Who Gets The Mic
Updated: 7 hours ago
A Case Study of Hip Hop Spaces in The 734
Part 1: History
Living in the state of Michigan as someone on the music scene, one lives constantly in the shadow of Detroit. And it isn’t hard to see why. It’s Detroit, the Motor City. The home of Motown, J Dilla, Eminem. Truly, Detroit is one of the great American cities, living large in the grand tapestry of the American mythos. As such, those of us coming from the city’s surrounding areas have a strange relationship with the place. There’s a sense of awe and wonder, a desire to be a part of the legendary musical culture and legacy that Detroit possesses. The name recognition alone carries weight. Anyone from the area knows that it’s much easier to say you’re from Detroit and receive acknowledgement than to say you’re from one of the cities surrounding it. However, this phenomenon also proves to be a double edged sword, as those struggling to gain a distinct foothold for their own local scenes often have difficulty breaking away from The D’s orbit. This drive for distinction isn’t unique to Michigan either, it occurs across the country and the world. New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, etc. There are a multitude of immensely talented local music scenes in these and other areas all fighting to make their mark. This is not a story about the multitudes though. It is a story about Ypsilanti, about Ann Arbor. It is a story that I hope welcomes you into the world of The 734.
Ypsilanti is a mid-sized city about 18 miles west of Detroit, with a population of around twenty thousand people. Its neighbor Ann Arbor is a larger city, sitting at a population of over one hundred and twenty thousand. Both reside within the area code 734. To the casual outside observer, they are both primarily known as college towns, hosting Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan respectively. U of M being a prominent school within the American university system has gained Ann Arbor some recognition in its own right, with EMU and Ypsilanti at large coming to occupy the status of its smaller, scrappier sibling. The University of Michigan’s presence has also made Ann Arbor, and Ypsilanti as well by extension, an area ripe for gentrification.
The impact of Detroit’s music industry and culture on this country and this planet cannot be overstated. The way Motown Records alone innovated the way popular music was produced and recorded in the 1960s and 70s has been the subject of numerous articles, documentaries, and more. Detroit was the home of the legendary soul songstress Aretha Franklin, who managed to build an empire of her own without ever signing to Motown. It is also the birthplace of techno music in the 1980s, and by the late 1990s and early 2000s, the city’s hip hop scene had begun to stake its claim nationally as well. Naturally, such musical excellence couldn’t help but bleed out into the surrounding area, and the 734 was no exception. As hip hop grew as both a music and a culture, talent sprung up all over, with a multitude of MCs, DJs, and more all eager to make a name for themselves. But with Detroit itself only just starting to gain recognition for its hip hop by the turn of the millennium through names like Slim Shady and Slum Village, it was difficult for those coming from outside the city to ride the wave without being absorbed into The D’s gravity. As time went on, it therefore became the mission of a select few to elevate The 734 into a status all its own.
Circa the late 2000s and early 2010s, hip hop music and culture were more popular than ever. Rap dominated the charts, and hip hop was really hitting its stride as the trend setter within the American mainstream. However, that influence didn’t always trickle down to the local level, as organizers within The 734 know well. “It was just a lot of closed doors,” recalls Duke Newcomb, veteran MC and one of our area’s premier organizers of hip hop spaces. His long running monthly open mic night The Dojo is where many local artists have gained their chops performing their music, as well as provided a space for participants in and lovers of the culture to build community, this writer included. “Circumstantially, there were certain businesses that were changing and they didn’t want local stuff period, especially hip hop. They didn’t understand the community. Other establishments kind of put everything in the same bag, there were some instances with some whack shows where there were some shots taken and all out fights and stuff like that. But not taking into account that there’s different lanes in all genres. And also they weren’t doing their homework, dudes booked two rival gangs on the same bill, and then they’re looking at that like ‘We don’t want any rap now.’ Saying that we’re not nuanced people, rap fans, hip hoppers, black people. However you view it. So as far as The Dojo, we were like ‘Fuck that, fuck ‘em.’ We were able to get with The Elks Lodge, who were gracious enough to host us. My mindset was like, we’re going to make this shit so hot that they have to fuck with us.”
