Artist Profile: Driveby
Driveby, the experimental hip-hop producer from New Jersey, has been making beats for almost two decades, but, now, in his most recent project with enigmatic MC Fatboi Sharif, he has found his perfect collaborator, crafting a culmination of the inherent strangeness in his creative mind.
Driveby’s exposure to music began in the very earliest days of his childhood; his dad was a massive stereo-head, amassing a vast collection of audio gear and taking his son crate digging with him almost every weekend. While his father was primarily into jazz and psychedelic rock, Driveby very quickly gravitated towards hip-hop and, as a child, would sit in his room at night and rip audio from New York radio station HOT 97 onto cassettes, hoping for his favorite artists to be played.
“I've been around music my whole life. My dad would buy me instruments, but he never would force it on me because he always felt like I would hate the art when I got older… He said, ‘I let you choose the path’, so that's one thing I was grateful for my father for; he never forced it upon me.”
Nevertheless, Driveby’s father’s love for music was certainly a generational development, and, as Driveby grew older, his longing to make music grew and grew.
At 14, a coworker introduced him to Reason, and Driveby took his first tentative steps into making beats. With Black on Both Sides by Mos Def and Funcrusher Plus by Company Flow having been the foundational albums of his childhood, he was well-acquainted with the conscious and underground sounds of the East Coast at that time.
Yet, for the most part, these first instrumentals were overwhelmingly upbeat; that is until he received guidance (and some criticism) from a friend of his that pushed him to lean into his experimental edge.
This advice, when coupled with his eventual acquisition of an MPC, was game-changing. He began pitching down his samples far below the limits of where producers are usually willing to go, finding intense and unique pockets and experimenting with the wonky drum patterns made famous by producers like J Dilla.
Yet, having found his sound, he struggled to find a rapper that was willing to match his wavelength.
“I was trying to give [beats] to rappers, and some rappers would be like, ‘Oh, this is too weird for me, or ‘This beat gives me anxiety,’ or, ‘Nah, man; you got any regular beats?... So I was about to quit music because I was tired of hearing that; I couldn't find a rapper that didn't want to make simple, safe beats. It was boring to me, and no shame to anybody that does that, but, withme particularly, I'm a person that gets bored quick.”
After years of hitting what he describes as a “brick wall”, Roper Williams, a fellow producer, introduced Driveby to Fatboi Sharif, who immediately gravitated towards the sound that Driveby had carved out. The pair had an evident creative connection, and Driveby’s first released tracks spawned from this initial meeting.
Since, he has taken his idiosyncratic sound to new heights, collaborating on full-length tapes with the likes of Pootie, OneShotOnce, and Wavy Bagels. Yet, Let Me Out, his newest collaborative effort with Fatboi Sharif, wholly encapsulates the lopsided and dark-spun sound that other artists had initially balked at.
From the album’s intro, “Battlestar Galactica” to the stunningly thriller-driven “Basquiat Painted Transylvania”, the pair wear their love for sci-fi and its accompanying soundscapes on their sleeves, and, as Fatboi Sharif’s unfailingly recognizable voice belts over the project’s instrumentals, any listener can immediately recognize that something special, and one-of-a-kind, has occurred in the making of the project.
Now, Driveby has a plethora of projects in the works, with collaborations with K-The-I???, Life Long, Rahiem Supreme, and many others in development, and he will continue to push his sound deeper and deeper into modern hip-hop’s underground.