#wisechild

Spilled Chai: How did you two come up with the name “Native Children”?

Native Children: So we kind of just combined all of these ideas that we had and then one day Sal messaged me and he said “what about Native Children”.  I was hella feelin it, his explanation behind it was we’re all native to this earth and we’re all children under the same sun so it doesn’t really matter if we’re brown, black, white or whatever yellow, purple, golden…at the end of the day the rhymes that we spit even though it’s a different language and the music is different from many others, at the end of the day no matter how you express yourself you’re native to the same planet earth and you’re a child of the same sun.

SC: How did you two meet and how did your whole musical love story begin?

NC: It’s actually crazy cause the homie Mandeep Sethi threw this show in Sacramento at  Sol Collective called “Word to your Motherland” with Nisha Sembi (crazy artist, Kalakari Crew shoutout to them) and I was 15 at the time and Mandeep was my favorite Emcee. I hit him up and he gave me a spot on the bill and I didn’t know Salvin, but Mandeep -through his own connections hit Salvin up to do some poetry.  So we’re at this show and all the artists are meeting eachother and everything and I had an uncle that came to the show.  So Salvin and I run into each other with my uncle and Salvin’s like “Yo! that’s my uncle” and I’m like “That’s my uncle!”.  So it ended up being that through that uncle we became cousins and then after that we found out that we lived three minutes away from each other.  Also at that time you know we we’re both beginning our creative endeavors and now here we are, two years later.

SC: There are a lot of DJ’s, rappers and Emcees in the south asian community persay, so what makes you two different?

NC: The fact that we’re just artists.  It doesn’t matter what culture you come from because we have to look at where hip hop is born from.  We don’t only represent brown people or Sikhs or Punjabis- we represent Hip Hop culture founded by Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation.  We’re not different from anyone else, but at the same time we are.  It’s like we represent our own culture and everyone else in this community represents their own culture and their own experiences.  Musically we may be really different because we don’t work with typical Punjabi music. For us our only difference is our own experiences-which everyone has.  For example, we both grew up in South Sacramento and didn’t have many Indian friends growing up. Most of the time we spent our days with the blacks, latinos, and many other diverse people that make up Sacramento. We never wanted to be hip hop artists specifically in the south asian community, even though we were influenced by some of the artists in south asian community. We grew up on hip hop, so if anything we are the classic DJ/Emcee duo that just happens to be Indian.  In the literal sense we’re different because we make up that classic DJ/Emcee duo which I haven’t seen a lot.  But the way we express ourselves technically and spiritually is different, but at the end of the day it’s all the same.

SC: You guys just completed your first out of the country performance in Toronto! Reflect a little bit on that whole experience and your mindset through it all.

NC: The whole thing from the beginning, like flying out and everything was crazy!  We went to a Hip Hop show in San Fran and got to watch the big homie Bambu right before heading to the east coast.  Experiencing that and watching someone who you mad look up to and then catching a flight at 5am was just crazy.  But the show itself and being in Toronto and meeting all these artists who we’ve been listening to since we were kids was incredible, and I think that was my favorite part about it.  You come to a complete circle-you got into this culture because of these people and now you’re out here sharing the same stage with them.  Other than that it was just soo much love.  We received much more love than we thought we’d expect on and off the stage. One of the craziest moments in Toronto was when we ran into supporters at random locations like cafe’s and subway stations.  People we didn’t even know stayed through and watched our set and talked to us and we got to meet with the people and that’s the best part…connecting with the people. At the end of the day if you can establish that connection and you feel that energy that’s when you know you’ve done your job, doesn’t matter if there is 50 people in the building or 5.

SC: Describe your artistic vision in any of your home languages

NC: Um I’m not too sure what language this is in but there is a word in the Guru Granth Sahib that talks about this one specific frequency that vibrates throughout the entire universe, and I believe it is called Anhad (celestial sound) and I guess that’s what it is…the sound of silence.  It’s like what Mandeep said you know, If you aren’t making art with a purpose it’s probably not going to be worth it. At the end of the day there is some type of purpose and that primary goal of ours is that we want to achieve this idea of the sound of silence- and what that means is it’s a sound we all know.  We know it in times of happiness.  We all know it in times of sadness.  We know it in times when sending a prayer to someone. We know that across different languages and no matter who we are, silence is universal and beyond the human flesh.  And that’s what we are trying to achieve.

SC: If you could create any dish of your choice and add a desi twist to it what would you create?

NC: Yo it’s a trip that you asked that, cause Native Children and food get along very well.  So one day during our break from recording we’re walking down the street and we get to this indian place and we get there and this spot had strawberry lassi..

SC: Whaat!?

NC: Ya! So Sal and I were talking and we were like what if we come up with different flavors of lassi and it becomes an actual thing, like watermelon lassi or something.

SC: So this is the last question but our whole concept is reaching out to people and asking them how they “Spill their Chai” which in essence is asking “how do you empower others through what you’re doing.  How do you want people to take in your music?”