Shawn Setaro
[The rapper Cambatta recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher” podcast. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems the Smoke & Mirrors artist dropped during the Q&A.]
On why he started smoking weed:
“It wasn’t until I was 23 that I started experimenting with marijuana. Not that it’s a gateway drug – maybe a gateway to heaven – but once I realized its impact on my psychology and my ability to sit down and want to write, I just started dealing with other psychedelics.”
On magic and ritual:
“The deeper the ritual and regiment, the deeper you convince yourself. That’s where magic comes from.”
On battling:
“I don’t like spending my creative energy on dehumanizing another person. If I have to take it there, it’ll happen. I’d rather it happen musically though, so at least it’s encapsulated in time.”
On writing about “the streets”:
“There’s two ways to write: you can write from personal experience and mold the rhymes around what you want to say; or you can rhyme and mold what you want to say off of what rhymes. I was a bar dude. At the [beginning of my career], describing dealing drugs and describing killing somebody and describing the streets was the only vernacular that I had, as far as bars and punchlines went.”
On fitting a lot of ideas into just a few lines of a song:
“Why give you eggs, bacon, pancakes, and sausage, when I can make a McGriddle? I can tell you so much more in so much less. That’s the real tool of lyricism. If I could layer one or two lines with the same amount of stuff that you get out of four or five, then I’m a very effective writer.”
