“I love to play live,” says Kevin Turner, the emcee of the Charlottesville, VA hip-hop group The Blackout Project. Turner and his bandmates will have ample opportunity to play in the near future, as word of the band’s polished yet energetic live show spreads. The Blackout Project is a puzzling band from an outside perspective. This is a group of outwardly polite young students who insist they are committed to the critical dialogue of hip-hop, and a band of diverse musical interests and talents that delivers an authentically unified sound.
Any remaining questions should be answered with a visit to one of The Blackout Project’s shows. If not, they fade from relevance as one is easily caught in the frenetic delivery of Turner’s rhymes and the irresistibly danceable funk the band presents in song after song. TBP’s quick rise to prominence around Charlottesville is then evident: this music is just too good to keep hidden.
The band formed in early 2007, and in their first real gig, won the UVa. Battle of the Bands competition against some impressive opposition. The band members credit a quick assimilation to each other, and to the genre of hip-hop, with their early success. Says guitarist Robert Word, “Originally I was attracted by the opportunity to play something different. Then, I was fired up about the skill and desire of everyone.” Drummer Andy Hunt adds, “I knew going in that we were going to have some accomplished and talented musicians in the group, but the key was, of course, how we came together so neatly to form our own sound literally in a matter of months.” The band is composed of Turner, also known as K-Nice (a childhood basketball coach gave him the alias), Word, Hunt, pianist Chris Plietz and bassist Ryan Gilchrist.
Plietz says that finding a sound within the framework of hip-hop presented a new challenge for the musicians, who were previously fluent in jazz and rock forms. “I quickly realized that with a repeating pattern in hip-hop, there was lots of room for variation and improvisation. Hip-hop has so much potential; it is really an open forum for the band as well as the rapper.” Fluency in hip-hop was no problem for Turner, who has been involved in the music since his childhood. “I graduated from rapping along to records to writing my own raps to impress my older brother and his friends and to try to get the attention of girls way out of my league. Not much has changed.” Turner garnered some attention in the Washington D.C. area before relocating to Charlottesville for college. He believes the band is the new best environment for his lyrical skills: “The Blackout Project is just what I needed. I think live, full-band hip-hop is much more fun to do, and it’s also a more compelling show for the audience. We can jam. We can interact with the audience. We can change things on the fly. Every show is different.”
Hunt says that though the band has had a great deal of success in its young career, it faces some important creative challenges. “We will always struggle, I think, with fitting all of our chops and all of our ideas into a sort of statement that is authentic to ourselves and authentic to hip-hop. I think that struggle isn’t necessarily bad, though. We are all a bit hypercritical musically. If an idea makes it through the gauntlet that is band practice, then I’m pretty confident it is show worthy.”
At the same time, the band says they are willing and able to stretch the horizon for hip-hop stylistically. Gilchrist says, “We are very open to whatever direction our collective influences take us. Instead of starting off with a concrete idea of what we wanted to sound like, we let each of our creative inputs form our sound.” The band’s sound indicates that they aren’t having undue difficulty reconciling hip-hop authenticity with an improvisational spirit. As the young band’s schedule fills for the coming months, The Blackout Project will attract some bright lights.
