The veteran radio producer and longtime Takoma Park, Maryland, resident wanted to create a space — both on-air and physical — that would be a neighborhood social, cultural and educational hub. So she jumped at the chance to submit an application to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to create one of the small, noncommercial FM stations.

The result is Takoma “T-Rex” Radio, otherwise known as WOWD-LP, a low-power station that comes on the air July 16 with a listening radius of 2 to 5 miles. The station, broadcasting at 94.3 FM from studio space rented from Airshow Mastering on Westmoreland Avenue, will reach neighborhoods in upper Northwest and Northeast D.C. and parts of Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland.

Many voices: The microphones were open, but the station wasn’t broadcasting yet at the open house event.

Takoma Radio won’t be the first or only community radio station in the region — Arlington, Virginia, has the low-power (LPFM) station WERA, and a handful of other small projects such as Anacostia’s We Act Radio maintain livestreams and periodic FM broadcasts. But it’s perhaps surprising that a hotbed of DIY culture like Takoma Park — with its reputation as “the Berkeley of the East” — didn’t already have one. More than 2,800 applications were filed with the FCC, and Takoma Radio received the only new license in the D.C. listening area.

“I’m talking about a mission to serve the community and pockets in the community,” Partridge says. “If you look at the radio dial in D.C. it’s a wasteland. I think also our ideas about ‘internet has killed radio’ is a very privileged perspective and that still a lot of people listen to the radio in their native languages, read newspapers in their native languages and in their communities.”

T-Rex programming will be determined by the people who tune in and want to participate, so Partridge expects shows will be as colorful as the community. Volunteer programming coordinators have been fielding applications for shows for several months, and the diversity of those ideas — combined with ideas from Partridge and her team — encompasses children’s shows; Spanish-language and talk programs; music including blues, local hip hop, punk, acoustic Congolese and a show called Bayou Boogie; live and recorded poetry; gardening tips; local news; and interviews on everything from pinball to astronomy in a program called The Thought Bowl.

“We just have to consider who’s not going to NPR programming and offer some really strong programming for niche audiences right up against those shows,” says Partridge. “Who listens to All things Considered? Well, not people who only speak Amharic.”

A grant will fund an audio production based on a yearlong education program with young people of color from diverse backgrounds and foreign countries. The youths will reflect on their culture, languages, community, music and sense of belonging.

Outreach initiatives like the youth program and live readings and concerts — along with technology training in everything from DJing to Google Drive — are intended to serve as a “come-togetherness” component complementing the on-air content.

There’s a lot of thought behind the station’s process. The overall consolidation of American media in recent decades is triggering a desire and need for local, community-driven LPFM stations like the one WOWD plans to be, says Michael Richards, a communications attorney and former broadcast journalist who helped Takoma Radio win the FCC license. Even the NPR system has been part of the trend toward centralization of news and public affairs content, Richards says.

“There was a tendency to have less that was locally produced because there was so much wonderful national programming,” Richards says. “But what you sometimes lost by having all of these wonderful voices like Ira Glass and all of the programs that were spurred by that, even before the podcast revolution, is that there was less and less space on many public radio stations for something local that wasn’t necessarily news.”

In response to the radio industry’s consolidation and evolution, the Local Community Radio Act was enacted 2010, limiting new LPFM licenses to commercial-free nonprofits only. Corporate broadcasters, worried about signal interference and losing airspace, pushed back and lobbied for restrictions. But nonprofit groups — most notably Prometheus Radio — fought back, and in 2013 a new licensing window finally opened, this time including availability in major urban areas.

Historic Takoma steps up

The realization of Takoma Radio has been more than five years in the making. Partridge says she had been planning even before the FCC announced the new round of licensing.

“From the very beginning of me saying to people, ‘I’m going to start a radio station,’ depending on their age group, the young people were going, ‘What, why, huh?’ and the older people would say, ‘Uh, really, there’s so much. For what?'” Partridge says.

