Cool Kids, Phono, Hollywood Holt, Mic Terror
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Mano’s best known as a DJ. He spins club nights around town, puts together mixes, and backs MCs for their live sets–including Shawnna, who’s signed to Def Jam, and local rappers like Hollywood Holt (his cousin) and Mic Terror. (He’s also got an ongoing collaboration with electro diva Drea.) But his primary passion is production–if he blows up, his beats and remixes will be the reason. For the past few years he’s been making tracks for a small but prolific stable of MCs, refining a style that combines elements of straight-up golden-age hip-hop with elements of house-based dance music–the complicated polyrhythms of juke, for instance, or the gnarly sawtooth-wave synths of vintage electronica. And his unauthorized remixes–Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” reconfigured as a juke track, Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” turned into Baltimore house–already have a few corners of the Internet going nuts.
Emmanuel Eugene Nickerson, as his parents named him, is only 23, but he has a decade of beat-making experience–he got started on a Dr. Rhythm drum machine when he was in eighth grade. Back then, he remembers, “Me and my brother was always listening to quote-unquote ‘real’ hip-hop”–especially the Wu-Tang Clan and locals like Crucial Conflict and Do or Die. “I was in these ghetto-house dance groups too, and we was footworking, and it was so funny,” he says. “I was stuck between listening to this gangsta stuff and, like, ghetto house.”
Mano’s a hip-hop kid at heart, though, and he still spends plenty of time on that scene. He recently gave a beat reel to local rapper GLC, who said he liked everything on it but eventually picked a track Mano had built from a juked-up beat and a sample of Bernard Herrmann’s theme to Twisted Nerve, better known as the creepy whistle song in Kill Bill. That track became the basis of GLC’s “Haterville.” Welcome to Haterville, the album it’s supposed to be on, has been in limbo for months, but the song’s already leaked–it got Mano some attention from GLC’s label boss, Kanye West. “‘Ye personally called me and said, ‘Yo, that shit is dope,’” he says, grinning. “It’s awesome that these incredible people give me props over some shit that I did on a weak-ass PC at my mom’s house.” Mano and Hollywood Holt also earned a few minutes of Internet fame with a video for their moped-centric remake of “Throw Some D’s” (briefly noted in Jessica Hopper’s July 27 Reader piece about the Peddy Cash moped gang). “It even amazed me how many people threw that up on their blogs,” he says. “That’s just our lives. We’re some eclectic black kids from the hood that ride mopeds.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Mno by Jason Creps.
