Inner West hip hop duo Horrorshow aimed high, albeit slyly, when they borrowed their name from Nadsat – the contrarian, made-up language in Anthony Burgess’ ultra-violent dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. In Nadsat, ‘horrorshow’ means something good or excellent, and the Aussie hip hop duo of the same name have busted their chops to earn the moniker.
It wasn’t until they’d nearly finished recording their first album, The Grey Space, that Horrorshow hit upon the name. “I was taken by the book, but I also wanted to find a name that was in a hip hop tradition but marked us out as wanting to do something different with our music from other rap crews,” says MC Nick Bryant-Smith. Under the stage name Solo, Bryant-Smith makes up Horrorshow together with high school buddy and producer Adit Gauchan.
“That’s literally what our name ‘Horrorshow’ is,” Bryant-Smith continues. “It’s like us saying that we’re dope, but doing it in a different way to everyone else.”
That Bryant-Smith should draw on literary origins for the band’s name and find his métier in rap isn’t surprising. Bryant-Smith was a born storyteller and sees rap as a natural extension.
“Even as a kid I would write stories and get my dad to illustrate them,” he says. “I’ve always loved the art of storytelling and been interested in people’s stories. Rap and hip hop just provide such a great platform for telling those stories and getting a window into what life is like.”
Bryant-Smith fell in love with hip hop in his early teens, and embraced the sense of community and identity that went with it. “For myself and a lot of the One Day guys, our introduction to hip hop was graffiti, which has a whole lifestyle and vernacular attached to it. Once you engaged with that and started looking out for tags on the trains and listening to the music, which at that time not many other people were listening to, it made you feel like you were in on some kind of inside joke or part of a community that not everybody else was a part of.
“That sense of belonging and identity was literal sometimes as well – by picking an identity for yourself, your tag or your MC name was a way to reinvent or amplify yourself through that music and culture.”
Even though Bryant-Smith and Gauchan had worked on other music projects together while they were at school, Bryant-Smith initially wrote rap in secret. Thankfully, Gauchan was less private when it came to his home computer experiments with original beats. By sharing them with Bryant-Smith, he gave the latter the metaphoric kick in the strides necessary to take his rhymes public.
“I don’t have a super clear memory of what sparked us to start trying,” Bryant-Smith says. “But Adit would record a few beats and send them to me over MSN and I’d have a crack at writing for them. It felt like a cool challenge, and then before we knew it we had an album worth of songs. But it was never like, ‘We’re gonna be rap stars,’ you know? We just started doing it.”
Adit would record a few beats and send them to me over MSN and I’d have a crack at writing for them.
Indeed, Horrorshow did it so damn well that music is now Bryant-Smith’s full-time gig. “Music is an interesting thing to do as a job. There’s all sorts of ups and downs that go with it. Some days you have your victories and things go the way you want, and other days they don’t, but the thing that remains constant for us is that we’re proud of the music that we make and we work really hard on it and it comes from an honest and true place.”
Which is why Horrorshow’s lyrics reflect moments of confidence as well as self-doubt, although such candour can be a doubled-edged sword. “Making music for a living and commodifying something that concerns essentially matters of the heart is a minefield. It’s certainly not as straightforward as a lot of career paths, but it goes back to the fact that we never really consciously decided that being rap stars was what we were going to do. We just started doing it because it came naturally and we’re still just following that urge to write songs and share it with people, through ups and downs.”
The fact Horrorshow are prepared to thoughtfully explore the vicissitudes of life, up to and including the inevitability of death, is reflected in their latest album Bardo State. Referencing the Bardo Thodol, better known (albeit incorrectly) as the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, the ‘Bardo state’ describes a liminal or intermediate phase of existence. It could be the state in between life and the afterlife, but in Horrorshow’s hands it captures more.
“It may not be the most straightforward title for a rap record ever, but I was fascinated by this idea of being between two lives. It relates to death, but more generally as a concept it relates to being in a range of different states. In Tibetan Buddhism they think you’re in a Bardo state while you’re in the womb before you’re born and a Bardo state when you’re dreaming, between being awake and sleeping.
“It resonates with me because I feel like in our lives at the moment we’re in between places musically and personally. Also, there’s an interesting dichotomy between me as a performer and musician and my normal everyday life dealing with friends and family. It’s an interesting idea to consider yourself as always being in between different possible lives and how to navigate what’s in between.”
Photo: Cole Bennetts
Bardo State is out now through Elefant Traks. Horrorshow play the Enmore Theatre on Saturday June 17.
