Beat Studies Made Simple
In On the Road – Jack Kerouac’s defining work of the beat generation – the existential query, “What’s your road, man?” served as a siren song that lured thousands to answer the call of the open road, leaving the establishment behind in search of new meaning.
Beat Studies Productions – an Atlanta-based independent hip-hop label, like Kerouac, calls out the establishment (the hip-hop one) on its complacency when it comes to the commercialization of the genre. Beat Studies is paving a new road for a new generation of hip-hop artists who want to make what founder B.J. Alden calls “intelligent music.”
One of those artists is SIMP (a.k.a Duran Butler). For the record, SIMP is just about the freshest thing to sprout out of the South since, well, the Dogwood.
Here’s my enlightening Q&A with SIMP.
