The ‘Round The Campfire Interview Series is Pop Break’s preview series, curated by Lead Music Writer Andrew Howie, for Summer Camp 2022.
One of the main reasons so many people return to Summer Camp every year is because so many of their local artists are on the bill. This year will mark the fifth time that Champaign-Urbana hip hop duo Trouble Chasin’ (comprised of Chase Baby and Sandman Slimm, formerly known as Truth AKA Trouble) have played the fest. As a pillar of our local music scene, I wanted to get their thoughts on what makes Summer Camp what it is, how hip hop is continuing to evolve, and what they’ve been up to in the lab lately.
Andrew Howie: What can you tell me about any new material that you’ve made during the last few years, either as solo artists or as a duo?
Chase Baby: Not a lot of Trouble Chasin’ content was created during the meat and potatoes of the pandemic, if you will. It was mostly solo art; I made all of Seasonal Depression, I made Leave of Absence, I made Thanks 4 Being Patient, I made Chasin’ Treezz, I made 80% of The Blue Collar 2. So I got my bag, but I was also being manic as shit, so I ended up getting on mood stabilizers. Towards the end of the pandemic I leveled out and now I’m creating at a much more balanced rate. I didn’t really realize how much I was recording, because I felt like I was in a slump, but I looked back on it and realized I released a shit ton of music last year.
Sandman Slimm: That shit gave me time to finally finish up the project that I’ve been working on for forever. That was giving me drama for like two or three years. In the midst of that, I did Beautiful Chaos, did Freebase, did The White Pill as well. Same as Chase, manic as hell, had no other way to really get out everything that I was feeling and didn’t quite know how to process yet. So just really getting into that bag was nice. One dope thing I do remember was one moment kind of mid-shutdown, we linked up over at the homie’s crib for a live stream for Summer Camp. When it was over, both of us (who had to go do other things afterwards) sat there, and we wanted to kick it longer. Let’s crack some beers, you know? Let’s play some shit we’ve been working on and let’s see what happens. That sort sprinkled the seeds for what later became this project we’re working on now.
CB: I will also say that towards the end of the pandemic, I kind of took a mental inventory of what I had going on. It’s really easy to get into a routine, and it makes you feel safe and secure, and complacent. but when something like that comes in and shakes things up, no one knows how to react or mitigate things. So for me it ended up being a time to sit back, see the bigger picture and think about what was good for me, here’s what’s adding stressors and what have you, and I ended up removing, slowly but surely, the things that were causing me stress. Anxiety and depression were messing with me at my job, etc. It was a shitty thing to go through, but I feel like I made really good use of the time. It was just a reaction to the pandemic, maybe a defense mechanism, to just have something else to focus on.
AH: Do you find that you approach the music itself any differently, from any perspectives, anything like that?
SS: It’s inevitable to be affected by everything that’s happened and for that to pour over into what you’re doing. At the same time though, as far as what all is really influencing what I’m trying to make, or what we’re trying to make together lately, I really zoned in on remembering that music is something that I always use to make myself happier. Just had to ask myself what do I want to do, what do I want to make that’s going to make me feel good? Let me try and push this, I’ve always wanted to do this, make a song like that. I want to make something that feels like that, and then just combining powers with him and figuring out how can we do this and make it sound like us. Plus, what do we sound like compared to everything else that’s out there?
CB: That’s the question there is what do we sound like? In the beginning, the first two projects were just us creating music with whatever we felt like we had. The duo Trouble Chasin’ began at Summer Camp, so a lot of that music was tailored directly to that festival. The second one, we kind of veered off in some other directions, but it was still sort of just a compilation of songs. This one, this new project, finally has its own sound. It hits different than our solo sounds, or the sounds we’ve had on features or whatnot. A lot of the music this time around is made with purpose and intention. It is supposed to sound this way. It’s not so much linear in creation, but in intention.
AH: Speaking of Summer Camp, let’s talk about that for a minute. You’ve played several times now, this being your fifth year in a row. What is it about this festival in particular that gets you excited to go back again and again, both as fans of the music itself and as performers?
SS: It’s one of the few places I’ve ever gone where it feels welcoming. It always feels like home going back there. I talk about it every single time, but when you’re coming down that strip on 29, and you see Three Sisters, that feeling is why I love going back to Summer Camp. It’s that feeling exactly right there, and it’s almost like preparing for adventure. Once you get in there, it’s wild. That place has opened up my mind to so many other genres of music and made me grow in my love and appreciation for different genres, as well as just different kinds of people. A little bit of everybody goes to Summer Camp. It’s one of the most mixed up crowds I’ve ever seen. That’s what makes me get excited about going back.
