(AllHipHop News) From Uncle Luke and 2 Live Crew, to Slip-N-Slide’s reign with artists like Trick Daddy and Trina, on to today’s lengthy list of artists like Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Ace Hood, Plies, Flo Rida, Brisco, and Billy Blue, Miami and the South Florida region has held its own in Hip-Hop music for years.
But while those artists are all popular in their own right, there’s a skateboarding and grafitti-tagging rap crew that’s literally making its own mark on the streets of Miami and garnering a great deal of attention across the internet.
Critically acclaimed for their freestyle videos with A$AP Rocky and the A$AP Mob, rapper/producer SpaceGhostPurrp and his crew, the Raider Klan, are quickly becoming known for their dark imagery in videos (see “Tha Black God”), and their “Raider Hieroglyphics” seen on clothing, graffiti, and in song and album titles.
Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp, released yesterday on 4AD records, looks to give fans a glimpse of the Raider Klan’s life and things to come from SpaceGhost. The project summarizes the past few years of music that he has created amongst his Raider Klan members on their rise to working with artists like Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J, to name a few.
“All my life, man, since I’ve been a child, all I’ve known was 90’s rap. DJ Screw, Three 6 Mafia, Wu-Tang, all that of that real underground stuff, that ’94 Nas. That hardcore sh*t took my life to another level. Especially that Three 6 Mafia as far as production wise, and it just inspired me to go hard,” SpaceGhostPurrp told AllHipHop.com.
SpaceGhostPurrp and the Raider Klan are noteworthy aside from the comparisons drawn to Odd Future and A$AP Mob as the tight nit group brings a unique edge to their music having all grown up in a similar rough background in Miami.
“Some of us grew up together, some of us met each other through our friends and we just all got connected through family and mutual friends, and we just got to know each other. We all grew up on the same music, and nobody is not trying to judge nobody and nobody not trying to be better than nobody, we came from a hard background, and we all here to fight and stick up for each other and it is what it is,” SpaceGhostPurrp explained about the Raider Klan.
The Raider Klan’s “Raider Hieroglyphics” also shows the crews taking to the elements of Hip-Hop as the crew has developed their own language and writing to communicate with through graffiti tags.
“Where we came from in Miami, like me and my homies we would write those letters, we call it Raider Hieroglyphics, its like how gangs got they own type of language when they write so the police wouldn’t know what they are talking about,” SpaceGhostPurrp explained. “We’d just go around skating, getting drunk and f*cked up and go around tagging up walls and sh*t. The police just didn’t know what it was, because they are so used to seeing the Bloods and the Crips and Gangsta Disciples and Latin Kings and sh*t.”
The Raider Klan’s embrace of skate culture further reinforces that skating is a rapidly growing element to Hip-Hop culture.
“We got a few people in the Raider Klan that skate. I’m not a pro- skater, but I do my thing at the park. My homie, Chris Travis, he skate. Perion is one of the dopest skaters in our sh*t. We got the Raider Klan Brooklyn be skating all the time; we got some dope as skaters, man,” SpaceGhostPurrp explained.
“As an artist [embracing skate culture] is what I want to do. As we say, you got the posers and you got our era, thats the skaters that grew up on gangsta rap. That’s what the Raider Klan is. We not trying to be gangsters, man, ’cause our family members was gangsters and we came up under the OG’s and sh*t.”
“We were the outcasts that grew up around gangsters that were skaters and that weren’t around the posers. Now, you got these posers in the game trying to mimic what were are doing, and what we trying to do is put on for the skaters that came up on that hardcore gangsta rap and that real Hip-Hop music. Being wild and free, and at the same time inspiring the youth to just be themselves.”
To hear SpaceGhostPurrp’s project check the stream of the project via Rolling Stone here.