Feature 1

00:00

Please introduce yourself:

Hey I'm Supa Bwe.  Yeah, my name is a little odd. But I'm from Chicago IL, and I currently reside on the west side baby.

My childhood was kinda crazy being that my mother was from England and my father was from the projects.  My dad was a cop / gang banger/ crime boss and my mom, a very educated, very straight edge woman.  I saw a lot of strange parallels growing up - a lot of strange things - but we eventually got out of the hood, moved to Oak Park, and I was able to get a very different view on life - a very cultured view, one that wasn't just about drugs. The west side was very limited and there was only so much going on for a kid like me - a young boy where you couldn't even go too far because somebody would take your bike or take you on some weird creep shit. The hood ain't a safe place for anybody.

We moved to Oak Park, and that really opened up my eyes to the rest of life. I was able to see that there was a different end game; I didn't have to do what my pops did or my uncles did with the other n*ggas on the block. There are other ways.

02:47

How did your parents meet?

My parents met in high school when they were 14, 15 years old. It was one of those love at first site kinda things and they were just inseparable.

My mom moved here from England when she was 13. Her pop was Scottish. When they moved to the west side of Chicago, he came here as a white man with a thick accent and people were always testing him and trying to do shit to him.  There were a lot of pressures in his life so he ended going back to Europe but my mother and my mom's mother stayed back.

03:36

So you grew up on the west side with your mom.  how did she feel about the environment? 

My mom was really focused so she used to have me sit outside and read books, which would get me beat up because all the kids would walk pass and start shit.  I'm not trying to be funny, but they would really be like "Why are you sittin outside here reading? You're a fag."  I'd be like, "No I'm not. I have no choice but to read."  And they be like,  "No, you a bitch" and they would take my books and throw 'em and I would go back into the house and be like. "Mom, these kids just threw my books" and my mom would just be like "No, you just don't feel like reading" and then would whoop my ass. I was always just stuck between a book and a hard place, literally.

4:55

growing up, did you fall into the pressures of your peers?

Oh yeah, like everybody else. I was aware of things but I was still like a monkey. I mean, we're all humans and we emulate things that we are attracted to ... and I just had a whole bunch of weird phases. I was still always myself, but I would dress differently and try different things. Just like everybody else, I played myself a few times.

05:32 

talk to me about your love for music and how that ALL started.

I've always loved music because of my mom. She's from England and loved everything - world music, Irish folk music, metal, punk, emo, Depeche Mode because she's a 70's baby, but she grew up in the 80's and was into all that weird stuff. But my dad - he just really loved gutter shit, like street stories that really talked to him. He really liked that kind of music. So watching my dad grow up and watching my mom grow up and listening to what they listened to, I was able to understand the different stories being told. Like I knew why my mom would listen to Sinead O Connor's Pheonix From the Flame because that's how she felt; that's how she grew up and that's the pain she was going through. But I also knew why my dad listened to Master P's Swamp N*gga because he was actually out there on the streets doing that shit. That's how I was able to pull from the bad and the ugly and the good and everything else and translate it for me as I watch my parents translate music for them. They translated it with their lives and I'm able to translate from it to my life now because of it.

06:39 

do you think you had that awareness when you were growing up or is that something you've discovered in retrospect?

I think it's something you become aware of in steps. You kind of always have it figured out but the thought becomes deeper and you understand it more to the point where you just start to apply it. Once you can apply it, that's when the thoughts really develop.

07:02

DID YOU GROW UP PLAYING MUSIC?

Sort of.  I played guitar for a little bit but I was terrible.  Well, my little sister actually threw it.  Yeah. I had an electric guitar and she threw it into the bathtub to piss me off. And then I played the sax but it used to hurt my cheeks... and one day my dad pissed me off, so I broke it.  I never played anything else after that.  But yeah, me and my dad used to get into it growin up.  One time, well for years, I hid like 12 math books under our washer and he didn't know until our washer broke.  I just did things like that because I was like, "Fuck you, I'm not going to do what you say."

07:40

how did you get from that place to now making music?

