Rage Against the Machine cover band Bulls On Parade takes the Casa stage Saturday night.
Local funk-fusion group Boomslang is once again combining with Athens hip-hop artist Ryan “MC Schwartz” Schwartzhoff Saturday to perform Bulls on Parade, a tribute to the rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine.
The group traces its origins to the 2013 Athens Halloween Block Party, where they performed a cover of “Bulls on Parade,” currenty Rage Against the Machine’s second most popular song on Spotify. Originally only planning on performing that cover, the group did not initially intend to develop an entire set devoted to covers.
“Ryan had been kinda jamming with me and JJosh for a while, and we’ve been friends for years now,” said Wren Fenton, Boomslang’s percussionist. “So when we had a full band we thought ‘why don’t we do this cover?’ and then it eventually came down to ‘why don’t we do the whole entire set, and see what we can make of it?’ ”
Schwartz, now an essential part of the act, was initially unable to collaborate with Boomslang to create this side project as he was busy with his main hip-hop project, DysFunktional Family.
“They asked me to do the Rage thing before, but I was just so busy with other things I was involved in, it never could really work out,” Schwartz said. “The timing was right because I wasn’t involved in 101 different music things. I had just finished an album with DysFunktional Family, so that allowed me to free up some space to put in the work that it would take to pull a show like that off.”
Since starting his career more than 15 years ago, Schwartz has personally watched the Athens hip-hop community grow from an unforgiving one into a thriving scene.
“Initially it was very difficult because there wasn’t any kind of hip-hop scene ... there wasn’t much of an outlet,” Schwartz said. “Year after year it got a lot easier to do. Hip-hop has been more of an accepted art.”
Boomslang plans on recording new material in the future, and Schwartz recently released a solo side-project, Altered Beast, which he mixed and produced on his own, and is available for download on his bandcamp page.
sw399914@ohio.edu
