Steve Angello’s Secret Hip-Hop Past
The dance music superstar idolized Nas and Gang Starr and competed in scratch battles
This week, Steve Angello celebrates the release of his new solo album, Wild Youth, an energetic LP of big room bangers, hypnotically deep grooves, and melodic vocal dance tracks. It’s been three years since the breakup of his former group Swedish House Mafia, which found the trio going their separate ways after delivering some of the biggest, most genre-defining EDM anthems of all time. While Axwell and Sebastian Ingrosso are releasing music as a duo, Steve Angello has opted to brave international waters as a solo artist, continuing to oversee his Size and X record labels—the latter dedicated to deep and tech house. Wild Youth strives to carve out its own niche, featuring vocalists Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons and Gary Go, best known for his work with Benny Benassi on “Cinema.”
But there’s a side to Steve Angello’s musical legacy that we don’t often hear about—his early years as a hip-hop DJ. The connection is briefly touched upon in Swedish House Mafia’s farewell documentary, Leave The World Behind, but we wanted to dig deeper into the unsung period when one of the highest paid electronic DJs in the world was spinning boom bap beats. Steve graciously spoke to Cuepoint about his little-known formative era behind the decks.
Cuepoint: In the SHM documentary, Leave the World Behind, Ingrosso briefly touches upon your early days as a hip-hop DJ. What can you tell me about those years?
Steve Angello: I grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm. They look up to American culture a lot. So for us, the whole hip-hop thing came in really early, when we were around 8 or 9. Everybody was listening to hip-hop and that’s just the way it was. I was listening to a lot of East Coast, New York hip-hop. Guys like Nas, Gang Starr, Mos Def, early Jay Z, Notorious B.I.G., that whole era.
Then I started to scratch perform at all of these competitions. I was touring the world when I was about 11 or 12. That was pretty much my start.
What were the scratch competitions, were those big events like the ITF battles?
I don’t remember because I was a little kid at the time. But a lot of those guys went off to the DMC competitions and those things. We had local competitions in Sweden, obviously I was always the youngest. At the same time, it was a great time in my life, when we kind of got into that whole lifestyle. It was a good time for music in general, because everything was new and we were discovering this whole world of sounds. Slowly but surely I got into beats and breaks because of the competitions and slowly I got into electronic.
Do you think that your skill level as a scratching DJ at that time was up to par with those you were competing with, or were you just a hungry kid trying to get in and compete?
At the time, I was a hungry kid who didn’t have have any view on myself. I didn’t know if I was good enough or bad. I won a couple of competitions when I was 12, 13, or 14 and went on to the bigger ones, but I was so young and the culture wasn’t that big. I was competing with guys that were in their thirties, so for me it was always tough. But I was hungry and young, so to me it didn’t matter. The excitement was just being there and seeing these other guys. It was like being this little kid on the side of a basketball court looking at these older kids playing. That was kind of how I grew up in the musical culture. It was a very suppressed situation, because the suburbs in Sweden were very much on their own. There was no money invested in it, there was nothing to do for the kids, there was nothing educational or any after school activities. The only things we could do were sports, music, and computers. So at the time, it kind of saved a lot of people from doing bad stuff.
How were you getting your vinyl? Were their many good record stores out there?
We had a massive vinyl community, some massive stores in Sweden. Then I started to work in a specialty shop a couple extra days a week and my pay was that I could take a couple vinyls a week. I would go there after school and just help them sort and do anything that they needed help with, just to get my records. I was 12 and my mom was working three jobs, so she wasn’t home at all. I could easily go out and work.
I’m wondering if you can tell me some specific songs or your go-to cuts of that era?
I remember the whole Nas Illmatic album was a really important piece of music for me. “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” was one of the songs that really connected to me. And then if we go even deeper, Gang Starr’s Moment of Truth was another really important piece for me. There were all of these cuts, “Moment of Truth” obviously, then you have “The Militia,” “My Advice To You.” It’s a good album. It was such an interesting chemistry with Premier. We had all of these guys that were DJs, so we could dream on like ‘Hey, you could be like a DJ/producer guy.’
It was so different from the music that we saw, where you had to be in a band or you had to be a singer. We couldn’t afford instruments and we didn’t have the benefit of people teaching us to play them. We just had the decks, that was my instrument. Later on I got a drum machine, years after that I got a really shitty computer. You kind of move on from there and then all of a sudden you have a real studio and you’re making cuts. It was a really interesting and cool way of growing up, appreciating the craft of making records. Gaining an understanding of the how the vinyl was made, it was cool. I’m really happy I was a part of it, because it meant so much to me, even today.
Yeah, that reminds me. If you look at the trajectory of hip-hop, Moment of Truth is kind of one of those last albums before hip-hop really went commercial.
I kind of lost the whole hip-hop scene after 1996. You still had guys like Biggie, Nas, and Jay Z coming in. Mos Def and Wu-Tang always were still doing really good stuff. And then a lot on the underground, obviously. But it kind of lost its mystique. I remember one thing that happened too was that the concerts became really violent, regardless of the country, with a lot of criminals and gangs. For us, it was always speaking to the suburbs, but for others it was speaking to the projects. So when those two groups come together sometimes, it has a really bad effect.
