Here comes Big Smo: The rap, country, rock, and reality TV star brings his ‘Small Town Scandal’ tour to Hermosa Beach
Big Smo plays Saint Rocke February 7. Photo courtesy Warner Brothers Nashville
Big Smo — recording artist, reality TV star, moonshine connoisseur — recently had an opportunity to watch some grainy footage from his past.
The scene: a school talent show. Big Smo is 12 years old, on stage performing “Wipe Out,” a hit single from the early New York hip-hoppers the Fat Boys. And the audience is not exactly loving it.
“I went to an all-white school and I was up there doing this rap song,” recalls Smo, who is also white and whose given name is John Smith. “And everybody was looking at me like I was crazy.”
But something else stood out to Smo as he watched to footage. The outfit for his performance included the dog tags of his father, who served in the Navy for many years. Smo still wears those tags when he performs.
“I was wearing the same dog tags that I still wear,” he says of his 12-year-old self. “And I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s the dude I am today.’”
Authenticity looms large for Big Smo, who brings his blend of rap, country, and rock music to Saint Rocke this Saturday, part of the Southern California leg of his “Small Town Scandal” tour.
Smo tows that eclectic list of genres behind him like a kid dragging a boogie board through the sand: he’s happy once he gets to use it, but down about what goes along with it. He’s reluctant to pigeonhole himself into any one of those musical regions, and seems almost disappointed when asked about the idea of crossover.
“The number one question people ask me is, ‘How do you classify your music?’” and I don’t have a good answer for them,” he says. “I don’t have a genre that I live in. I live in a free area that is influenced by good music for people who like good music.”
If you think this sounds like a copout, I’ll admit that at first I did too.
Smo just released his first major-label LP Kuntry Livin’, and recently wrapped filming for the second season of his eponymously titled reality show on A&E. And at least some of this rise to fame for the man who goes by “Hick Ross” is owed to the juxtaposition of hip-hop and country music. Each is distinctly American, but our complicated national history has forced them into separate worlds—ghettoized them, you might say. Throwing the two together is jarring and attention-drawing.
The common thread between the two genres, of course, is storytelling. And one of Big Smo’s maxims is, “Live it, love it, tell it.”
Smo’s music is at its weakest when he strays too far from this; when he preaching rather than narrating. “Redneck Rich” begins with an interesting acoustic lick, but it’s quickly drowned in country consumerism. The result is a song that ends up sounding like an unintentional anthem of the credit crunch: “Flat-bottom boat, four-wheel drive/John Deere Mower and a Side-by-Side/Always got something hooked up to my hitch…yeah I’m redneck rich.”
But at his best, his lyrics have the power to convince you that you were there, and that this is how things played out. “Ain’t Nothin’ Free” takes a blues lick and lays it over a story about cars breaking down. There are echoes, perhaps deliberate, of Cage the Elephant’s hit “Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked.” But “Ain’t Nothin’ Free” turns that the boastful cynicism of that song on its head. By the end of the song Big Smo’s hedonistic chorus becomes ironic, as a force that can only be identified as karma sets things right on a backwoods road.
Big Smo’s great insight as a crossover artist is that the big tension is not between genres like rap and country, but between folk music and pop(ular) music.
“Both [hip-hop and country] are heavily driven by lyrical content,” says Smo. “It’s not like a pop song where you can just repeat the same four lines.”
Big Smo’s major label debut, Kuntry Livin’. Photo courtesy Warner Brothers Nashville
Folk music is likely not the first thing to come to mind when people hear about a reality-TV star with his own brand of barbecue sauce (It’s called “Meat Mud”). Indeed, minds likely drift in the opposite direction: This guy is just a corporate showpiece, another great rock n’ roll swindle.
Smo has been in the music business long enough to be aware of this perception. Perhaps as a result, he is quick to detail his musical education.
“As I grew up, I had a couple of guitars. I played drums in the high school band. I played the trumpet. I played keyboards. Once I got out of high school, I recorded myself on a four-track, and learned to make simple drum patterns,” Smo recalls. (As he confidently ticked off instruments, I was reminded of the zeal with which Bruno Mars played the drums at last year’s Super Bowl half-time show, as if to say, Take a look at this, you snobs.)