Skepticism wasn’t the biggest hurdle, however. Getting the FCC license required sponsorship by a nonprofit organization, one with a board that had to be vetted by the government (sample questions: Have you ever done pirate radio? Are you a convicted felon?) and could fill out the application for the station. At the eleventh hour, Art for the People, the organization originally sponsoring Partridge’s project, bowed out.

“There was this really scary moment. Then, with hours to spare for filing with the FCC … Historic Takoma voted yes,” Partridge says. Although she calls the vote an “upset” for the board “one person quit that very night, right then and there” — she says most saw a unique opportunity in the unanticipated partnership.
Historic Takoma, Inc. was founded in 1979 with a mission of “preserving the heritage” of Takoma Park and the nearby Takoma neighborhood in D.C. Diana Kohn, the organization’s president, is one of the biggest advocates for taking on Takoma Radio.

“To our knowledge, no other historical society in the country has a radio station, but [novelty] never stopped anybody in Takoma Park from doing anything.” —Diana Kohn, president of Historic Takoma Inc.

“We are trying to collect the history of this community, and radio struck me as being a very unique way to capture not just the current history, but a flavor for the diversity of the people who make up the community now — a portrait of who we are,” Kohn says. “It’s not just that we get something out of the radio, but the radio can foster that more unified sense of identity.”

The group’s involvement with the radio station certainly upends the traditional expectations for a historical society’s role in its community.

“To our knowledge, no other historical society in the country has a radio station, but [novelty] never stopped anybody in Takoma Park from doing anything,” Kohn says.

Kohn points to some of Takoma’s defining moments as proof: The city began in 1883 as the first commuter suburb; residents built their own schools instead of waiting on jurisdictional arguments between D.C. and Maryland; and in 1963 residents stopped a freeway from being built through the center of the town by protesting and establishing historic districts that could not be razed. To her, the creation of Takoma Radio just makes sense.

“One of the things that makes Takoma unique is the insistence of the people who live here to do things,” Kohn says.

That attitude has helped the station build resources, too. The team behind Takoma Radio collectively has decades’ worth of broadcast, technical and outreach experience. Partridge’s connections in and around Takoma Park — and within the often insular radio community — clearly count for a lot, too. The team’s relationships have been vital for significant contributions like cheap rent for the studio, website-building help, spaces to hold fundraisers and donated auction items and equipment.

“We really try to give full projects to people and just say step up and do that,” Partridge says.

Nothing is certain

Volunteers have been hard at work. Program applications have been vetted and the broadcast schedule is being refined. The studio is furnished with a sparkling soundboard, and an antenna is on the roof. On the surface, WOWD-LP looks like it’s already inked into Takoma Park’s history books. But this isn’t necessarily an “if you build it they will come” situation.

Station Manager Tatyana Safronova — who also works part-time at the D.C. Public Library on their audio podcasting and oral histories projects — recognizes that outreach is essential for long-term success. The station has offered workshops for students at the Silver Spring library, partnered with the Takoma Park recreation center to engage youth groups, sponsored a go-go show at the town gazebo and featured a visiting Ethiopian poet. Safronova says the station leadership “can’t expect people to just come into the studio.”

But, she adds, once they do, “they need to bring their own programming, their own ideas about what radio should sound like. Because we can’t dictate what the radio sounds like; it would become obsolete in five minutes.”

As with most nonprofits, raising money will continue to be a challenge, likely a make-or-break one. And even in a community like Takoma Park, which seems like a natural fit for an LPFM station, true staying power will have to be earned — especially in an era when people often have multiple screens vying for their attention at any given moment. And so Partridge is suitably blunt when talking about the future of the station.

“We want it to be really vital in this community,” she says. “In five years it’s either going to be vital or dead.”

The grand opening of Takoma Radio takes place from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 16 at 7014 Westmoreland Ave., Takoma Park, Md.

That’s basically what Heavy Metal Parking Lot is. It’s essentially a movie — if you want to call a plotless 16 minutes and 41 seconds a movie — of drunk teenagers making asses of themselves in a parking lot.

