Big and Getting Bigger: An Interview with Big Cats! (The Tribe and Big Cats!)
By: Christian Hagen
The biggest issue that comes up for Minneapolis rap trio The Tribe and Big Cats! about their name, besides the unruly punctuation and the fact that it’s just a little odd, is that it’s a bit misleading.
“It implies a lot of people,” producer Big Cats! explains. “People think that we’re like fifteen people and a couple jungle cats or something.”
The idea of a huge, self-contained collective doesn’t quite describe The Tribe and Big Cats!, a trio featuring rapper TruthBeTold and dual producers Aye Yo Pete and Big Cats!, though in some ways it describes the way they think of the Minneapolis hip-hop scene.
“I feel like a lot of times, because the scene in Minneapolis is so large and so active, we end up isolating ourselves,” Big Cats! says, “because there are so many artists to work with in Minneapolis, there’s so much going on in any given night, that we kind of forget about how much great music there is coming out of LA, out of New York, out of Chicago, out of all the areas around us.”
Where do The Tribe and Big Cats! fit into all this? The answer may be most easily found in the title of their newest record, Forward Thinkers Movers Shakers, a four-word treatise on the group’s objective to mix a social conscience with high entertainment value.
As Big Cats! says, “I wanted to create a record that could still hold your attention content wise, and was actually saying something, but which you could also listen to with your friends just hanging out or, you know, with the windows down, turn it up.”
To accomplish this mission, while escaping the stigma of being exclusively homegrown, the group reached out beyond their local friends (though some, like Toki Wright and MaLLy, did make an appearance) to some national acts like Planet Asia and Abstract Rude. The result was an album that sounds like it should be much bigger than an independent release from the Twin Cities.
This effort to reach out, lyrically and geographically, will continue through the group’s current project, a four-month singles series they’ve dubbed MAKE GOOD.
“Our plan is to do four,” Big Cats! explains. “One in July, August, September and October, with a video for each one. The one in August is called ‘Stay High.’ In September, we’re putting out a track called ‘One Call Away,’ featuring Greg Grease, a local MC who works with a group called The Usual Suspects, and it also features DJ Chicago Kid, who is from Chicago, obviously. The fourth one is called ‘Good Life’ and it features Smoke Dizza, who is from New York.”
The project is designed to sate fans, or as Big Cats! says, to “bridge the gap” between FTMS and their new album, which the group is in the process of writing. The first video in the series, for the song “We Gone,” filmed near a reservoir in Roseville, MN, features the trio and their friends MaLLy and Claire Taubenhaus hanging in the woods, throwing streamers, and swapping masks. While it might be unclear what the visual motifs of the clip might mean, it’s clear from the production, of the video and the track both, that The Tribe and Big Cats! have the chops to play on a bigger stage.
Still, according to Big Cats!, they hold strong to their home roots, and are glad to see them grow.
“I’ve lived in the Twin Cities my whole life, and so I’ve gotten to see [the hip-hop scene] grow from the very early days of Headshots and the early days of Rhymesayers, and gotten to see what that spawned.”
“Now,” Big Cats! continues, “it’s at the point where there are three or four shows on any given night, and somebody’s putting out a record just about every week. And it’s cool to see it get to a point like that from where it was even ten or fifteen years ago where there were one or two crews, and there were maybe a couple weekly events, but nothing to the degree where it is now.’”
With luck, The Tribe and Big Cats! might just help make that gradual expansion of the Cities’ influence that much faster in the world of independent hip-hop. Time will tell, but it’s guaranteed that all eyes will be open to see the group’s next move.