Shawn Setaro
[The long-running and popular underground duo – and members of the Living Legends crew – The Grouch and Eligh 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 they dropped during the Q&A. Photo credit: Leo Docuyanan]
The Grouch on how hard it was to find beat-making equipment in the mid-1990s:
“It was like finding a gold mine when somebody had a sampler or a keyboard or a drum machine. My radar was set for finding that stuff, and we would travel after school on buses in high school to go to somebody’s house – traveling a couple cities away just to be around the equipment. It was mesmerizing for me.
The Grouch on the importance of Bay Area community radio station KPOO:
Grouch: “They would play hip-hop that they didn’t play on other radio stations. They would play Too $hort, KRS-One, Public Enemy, NWA – just cool stuff. I would go to sleep with my radio next to me on my bed, listening to that stuff nonstop. I feel like part of being raised was listening to hip-hop. I feel like hip-hop raised me, in a sense.”
Eligh on their debut albums, recorded on four-tracks:
“Now if I listen to them, I’m like, oh my God, [the sound quality’s] really bad. But I remember back then, thinking this is amazing that we’re making these sounds and it sounds great. It just has character that you couldn’t recreate.”
Eligh on using science fiction in his early songs:
“I’ve always been into that genre of book, of movie. I’m always imagining, and I’ve been that way since I was a kid. It’s funny, because Grouch is the opposite. He’s not really into that kind of stuff, but I am. I’ve always had an imaginative way of writing, and I come up with stories in my head. Plus, I was a big weed-head.”
The Grouch on finding other kids into hip-hop in the 90s:
“You’ve got to imagine, hip-hop is not yet the most blown-up popular culture in the world. When you drive down the street and you see a guy on the corner with baggy pants and a certain kind of belt on, chewing on a licorice stick, you know that he’s into hip-hop. And you know that he’s probably into the kind of hip-hop that you’re into. It was very easy to tell who was into hip-hop at the time.”