But Heavy Metal Parking Lot has the distinct privilege of being a featured exhibit at the University of Maryland for the next year. Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The 30-Year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation aims to tell the story of how a low-profile 1986 video wound up all over the country — at a time when it wasn’t so easy.

Here’s the short version: Jeff Krulik was working for public-access television in Maryland and had access to recording equipment. His friend John Heyn had the idea to go to the parking lot outside a Judas Priest concert and just see what they could come up with. The two aspiring documentary filmmakers recorded about 65 minutes of footage on the afternoon of May 31, 1986, outside the Capital Centre in Landover.

(James Doubek/WAMU)

Heyn edited it down to the most entertaining encounters — almost all of which involve young people in various degrees of intoxication. And because Heyn had a job at a video dubhouse, they “gave out copies out like water,” Krulik says.

In the early ’90s, some of those copies make their way through friends out to the West Coast, and to places like Mondo Video A-Go-Go, a cult video store in Los Angeles. Dubs got into the hands of people like director Sofia Coppola, who wanted to use it in a TV show, and onto tour buses of bands like Nirvana.

It was protoviral video.

“The story we wanted to tell was kind of twofold,” says Laura Schnitker, the acting curator of the University of Maryland’s Mass Media & Culture collection, who is co-curating the exhibit with Krulik. “First we wanted to tell how the film was created, like what equipment they used and what their initial thinking was. And then we want to talk about how the film went viral at a time when there was no internet and no digital film.”

The exploration of this dissemination is one of the reasons the university agreed to host the exhibit.

Additionally, Schnitker says she was able to “sell” her colleagues on the exhibit because it’s very Maryland-focused. Krulik is a University of Maryland grad (’83) and a lifelong state resident. Schnitker notes the Maryland accents of the people in the movie and its documentation of a “really identifiable subgenre” — working-class white Marylanders, with distinct hair and clothes.

Co-curator Laura Schnitker notes the Maryland accents of the people in the movie and its documentation of a “really identifiable subgenre” — working-class white Marylanders, with distinct hair and clothes.

Krulik donated his archive of source material and video to the university’s Mass Media & Culture collection last year. He pitched the idea of the exhibit in anticipation of the movie’s 30th anniversary, and also as another way to celebrate the donation.

The exhibit is nestled in a small corridor between the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s main building and the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. The floor is gray with yellow stripes, in tribute to the parking lot.

You can see the whole thing in about the time it takes to watch the movie. VHS tapes of Judas Priest and Dokken (the other band that played that night) are on display. One wall contains screenshots of the movie’s “stars” and their notable quotes, including such words of wisdom as:

“Priest is bad, man. Priest is Number One in heavy metal, man.”

“Joints across America.”

“I’d jump his bones!”

“Who are you here to see tonight?” “Your mother!”

Krulik especially wanted to “pay homage” to the Cap Centre, Schnitker says, noting its importance to people who grew up in Maryland in the ’80s and ’90s. The exhibit features a brief history of the venue, along with asphalt taken shortly before its demolition in 2002.

Visitors can see a handwritten postcard from John Waters, sent to John Heyn in 1987. “Your film was great — what monsters!” Waters writes. In what must be truly a feat of accomplishment for Heyn and Krulik, the director of Pink Flamingos writes that Heavy Metal Parking Lot “gave me the creeps.”

In what must be truly a feat of accomplishment for Heyn and Krulik, director John Waters writes that Heavy Metal Parking Lot “gave me the creeps.”

That postcard is one of Schnitker’s favorite items, along with a ticket stub from the concert. It harks back to the days when people saved Ticketmaster stubs as mementos. Scannable codes on smartphone screens these days just don’t have the same charm.

There’s also a wall filled with pictures of magazines from the ’90s and 2000s that mentioned the movie. Request magazine in August 1999 referred to “a Wild Kingdom-style study of haystack-haired headbangers like ‘Zebraman,’ drug-legalization champion Gram, and other Jack Daniels-swilling Beavises and Butt-heads in their natural environment.”

Even though it’s a Maryland story, something like Heavy Metal Parking Lot probably could have happened at any Judas Priest concert on that tour.