And fuck with them they did, but like all good things, The Dojo required time to come into its own. “From the jump, there were like 3 of us chilling in a basement, rapping at each other. But then there were 6, then 18, and then it was like 52. And then all of the sudden people were looking down the stairs because they can’t get into Elks no more, taking a peek. And we’ve had some beautiful, epic nights man.” Duke reminisced to me with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. I asked him how he transitioned from being an artist and an MC to one of the 734’s most recognizable event hosts. “I just had a realization.” He answered. “I’m sitting around surrounded by my friends and I’m like ‘Somebody needs to do this, somebody needs to do that.’ And I was like, oh shit, it’s me. If I’m sitting here complaining, and I see the things that I think need to be done, then I need to do it. I finished my album and I didn’t know what to do, but I knew my name was buzzing, so I was like how can I use my name? That’s why it was called ‘Duke Newcomb Presents The Dojo’. Now it’s The Dojo, the brand as The Dojo has grown. But at the beginning I was like, I don’t know how to show people in other cities and towns that I’m valuable, because I just have a rap album. So does everybody. So then the focus should change to how do I become one of the pieces that help make my city important to rap, to hip hop? If my scene’s important, then I’m important. So it was kind of selfish, but it wasn’t completely selfish.” He chuckled. But Duke wasn’t the only one following this line of thinking when it came to building the 734’s hip hop scene.
“Honestly, Tru doesn’t get the props he deserves, because Tru was really doing this before The Dojo.” I was assured by Duke, directing me towards one of my next interview subjects, not that the man needs much introduction. Tru Klassick is another of 734’s most well-known figures, as his tall stature, booming voice, and lyrical dexterity on the mic makes him stand out as both an artist and organizer within the hip hop space. His showcase Bridging the Gap comes a few times a year, and it’s always a major event. “I came up hearing about a bunch of stuff when I was in high school, a lot of events that AML [Athletic Mic League] and Binary Star were doing at Heidelberg and all that, but I was too young to make into any of those.” Tru remembered as we chatted at The 8 Ball, the basement bar attached to Ann Arbor’s The Blind Pig, one of 734’s most storied music venues. “By the time I got out of high school, all the artists that were throwing events had left. They were out in L.A. or travelling the world. So me and my homies linked up, this was probably about 2010, 2011. I linked up with my homeboy Sada Dondada, and we started throwing an open mic style event in the basement, it was called Goodnight Gracie’s. It’s called Last Word now, it was under the basement of Live. We started throwing events there, and those started being packed the fuck out. Eventually I started working here in The 8 Ball and The Blind Pig, and I was trying to book shows upstairs and I just couldn’t book any shows. But my manager at the time was throwing punk shows on Monday nights in the hallway of The 8 Ball. I asked him if it’d be cool if I came in like once a month and did something. We called those Vibe Out Mondays, and we packed that out beyond capacity, it was crazy. That was a green light to move me upstairs.”
Throughout our conversation, Tru is an endless source of 734 hip hop lore, with more stories than I can detail in this piece alone. “Biweekly, we would have one event that was downstairs, that was Vibe Out Mondays. That was a free event for people to come kick it, it was dollar beer night, people were coming in here getting fucked up. And then two weeks after that I would do Vibe Out Wednesdays, and that was upstairs. That’s when we really started cultivating a lot more relationships, branching out a lot more and bringing other people in. We were packing out The Blind Pig with 200 plus on a Wednesday night, it used to go up. Eventually I kind of slowed down doing those events and started throwing an event called Bridging the Gap after I’d travelled around the country and saw a whole bunch of stuff. I took the format and the date that my homies were doing in Detroit for Blue Collar Gentlemen when they ended their thing, that was a huge showcase for the Midwest, they used to bring all types of people through. I was throwing this event up at The Heidelberg, in the upstairs at The Club Above, probably about 2015, 2016 at this time. Did that every first Friday of the month for about 4 or 5 years until that ran its course. Now I move Bridging the Gap around for when other cats are travelling, I can book something and have the locals rock and have the out of towners come and do their thing.”
