By Hunter Stephenson

Photo by Karen Genetta

Welcome to my humble home. Smooth out the stresses, slip in to the new Adidas, fist a tallboy of orange death (product placements!) and have fun, get loose – the simple equation for hedonism in this horrendous Bush league era. Dammit man, forgot the music: Spank Rock is childishly devious, like the too-intelligent tyke who’s been downing the booty-rap Kool-Aid. The kid who jogs drug store aisles, smiling and screaming “I don’t give a fuck!” as moms drops her stuff and puts out the APB. The slightly older girls in the store giggle. They like that kid.

“Spank Rock” is what’s gleaming on the nameplate dangling from the skinny neck of emcee Naeem Juwan, a 20sumpthin’ dude from Baltimore who reps the Philly creative circles now inseparably associated with ‘00s deejay duo Hollertronix (the guys who indirectly introduced somebody in your family to M.I.A.’s “Galang,” Brazilian Baile funk, that dreaded “mash” word and a ginormous Turntable Lab account). Besides being the rap doppelganger for Naeem, Spank Rock is also the cocktail umbrella shading one messy fuckin’ table of brassy deejay pals including Brooklyn producer Alex “Armani XXXchange” Epton (above right) and Baltimore draftees Chris Rockswell (above left) and the slightly unhinged Ronnie Darko (missin’). MySpace, much?

To that sonic tab, add Philly rap snappers Plastic Little and their aNYthing label-head A-ron the Don, and overstand why any inevitable, bony-knee-jerk “dumb ass rap” criticisms fired at Spank Rock’s choice album YoYoYoYoYo ain’t cuttin’ the mustard. Spank Rock is the purple icing on top of a huffin’ puffin’ bakery of tastemaker fiends that make License to Ill circa Beasties look like Northern State (sorry, got a soft spot for Fannypack).

“Craziest shit that’s happened so far is this fucking French dude was trying to grab Alex’s mic while we were performing, and Alex had to give him a nice, sharp elbow to the chest. That’s a no-no. And last night rock star Darko got into a bar fight. I wasn’t there, but I’m sure Darko had something to do with it,” says Naeem. [Consorts with friends] “The dude had a mustache that was the problem.”

Resting around a London hotel before a gig at the grime-fixated monthly party WWWHUT!?, Juwan doesn’t play up the debauched image that causes stereo speakers bumping his Viola mixtape to wobble, and vixens waking up with orange-stained lips to hold back bitter faces. His voice is smallish and similar in tone to many indie rockers’. There is a dash of the vulnerability and cocky flare up of Tony Starks in chill-mode but none of the natural hype and dramedy. Such theatrics are kept in cold storage for wiling, the live show and for wax, all of which require a Transformer’s generator few people have the opportunity, aspiration or energy to tap into.

“I first heard Spank Rock after a Philly Hollertronix [party]. Naeem played me a CD off his Discman and I really felt it. It was a very early stage of Spank Rock, but it was live. Naeem and I have been sharing dance floors in Philly since ’03, and I had an instant crush on him. He had dance moves and style, even carried a fifth of Jack, so we became friends easily. About a year ago I met Rockswell, Darko and XXXchange; those dudes are comedy, so again we bonded -crazy like glue.”

And who the hell is this? Chances are, when your friends yank your ass into Joe’s Pub, a Retail Mafia party in New York, or a Hollertonix jamboree anywhere and you’re smoked out of your skull and more than willing to leave all posting to the broheims, it’s an extravaganza being hosted by nightlife dynamo Roxy Summers aka Oxy Cottontail, she of the bunny silhouette logo stamped with “OXY.” A sly hustleritrix with a personality as friendly focused as a Runaways Joan Jett, her Pratt-informed promotion implosion of pills, dirty rap iconography and on-it-firth billings is the networking elastica for this scene - one that craves documenting and is kept on perma-blast via her cells of choice.

“Spank Rock is the next rapping Usher or Prince,” says Summers. “If you can’t feel it, you’re deaf. Luke, James Brown and Michael Jackson were gonna make a baby one day, right?” Ahem.

Enuff Profiling, On to the Music

Spank Rock’s YoYoYoYoYo is a smart Too Short update released for all us worthless cash-burning punks on the UK Ninja Tune imprint Big Dada. Spank’s electric prose glides and sizzles with wordplay typified by the “My tongue is a drum / my mind’s a machine” of “What It Look Like.” Occasionally, his lyrics get stunned interstellar by XXXchange’s scuba rec room of bass-y electro drips. Throughout the interview, Naeem colors in a blotter sheet of sound references with Mos Def, De la Sol, Outkast, Beatles, Talking Heads and “toss in ESG for Alex.”

