Miami's OG Dirty Connects With DCWS To Discuss His New Project and The OFFRIPCULT Collective
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OG Dirty is a Miami based rap artist who is a member of OFFRIPCULT, a collective of creatives ranging from artists to photographers, website designers and producers. OG Dirty's single '45' which will appear on his upcoming release "Warm Winters", was selected recently as our "DOPE Song of the Week", so it only made sense that we dig a little deeper into the mind of the emerging artist to find out how he started rapping, what we can expect from the Warm Winters album (dropping on Sept. 1st), and much more.
So how did you get your start rapping?
That's a funny story actually, my boy Jskii (also a member of OFFRIPCULT) had came to us around the summer before 9th grade, so we talking like 2011, he had came up to us and told us he was dropping a mixtape this coming year and to be ready for it, so naturally we were all hype to hear it since Jskii been rapping for a minute already just dropping freestyle videos and all that on youtube. So the coming year came and he didn't drop anything, and after a bit more time passed and he still hadn't dropped the tape I was like "Yo, I bet I can drop a mixtape before you do." So the idea was to drop a little tape there clowning on him cause that's the homie but when I actually got into making it and the whole process I actually really liked it a lot! It was fun for me and a new way of expressing all the things going on in my head, so through that I just started working and studying the in's and out's of making music and just getting better day by day until the point where I was confident enough to start releasing the music, and basically yeah that's how I started rapping!
Tell us about OFFRIPCULT; who are the members and how did you guys connect with each other?
OFFRIPCULT is basically just a group of 11 friends just trying to encompass all forms of entertainment and creativity with the main focus being on music above all, we have the artists, managers, photographer/videographer, producers, website maker and overall just people that are really talented in being creative and making dope content whether its music, videos, photography, graphic art, clothing, all that and pretty much anything else you can think of. To run down the members real quick we have the artists which include myself, Jskii, Mageez, JGuada, and Asix. Then we have Alex Reyes, Jose, and Brandon as our managers and they basically handle the business aspect of things and are the main speakers during our meetings and whatnot, and then we got Henry, Ivan, and Anthony who do the multimedia aspect like Anthony is the photographer, Henry handles the website and Ivan reaches out and contacts the outlets. Even though you can specify the jobs everyone still does a little bit of everything and we consult together for mostly all decisions. As far as how we connected, these are all people I've known since my early elementary school days and if I didn't know 'em then, then someone from OFFRIP knew them since then, so it's a very tight knit group where even outside of all the business we're still best friends and are always together.
What can we expect from your upcoming project "Warm Winters", where will everybody be able to stream/download it and on what date will it be available?
Yes, the project! Alright so the project is called Warm Winters and it will be available September 1st! When it comes to what you can expect from the project it's hard to say one specific thing because my goal with the project was to cover the whole spectrum of emotions any given person can feel, including myself. I got songs on there man where I will rap my ass off over heavy 808s and then I got songs where I'll just sing my heart out and open up to the listeners, and then I'll have songs where I blend both styles together. The point being that me as a person I go through a whole mess of feelings and emotions and with Warm Winters I just really wanted to capture as many of them as I can and lay them all out in one cohesive project where the songs will blend together well and transition almost like a story, I have a whole theme going on in the album with little skits between songs which explain what it is that I'm going through at that given point in the project. As far as where it will be available, the best place to find it would be SoundCloud, @OGdirty and can be found under @OFFRIPCULT as well, we'll try to have it up for streaming on spinrilla as well as other mixtape streaming apps but for now your best bet is Soundcloud, and that will be available September 1st, my birthday!
You are based in an area (South Florida) with a great legacy in music, especially Hip-Hop. Who are some of your musical influences?
Everyone knows about South Florida's legacy in music with people like Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, Trick Daddy, and it goes way deeper than just rap, Miami and South Florida as a whole is just a really rich place when it comes to music and diversity. When it comes to my influences from South Florida rappers though I get a lot of inspiration from the new wave like Pouya and Buffet Boys, Denzel Curry who has been going in for a while now, Robb Banks, Yung Simmie and the list goes on and on, it's hard to not be inspired and want to make music when you see all these dudes putting in work and representing for the city! Outside of Florida though my favorite artists as well as the main inspiration behind almost all the music I make are Kendrick Lamar, Mac Miller, Travi$ Scott, Kanye, Young Thug, Isaiah Rashad, Jay-Z and the list goes on but that's some of the higher ones on my list. I try to combine a whole bunch of different flows, sounds, and styles when I make my music and a lot of it comes from those artists previously mentioned.
What are your goals for the remainder of 2016 and can we expect a new OFFRIPCULT collaborative album or EP anytime soon?
My goals for the rest of 2016 after dropping Warm Winters is just to continue to network and interact with the many outlets I have around me as well as performing at way more shows and laying the groundwork to be able to perform at a lot of festivals in 2017, you're going to be seeing a lot of me and OFFRIPCULT as a whole working throughout the rest of 2016 we have solo projects lined up to drop before the end of the year. I don't know if you can expect a full fledged OFFRIPCULT collaboration to come out anytime soon since most the artist are working on their solo projects and it's difficult to get everyone to sit down and work on one at the moment but I can tell you that there is going to be collab EP between myself and Jskii dropping before 2017 so be on the lookout for that, that's gonna be crazy good I can't wait for y'all to hear it, as always you can keep up with all our news and upcoming releases and shows by finding us @OFFRIPCULT on basically any social media and our website offripcult.com. Thank you guys for everything, everyone at OFFRIP appreciates every person who takes a second to check us out and show love, we have a lot more coming for y'all in the form of music, videos, clothing and everything else, we're not stopping anytime soon so we hope the listeners can be there with us while we continue to grow and evolve, thanks again!
Connect with OG Dirty: Twitter