DEANTE' HITCHCOCK: HOW ATLANTA, CAR FREESTYLES, SAMPLES & RELENTLESS WORK GOT HIM A DEAL
It's 9:30PM on Wednesday, November 29th. I'm at the historic Los Angeles concert venue The Mint, backstage with fledgling Atlanta MC Deante' Hitchcock & his producer Brandon Phillips Taylor. This is the third official stop of Grammy nominated Rap Queen Rapsody's Wisdom Is Power Tour, and subsequently, Deante' Hitchcock's first nationwide gig. He joins Def Jam's Jamla artist GQ and Roc Nation's Louisiana bred Rapper Don Flamingo for the tour, who are currently chopping it up with the group that has accumulated in the green room. The atmosphere is all laughs and very light, as a 750 ml bottle of brown gold, aka Hennessy, is being passed around the room from hand to hand. Deante' is face down in a massive plate of hot wings, courtesy of the venue, and Brandon Phillips Taylor is telling me about the time he was mixing and mastering Deante's break out project Just A Sample in the waiting room of the hospital during the birth of his now eight-month-old child.
Eight months ago the world was just beginning to take notice to Deante' and Brandon's hard work. Almost a year and a half ago Deante' was making his rounds on the Internet as a viral social media star due to the popularity of his car freestyle videos. Yeah, he's that guy that you probably saw utterly wrecking the 60 seconds Instagram allots for videos in the passenger seat of any given car, on any given day, on any given beat, on any given device you so choose to browse your feed. Yeah, this guy:
Though it took sometime, all of the pain staking hours of recording and the countless freestyle videos have paid off and now Deante' has successfully made the transition from Internet Rapper to full blown, professional Rap Artist and just recently inked a two-way deal between Bystorm Entertainment, home to artists like Miguel & Ro James, and RCA Records, which is home to the likes of SZA & H.E.R. The deal is huge break for Deante', who will now be under the methodical guidance of RCA's Urban Music President/CEO of Bystorm Entertainment, Mark Pitts.
By now, it's just about 15 minutes before Deante's set and there are no signs of nerves or butterflies on the surface. He and his partner Brandon are cool, calm, collected and astonishingly prepared for the performance. A moment three years in the making, you could sense that these two were in their element. I grab my camera and head out the door behind Deante' and Brandon to photograph what would end up being one of the most entertaining sets I had seen from an artist in a while.
About a week and a half prior to the show I had a 40-minute phone conversation with Deante' Hitchcock and his Producer Brandon Phillips Taylor about a wide range of topics including the movie Sister Sister Act 2, the infamous Instagram freestyle videos and how all of these things factor into Deante's come up. During the process of transcribing the interview I realized that I couldn't quite tell the story the way they could. So I decided the best way to deliver it would be to allow Deante' & Brandon to do the story telling for themselves. In this extensive Q&A Interview, Deante' and Brandon gave DROPS an exclusive look inside their process to get to this point in vivid detail. What you are about to read is the real, unfiltered story of Deante' Hitchcock and Brandon Phillips Taylor, a pair of creatives from Atlanta hell bent of doing away with good luck and reshaping the sound of the new hub of Rap music.
How much has your day-to-day routine changed since you officially announced your record deal?
Deante' Hitchcock: I don’t really necessarily feel different, my phone be on my damn nerves now, that’s it, it’s always goddamn going off. But that’s really it. It’s not like, I haven't been excited but I haven’t been like, back-flip off my bed excited type shit because part of me feels like this is what we have been working so hard for, this is what we worked so long for, so it’s cool to see the results in that way. It definitely has more pros than cons, the cons are definitely there too, because like, people that are in your immediate circle and friends and family look at you like you’re more famous than you might actually feel or more famous than you actually are, but it looks a certain way in a sense. But it’s cool at the same time.
What sparked you to start creating the car freestyle videos for Instagram and Twitter? Deante' Hitchcock: I had another segment I was doing, me and my boy called New Atlanta Tuesdays. I was rapping over different people’s beats and I was like putting it on Youtube and shit — So it was like, we was trying to make it official official, recording like actual videos. At the time, my partna, his name is Garfield he shoots for thug now, but when I had first met him, he had just got done, I think he had shot a video for Trinidad James — And this is like when “All Gold Everything” came about and shit like that so Trinidad was like huge and he just shot a video for him so his prices were up and he told me his prices and I was like, bruh I can’t do that. So I went and copped a camera myself, it was like a little $400/$500 camera and I started recording the shits in my room, and I was just doing them on my own. Then he started seeing them and then from there he had hit me like ‘bruh, forget the price let’s just do this, let’s just make it happen. And then we would put em out every Tuesday, faithfully. Initially we kind of were building it but we weren’t really necessarily building it in any direction you know what I mean? It was more so like, I’m going into the studio every week & recording — I’ma do whatever the hell I feel like doing and we gone put it out and we gone see what stick & see what people like & see what people fuck with. I was kind of upset at the same time while we was doing it because I didn’t want to dig a hole where it was like, people only knew me as like a cover artist per say, somebody who is rapping over other people's beats all the time who wouldn't put out I guess original music. But, even when we were doing those the build up wasn’t like, instant, because we were doing those in like 2012 through 2014, I dropped out in 2014 we were done by then. The freestyle videos that hit Instagram & Twitter, I didn’t really start doing them until like last year round may or march, something like that. And those were the ones that really took off.
