Young Money, Old Soul

Insert less gay picture of aba!

By: Vera Oleynikova

Rapper Abadawn comes of age in hip-hop.
“Wait, how did we get from the topic of sex to cartoons?” jokes Abadawn on the phone from the Camobear Records offices in Portland Oregon, which the Seattle rapper now calls home.

Talking to Abadawn is not unlike listening to his music – a clusterfuck of metaphors, anecdotes, jokes and sexual innuendo, stories that turn in circles, and segue into juicier stories recounted with heartfelt humor and honesty.

Blessed with empathy, insight and a balanced perspective well beyond his years, Abadawn is full of quiet confidence that he has earned throughout an already notable career across North America.

“I’ve never been one to want to stake my claim in any city. I would much rather be able to go to Kansas Missouri and play to 8 people, then play to a crowd of 50 in Seattle every week. I don’t care if the fans are dancing or going wild. If they are just standing there, watching me freak out, that’s okay.”

WHAT MAKES AN ABADAWN?

“I may be young, but I have been doing this for years, putting out records, putting myself out there and trying to make the right connections.” With a staggering 10 releases under his belt Abadawn is showing no signs of slowing down. He will wrap up the decade by releasing the 3rd installment of the Steal Gas Buy Music mix tape series with rappers ThirdEyeTheory. This mix tape series allows Abadawn an outlet for his darker, more experimental tendencies. He describes the sound as “Battle-esque, grimy, raw underground shit that no-one’s making anymore.” Describing the writing process for the first installment, Abadawn touches on recession themes in both content and process, “It was like hey, look, we’re all unemployed at the same time. Let’s do this right now! Fuck the sound quality.”

CAMOBEAR CONNECTION

2010 will see the release of his subsequent full-length, tentatively titled “Posthumous” which will be released on Camobear Records.

When I asked him how the Camobear connection came about, he assured me that it arose organically out of his friendship with world famous rapper and Camobear exec Josh Martinez, “I started working with Josh and we just clicked instantly”.

Things felt right for Abadawn, and with the prospect of sponsorship from Camobear rappers Sleep and Josh Martinez, the young rapper took the leap of faith and left his native Seattle WA for Portland OR.

GROWING PAINS

When I first met Abadawn, nearly two years ago, he was rapping about the emptiness of bling posturing, as well as the trials of poverty and the joys of fatherhood. While lately his writing is peppered with vampire sex, monsters and other horrorcore fantasies. “I rap about love, life and demons. My darker shit is just an extension of who I am.”

I suggest that his inclination to explore this lyrical territory might come from a sense of comfort and security in his career that he has not previously felt. Abadawn is not one, and has never been one, to subscribe to any of the ready-made, cookie cutter archetypes prevalent in independent hip-hop (wounded lover, computer dork, angry over-compensator, granola activist, art school weirdo, recent psych ward escapee etc.) and instead draws on personal experience as well as literary themes from his favorite writers which include Ray Bradbury and Chuck Palahniuk. His apocalyptic loveraps could not be more different. As he reveals to me his love of foreign films, a fuller, more complete portrait of Abadawn is materializing in my mind.

“My dad once told me that I don’t know myself. That I don’t know the first thing about who I am, but that my true colors tend to show in my writing.” If there is one thing to say about Abadawn both as a writer and performer, is that he is a natural. “I believe that this is what I was meant to do. Everytime I play live my stage show improves, and that’s inspiring to me.”

LOFTY AMBITION

He is so confident in his path that even the birth of his daughter three years ago did not deter him from following his dreams. “Don’t get me wrong. I tried to settle down and do the right thing. That was my first instinct. To get a job and provide for my family.” But it turned out Abadawn was more of a lover than a provider. “I just couldn’t keep a regular job. I would get bored and spend all my time daydreaming.” Instead of letting himself become a negative product of his new predicament, Abadawn used his frustration as an opportunity to evaluate his life and goals. “It really made me step my game up. I was like, fuck, I really need to do something with this. I’m too fucking deep, I can’t stop now.”

HOW BIG CAN YOU GET?

“I don’t know how big I’ll be able to get, but I’m confident that I will get my 15 minutes to do something. I’d love to get on MTV and blow the minds of a massive mainstream audience.’ When further probed about his motivation to embrace an aspect of a performers’ lifestyle that some underground cats may feel is shallow and demeaning, Abadawn instead stresses the utilitarian aspect of it. “I would be doing it so that I could get up there and tell people that it’s okay to be different and original. You don’t have to follow anybody.”