I wanted to know from Tru how he saw the evolution of our scene from when he and others were developing it to now. “The difference now is that there’s more venues that are open to hip hop, back then you had maybe two spots total. There wasn’t as much unity between different styles of hip hop, there wasn’t as much unity between the ages of hip hop people. Now I feel like even the OGs and the younger generation are more connected than they ever have been before and there’s more mutual respect for each other. And we’re just collaborating as well, all of us. Me and Duke collab on events, me and TJ collab on shit. The last time me and TJ collabed on some shit, that bitch slapped.” The event that Tru mentions here is none other than 734 Saturdays and its host, providing a helpful segue towards our next subject TJ Greggs, aka The Family’s own Lewy Seifer.
734 Saturdays is another one of the area’s premier open mics/showcases for hip hop, practically an institution for local participants in the culture that pops up every few months, Lewy Seifer being the driving force behind it. We each sipped on large mugs of beer at the local brewing company as we discussed our mutual favorite subjects, hip hop and community building. “We used to do a lot of our stuff via house parties, that’s how it was because the venues wouldn’t let us in in like the mid to late 2000s. A lot of local venues were like ‘Hey, we don’t really want to have people come out, dress a certain way, play a certain type of music, we’re worried about fights and gang activity.’ Which, that’s not the reality of the situation. Originally, we up at 734 had a bunch of kids we used to hang out and do house parties with that were metal kids, and they would get into the venues. Me and a couple of the homies, we were like let’s jump onto their sessions and be like ‘Hey, let us do hip hop here! You see the people that we hang out with, you see that we cause no issues.’ So it kind of worked out for a little while, a lot of the places weren’t really feeling it as much, but we appreciated that they were giving us the chance to do it. Just being able to play hip hop in local venues was a huge thing. And so once we start being able to actually get in there, they were like ‘Ok, well hip hop’s not that big of a deal. We see the crowds that they’re pulling out, maybe it’s ok.”
“Maid 7 Lounge, that’s where we ended up hosting the first 734 Saturdays, this was back in 2012.” Lewy grinned as he looked back on it, reflecting on the beautiful struggle that was required to establish hip hop spaces in the area. “Watching what it’s grown and accumulated into now is amazing. We had Tru out here doing Bridging the Gap, he did that every month. We got Duke out here doing The Dojo, he was doing that back at the Elks Lodge. Those were some magical times! I think it was just a gradual team effort to get accepted because all three of us, us running the open mics, they started seeing the crowds that we were having. A couple of us had to get in with other genres and styles just so that we could show face, and then once they saw what we were doing and the energy we were bringing, they were like ‘Ok, these aren’t bad people. Hip hop can be not bad, let me indulge them.’ And I think them letting us do that more and more, especially with local people, helped a lot. I remember going to The Dojo and just seeing the open mic for the first time, I was like, hell yeah dude. This is dope. Seeing him do that at The Elks was black excellence, I loved it. I was like we gotta keep this going, we gotta do the same thing. Keep the culture building, keep it growing. We can have that going on in Ann Arbor, build off of Ypsi, how can we keep doing this and keep it growing? And so just being able to see where it is now and see that it’s still continuing even a decade after is phenomenal to me. Especially to see some of these kids that have grown into where they are now, I have all the faith in them.”
When it comes to hip hop in 734, no name comes up more than that of Buff1, and that includes with my previous subjects. “Buff1 for President!” Tru Klassick proudly proclaimed when his name came up. Lewy Seifer said the title “Mayor of 734 Hip Hop” was a perfect descriptor for him. “I would agree with that, that’s appropriate.” Buff told me with a laugh, humbly accepting his mayoral title. Known to the larger 734 community simply as Jamall Bufford, Buff1 is one-seventh of the pioneering hip hop group Athletic Mic League (AML), as well as the director of My Brother’s Keeper Washtenaw, and co-founder of the music and art collective The Black Opera. AML’s success in the early 2000s is the stuff of local legend, showing kids from Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor that it was possible for us to tour around the world and break into the national rap conversation. Buff himself is a staple of the community, both within hip hop and beyond, and many young people in both cities can count themselves among his mentees. As we sat in a local coffee house, he elaborated to me how he felt about his role in this ecosystem. “Ambassador, mayor, whatever you want to call it. I’m proud of that, I’m proud that people see me in that way, in that light, in that fashion. There were definitely people doing it before me, but I take pride in knowing that people see me in that way and feel like they can use me as a resource. I want to be that for this community.”