Necessity?  I worked for a studio and that's how I learned how to engineer - well how to refined it. I went to school and at one point I was working and going to school at the same time. It became way too expensive; you can't live and also do school nowadays as a normal person. With what I learned within that semester, I was able to get an internship at a studio and at that studio, I saved up enough money and was able to open up my own studio. In that whole time, I was always showing up to the studio at 4 AM when no one else was in there and used it ... and if any of my friends had a basement or anything that was sound proof, I was down there recording; I was always trying to get it.

I don't think it became real for me until 2014 when I was able to have my own studio. That's when it was just like music, music, music. 

I've been doing this seriously for 9 years, but I didn't even know what serious was back then. I've watched Chance's expansion; I've watched Mick and all these great artists right next to me go up to other places... and I realized I wasn't putting in the steps to even do this right. Although I've been doing this for 9 years, I've only really been doing it for the last 2. 

08:59

What do you think the right steps are?

When you start not going outside ... when you stop picking up your phone and it doesn't bother you ... when you wake up and you get anxious because you haven't started working yet - that's when you know you're working. Everybody says you gotta make it an obsession, but it's beyond an obsession. You ever have that significant other that's like shady as shit and you can't stop snooping on them? When work is just like that, that's when you know you got that flame and you gotta exploit that; you gotta take that madness to a whole new level and keep creating.

09:39 

What perspective do you think you bring TO your music?

The perspective that I stand out with is that we are all shit ... and not in the way that everyone is worthless because I don't believe that at all, but I believe everyone does bad things and lies about doing bad things. I think the people that are able to fess up and say they fucked up, my bad, lets fix this are the people who are less shit than others. But I want to instill this next thought into young black men. Because as a young black man, I think the biggest thing in my life that held me back was that I made excuses for myself all the time and always had reasons to validate my excuses and shit. When I was just being a bitch, I was just a bitch ass n*gga. A lot of times, people don't even know that they bein bitch ass n*ggas, like they think that everything is okay when the whole time, it's like no - you a bitch ass n*gga influencing other bitch ass n*ggas to be bitch ass n*ggas and now you got a world full of bitch ass n*ggas. Look at Trump, look at Hillary; fuck both of them, all these snakes. They're all snakes because that's just all they know.

10:46 

Do you think you're able to shift culture through your music?

In a way. I mean, I just want self awareness you know? Self reflection. Ego death, if anything. Mothaf*ckas just need to understand that they're not special, you know?  Like stop acting special and actually do something for someone else. I mean you don't gotta go feed homeless people or shit like that but you also don't have to throw plastic on the ground just to be an asshole. 

11:15 

How did you get to the point where your perspective became unique anD your own?  were there situations you went through?

Losing things, you know? Kinda beating drug addiction... trying to beat myself...  I've had a lot of good friends and I've lost all of them. I only have a few of them left and sometimes, it's one of those situations that you need to separate because people grow apart. Sometimes, somebody will do something thats legitimately shady but other times, there will just be a stand off of pride and a complete fall out because of it. Growing up, I used to be okay with losing homies and losing friends because the way I saw it, I was like "I know I'm right, Fuck them," and if they weren't going to acknowledge it, then I didn't want their friend. But I feel like this is something you develop with age - the ability to say "Nah, this was my part" even if they didn't have to say what they did ... because that's apart of their journey too.  Did I deviate from the question? What was the question again?

12:34

Nah, I just wanted to know how you grew into your mature perspective.

Oh yeah, just losing all those homies and time after time realizing that I kept doing the same thing. I always did what I thought was the right decision... So I learned this from a Lauren Hill interview. Lauren Hill once said that you can make the right decision, but you're not necessarily moving righteously. Like - you can be right, but you're not being righteous. And that's something that I didn't understand before but I'm glad I saw the interview because now I do.  For example, my father was right a lot of times but the way he carried out his law, he was just not righteous.  Or my own band Hurt Everybody.  Part of the reason Hurt Everybody broke up was because a lot of times, I may have been right but I was never righteous in the way we discussed it.  Because I was more like, "Shut the fuck up, let's get this money, y'all playin." And they were like "Well, we believe this" but I was just like "Nah, I'm right. I'm not gonna hear anything you're saying."  I wasn't being righteous but yeah, I learned this through loss.

13:39 

So Let's talk about your banD.