Talk me through the time between you dropping out of school and the release of your first project Good. What were you doing? What were things like?
Deante' Hitchcock: I got another partna who raps, he’s one of the older heads, like when I was like 13/14 he was like 26 and he was rapping and I would just be in the same crib with all them just like studying them and see what they do and trying to get on tracks with them — But, before I put out that last tape, well not the last but the tape before the last, Good, that was like May of last year (2016), it was supposed to come out March 10th, on my birthday, and I was ready to put it out — This was like the day before, and I got a phone call from him and he was asking me ‘Bruh if you put that tape out tomorrow, who really gone give a fuck about it?’ And you know what I’m saying, I’m offended like low-key ‘Damn bruh wtf you mean, it’s my birthday, we bout to put out new music, we been working on this shit for like a year, everybody gone love it.’ But then I sat down and I thought about it and I was like, damn bruh really right — Because we put so much into it, I would’ve hated for us to drop it and then people fuck with it for a week and it’s gone, like it disappeared. So, he had told me, he was like ‘Bruh, you gotta find whatever makes you stand out, whatever is different about you then just about everybody else trying to do the same thing’ — Because we in Atlanta and everybody wanna rap in Atlanta. It was like take that shit and put a magnifying glass on it. So at first, I took that as like, Aight, don’t put it out yet, hit the blogs up, just start reaching out to different people and trying to get them to — You know what I’m saying, be ready for it drops and get them aware of what’s about to happen. Like ‘We’re about to drop this and it’s going to be fire. You need to put it on whatever, whatever’ But the blogs weren’t paying attention at all. I emailed like 200 blogs, not even lying. I was so sick of that shit - Nobody was answering, nobody. So, I got into a car accident. I was working construction and got into a car accident in stone mountain. The insurance from the other people that hit me payed for a Camaro. I had that Camaro for like two weeks, so I just wanted to flex in the Camaro. I hopped in the car and I had my partna record me just rapping in the car and then we put it on Instagram, and that shit took off! I was like wtf because it wasn’t even really like super planned but I just wanted to do it just to do it because I like rapping and I had the drop top Camaro so it was like ‘Fuck this shit, this for the hoes. This how we gone do it’ and it took off.
What was it like to see the freestyle videos blow up like they did, and in turn, what was it like to see the response to "Thinking Bout You" when it dropped and blew up much the same way?
Deante' Hitchcock: From there, just made it a regular thing and that shit just went. Thinking bout you was weird, that shit was weird as hell. Because I think we made it first out of all the songs on that project, and from there, after we put it out, that’s when we (Deante' & Producer Brandon Phillips Taylor) decided, last minute as hell, to make it a project (Just A Sample). Because we saw what that one did, the numbers on it was crazy - But then we started looking at it like a cheat code in the sense — it’s like if you take a song and it has a sample in it, especially if you flip the sample well, it’s kind of like remixing a song that somebody already likes — so it’s essentially a cheat code in a way. And if you actually make a good song out of it, you can’t lose. Bruh, we put “Thinking Bout You” out, and the next day, the next two days or whatever it was, it had racked up the most plays I had ever seen that quick. It was like 12,000 plays or something like that in two days. Bruh I was like wtf, and we were sitting there talking bout it like, ‘This is crazy, this is it!’
Brandon Phillips Taylor: Honestly, for that one ("Thinking Bout You", I think it was like two main things. I’m a big fan of Sister Act 2, that was one of my favorite childhood movies. And in one of the scenes in the movie that song plays, “Never Should’ve Let You Go” by Hi-Five, and I randomly came across the song again, 20 some odd years later and I was just like, ‘Yo this shit is dope as hell, I wanna sample it.’ But I stayed away from it for a minute because it’s in a different time signature than typical rap is — It was a 6/8 and I was trying find a way to convert it to a 4/4, but I left it alone for a while. Then we were in LA in January and I had this little love fling going on with somebody and I was wide open man. And pretty much I ended up getting to the airport maybe round four or five hours early and the whole time I was sitting at the airport I was thinking bout her. So like, literally when I was sitting there thinking about her, and I was just going through a playlist I have on my iTunes just for samples and that song came in (Never Should Have Let You Go” Hi-Five) and those first words *Sings* ‘Thinking bout you every night’ and I was just like, ‘Fuck I gotta find a way to flip this joint.' Then there was just the matter of trying to figure it out from a technical level, of how to make it work for a rap song and not be in that old school, ‘1,2,3,1,2,3’ kind of feel, and so I did a few different experiments with it and it came out well and I loved it after that. It’s probably one of my favorite one’s and I hate the drums on it, honestly, but the sample was so clutch I didn’t really have to do too much to it, the sample really made the song to me.
