Rapper Tuscanooga Keith likes his hip-hop old-school.
His DIY ethics make him a well-rounded and driven performer on and around the local scene. He said he's heavily influenced by the four main elements of hip-hop culture: graffiti, DJing, MCing and break dancing.
"Hip-hop's been based a lot on history," he said. "Sampling's one of the main things that separates hip-hop from other genres. I don't look at it so much as copying things than as paying respect to them. Louis Armstrong's my number one. I listened to him a lot as a kid. It's something in the way that he makes music. He never plays a wrong note."
He also draws on Zapp and Roger, an '80s funk band, for helping pioneer the talk box, as well as early '90s hip-hop like A Tribe Called Quest, the Pharcyde and Souls of Mischief.
"Local artists influence me a lot, too," he said. "I like to do a lot of work with them."
He performs Thursday at the Stove for the Bomb the Canvas pre-party. He also performs at Blackbird Buvette Oct. 11 at 10 p.m.
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"I'm very into the old-school way of doing music - every emphasis on live performance," Keith said. "Recorded music is great and stuff, but the way things are changing, you can download everything. I want to go back to the old way where you actually pay for a show when you go to see something. Sometimes people pay for a recording of music and just listen to it. People pay for an entire project, an entire show, as opposed to paying for one medium, you know?"
He said he usually performs alone, though sometimes friends will come onstage.
"I'm always willing to work with people who are motivated," Keith said. "Anybody who wants to perform with me probably can. It's really fun to perform with other people, but I feel like as a rapper that kind of allows me to be a little bit lazy in some ways. You can rely on other people to do the work. If you're a solo artist, it's all you."
He performs at Blackbird Buvette once a month in an instrumental showcase.
"We'll have various hip-hop producers from Albuquerque come out and showcase some of their instrumental stuff, sans MC and also with freestylers up there, too," he said. "It's a really good opportunity for people who are interested in getting started to make necessary connections."
Keith also goes by Tug or Grim. Tuscanooga is a town in Florida, the state in which he was born and lived until he moved to New Mexico at 10 months old.
"It means chief of the tribe. It's Seminole Indian," he said. "Tug is a funky abbreviation of that. Grim used to be my graffiti name. I don't really do illegal stuff much anymore, but in high school and middle school and stuff, that's where that got started. I've never shot a man."
He works with at-risk children at Youth Development Incorporated, teaching them to rap or play music.
"I'm basically a music teacher slash social worker," he said. "I play guitar, drums, bass, piano and a little bit of saxophone. And I know a little accordion from my dad."
Two years ago, he went to California and joined a hip-hop group called Safe Sounds. They did shows all over the state until some members became less active, and so he came back and kept doing solo work.
"Things have really picked up locally," Keith said. "I've been doing a bunch of shows. I started off doing a lot of underage promotions, and then when I actually turned 21, I started doing a lot of stuff at bars Downtown and stuff like that."
Tuscanooga
Thursday at the Stove at 114 Morningside Drive N.E.
Friday and Saturday at North Fourth at 4904 Fourth Street S.W.