What makes it unique is that events weren’t “documented to death like things are today,” Krulik says. “It was a real novelty to be in that kind of environment, that place with professional video equipment.”

The exhibit will be up through May 2017, after which it will be put back with the rest of Krulik’s collection in the university’s Hornbake Library. Schnitker and others are creating a digital version to put online.

On a summer day with the semester over, not many students passed by the day I saw the exhibit. But Krulik is hopeful students will take a second to be inspired when they do walk through. Perhaps from some words on the wall: “Heavy metal rules!”

(James Doubek/WAMU)

“Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The 30-Year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation” is on view at the Gallery at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library through May 2017.

It wasn’t always that way for Margus. There was a time that he wouldn’t think twice about wearing a flaming red wig and playing guitar onstage in a Ronald McDonald costume. That outfit — deployed during a medley of TV-commercial music — was one of many he wore when he performed with his band Friends of the Family in the ’70s.

The band Inspiration, in another photo posted on the DC Bands from the 70’s group on Facebook.

The fast-food-clown getup was hardly the most outrageous thing in the band’s wardrobe.

“Spandex and satin were pretty happening at that point. Once we did a Queen medley and a couple of the guys had capes that had hundreds of lights inside,” says Margus, 65.

In an early photo of the band, its seven members are wearing matching white suits, each adorned with colorful floral patterns made by a man who designed costumes for KC and the Sunshine Band. Caught in what appears to be mid-strut, the band is smiling.

“If I put that on today, I’d get arrested,” Margus laughs.

The outfits worn by Friends of the Family are unforgettable. But the band and its community are little remembered. In an era when walloping hardcore punk and hip-shaking funk were the loudest sounds emerging from the nation’s capital, there was a shadow scene of flamboyant and popular cover bands that played at long-forgotten venues in the Washington suburbs.

These were show bands. They were typically all-male, and often racially integrated. The types of variety shows they staged weren’t exclusive to the Washington area, but the scene was particularly vibrant in suburban Maryland, Baltimore and Ocean City. Like many cover bands, show bands included accomplished musicians who dreamed of making a living with original material. But to make ends meet, they played nights full of Top 40 hits at nightclubs and hotel bars. Making it on that circuit required, at a minimum, versatile musicians who could easily satisfy audience requests for Styx and Billy Joel, “Freebird” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Friends From the Start press image

The bands that stood out had something more to offer, though: Comedy skits. Magic acts. Stunts. Friends From the Start, another of Margus’ bands, brought a gallows on stage for a cover of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.” Bandmate Rick Davis was the lucky member who got to hang during the song.

“We went through all kinds of testing with this thing,” Margus remembers. ”We had him hooked up with harnesses and had the noose so when the hatch pulled he actually wouldn’t hang, but we had him hooked up in the back on bungee cords so it would look like he was hanging.”

Tiny Barge and ‘shooter sets’

Some of the history has been collected by Michael Weiland, who was in the bands Confection, Springfield and Redemption. He operates the Facebook group DC Bands from the 70’s, which features colorful promotional photos of groups represented by the Washington Talent Agency and Barry Rick, once prime movers in the scene.

Prominent bands played as many as five sets a night, six days a week. The most successful groups made $6,500 a week, which would be $20,000 today. One of those sets would be a floor show.

Friends From the Start members Rick Davis and Pete Margus perform at Mr Pip’s in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in an undated photo.

“For the most part bands sat on stage and people were on the dance floor,” explains Arthur Leon “Tiny” Barge, a musician and promoter who developed floor shows for bands while he worked for the Washington Talent Agency. “These were a special presentation where the audience would take their seats and the band would be on the dance floor.” Floor shows were an added attraction for patrons out to see live music. A band that played six nights a week might only do floor shows on two of those. On Thursdays, floor shows drew patrons into clubs on a slow night. Saturday nights, they whipped up a party.

