Cult Californian Hip-Hop artist, ANTWON announces NZ dates
AUCKLAND - Friday 14th October - Whammy
with support from Dbldbl
WELLINGTON - Saturday 15th October - Valhalla
Tickets on sale from undertheradar.co.nz
If ANTWON didn’t exist, no one could have invented him. The former hardcore punk, unabashed hedonist, and Nature Boy leader is what you’d get if Bad Brains spent their summers balling on a budget.
ANTWON isn’t a contradiction; he’s a man of complexity. He’s got the charm and rhythm of Notorious B.I.G or Big Pun, but swears his greatest influence is Kid Rock. You might catch the San Jose native flexing in BMWs chauffeured by freaks, but he’d prefer to be low-key in a Prius. You might catch him in the club sipping tea and smoking the highest caliber of weed. He isn’t weird, isn’t for the sake of being weird. He’s weird for the sake of being raw as fuck.
Growing up on pop-punk and hardcore as much as rap, ANTWON’s nihilistic approach to life is backed by the softness of a big, bad macho teddy bear. ANTWON first burst onto the scene in the early years of this decade, blending slightly nostalgic fluorescent raps with gritty industrial dirges, and live shows so rowdy the bruises still haven’t healed. He effortlessly shifts between styles and genres without losing the lecherous wit that made him instantly stand above from the sea of Tumblr struggle rap.
With his lo-fi druggy summer anthems, ANTWON emerged as the missing link between Kid Rock and the Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle, The Misfits and Martin Lawrence. He was ostensibly too raunchy for the punks, too punk for the hip-hop traditionalists, and not chill enough to be chillwave, but he still built a die-hard cult—one of music’s true originals, idiosyncratic, off-beat, blunted, and always with a bad chick hanging off of him.
The Fader said, “ANTWON has a gift for making filthy-fun-times rap songs with people who don’t usually produce rap.” Spin compared him to “a teenaged Biggie in that famous street-corner freestyle resurrected as an ex-hardcore dude.” Pitchfork claimed, “ANTWON’s heavy voice mourns the people whose lives are growing stagnant and not progressing…like Death Grips if they showered up and decided to write the vast majority of their songs about oral sex.”
He’s too smart and self-aware to try to be the voice of his generation, but his raps embody the spirit of the masses that refuse to fit into any classification. He’s the music nerd and the class clown, the punk and the pervert, emotional and aloof, the rap kid sampling Metallica, old funk, and 80s synth-pop.
He’s toured with artists of varied genres; from White Lung to Leif. ANTWON couldn’t give a fuck even if he wanted to—an original artist that’s always evolving, swerving recklessly in the lane that he built.
