Swollen Members: Nov 17, 2001 Article
Bad dream a wicked reality
Hip-hopsters Swollen Members got it goin' on
By Nick Lewis - Calgary Herald
He moved from Vancouver to San Francisco as a teenager, where he slept on pizza boxes and cold floors. Eventually, he secured a minimum-wage job delivering pizzas and when he was lucky, he'd crash on the shop's couch.
That's how bad Mad Child, aka Shane Bunting, wanted to be a hip-hop MC.
"I moved out to the Bay Area in 1993 because at the time it was the third most populated hip-hop scene in North America," Mad Child says. "I mean, a lot of kids were into hip-hop in Vancouver, but in the Bay Area they were already living the hip-hop life. I moved there, loved it and decided to stay."
While there, Mad Child made a few contacts in the music world, including a rising rapper named Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, who was sufficiently impressed that he promised to collaborate in the future.
But it wasn't until Mad Child returned to Vancouver for a visit that he met the man who would help him achieve his goal. When he met a rising MC called Prevail at a house party, Mad Child decided to return to Canada.
"Mad Child came in and we were both sitting across from each other," Prevail recalls. "And we just started spitting rhymes back at one another in a room full of a hundred drunk people. No one said a word. At one point someone came in and started going, 'Hey, where's...,' and everyone in the room just went 'Shut up' at the same time.
"We knew we had to get something going."
That was the night the two decided they had to work together. The duo became known as Swollen Members, a hip-hop collective that first gained attention in Canada after snatching the 2000 Juno award for best rap album - their debut, Balance. That record spawned one of this summer's biggest singles, Lady Venom, and the duo recently shared a cellphone and a interview from the set of Nelly Furtado's new single, on which they guest their their vocals.
Ironically, Swollen Members had already achieved global success. They performed for more than 10 000 people at Glastonbury '99 in England, sharing a bill with such names as REM, Lenny Kravitz, Travis and Hole.
Their debut album brought them still more attention. "We called our debut Balance because that's what it was - a balance between my dark side and Prev's intelect," Madchild explains. "We bring out the best of each other's personalities and play off it, bringing different things to the table. I'm the studio MC, while Prev's the street MC that will battle anyone, anywhere, anytime."
Their last album, Bad Dreams, released Nov. 13, copies that formula. It showcases Prevail's intellectual freestyling and Mad Child's sinister rhymes, resulting in a dark record with lessons in street philosophy.
It works because, as Mad Child says, the two are different people, with different backgrounds and interests. Mad Child is a bussinessman who owns Battleaxe Records; Prevail is the literate bohemian with a gifted ability to freestyle rap on command.
"We started building a friendship right from the beginning," Mad Child says. "We started hanging out a lot more and doing things to see if we could click. We just knew, dude.
"Now we're like brothers, and being family, you learn with each other. You learn when to give each other space, when to leave each other alone - you can almost feel each other's energy. We could be sitting in the truck driving and if Prev's felling uptight in the front, I'll feel it in the back seat."
It's this understanding of one another, fostered through hundreds of shows throughout Europe, Australia, the U.S. and Canada, that Prevail says carries the Swollen Members in a live setting.
"We're one of those groups where it's a different show every night." he says. "It's high energy, and the only thing that we plan is for people to leave with a good taste in their mouth."
Saturday, November 17, 2001 [Calgary Herald]
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