The show-band scene owes much of its success to Barge. A composer who could sing and play multiple instruments, he was a founding member of ’60s D.C. soul group the El Corols, the first band signed to the fledgling Washington Talent Agency. The group’s knack for showmanship made it a hot commodity — so much so that while Barge was still a student at the University of Maryland in the early 1970s, the company had him coach other acts in choreography and audience interaction.

“We were prostitutes. We had to play what they heard on the radio. We sold liquor. If they sold more liquor that night, the band would come back.” — Bob Farris, show-band guitarist

Barge helped show bands pace their sets and warned against habits that hampered audience engagement, like drum solos. Mimicking a solo with his voice, he explains how an audience will stop clapping if unaccompanied drumming continues past a reasonable point.

Kent Harris, singer with the show band Springfield, credits Barge with taking a bunch of white guys and teaching them to dance. “We were idiots!” Harris says.

The most successful show bands could perform, in addition to Top 40 hits, a live variety show that kept customers coming back to the nightclubs. And kept them drinking.

“We were prostitutes,” says Bob Farris, who played guitar in a number of show bands. “We had to play what they heard on the radio. We sold liquor. If they sold more liquor that night, the band would come back.”

Friends From the Start even had what it called a “shooter set,” where customers would send the band trays of lemon drop, apple pie and lime shooters. “People wanted to see if they could get the band wasted, and it happened more than a few times,” Margus says.

A newspaper ad from September 1980 featuring Friends From the Start’s multi-day schedule at Chesapeake Crab House & Lounge in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Show bands played venues like the Classics III Supper Club (now the Classics) in Camp Springs, Club Venus in Baltimore, Mr. Pip’s and Bojangles Too in Glen Burnie and Randy’s California Inn, which currently sits abandoned at the intersection of Route 1 and Whiskey Bottom Road in Laurel. (There were occasional gigs in Virginia, too.)

Sometimes a show band had a good idea but not good timing. Harris, who sang in several bands with Margus, recalls a plan he had hatched with his band, MacArthur Park. “We were getting ready to do a disco version of ‘MacArthur Park.’ We had an excellent female singer, a little like Chaka Khan. Then Donna Summer came in and did a version.” That version became Summer’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. MacArthur Park never recorded its own version.

Despite that missed opportunity, Harris, who also booked and managed acts for the Washington Talent Agency, had other good ideas.

“I went into the Rockville Ramada, which is now a Comfort Inn off of [Interstate] 270. And there was a piano thing going on, a single act. There were only a few people there, and I thought, there’s no club activity at all around here — there’s no place to go. I got together with the general manager to start a band and I told him we’re gonna blow this place away.”

Because Harris was also a talent agent, he had access to top local musicians. “We started doing entertainment there, and the place went crazy — people lined up all the time. There were people standing in the back and one Saturday night the fire marshall was there, and I had to stop right in the middle of a floor show.”

All of that energy and showmanship also led to some ideas that are politically incorrect by today’s standards.

“We did a takeoff on the Jackson Five,” Harris says. “We were the Jacksons but instead of Michael we were Stonewall Jackson and Andrew Jackson. There were things that today you couldn’t do.”

Changes in the grind

When Barge left the East Coast for Chicago and points West, he brought the show-band aesthetic with him, but while some bands adopted the variety show format, it didn’t take off as much as it did back east.

Show bands thrived through the 1970s and mid-1980s, and while some of them still perform as wedding bands, the show-band business model had faltered by the dawn of the ’90s. What happened?

“I was in was the band Bittersweet almost 15 years doing as many as 50 jobs a year. We opened up for Bill Cosby, Fifth Dimension, Ray Charles, Barbara Mandrell. Then it was just wedding bands, bar mitzvahs and company parties. Some of the players had graduated into that,” Margus says. “Then you’re playing the circuit for years, with no recording contract, and you’re on the road six days a week, married with kids.”

Other factors led to changes in the scene: DJs became more popular, and they charged less than a live seven-piece band. But many show-band players say the law interfered.

