About Monk
Unlike a lot of good MC's, I was never really a big Hip Hop head when i was younger. I was more of a Heavy metal kind of mosher guy. I used to skate, bmx, was very interested in most extreme sports, basically anything that was even slightly related to the kind of music I listened to. I've always been an unfit cunt, so was never a good skater or bmxer, but I enjoyed it haha
After I wrote 2 or 3 songs I just kind of stopped. Didn't think about writing or recording, was still listening to Hip Pop, it wasn't really until about 2006/07 when I heard RA The Rugged Man's verse on Uncommon Valor, it made me really want to hear more music like that and I very quickly transitioned from a pop fan to an alternative Hip Hop fan. I still wasn't writing though, was thinking about trying it again, but I generally accepted I wasn't very good, so I left it. Just continued listening to good Hip Hop.
It wasn't actually until 2010, if it was 2011, it was early, like January, right around that time I wrote my first verse in 5 years or so. Obviusly, I took huge influence from the best I'd heard at that time, which was RA on Uncommon Valor. I spent about a week writing one 16 bar verse. I wasn't trying anything fancy with words, all I wanted to do was imitate the flow of RA The Rugged Man, using my own words. That was my whole goal and although I didn't get exactly like RA, I managed multi-syllabics, which you can hear on "feelings". The first verse I wrote had more multi-syllabics, but was garbage lyrics-wise. It made no sense, there was no similes or wordplay, it was terrible. But I got the sound I wanted and that was the goal I set out for.
I wrote a few verses here and there for the first few months, but nothing I felt like I'd be willing to record and put out for anyone to hear. Even if I wanted to, I had no money, no recording equipment and then if I did get recording equipment, I had no software or knowledge with software to do anything with the music I recorded, so I was pretty stumped. It wasn't until around the January of 2012, I really got working on something I could release. I eventually got a cheap mic, I got some basic tutorials on how to make things sound listenable and I felt I had lyrics at the best standard I could get them to, purely relying on listening to a variety of MC's.
Within the December of 2011 and a few weeks before the release of Fanfaronade, I'd written 18 tracks, if I remember correctly. Out of that I only felt 11 were worthy of releasing, was waiting on one collab coming back and realised how bad my verses were on that track as well, so I left the collab to die out and just released the mixtape with 10 tracks. The other 8 tracks were discarded, it wasn't a big loss, nothing of any importance was discarded, they were mostly dubs or low quality youtube beats. The 10 tracks on the mixtape were the best tracks I had.
For only been rapping for a year, seriously, I really appreciated the large amount of good feedback I received from the mixtape. I knew it wasn't high sound quality, I knew it would never be my best work, but I was proud of it and really happy other people seemed to enjoy it as well. At that point, with promotion I was getting 6 downloads a track, with the mixtape I got 30 downloads. Not a lot to some, even in Scotland, but for me to know 30 people had downloaded my music was fucking huge. I counted 7 blog posts from people I'd never interacted with and of 30 downloads, only 15 or so were from the UK, which meant 15 people from other countries had heard my music, which boosted my "buzz" even more lol
Now 3 months after the release of Fanfaronade, I'm planning an EP to be out fairly soon, then either 1 or 2 mixtapes after that. In the meantime, collabs are in the works, various cypher tracks. A lot of good shit coming, be prepared for it. BOOM!
Monk.