Doomtree presents BLOWOUT SUNDAY: Curated by SIMS
Presented by 89.3 The Current and City Pages
"I chose all of these guys because I am a fan of both their music and them as people. It's not as rare as one might think to find great people in the music community, but these three individuals stand head and shoulders above almost everyone I've met as intelligent, hardworking, stand-up dudes. I wanted to make a night that represented my nature to talk about hard things in a way that makes you feel like partying, they can throw down among the best of them so it was a no-brainer to get them." -- Sims
Tag your Doomtree-related tweets this week: #BlowoutVII
SIMS
Restless and passionate but with an unflinching realism at his core, Sims has seen enough of life to know there are no easy answers. His second full-length release, Bad Time Zoo, released February 15, 2011 on Doomtree Records, reflects this rapper’s ongoing quest for solid understanding in a society on the brink of dystopia. For Sims, it’s been a long road. Andrew Sims grew up in the working-class Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins, Minnesota. His parents were both musicians with problems of their own, and Sims often had to look out for himself and his younger brother. “I was super short-fused,” he remembers. “I got in fights almost every day until I was about 13.”
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He found solace in rap and R&B music, nurturing a love for mainstream hits as well as then-underground artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan. His parents didn’t approve of his new love, however, so he built a secret stash of cassette mixtapes that he traded to kids at school. He soon found a gift for rhyme and begin channeling his aggression into feisty, kinetic wordplay. His rap habit quickly grew from playground cyphers to recorded projects. In high school, he met a local producer and rapper named P.O.S. who would sell him beats for $30 a pop and let him record at his house for free. Eventually, their home-recording experiment blossomed into a full-on musical enterprise that would pull in other aspiring artists and help put Minneapolis hip-hop on the map. Enter Doomtree. Hailing from the same untamed Minneapolis indie music scene that spawned both punk legends the Replacements and, 20 years later, hip-hop powerhouse Rhymesayers, Doomtree has become one of the most trusted and influential names in grassroots hip-hop.
BROTHER ALI
Brother Ali has no reservations in saying that he’s “trying to be one of the greatest of all time” (on the Molemen track “Life Sentence”). Inspired by golden era legends like KRS-One and Rakim, this undisputed Master of Ceremony began rapping as a means of survival. Growing up albino (colorless hair, skin and eyes, poor vision, and extreme sensitivity to the sun) in a world of cruel kids made it strikingly obvious to Ali that he needed a high-powered way to earn some respect and prestige among his peers.
ASTRONAUTALIS
Once you find out that Astronautalis was born to a Texas train man with a nose crooked from bar fights and a pretty Kentucky girl who ran away from home at 17 to become a photographer, it becomes clear that he didn’t stumble into the life of a drifter, he was born into it. With a poet uncle who lived off horse betting and hitchhiking, grandfathers who were spies, sailors, and test pilots, and over 500,000 miles of touring under his own belt, you have to wonder where the tales in Astronautalis’ music end and the life of Andy Bothwell begins.
ONE BE LO
OneBeLo (aka Nashid Sulaiman) has performed around the world as a solo artist and a member of the legendary rap duo Binary Star, but his travels throughout different mindsets and communities have made even more of an impact. Throughout his life, Lo has also assumed the roles of star athlete, convicted felon, Christian, Muslim, and Egyptian resident—and all of these things are reflected in his music. He is also a member of the World Champion B-boy crew, Massive Monkees.
