Got Brain Trauma? Talking with some local horror core favorites by Morgan Kelly mkelly@wvgazette.com
On stage, the rap duo Brain Trauma favors hockey masks and bloody painter's suits to baggy pants and jerseys. But that doesn't make them bad people. In the past year, the group's underground popularity has soared thanks to the Internet, relentless touring and shameless self-promotion. On a bright day last week, the gazz got some face time with Charleston's darkest musical minds Kasket Kyle and Toxik Flow before they headline the rap festival Murderfest 2006 at Huntington's HYAMP Saturday. With the promotion done and the acts booked, the twisted twins took some time to discuss the brighter sides of life: porn, publicity and not killing someone if you can't get away with it.
Q: Are you the most offensive band in West Virginia?
Kasket Kyle: Easily. People will try to get me to go to church saying how we'll go to Hell if we don't change. I get a kick out of it. People are so easily offended by things that are different.
Toxik Flow: The first show we played we were told we couldn't come back. The funny thing is that the bands that played with us had the same kind of lyrics if not worse.
KK: Plus, at the end of that show, I took a stapler and I stapled a dollar bill to my head. I don't think anyone else in music in the entire state has ever done that.
Q: Did it hurt?
KK: Yeah and I got blood on the carpet and it stuck in my skull. When I tried pull it out it kind of made a pig noise, but it had to come out.
TF: It's adrenaline. Even if it's just six people or 600 people there digging your stuff, you don't know what's going to happen. I could hit him in the head with a chair -- you never know. And they love it. I could hit some kid in the face and they love it.
Q: How did you get into horror core?
KK: We grew up watching that horror sh*t on TV. I liked a [Detroit] rapper named Esham for a while. [But] on our new album there are only maybe a couple tracks that could really be considered horror core. The rest of them are really just raw underground rap music.
Q: What does "underground rap music" mean?
TF: No major label pushing you. Doing everything yourself.
Q: Why sing about violence and gore?
TF: Stress, man. This place is messed up. Not just here, but the world. It makes you want to blow your brains out. You push that into music and its freedom. Being able to say what you want to say, that's freedom. Having fans that follow you, listen to your music, buy your CDs and come to your shows, that's freedom. That's power. It makes you feel worth something.
KK: Let's say you're working every day at these bullsh*t-ass jobs making five-something an hour, you worked all week, you get a paycheck for a little bit of nothing. You put that aside, you do that the whole month and then you just have enough money to pay your rent and then you have to borrow $20 off somebody to keep your electric on. It makes you want to f**king go crazy or rampage. But rather than do that -- music. It's the only thing I've found that will keep my ass calm.
Q: Do people think you're axe murderers?
KK: I get people coming up to me all the time asking me crazy sh*t like if I'm a serial killer or 'How long have you been worshipping Satan?' What I'll do is just have a normal conversation with them and they say 'Oh, he's not as crazy as I thought he was. He's a normal guy.' But if people want to think I'm crazy, I don't care.
TF: I ask people, 'what's the difference between us and other rap?' 50 Cent will rob you for your shoes and keep the money after he sells them. What's the difference between that and us talking about how screwed up this world is and how stress builds on top of your head until you want to kill yourself?
Q: Do either of you worship Satan?
TF: Lord no.
KK: I don't believe in that sh*t. I'm a Buddhist. None of the songs on our Web site are even remotely horror-core. The lyrics aren't really as evil as the appearance.
TF: We don't run around with masks on chasing old women up the street. It's part of the show.
Q: But your Web site has a bloody background and a porn forum.
TF: Don't get it twisted. Our lyrics are evil. They're not horrorcore, but they're evil.
Q: You guys seem to have a fondness for porn.
TF (Laughing): That's all him. He's the horn dog. I like women, don't get me wrong. But he's about the porn.
KK: I'm a big sicko. I can't help that I guess... I like women -- they're pretty. And I'm a pervert so that kind of ties in. I'm not like a sick this-guy-needs-to-be-locked-up pervert or anything, but I'm out there sometimes. I'm just dirty I guess. I have an extensive catalog of pornography at home, right beside the horror catalog. Some of them are both. I don't think I'm any more perverted or messed up than anybody else. I'm just open about stuff.
Q: Do you guys ever scare yourselves or your friends?
KK: Friends definitely. I don't think I've ever scared myself -- maybe a couple of times when I was high.
TF: I have. Some of the stuff I write, I go 'What the f**k am I thinking?'
Q: Do you consider yourselves sick and twisted?
