For most up-and-coming Canadian bands, a slot at the famed Austin,
Texas, music festival South by Southwest is nothing to be embarrassed
about. When the electro-hip-hop duo Thunderheist scored shows at the
fest after a two-year wave of blog hype, success seemed all but
guaranteed. But for the duo’s DJ Grahm Zilla, the set began on an
awkward note.
“We were performing at, like, one in the afternoon,” says Grahm, on
the phone from Edmonton. “Before we started, I got on the mic and was
like, ‘Who’s still drunk from last night?’ I expected a bunch of people
to cheer…”
“And nobody said anything!” vocalist Isis Salaam chimes in
gleefully.
“And then it was just me going, ‘Wooooo…,'” Grahm concurs. “And
then I had to start the music. I was like, ‘OK then! This is starting
off really…well.'”
This little anecdote seems to be the exception rather than the rule
for a duo who’ve been deemed the new arbiters of cool by the
Canadian media. Things just keep getting better for Thunderheist.
They’ve been gushed over by Perez Hilton, while a contest for fan-made
videos resulted in a winning entry, declared one of the best videos of
2007 by Pitchfork and Spin. There were tours in Europe and
Japan, a massive street party outside a swanky London nightclub, some
hobnobbing with MGMT and Richard Branson, and a song—“Jerk It”— in
one of last year’s most talked-about films, The Wrestler. And
all of this happened before their first album dropped.
Thunderheist finally came out on the UK-based hip-hop label
Big Dada on March 31. Halifax marks the last stop on the pair’s 16-show
promotional tour across the country. The word-of-mouth buzz and cover
stories in Exclaim! and the Montreal Mirror seem to have
worked; most of the shows have been sellouts.
This explosion of interest has actually been a long time coming for
the pair, who both spent years DJing and performing before getting
together. A few years ago, Montrealer Grahm was introduced to the
Nigerian-born, Toronto-bred Isis through a friend. Later, the DJ
accidentally sent Isis a song file of a beat he had made; Isis assumed
it was for her, recorded herself rapping over it and sent it back.
Grahm was impressed and the pair began to collaborate. Isis had already
quit school to pursue music and Grahm left his job as a computer
software programmer to make the union work.
“When I quit, I lied to my mom for about two months while I was
putting (the band) together,” Grahm says. “I totally got busted when I
answered my home phone one day. I told her I was doing music full time,
I had to take this chance, and she was like, ‘Well, what about your
dental insurance?’ I was like, ‘My benefits will not stave off the
depression like what I was feeling at that job.'”
Thunderheist’s first year-and-a-half consisted of being broke, DIY
touring and sleeping on couches. Grahm says that there were some
“intense moments” between himself and Isis in those early days and as
the pair discuss their history, their dynamic begins to reveal itself:
the bratty, rapid-fire rapport of two kids who revel in poking at each
other.
“Yeah, Isis toured on her own for awhile,” Grahm says. “It is
nothing like the tours we are doing now.”
“Thanks for shitting on my parade, Grahm!” says Isis.
“Grahm finagled a lot of our early gigs,” she continues, “before we
had a booking agent, who’s amazing. Nothing like what Grahm was
doing.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence, thanks,” Grahm says.
Nowadays, Thunderheist go between cities by plane and stay in
hotels. They have a rider that includes Skittles they can throw at each
other backstage. And they’ve noticed the increasing numbers—and
ardour—of their fan base.
“I had never even signed an autograph before this month,” says
Grahm. “Now people are coming up and I’m signing body parts. I have to
keep telling my girlfriend, ‘It’s just business.'”
Isis has also received her fair share of attention from female
fans—a fact that Grahm is all too delighted to bring up, referencing
“a big-boned Dutch girl,” who after one show attempted to proposition
the MC for a threesome.
“I prefer men. I want to make that clear,” Isis says. “But the thing
is, the guys are always really timid (after shows). Meanwhile, the
girls are the ones giving you six shots of whiskey and suddenly you’re
in the backseat of a car and don’t now where you’re going. The men are
soft. They’re little punks. With the ladies—they’ll date rape you.