Don’t chip teeth on that Jolly Rancher lounging around in a Monster-Jäger concoction, but “Touch Me” plays with the close intensity of a nubile Busta Rhymes prowling quietly over a Vegas-ghetto sundown rider. Naeem’s raps climax and swagger to and fro, as intoxicated bass lines thud like bumper cars into vocoder spasms. All the while, that retardo sample of a goddamn wildcat from Favela Booty Beats growls ferociously. Look down and Goldie Hawn’s lips (just her lips) are treating coke-laced cock like ice cream - let ‘em work magic and press the Audi pedal onward while straightening up off the curb in a stupor.

Spank Rock’s “ideal girl” is Philly rapper Amanda Blank of the Typical Girls click. They have a Sparks-imbibed rendezvous on “Bump,” and three minutes in, after his proclamation “Behind my game boy, I got game girl,” Blank is snatching weaves, rolling Dutchies and giving dabs to her snatch in a carnal tongue blister, the typical shit. “Sweet Talk,” the second single after the canister novelty “Rick Rubin,” is populist boogie-woogie bandstand for the house parties, until the Typical Girls surf on feel-good vibration and swoon “We be down at the corner store, I’ll be your candy, whenever you need me, daddy, yeah.” Amidst Naeem’s air-cock-thrusting, ladies still get their cookie, dos butter. (Not that the vixens out there need encouraging.)

“Chilly Will” is fearsome Chad Hugo-Pharrell paranoia-building as Spank’s voice wigs out, splintering into retro-VR fractals for the clubs, all sleepy-limbed, raccoon-eyed momentum. Such mood-altering comedown tracks are the album’s peddling saviors, and why the release possesses blue-chip longevity for the rest of the year, and will achieve brisk spins on the long tail thereafter.

The scruffy Eazy-E sleaze of “Coke & Wet” hops proudly on a jalopy funk beat and is a champion thin kid’s sidewalk anthem: “Coke and wet bitch, gunz, nigga holler.” Project that chorus on the day’s trials at will, ‘cause it beats the hell outta shelling $400 on a PS3. There’s a tale behind the telling…

“The inspiration for ‘Coke & Wet’ was my Philadelphia college experience. Well, and this 18-year-old white girl from Northeast Philly I worked with at a retail sneaker shop,” laughs Juwan. “She spit the most gangsta rap I ever heard. It was fucking insane ‘cause she had braces and she weighed, like, 90 pounds. She was like, ‘Yo, I rhyme.’ It was a sight, man.”

Baltimore, Philly, New York, London, Austin, Miami

A year ago, Spank Rock performed at the Thursday party in downtown Miami, Spider Pussy, for Winter Music Conference and the m3 Summit. Since then, Naeem, Chris Rockswell, Alex Epton and Ronnie Darko have recorded, globe-trotted and recently wrapped up slots at the ever-growing South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

“Since we were in Miami last year, a lot really hasn’t changed. We’re getting more press, and the heads at shows have been coming back to see us repeatedly, which is surprising,” says Juwan. “We’re pretty much handling shit like we always have, enjoying our music and performing. If we see some success with this album, things might change a little more. We’re not on the radar of big-time artists yet, but I did hear MF Doom and Ghostface were listening to the Viola mixtape while they were in the recording process for their album. That shit was a big surprise.”

No shot at the onset of their popularity, but ten years back, Spank Rock probably would have been basking in some charming New York public-access acclaim, whereas now, they’re welcome on stages worldwide, with crowds buzzing off the Internet-coating first whipped up like crack by Hollertronix’s Diplo and Low Budget, with the help of Roxy Summers and the New York shop Turntable Lab, on their future coffee-tap-book-seminal Never Scared mix CD.

Sure, it’s just party music for kids to have too much fun to, and who knows how many copies YoYoYoYoYo will push and how much traditional radio play it’ll receive. Hello, none of that shit matters anymore, at least in the line of this new culture. There’s still a ton of work to be done, texts to be fired, and middle men to wade through, but the celebrations, parties and success stories feel much more personal and yet witnessed and calculated almost-instantly by millions of eyes that belong to hundreds of thousands of nodding heads from Brazil to Japan to Miami to New York to Houston to Montreal to Los Angeles to infinity. So, it’s a better time than any to say fuck the hangovers and get loose.

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