On October 10, the day local hip-hop blog Fake Shore Drive turned ten, it launched Fake Shore Dive (that’s right, “dive”), a pop-up bar in the same Wicker Park storefront previously home to Riot Fest’s temporary restaurant—and before that the Saved by the Bell diner, Saved by the Max. Fake Shore Dive stayed open for three nights, and in that time many big-name Chicago hip-hop players stopped in to thank the site for championing the local scene when few others paid it much attention—among them Chance the Rapper, Twista, and Bump J. Even the slate of DJs was full of scene VIPs, including DJ Oreo, the Cool Kids’ Chuck Inglish, Jugrnaut co-owner Manny Muscles, and FSD deputy editor Ty Howard (who spins as SomeGuyNamedTy).
Andrew Barber: The industry has changed pretty significantly in those ten years. There’s a disruptor every ten years within the music industry. Right now we’re in the streaming era, but ten years ago it was the blog era. Then ten years before that it was Napster, when that whole wave happened.
It was definitely a learning curve, trying to usher some of the artists into the new era. But hey, blogs are a thing now. You don’t have to just shoot to try and get your video on MTV or BET—there’s YouTube now. When I was first doing that, there was really no social media. There was MySpace and Facebook—but Facebook, you had to be a college student to do it. Just any geek off the street couldn’t do it. Social media wasn’t a thing. But you could reach out to people via MySpace, and I think once people saw that on MySpace you could kinda upload songs, and people were starting to post their own music—that caught fire.
That’s really what I wanted to do—to showcase everything that was happening here. Not just something that was happening in street rap, or in hipster rap—as they called, like, the Cool Kids, Mano, and all them at the time. I wanted to showcase it all, because there’s more to this city. In 2007, the big four at that time were the only ones really getting any national coverage. That was Kanye, Common, Lupe, and Twista. And Lupe, Common, and Kanye are all from that same kind of school and kind of style of rap. A lot of people thought that was what Chicago was, when in fact there was a lot of other stuff going on. What we wanted to do was highlight that and give some of these underground artists, who are really dope and sell out shows, a platform nationally. Obviously didn’t happen overnight, but brick by brick we were able to help build that.
But once the Keef and the Chance thing happened, everything changed. That’s when labels started flying here all the time. My phone was ringing off the hook, and everybody was coming here and trying to figure out, “OK, what’s in the water in Chicago? What’s happening out here right now?” You saw everybody jump on that train when the Keef, Louie, and Durk thing exploded. In the next six to nine months, the Chance the Rapper thing happened. And then they’re not calling about the drill guys anymore—they’re calling, like, “Hey, who’s like Chance?”
And finally, one of the things I was able to work on is the New Chicago playlist on Apple Music, which helps Fake Shore Drive jump into the streaming era. I know that’s where we are now. Carl Chery at Apple Music—I’m thankful that he brought me in to do this. That’s just another piece of the puzzle that lets this thing continue to work.