They’ll fucking do it.
“And then you wake up in a hotel room with no idea what happened the
night before. Crazy!” she says wryly. “Life’s a roller coaster.”
So what is it about Thunderheist that drives bloggers crazy and
pushes their fans to behaviour that borders on the criminal? Quite
simply, they produce lusty, drunken, unapologetic party music. On their
best songs, Isis spits lyrics about dancing, money and fucking in a
throaty Bahamadia-esque delivery over Grahm Zilla’s beats, which range
from pumped-up electro (“Little Booty Girl”) to jailbait disco (“Sweet
16″). Early club favourite “Jerk It” is a slick, slow-building paean to
booty-rocking, show-stopping and possibly masturbation. The reputation
of a fierce live show probably doesn’t hurt them, either—on any given
night, knee-socked dancers, crowd-surfing and Isis’ exuberant,
alcohol-fuelled performances are par for the course.
“By definition, I wouldn’t believe that a DJ and a rapper could have
as good of a show as they do without pyrotechnics and crazy lighting,”
says Vice‘s Toronto production manager Tim McCready.
(Thunderheist has headlined three Vice tours in Europe and the
US.)
“Isis has so much natural happy energy that she doesn’t look like
she’s putting any effort into it. It’s just flowing right through her
and it makes the entire room dance.”
Booze is often flowing through Thunderheist shows as well, with Isis
frequently tipping her bottle of Jack into the mouths of lucky audience
members. Has the onstage drinking ever been a liability? “Yeah, at an
all-ages show!” Isis quips. “But no, seriously—we don’t always drink
that much. Sometimes we don’t even drink at all. You just wouldn’t know
we’re sober.”
“Uh, I don’t remember any of those sober shows,” Grahm says.
“I’ve done a sober show.”
“Maybe in that dream you had.” Grahm gets serious for a moment. “I
guess we’re promoting a stereotype of the band,” he says, referring to
his poorly received “Who’s still drunk?” intro at SXSW. “We do it for
the people that expect it, right?”
Live presence aside, the real question of Thunderheist’s longevity
will most likely hit once the pair return home from a flurry of shows
in Europe and Toronto in August. Thunderheist’s album has so far faced
a lukewarm reception from many of the same music media outlets that
once lauded them. An NME writer felt Isis’ rhymes weren’t
“clever, surreal, skewed, or disgraceful enough” to truly move the
average listener, while a Prefix Magazine reviewer wrote that
the album lulled him into “a bass-riddled fog of sameness.” To their
credit, Thunderheist are keen to evolve their sound and take things in
a completely different direction.
“The album is two-and-a-half years old,” Grahm says. “We’re on that
tip. We want to write songs. We don’t want to be a rap derivative.
[Rap] is something we’ve both been doing for a long time. I appreciate
all kinds of music. I want to try and do different things.”
Some of those things include the incorporation of more live
musicians, stepping up the stage show in a festival setting and, as
hinted on a few of the songs on the album, getting Isis to sing.
“I used to sing around friends, do karaoke, the way closeted singers
do it in the shower,” she says. “I wouldn’t hold myself up to any of
the greats. But I think singing is kind of apples and oranges with
rapping. I want to write songs, write lyrics and tell stories. How I
choose to do it could be in any way, shape or form. I could fucking
paint a picture if I wanted to. I just don’t want to feel like I’m
expected to express myself in a rap format and all hippity-hoppity and
shit. I’ve been doing this since I was 13. It’s not to say I don’t love
it. But sometimes (with singing) it’s like, ‘Dude, give me a chance. I
know I could be really good at it.'”
In a 2008 article about the rise and fall of the internet buzz band,
journalist Bill Wasik wrote, “How can we resist the new story, the one
everyone else is listening to, linking to and cueing up at parties?”
It’s clear that Thunderheist still have some stories to tell. But their
ability to continue will depend on us, and how willing we are to accept
them once the party’s over.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.
THIS SHOW WAS AMAZING. Best show in Halifax so far for 2009.