How long had you two been working together before the success of Just A Sample? How had the sound you developed help you carve out a lane for Deante's music? Brandon Phillips Taylor: I think probably about, three years, coming up on three years now. Fast forward to now, I think we went through a lot of different phases sound wise, but I think the base of it all was the friendship though, you know. It wasn’t necessarily like, ‘Oh let’s have a studio session today, let’s try to find a sound’ it was just us kicking it, and we both love music and he loves rapping and I love producing — So, he would come through and he would try some shit out, and I remember initially, when we started on Good, one of my goals was to highlight Deante’s voice because his voice's timbre has a lot of resemblance to J. Cole, and a lot of people will say that, and then on top of that, J. Cole was, and is his favorite rapper so that naturally going to have some influence — But since his voice actually sounded like J. Cole’s, I felt like we had to distinguish something about ourselves so that if someone heard his songs on the radio, they wouldn't be like ‘Oh that’s that new J. Cole’ it would be like, ‘Damn I never heard J. Cole rap over this type of beat.’ So I think for the Good project we wanted to make sure it had a heavy Atlanta element to it, trap Hi-hats, a lot of 808’s, a lot of booming bass, so that it didn’t sound like J. Cole, it sounded like ‘This is somebody from Atlanta.’ Since then, I think we have experimented more and Deante’ has experimented more with his voice and different inflections he can do to sound differently and I think that has opened it up for me to be able to do different things And I think now we are just back in an experimental phase where we are creating what feels good and trying to go with it. Which kind of lea to the project Just A Sample and joints like “Wide Open” & “Thinking Bout You.” But really we are just always trying to create something new. Trying to create a new feeling and not trying to necessarily become monotonous and stuck with what we did.
What's it like now that you are signed and have access to major artists and label mates like Miguel? Deante' Hitchcock: That nigga (Miguel) giving me book recommendations, it’s weird it’s different. I mean, I talked to Goldlink, Maxwell goddamn posted our shit, that shit was crazy. Like, my Momma got Maxwell records nigga we came up off that type of shit. It’s different, like, Cole done heard the music, I damn near talk to Wale regularly — like it’s weird, especially from people that you actually listen to, like people that you listened to before any of this shit was a reality, when you were thinking like ‘Yo I could do this too’ even though this seems so far off and now those people are like a call away and people are like a show away, like you can go to they show and get free tickets or anything like that, it’s different, but it’s cool.
What do you want people to take away from your music?
Deante' Hitchcock: I think in a sense Atlanta is, and I don’t want to be disrespectful to anybody, but Atlanta now is essentially is what LA or what New York used to be like for music it’s like the mecca for music right now — And our representation is one-sided right now, but you have a lot of different artists out here right now who are showing like the other side of Atlanta that you don’t get. Like you have Young Thugs, you have Rich Homie Quan, you have Jeezy, T.I. , this that & the third and it shows you one side of Atlanta, and I don’t want to say normal Atlanta because it’s not normal Atlanta, but you have another side of Atlanta as well and a lot of people haven’t really got to see that other side. But I think it’s kind of like the re-birth of I’d say like an Outkast era or a Goodie Mob era or something like that that’s coming along right now and I think we are right there in the center of it. Because we are not necessarily your street niggas, we’re not necessarily your scamming niggas, we’re not necessarily any of that, but the shit that we dealing with, street niggas deal with, and scamming niggas deal with too as well as the other side of Atlanta that a lot of people haven’t really seen or heard in music in along time. And I think that’s why it’s really important because of the relatability of it all, like shit that we dealing with, everybody dealing with and shit that we talking about everybody deals with. It’s just regular life shit, whether it be emotions or it be pride, whether it be, any of those things like it’s stuff that everybody goes through day to day. Like everybody be on the Henny, and if you not on the Henny then you on something.
What's next?
Deante' Hitchcock: Look man, really, this rap shit is a front to go different places in the world and eat good food, that’s it. Like, I’mma rap, cool, everybody like it — if this rapping going to take me to London so I can get these crepes or its gone take me to Brazil so I can eat on these actual fire tacos then cool, that’s what we on. That’s what I’m trying to do, hit this road and stay on this road, we working on this next project too. I was bout to say, we slick bout done with it, but we just wanna have everything in the pocket so that we stay ready so that we ain’t really gotta get ready.