“In those days,” Harris says, “People would go out any night of the week. When DUI laws went into effect in the ’80s, people would not go out as much. The budgets just collapsed.“

Farris, who performs to sold-out audiences today as part of local rockabilly legend Johnny Seaton’s band, recalls that in least one case, clubs pulled the plug on show bands too soon. He had a regular gig in a popular oldies band at the Pooks Hill Marriott in Bethesda, when one night in the early ’90s a waitress informed him that the venue was closing. It was to be converted into a corporate replica of the bar from television series Cheers.

“I went back there when it opened on a Friday night,” Farris remembers, “and there were three people at the bar, period. There was a stuffed animatronic Norm and Cliff. Cheers was playing on eight different televisions. Three people at the bar. That was the end.”

There are a lot of confessions, rants and proclamations gurgling inside the mind of the 25-year-old Maryland lyricist. When he sets them loose, they fly with blazing velocity. After listening to K.A.A.N.’s newest project, Eclectic Audio, it’s easy to wonder whether the 25-year-old — real name Brandon Perry — has figured out a way to survive without oxygen.

K.A.A.N.’s speedy delivery has fans forecasting his rise to fame. Praised for his technical ability and contemplative lyricism, he’s been compared to emcees Logic and Kendrick Lamar.

But for now, Perry doesn’t feel that fortunate. He’s still living at his parents’ house in Howard County, working various jobs. He used to work at Target. When we spoke in January, he had a gig cleaning cars. Before that, he labored as a brick mason for six years until he was laid off. He dropped out of community college, he says, because he couldn’t afford tuition, and he refers to a lonely childhood, spent mostly indoors under the watch of a protective father.

Now K.A.A.N. devotes most of his time to music, publishing new tracks and videos at an impressive rate. But he’s as self-critical as he is prolific. Perry says once he drops new music, he never listens to it again. If he did, he’d wind up deleting it.

Ahead of K.A.A.N.’s show tonight at DC9, he talked to Bandwidth about his machine gun-like cadence, his introverted personality and why he considers some mainstream artists — such as Future — dishonest.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Bandwidth: You write in a pretty raw, emotional style. Can you talk about that?

K.A.A.N.: Right now, I feel like [my music] has to be personal… because I want to build a real fan base, and the only way I can do that — without a backing — it’s gotta be relatable. So I’ve gotta try and tell the truth at all times just so that people can relate to it. I’m not gonna make music like this forever. I don’t intend to make super personal records for the rest of my career, if I’m blessed enough to have one.

So it’s not just about expression, it’s also about strategy.

It’s 100 percent a strategy. I mean, it started as expressing myself and getting it out, but what I had on my chest, I got it off my chest.

“If I didn’t rap fast, would anybody listen?” — K.A.A.N.

In a piece you wrote for the website Random Nerds, you refer to having communication issues. What did you mean by that?

I’m just not really a people person. I can’t really hold conversations, honestly. I’m not thinking about anything else other than music. People are talking, but I’m not really listening. A clock’s going off. I’m 25, I’m about to be 30. I’m just not trying to be in this position forever. So my mind is 100 percent on music at all times.

How does it feel to get attention for the work that you do?

I don’t wanna sound ungrateful — ’cause I still remember when I would post stuff [online] and nobody played it — but I stopped looking at comments and paying attention to all that stuff a while ago. It’s not really realistic when it’s on the Internet. It’s more like, “Yo, you’re the greatest of all time,” or, “Yo, this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” You can’t really get a realistic perspective of yourself and where you’re at buying into that stuff.

You don’t really seem to court media attention, either. 

100 percent. I can honestly say there’s nobody behind me. I have no money behind me, I don’t have a manager that has connects, I’m literally just throwing songs out and it’s been that way. The more and more I’m finding out about a lot of these [rappers], in my opinion, they’re ho-ing themselves out to get blogs, retweets and placements on these websites, and they’ll have people behind them. Some of the bills these guys get on — do your research, and it’s like, “Wow, OK that’s how [you booked that show]. You got a publicist, you have a booking agent. But you don’t talk about that.”

What do you like most about the music you make now?

