When he was a kid, Sideshow wasn’t particularly interested in music. He and his friends would scatter across the Arat Kilo section of Addis Ababa, happily unsupervised, playing marbles and riding bikes; the songs he heard, many of them mezmur numbers intended for the church or pop standards about stuffy romantic ideals, seemed decidedly for adults. “They’re singing about God and they’re singing about love,” the 28-year-old rapper, born HaileMariam Kassa, says from his Virginia home, “and I thought to myself, I’m not in love with anybody. I’m young. I don’t even care about that.”
But after he, his father, and his two siblings followed their mother to America (a journalist, her work had rankled the Ethiopian government at the time) he began inching toward hip-hop. Through his adolescence in Arlington, Virginia and early adulthood in Los Angeles, Sideshow would learn to craft songs of his own that deal with contemporary ills—prescription pills, semilegal firearms—as if they’re eternal evils.
His latest album, TIGRAY FUNK, takes its name from his homeland and fuses it with the G-funk he immersed himself in while living out West. Through 32 songs (and divided into four discs), the record is coiled rather tightly around a parable about a tiger, a dog, and original sins of violence. Sideshow, who credits encouragement from MIKE as one of the catalysts for his career, is a natural fit on MIKE’s label 10k Global, which now houses a significant percentage of underground rap’s vanguard; it was Niontay who recently showed him how to record himself, allowing for TIGRAY FUNK to spring from unusually isolated sessions.
Toward the album’s end, on a song called “LOOK WHAT OUR STOMACHS MADE US DO,” Sideshow raps: “From Tigray to Palestine, we facin’ cold facts/If you not white with blue eyes, your suffering don’t matter.” TIGRAY FUNK is more than a lament in that direction; it explores the underpinnings of violence banal and spectacular without ever become didactic or prescriptive. It’s an achievement in form, in tone, in rhythm, and as political thought, a genuine revelation.
