Riders Against the Storm

One Liner: Local couple dropping rap knowledge

Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but this is hip hop
Home: Austin!

Poster Position: 21
Weekend Two Only.

Friday at 1:15 on the Tito's Stage

Thoughts:  Now I'm gonna be singing the Doors all afternoon.  This is not named after the Doors song, but a Wikipedia search brings up loads of references to Storm Riders in Chinese/Hong Kong/Japanese fiction/movies/video games. But this isn't any of that, this is a married couple - Ghislaine “Qi Dada” Jean and Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone - who have won Austin Music Award's Band of the Year three times.  And yet I don't think I've ever heard one of these songs, and only two of them have more than five figures of streams on Spotify.  Seems weird.

"Our name comes from a group called Sweet Honey in the Rock. They have a song called “Ella’s Song”…taken from a speech from Ella Baker. They talk about passing the torch to the young who will “run against the storm.” We chose Riders Against the Storm in the vein that we are the generation that follows those [who] made a tremendous commitment to freedom."  So there you have it.  Nothing to do with the Doors.  Also, these are the kind of folks who will say things like that they want their music to "bring spiritual application to people's everyday lives."

Their top single is called "Holy Water," and isn't on either of their albums.  36k streams.  Live version, but you'll get the gist.

From their interviews, it sounds like they were some of the hip hop trailblazers here in Austin, opening up the door for some of the folks who have come along since then.  They started a dance party called Body Rock ATX eleven years ago with someone called DJ Chorizo Funk, which grew into an event with some 800 people there before the pandemic hit.  August 29 is Riders Against the Storm Day in Austin.

"Mali," featuring local Austin guy Mobley, 100% sounds like Kanye West.  I had to stop what I was doing with work and pull up Spotify to see what was going on.  Totally sounds like a copycat Kanye track.  The lady's hook on "Magik" sounds like she's going for Lauryn Hill's part in "Fu-Gee-La."

Their top streamer from the 2021 album is "Is It?" with 10,497 streams.

Strangely, that video is from 2011, despite this song being from their brand new album.  The beat is definitely high energy, and the raps are solid.  The "go go go go go go" part at the end is a little tired. Ah, but the version on the album has a different beat - a little more of a techno sound an less of a used-up hip hop beat.  Interesting that they kept the same lyrics for the new version, still lamenting Katrina and Bush's response to it.  Seems like they could have changed it with the beat to be a little more topical.  And instead of the "go go go go" thing, they just play out the techno beat for a while at the end.  Odd.

I'd go watch this.  I'm just interested to see some local hip hop on the big stage at ACL, and these guys seems to be one of the O.G.s to the scene.  The big drawback now is that this is a really early slot on day one.  Not so sure I'll make it in the gates by then.