CB: I feel like I can be my whole self there, which isn’t something I feel like I can be in a lot of settings. I think that’s a very universal feeling there, and you don’t get that feeling everywhere. I’m sure part of it is because that’s where I first attended a festival and performed the next year, so it’s always been this mile marker of my progression through the years. How was I last year compared to this year? How do I sound, how’s my flow? Also, we’ve been so blessed to perform so many years in a row. Even if we’re on the bottom tier of the lineup, there are not that many artists that get to perform that many times, you know, five or six years in a row. It’s also somewhere that serves more purpose for me throughout the year than just that weekend.
SS: I call it my annual reset.
AH: So you’ve both been creating music for a good while now, and you’ve seen trends come and go. What are some current things you’ve noticed in the broader hip hop scene that maybe weren’t the same a few years ago?
CB: I’m gonna say the acceptance of foreign hip hop, UK especially, and how that influenced like the New York scene and how things are really going off-grid now.
SS: The main thing I’ve seen that’s different is there are so many different niche markets within hip hop now. You can survive and thrive. It doesn’t necessarily have to go through the major channels that land you at a major festival or anything like that. It’s difficult to do, but it’s possible to zone in on a market that you will thrive inside of. It’s a matter of finding it, having the capacity and the fortitude to actually go through with the processes of finding your niche audience.
There are lot of different facets of hip hop now. The rap Chase mentioned from outside the USA, that’s a whole market in and of itself. You want to be on the poppier side, you can make really upbeat music, that’s it’s own market. There’s the melodic ATL route. There are just so many different nooks and crannies, whereas in the past, what mattered was, ‘Is it going to work right here in front of these people at Def Jam or Columbia?’
Are you going to be able to come here and make people believe in it, to where it hits that plateau, where only people who break through a certain level will get any recognition? You can survive outside of that now. Denzel curry, Saba, I could sit here and name probably 30 artists who don’t necessarily get the billboard looks but are doing just fine for themselves. I think that’s a major difference in what I’m seeing in hip hop and what I actually see getting better. I see that divide between label playlisters and Spotify and the people out here grinding for themselves and getting to the bag.
AH: If you could go back to your younger selves when you were just starting out as musicians, what advice would you give them?
CB: Invent Uber. But honestly, the road that I’ve taken has been fantastic, outside of not being known per se. I would just give him some inside info like Back to the Future. Invest in Apple, buy all the Bitcoin right now, just do it, it’s fine. In all seriousness though, one thing creatively would be to collaborate more. Ditch the mindset of ‘I can do it all.’ You don’t need to do it all. You want multiple sets of ears and eyes. You make far better music when you’re collaborating and you’re in that energy. I kind of prided myself on being a one-stop shop. It’s cool, but it doesn’t help you meet other artists and get your name out there as easily.
SS: If I had to say one thing creatively: take the leap. Don’t be afraid to do the stuff that you feel like people aren’t going to like. There are songs that I’ve felt like I should’ve just gone ahead and just tried. That’s the only thing I would change creatively. Just trust it. I went through that a lot in the earlier years.
AH: Let’s circle back to that new material you mentioned earlier, the third Trouble Chasin’ project. What can you tell me about that material specifically, how it came together, what fans can expect, etc.?
CB: So we hinted earlier how it was made with intention and purpose. We have a title for the project, and it’s not going to be Trouble Chasin’ 3 or TC3, it isn’t like a series. It’s going to be much more of an album and an experience than more of like a playlist that we’ve created.
SS: I know that we’ve kind of met in the middle in the past on Trouble Chasin’ projects, so there’s a lot of that still happening; however, one thing that we’ve done this time around that I really liked was that he would send me something and be like ‘hey, you could do something with this. It might be difficult, but you can do something dope to this.’ And then I feel like I’ve done the same for him, where I’ll send him something and say ‘you might have to sit with this for a minute, but when it clicks for you, I know what that’s going to sound like.’ Everything is going to feel cohesive in the end. It sounds like we graduated, it sounds like we grew up, and it sounds like we both got better at our craft. This is the display. That’s what it feels like.
CB: Bigger, stronger, faster, happier. We’re actually shooting a video on Monday, April 25th, for a single for the new album called ’10 and 2.’ Keep your eyes and ears open for that.