Hurt Everybody was a collection of me, my old band mate Carie who was Carl, and Devon who was Melano Beats. And we were very close for a very long time but when you spend 14-18 hours a days with the same people, naturally things build up and keep building up ... and I was going through a phase where I was dealing with so much internal shit that it was hard for to be who I was supposed to be for them, and they ended up catching a lot of what I was dealing with. I was - I am - very obsessive with my work. I'm 26 years old now and it's not like I can go outside and play.  I can't just spend a day in the studio doing nothing because I have to pay my rent and eat off of only my music. With them, they had parents and other things and it wasn't the same sense of urgency for them which is fine but I was unable to disarm my own sense of urgency and instead, I attacked them with it. And that caused a huge rift. I had very high expectations ... I was expecting them to provide the same way I was. If we were getting paid for a show and I'm putting in my whole chunk towards studio rent while you're keeping yours and this goes on for two years, it really just starts to break you down after a while. And I don't know ... I just started feeling very overworked and under appreciated, and I handled it very badly. I can't speak for them, but I'm not happy with the way they handled it either. So it's one of the those situations where there's really nothing for us to say to each other and I don't think it's going to be something that's going to come to a worse conclusion, so it just is what it is at the moment.

15:31 

what was the takeaway, if there was something you learned from that experience?

Again, I think I learned that it doesn't matter if I'm right, I need to be righteous ... and I also learned that before you even reach the point of having an explosion or before you reach the point of building up and burning a bridge, sometimes you just need to walk a way. And sometimes you just need to separate yourself from a person because history repeats itself. If you guys are always having these huge life altering conflicts, it's time to walk away from each other instead of doing that same thing for 2 years. 

16:31 

Ok. So talk to me about a projet you're working on right now.

Right now, the one solid project that's going to be something is my Fight Me project. I have a new band called Fight Me and it's with my friend UG Baby and Shepherd Hues. UG does the same thing I do. He engineers his work, he mixes it he produces it, raps on it; does the whole 9 yards. Shepherd, same thing too. We're all from bands that didn't work for similar reasons and were all, in one way or another, the heads of those bands and the ones that were pushing to make it work. So I consider Fight Me a conglomerate of exiled world leaders. We're just on this island plotting to build a better nation. 

With my solo music, I can just do me.  I can just express myself and don't have to worry about the radios that are gonna like it or who's going to like it. I just make good music, and I have fans that love it and who are gonna push it. But with Fight Me, we have the ability to make that same type of good music but with the radio appeal, with the national appeal. And it's not false, like it's not forced or gimmicky or ugly or anything like that. It's just good and fun, happy music. I'm just really excited about that; I'm just really focused on that I'm trying to learn from what made Hurt Everybody fall apart and make sure I don't bring any of that into Fight Me. Because I know what I did to contribute to Hurt's fall out and I'm not gonna repeat those mistakes with them.

But you know with my solo work, I just stack songs - like 30 songs - and pick 5 that I like and listen to those 5 and come up with a project I like around those. So I don't really know about that.  Of course, there's something coming. I don't know what the names are yet, but I'm mainly just working on the Fight Me for now.

18:23 

some artist battle with thinking they are selling out by doing the radio stuff or going the other way and becoming truly independEnt, but it seems like you're comfortable doing both.

Hmm yeah. The way I see it is simple ... I hang out with my friends in my bedroom and we make a hit and we're able to travel the world, and we're able to absorb money for our voices and that's all it is and that's all I want it to ever be for us. Once it becomes anything else, that's when it gets lost. Once Hurt started feeling itself and the egos started showing, nothing was ever the same again. I'm just hoping that everyone just stays having fun with it, just having fun the room, mixing this shit. We gon' smoke, we gon' kick it, drop this shit and get some fuckin money.

19:25

You've mentioned before you don't have a publicist or anything. so you guys just do everything independently?

Yeah, everything. This was all built from years and years of work. I swear from like 7 years ago, I literally had 2,000 friends on Facebook and I would message each and everyone of them a custom message with my Soundcloud links and stuff. And it went from doing that to finally picking up some momentum. My fanbase now is so strong, I can like do 200,000 plays in a month just off of them. We're just trying to keep that going. We don't want anyone to mess up the formula or try and make us think differently; we're just going to keep pushing.