I had a dream, brothers and sisters, and in my dream I envisioned a world of DJ culture where hydra-headed labels and the self-limiting boundaries of electronic music were stripped away and there was only a pure pipeline of funky grooves left to course through the arterial-audio lymphatic system of the Great and Mighty Beat. And baby, I’m not the only one.
Supa-stah DJ Robbie Hardkiss, late of the San Francisco Bay Area and now making his home here in Austin — part of the notoriously vibey Hardkiss Brothers trio (with Gavin and Scott) — offered up this bonne ideé when asked to describe his own warm and fuzzy brand of two-deck magick.
“Me personally? I’m just … funky. I was really influenced by Eighties R&B and soul. Prince is a hero of all of ours, but I listened to black radio when I was little, and much of the music I’ve been working on in the past few years has ended up having that kind of rhythm underneath.”
The Little Wing EP, double-disc Delusions of Grandeur, and Mixed Messages comp all back up Hardkiss — as does remix work for the likes of Elton John and Mazzy Starr, and his legendary Freestylers “B-Boy Stance” mindwarper. Though he may not yet be a household name outside the shimmery world of baggies and glo-stix, that doesn’t mean Hardkiss is waiting around for the mainstream to catch up to him — although it is, and quickly.
“It’s cool, you know?” he says. “It’s nice that you can talk to your mom or your sister or someone that has nothing to do with the electronic music world or house music and they kind of know what you’re talking about.”
The flipside, of course, is ravey overkill and media saturation focusing on the less palatable side of the beat, i.e., those awful little pills and the good-for-nothin’ teen drug hoovers that snake ’em.
“Then your mom thinks you’re just a druggie,” he laughs. “They don’t understand how deep the whole thing runs. But that’s the way it’s always been, with every subculture. Acid rock, right? But you know what? The kids’ll be all right. The kids are always all right. Calm down, people.”
This article appears in March 16 • 2001.