(Written by Denice De Guzman; Photo by JC De Leon)
To interview the trio Shadow Moses may not be the most conventional take on the pulse of hiphop in the Philippines, especially since they admit to not being the usual cutthroat hiphop artists.
Shadow Moses performs nerdcore hiphop, a genre of hiphop music that talks mostly about geek references, something that is in essence far from the alpha male aesthetic of most in hiphop. But in their arguable fringe status, their lens of Pinoy hiphop might just be that valuable – after all, it’s not like the members of Shadow Moses are wet behind the ears.
Chyrho, or Victor Prieto, has been in the scene for a long time – a founding father if you will, considering that AMPON, a hiphop collective that he co-founded in the early 2000s has gone on to foster some of today’s most memorable rappers: Fliptop founder Anygma, Skarm, and international spinner Caliph8 to name a few.
Six the Northstar, on the other hand, has been producing beats for not only his own solo act, but also for other bands like A Problem Like Maria and Plazma. Resident young person Ninno Rodriguez may seem like a fresh-faced newcomer, but as current head of the creative collective LOGICLUB and a recording artist in his own right, no one can call him inexperienced. Separately, the members of Shadow Moses take on Pinoy hiphop in different ways, but together, they’re just dorks making catchy nerdcore music.
“The truth is we don’t know,” Ninno laughs, at the question on what has brought hiphop back to the forefront of Pinoy music. “We got featured in Pinoy Rap on Spotify and we don’t know why.”
“We don’t have a substantial answer to that directly,” Six says. “Because for one, when we hit the studio, we just wanna create music, so anything external we don’t wanna think about too much.”
It seems fair – Shadow Moses is weird like that. One of their songs boasts of lyrics that talk about slow internet, instead of the usual ‘cars and b*tches’ aesthetic in many hiphop tracks. But it’s not that Shadow Moses is unaware though, and maybe it’s just that the music scene now is just different. “We used go to malls with flyers,” Chyro says. “Now that s[tuff] is done on Facebook with a little thing called an events page.”
“The difference between the music then and now are three things: technology, technology, and technology,” says Ninno. It’s not just all the cool gadgets to create music with though. “You got technology in terms of how your music is heard, you got technology in terms of the gadgets we use, and you got technology in terms of people’s heads now, how they are more inclined into accepting these different kinds of sounds.”
At the end of the day though, “Hiphop will always be hiphop as long as you have the ‘nod’,” Ninno says.
