DraphtPerth rapper Drapht nabbed plenty of hype when he burst onto the scene in 2008 with his breakout track Jimmy Recard, but has learnt that it can come and go very quickly in our current instant society.
“It's a positive, but it's also a negative,” he agrees. “I mean, people's attention spans – people are just so fickle at the moment. You can release an album one week, and the next week someone else releases something and their attention goes straight to that. Six years ago I could spend a year-and-a-half on something and then give it life for a good six months to a year. Now, the light switch can be turned off after a week-and-a-half, which can be soul-crushing. It's cheapened the art a little bit I think and people constantly have to give away free music, and try and depend on their live shows, which sometimes just doesn't work. It's a tough market but you just need to adapt to the instant society we have at the moment.”
The hip hop artist, real name Paul Ridge, is pumped to release some new material after a two year gap since his last LP The Life Of Riley. In that time, he's started up his own café.
“It will be two years in April, which has just flown by,” he says of the passage of time since The Life Of Riley dropped. “I didn't really need to release anything (for a while) because it just kept going and going which is something I appreciate immensely. I felt like I needed to have a little bit of downtime, but in that downtime I started creating a café. which I'm just about to open here in Perth.”
“The cafe is called Solomon,” he goes on to explain proudly. “It's sort of a niche idea I had. I've suffered from food intolerance for the past 15 years so it gives people the option to go out and eat, catering to people's food intolerance whether it's gluten free, sugar free, dairy free. It's something that's really close to my heart and something I'm super passionate about, especially with touring and travelling around the world I've always found it really hard to find somewhere to eat where I'm comfortable and I can nourish my body.”
Read the full interview here.