I asked Buff for his thoughts about being regarded as a mentor by so many in the community who are now leaders in their own right. “It was important for me to keep hip hop culture alive, present, thriving in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. That was very important to me.” He replied. “To me, the only way to do that was to not think that I was better than anybody else or turn my nose up. I was one of the first and only cats to really tour consistently and outside of the United States, so they had questions, like how do you do it? And I would talk to them; I would answer their questions. And it helps that they’re dope, still want the best quality of music representing where we’re from.”
“Anytime I get interviewed in this regard, I always want to shout out the people that were doing it before us or around the same time as us. There’s a group called Prodigy, shout out Che and Fernando. There was Sterling G back then, of course there was Sun, Invincible, and Funktelligence.” Buff recited the names to me as he turned back his mental clock to the late 90s/early 2000s, when hip hop was still getting its foot in the door of 734 live music venues. “Funktelligence really helped open the door for AML. They were a band, so live bands got access back then versus if you had a DJ with you. Funktelligence, they were huge in this area, they pretty much sold out every time they performed at The Blind Pig. So, we started getting on with them and rapping with them. The two MCs from that group, Jackson Perry and 9 Lives Mike Demps, they had us come up with them and do some of our songs over their band. They opened the doors to us eventually, then we started doing our own shows, then we started selling out The Blind Pig every time we did it.” I realized as I was reviewing all my interview audio that these were the shows Tru Klassick mentioned being too young to attend, but they would still inspire him to organize his own events at that same venue years later. I speculated with Buff regarding what the trick was to maintain such longevity in an underground space like this one, somewhere that is so vibrant and collaborative that also still has to fight for resources and access. “I just didn’t quit. Even when the money was low at times. There were times when the money was really good, there were times when the money was not really good. I just didn’t quit, you found a way to keep active, and keep putting out material, and keep getting up. When you get knocked down, get up, get up!”
Hip hop has always been a culture that prides itself on being on the cutting edge, where there’s always fresh new faces and sounds that propel us forward as we strive to live exclusively in the present moment. There are many reasons for this attitude that range from the cultural, to the socioeconomic, and beyond. Undoubtedly, there is value in this approach to life, music, culture, etc. But I’ve always believed that knowing our history, rather than distracting us from living in the present, can actually help us to enrich the moment that we find ourselves in. Understanding where we came from, how we got here, and the struggles undertaken to get us to this point allows us to appreciate our present all the more. The 734 underground hip hop scene is one such space, a rich community filled with dedicated and talented individuals that embrace each other to make something beautiful and bigger than ourselves. It’s given myself and many others a tribe and a home to call our own. However, the journey to unite, gain recognition, and make space for us to simply be together under one roof has been so time-consuming that there have been scarce opportunities to take stock of what it took for us to be where we are now. Hopefully, this piece can be at least one step in the long walk towards better embracing our community’s collective memory, love for one another, and passion for the sounds that bring us together. I’ll allow my very gracious and talented interview subjects the final word, for now.
Duke Newcomb: “That’s what the show is about. It’s about your skill, it’s not about any of the other shit. So we’ve had a building full of all sorts of different people, and everybody’s just trying to do their best performance. And that’s all love and that’s all chill.”
Tru Klassick: “This is one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned dog, it’s knowledge is the truest form of wealth. Because you have to do the fucking work up here, there’s no cheat code to understanding something! You have to do your 10,000 hours. Knowledge is the truest wealth, so go get the knowledge and all this other shit will follow. And that’s the fifth element baby!”
Buff1: “Work together. I know it sounds cliché and kind of corny, but work together whether you have a team like The Family 734 or The Dojo team, whatever it may be. Having a team helps, and then working in community helps. Working as a network of people in the community, I just think you get further that way.”
Lewy Seifer: “Don’t sweat the petty stuff, pet the sweaty stuff!”
[End of Part 1]
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