I remember when I discovered Daft Punk with Homework, for me that was a whole new revolution of music. It hit me in the back of my head and I was like ‘what the fuck is going on!?!’ It’s the same principle: You find an old disco record, you chop it up, you add stuff to it and it could be a dance song all of a sudden. So it had that same formula of when I was growing up, looking at Premier and all of these guys. But it was just different. For us, dance music in Europe was cultural already. It started out in the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, so it was always around. It wasn’t like it is now in a lot of places, where dance music is this whole new thing. We always had it growing up. So it was just a development of that culture that I got into electronic music.
Yeah it is interesting that you say that, because I felt exactly the same way when I heard Discovery in 2001. The way that Daft Punk were chopping those samples was exactly how Premier was doing it. That also really opened my mind up.
We talk about how hip-hop went commercial. I feel like the same thing has happened to dance music. There was a great pocket of time where all of these great, creative records were coming out, and very quickly it turned into the business of making commercial hits. Do you see a parallel there?
It is the same kind of trip. It’s the same as punk rock as well. In the 80s and 90s in the rock world, everybody that had a guitar was an artist. It’s similar in the fact that the scene was so new — in hip-hop or any genre — that the kids that are getting into it have just discovered it. They haven’t really gotten into it or started to have opinions about it. Once they have opinions about it, they dive deeper. But what happened in punk rock and hip-hop is very similar of the journey of dance music.
But at the same time, dance music is such an incredible spectacle. It’s so much more value for your money if you go as a regular kid. The shows are incredible with the amount of production that is put into it. One thing that is really important is the social media aspect. We have so many big artists in the dance world that are promoting this thing called dance music. Whereas nowadays, you have all of these amazing hip-hop artists, but they are only promoting themselves, because they are trying to be different from the others. They are not supporting hip-hop as a genre, they’re just promoting themselves as an artist. They see themselves as a genre, where we see ourselves, all of us, are dance music. It’s that unity is the difference.
Dance music is so bilingual. You can come from any country and be at the top. Whereas if I would see a rapper from France, he would usually rap in French. So the problem was I could really get into his stuff, but I wouldn’t understand it. Whereas here, everybody all over the world are speaking the same language: music. I think that is the big difference. I remember really getting into French hip-hop at the time, it was super sick production, it sounded cool, it was really hard and dark. But I really didn’t understand it. Even if I went to buy an album or two for the cuts, I couldn’t really get into it.
What are your thoughts on the new Iggy Azalea track “Azillion,” that samples your track “Knas?”
I mean, I really don’t even reflect on stuff like that, to be honest. You know, if you look at early Black Eyed Peas, they sampled my record “Be” [on “Boom Boom Pow”] with Laidback Luke. But it’s the same thing there, it’s just a recycling system. Go for it. It’s flattering.
I’ve been listening your new album. The vocals really seem to draw from a lot of melodic rock bands and great 80s synth pop. Would you say that is an inspiration?
To be honest, I can’t really pinpoint where the inspiration comes from, it’s just a part of how I grew up. I haven’t really sat down and said, “I want the album to sound like this,” because it took such a long time. I guess it’s just the style of vocals that I like. But for me, it was really important that I didn’t try and do something. I wanted it to be as natural and as grassroots as possible, where every track had to grow up and become its own thing. I think a lot of synths, a lot of electronic, if you look at everything from Depeche to early rock to whatever I grew up with is probably the inspiration. I’m not trying to do anything with this, which was awesome, because there was no pressure on me, except for the pressure I put on myself to complete something. It was a really cool and organic kind of growth into the whole album.
What can you tell me about recording “Someone Else” with Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons?
We started right before Imagine Dragons’ first album. Before all of those songs came out, we were working together. We worked on a couple of ideas and sent it back forth, and then finally decided on the direction that we wanted. He cut the vocals and the track changed from there. But you know, when I first made it, it was more of like a structured radio record, it didn’t have the backing it had today. But then I just felt that the way that the album moved on, and he became this massive star with Imagine Dragons, it was kind of cool to clash the genres a little bit. Instead of doing the obvious like anybody would do, we thought it would be cool to take a new, more visionary creative approach to it and not do the obvious. I think actually makes more sense, because it’s a much cooler collaboration to me. Rather than just being like “Hey, same song structure as Imagine Dragons, let’s just put a kick drum on it,” like most of the guys would do. I just felt like it needed something else, something different, something more. So I’m really happy about the record. It reminds me of the early days of “Smack My Bitch Up,” like early Prodigy or Chemical Brothers. It has that grit, that darkness which I like.
And then of course, I have to ask, which I hate to ask, but there’s been talk…
Is there going to be a reunion? (laughs)
Right. (laughs)
A lot of people ask me that, everybody asks me about it. We haven’t spoken about it, we haven’t reflected on it, we haven’t even had an email cross paths about it. Like we say, never say never, but at the same time, it’s really far away from even being truthful. So, we have no idea. It’s nothing we’ve ever spoken about.
Alright, well cool man. Thanks for your time.
Awesome, let’s talk more hip-hop next time! Thank you.
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