If you live in Nashville, hopefully you are or are becoming familiar with the city’s rich, dynamic hip-hop scene. Artists like Daisha McBride, Petty, Tim Gent and Brian Brown are local favorites for their singular takes on writing and performing, as well as the active roles they play in Nashville’s heavily collaborative rap community. Many of them were featured in a recent outstanding collection of feature pieces for National Public Radio by veteran music journalist Jewly Hight.
Another of Nashville’s best-loved MCs has a new project that seeks to boost Music City’s signal to reach a broad national audience. Outstanding rapper and East Nashville native Gee Slab collaborated with Datwon Thomas, editor-in-chief of influential hip-hop and R&B magazine Vibe, on Tenn Toes Down, a playlist of Nashville rappers that serves as a 16-track primer on the city’s eclectic and exciting community of talent. Tenn Toes Down, which landed on Soundcloud and Audiomack on Oct. 9, was born when Slab visited Thomas in New York City in late 2019. The pair went live on Instagram, and Slab started playing tracks from Nashville artists, which quickly got the attention of Thomas’ IG followers.
“People were liking it and asking who the artists were, and we came to the idea,” Slab tells the Scene. “He said, ‘Do you want to do a project?’ He put the ball in my court.”
The pair originally planned to release Tenn Toes Down in March, but they put the project on hold in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. They reconnected in July, and Slab resumed contacting Nashville artists to gauge their interest in being part of the compilation.
“I hit up 50 to 60 artists,” he says. “The 16 on the project definitely weren’t all I contacted. … You can’t please everybody. So you can’t get everybody on there. We weren’t trying to make it a 30-song thing. We wanted it to have an album feel, where people will pay attention to the track list.”
Slab and Thomas met back in 2017 through a multi-city run of shows Vibe organized to feature rising MCs, called the Freshpack Tour. Thomas offered Slab a trip to New York City and an introduction to producer King Henry. In turn, Henry helmed a five-track EP featuring Slab called Favor Ain’t Fair, which was released that December and promoted by the magazine.
Thomas saw a lot of talent in Slab, to be sure, but he also saw an artist deeply committed to his city and its community of artists. Accordingly, Thomas gave Slab full creative control over the curation of the playlist project.
“I would send Datwon stuff, but he gave me full range to chop it up how I wanted to,” Slab says. “I did about 20 different arrangements of the songs once I got down to the 16.”
Artists who appear on the project include the aforementioned McBride, Petty, Gent and Brown, as well as fellow mainstays like Mike Floss and newcomers like Quez Cantrell and Legendary Spitta. The track list is a mix of unreleased music and fan favorites, with Slab explaining that he let each artist choose the track they believe best represents what they do. The resulting collection shows not just the depth of Nashville rappers’ talent, but also the city’s wide range of sounds. That range is what Slab thinks makes Nashville hip-hop so distinctive.
“We don’t have one sound,” he says. “That’s what’s really special to me — that you can get any piece of what you like out of hip-hop or rap, and find all of it here. If I want to go listen to trap music, I can go find it. If I want to go find more alternative styles, I can go find it. If I want bars all day, I can go find it. If I want some bops, if I want to get a vibe — whatever I want, I can go find everything in one city. In other cities, they have a formula.”
Slab himself appears on the project too, closing out the compilation with his track “Crap Table.” The track, produced by DviousMind, is something of an origin story, in which Slab peppers a personal narrative (“Went broke and bounced back without an ounce of pity”) with pearls of wisdom (“Don’t know yourself, how you tell me what I need?”) over airy keys and swirling vocals.
“I wasn’t planning to put myself on the project, but that’s one thing Datwon said I had to do,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was trying to make myself seem like something, but he was like, ‘Nah, you gotta put a song on there.’ So that’s why I made my song the last song.”
Much of 2020 has been challenging for Slab. Several of his loved ones lost homes in the March tornado, and he’s lost friends and an uncle to COVID-19. He was unable to write for the first three months of the pandemic, but he has since found his footing and is focusing his energy on new projects. In September, he released a new single, “Garnett,” which follows his summer EP No Signal. He has a number of plans in place for 2021, including a Tenn Toes Down event he says will be “major.”
“We’re doing a lot to keep this train going. Somebody told me a long time ago that when you get the light, you better stay in it. So that’s what we’re doing.”