His father and a childhood friend helped him build a backyard recording studio, where he practiced constantly. This was the start of a DIY approach more associated with punk than country, and Smo’s house became headquarters for his musical ventures.
“We were recording and mixing and mastering our own products, working our butts off and saving money,” Smo says. “We were doing it all ‘in house.’ Or ‘in shack’ in the backyard.’”
Smo continues to use the backyard shack to lay down backing vocals for songs, including on his most recent album, Kuntry Livin’.
Released in June of last year, Kuntry Livin’, features a large backing band that would be out of place among the autotune production of much of today’s hit music. In addition to traditional acoustic and electric guitars, I counted multiple fiddles, a cello, a piano, an organ, and some impressive slide guitar work.
These all come together on the album’s closing track, “Lawdy Lawdy,” which features an extended instrumental finish after some off-beat rhyming by Big Smo. The conversation between slide guitars and fiddles recalls the Allman Brothers’ “One Way Out.”
“Got Me,” is another musical surprise, featuring a lengthy chorus with an abrupt key change and more accented guitar work. And on “Down in the Backwoods,” Smo complements a gospel intro with a swinging, syncopated fiddle riff that is the most head-bobbing thing on the album.
Big Smo’s latest single, “Workin’” is an ode to manual laborers, asserting “I’m workin’ even when it’s hurtin/That’s the only way to make an honest day’s wage.” The song hews closer to traditional hip-hop contours than many of his tracks, featuring a boastful narrator challenging an anonymous “you” to keep up.
What kind of story is Smo trying to tell here? Who, exactly, is not making an honest day’s wage?
Smo, who poured concrete for years to support his music career, insists that the song is about “taking pride in what you do.”
“It’s about being part of society in a sense of, ‘We’re the ones that make the world go round’—the people who go wake up and help make the world a functional place,” he says.
When I first heard the song, I assumed Smo was calling out twenty-five years of rap music portraying drug dealing as work. He sounds positively old-fashioned at times as he advocates for traditional values: “I’m out the door by sun-up, focused on the come-up/We never sleep in, that ain’t how we was brought up.”
But Smo makes an unlikely culture warrior. He has country’s work-hard-party-hard ethos, but he also embraces a lexicon shaped by rap’s flirtation with criminality. In “Come On,” another song from Kuntry Livin’, Smo declares himself a “Top-shelf hustla” and finds himself “Out here grindin’.” Intentional or not, he’s borrowing from Virginia rappers Clipse, whose 2002 hit “Grindin’” is something close to a work song for selling cocaine.
Smo is too flexible, too eager to anticipate his audience, to be definitively fused to an agenda. (He calls himself “America’s top consumer.”) He knows who his listeners are, and he wants to make them happy.
“My job is to entertain those who wake up and go to work all day,” he says. “They want to go home and relax, and let the music take them somewhere.”
The transition to Warner Music Group was one Big Smo embraced with some caution after 13 years as an independent artist. In addition to the expanded resources it provided, Smo likes the discipline it imposed.
“You gotta look at the label like daddy’s wallet,” Smo says. “Daddy doesn’t like spending money unless it’s a good idea. But that was good for me. It made me step up my game as an artist.”
The major label deal has put him in boardrooms, and gotten him a seat at tables with major executives. (“I learned a lot by doing what by daddy told me and just keeping my mouth shut,” is how he describes these meetings.) He is grateful for the access, and says it has broadened his world. Nonetheless, he insists that he has managed to stay true to his country roots.
“No one’s asked me to stop wearing Dickies,” Smo says. “No one’s said, ‘Hey, we’re going to put you in some Affliction shirts.”
Big Smo plays Saint Rocke on February 7. Also on the bill is Kathryn Dean and Abby Hankins and the Lionheads. Doors open at 6, show at 9. Tickets $15-25. See SaintRocke.com for info.