really, really strong.
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An eleven-strong bunch of teen rappers, producers, skatekids, video makers and troublemakers from LA, Odd Future came out swinging in 2010 with a fabulous series of free, self-released albums by such cast members as Tyler, the Creator (whose next album “Goblin” will be coming out on XL), MellowHype (Left Brain and Hodgy Beats have now hooked up with Fat Possum) and Earl (my favourite of the Odd Future releases to date comes from the kid who has now seemingly disappeared). And that future is swag.Īt this stage, many readers will be familiar with the backstory, but a recap for those at the back. If the Wu-Tang Clan provided SXSW with a storied vision of hip-hop’s past at their St Patrick’s Night show at the Austin Music Hall, Odd Future are about, well, hip-hop’s future. After the shows they played over the last few days, no-one is in any doubt about what’s going on here. They came to Texas with a lot of people wondering what the hell OFWGKTA were all about. Over the weekend at SXSW, Los Angeles teen tearaways Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All came to town and played a handful of gigs which were chaotic, messy, riotous and, above all else, downright thrilling. There are some shows which are destined to live long in the memory.