Honestly, I don’t listen to any of it. I don’t listen to one single word of it. I’m super analytical. I would take it all down. I did that once. … I listened to one song and I couldn’t — I took it off the Internet in like, 30 minutes. I was like, “This is terrible, just turn it off.”

You sound like an incredibly harsh critic of yourself.

Yeah. There’s nothing anyone’s written about me or said about me that I haven’t thought times 10 about myself.

Did you answer my question?

What was the question? [Laughs]

What do you like most about the music that you make?

I think I like the honesty the most. … Obviously the song structure needs to be stepped up. But I think the best thing I have going for me right now is the honesty — that I will say things on a song that nobody else will say.

Are you afraid that you won’t get better if you’re not relentlessly self-critical?

Yeah, definitely. It’s very easy to become complacent. Last year I was trying to put out a song a week, this year I wanna put out three, four songs every seven to 11 days. I don’t feel like you can to that by [saying to yourself], “Yeah, you know what I am? I am this good. I’m dope.” I wouldn’t be trying to work as hard as I am.

You rap super fast on most of your tracks. Have you thought about slowing it down, doing a different kind of style?

I mean, right now, I don’t have anybody behind me. I don’t have a label. So if I didn’t rap fast, would anybody listen? I’m in a position where I have to show my skill set. I have to show I can rap my ass off.

So your next project, you’ll release it, then never listen to it again.

That’s exactly what’ll happen.

You’re so self-conscious.

[Laughs] Yeah, I guess. But it’s crazy — a lot of these kids don’t listen to anything. Their musical outlook and palate is so weak! They can’t name one song off Nevermind from Nirvana. They can’t name one album from Jimi Hendrix’s catalog. The only album they can name from The Beatles is like, Sgt. Pepper, which is super weak. They don’t know who Eddie Vedder is. I just don’t really feel a huge connection to this generation, for real. I feel like an old man.

Warning: explicit lyrics.

Anything else we should talk about? I didn’t really have a list of questions here — I just treated this like a freestyle interview.

That opens it up to conversation. A lot of these [writers], they already have a preconceived notion and they formulate their questions off that. But especially nowadays, you can’t just go off the music. You’ve gotta actually talk to the person.

Like, Future did an interview where he’s talking about he don’t even do no drugs. [Laughs] Like, what the f**k is that? You really can’t go off the music nowadays. You just don’t know. People are so dumb, and they’re so trained to just accept what’s given to them, they don’t even hold any of these artists accountable. I will never be able to support something that somebody says is a blatant lie. How can you still wanna dance to that? It’s fake.

But you said earlier that you have a strategy, too. You seem aware that you are also selling yourself.

You’re definitely right about that, it’s a strategy. But it’s a strategy to be honest. It’s not stuff I haven’t been through. It’s not like I’m gonna [break out] and be like, “Yeah, I was living in a mansion the whole time, I had money the whole time. I never worked a day in my life.” That’ll never be a thing. Nothing wrong with having a strategy or a plan, but I’m just all about honesty. It’s gotta be honest, or what’s the point?

K.A.A.N. plays DC9 tonight with Jay IDK, Cicero and others. Tickets are still available.

Fat Trel (Anne Arundel County Police)

The rapper signed to Maybach Music Group — the Atlantic Records subsidiary run by Rick Ross — was caught attempting to exchange $450 in fake bills for chips at Maryland Live Casino.

The 25-year-old emcee — real name Martrel Reeves — told investigators he acquired the counterfeit bills at 7-11 ATM in D.C., a police report says. But Trel told a different story on Twitter the next day, posting, “An ATM? I don’t even own a bank card. Picture Big Gleetchie [a nickname] at a ATM.”

In a tweet that’s since been deleted, Fat Trel said he got the counterfeit bills from a promoter.

The rapper, a native of Northeast D.C., first rose to prominence in 2011 with street hits like “Respect With the Teck.” He signed to Maybach Music Group in 2013.

Trel was charged with a misdemeanor in Anne Arundel County. He’s now back on the street, posting regularly on Instagram and Twitter.

Bandwidth could not reach the rapper’s attorney, who is on vacation.