KK: Not really. I've put a few people in the hospital before. One of them was when I was 15 -- I broke this guys neck for running his mouth to me. I got into a fight with him and I knocked him out. Everybody was egging me on to do something else to him, so I put him in a Boston crab just for the hell of it, leaned back and it snapped his neck. I ended up having to pay for the hospital bill. I didn't do any time. I was arrested, but they just called my dad and sent my ass home. They didn't even put handcuffs on me. They didn't even put me in a cell. A couple of other ones I'd rather not discuss... It's still there and I get really violent with the lyrics sometimes. When I have a bunch of kids standing in front of me chanting the lyrics, I sometimes get carried away and jump into the crowd wit them. The violence is kind of moving. If you don't like it, don't talk to me, don't come to my shows.
TF: There's times I just want to (makes gun with fingers, puts to jaw and make shooting sound). Living. It's just stress every day.
Q: For the most part, you two do your own producing, promotion and booking. Some say you are among the hardest working local rappers. Is that true?
TF: Yes, we are. It doesn't matter if it's a band, a rapper, an R&B singer or a church-going group, at this time you'll never find anybody in the local scene that works as hard as we do. That's why we went from playing shows with three people and two of them we know to selling out anywhere else that lets us play.
KK: A lot of people expect to just jump on the scene and everyone's going to love the hell out of them just because they sound good. You can be the best sounding, have the best lyrics, the best flow and the tightest production in the whole f**king area, but if you're not putting it in people's face, if people aren't there to hear it, it doesn't matter, it's not even worth it.
Q: Why do you guys work so hard?
KK: I don't have any formal past-high school education. I know if I don't get out there and make that money doing the music, I'm not going to do anything else really. I'm just going to work these small jobs for the rest of my life. If we can get to the point where can self-sustain on the music, that's all I want to do. I really would be happy making $400 bucks every week on music. I don't strive to be a multi-platinum rap star because most of those cats are multi-platinum because they've had people interfering with their music. Like Eminem for example, his first album could easily be compared to horror-core. It was very violent sh*t.
TF: Now he's a multi-millionaire and doing songs about Superman.
Q: Why are you a duo?
TF: Two heads are better than one and a lot easier than five or six, like a band would be.
KK: We've been offered a lot of times to put a band behind us, kind of like Rage Against the Machine or something. But when you have a band there's too many heads coming together on one thing. That's a reason a lot of local bands don't last long. There's seriously 30 new bands every month and they seem to fade away or break up and that's because you have five or six a**holes coming together and they've all got different ideas of what should happen. In our case, there's only two a**holes and we've both got pretty much the same idea of what we want to do.
Q: Does being two white guys from West Virginia make it harder?
TF: We've had sh*t thrown at us. We've been booed the f**k off stage. We won't lie. It's hard.
KK: We go out of state a lot and every time they say 'I didn't even know you had rap music in West Virginia.' Sometimes they won't even give you a chance. On our first few shows, we played in South Charleston, we didn't get through the first line of the first song and somebody threw a towel in my face. It was a bunch of cats from the hood and there were two white dudes on stage doing rap music and they weren't digging it.
Q: Would you have a better audience somewhere else?
TF: No. Take Cincy or Cleveland, you have 18 different groups doing the same music. Around here, people don't really know about that type of music because they've never really been opened up to it except on the Internet. That works for and against us. We can play here in front of 150 or 160 of our fans who like us -- or go to Cleveland like when we played with Tek 9, play in front of almost 1,000 people and they all say 'You're just trying to be like Tek.'
Q: How did the name and concept of Murderfest come up?
KK: The name just popped in my head. As for the concept, I decided that we need to have one big show every year. One time a year, in West Virginia, we'll always have that one big show and it's going to be Murderfest. Eventually, we're going to start bringing in big names.
TF: It's different than just having a towel on your shoulder and 20 of your boys up on stage. You come to our show and it's a show. You might not like our music, but you're going to get a show. You'll have your $10 worth... It hurts us, in a way, because a lot of places won't let us play.
Q: You say there's no rap audience here and it's hard to find a job. Yet, Kyle has West Virginia tattooed across his stomach and you guys won't do Murderfest anywhere else. What kind of relationship do you have with state?
TF: No matter what people say about it, its still home. No matter a person from out-of-state or from this state is saying about how terrible it is to live here it's home. It's pride.
KK: It's no different than some other rapper claiming the street they live on. We just take the whole state. If you can't talk about where you're from, what's the point? I'm not going to like and pretend I'm from Queens or some sh*t. I'm from Charleston. I really wouldn't want to live anywhere else honestly. This is the place to be. People are a**holes in other cities.
