Hatch Podcast Series – Gangstagrass

This story starts at Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, Nebraska. At the HATCH Summit. A gathering about world-building and cultivating relationships—set in a town with a long memory, including its role in the Underground Railroad. And from there, it moves to music. To Gangstagrass. They’re Emmy-nominated. Billboard-charting. And they’re also the soundtrack for Dispatch from the Heartland.

Hip hop and bluegrass sit together here— banjo and bars, rhythm and rhyme— without explanation. Just present. Tate Chamberlin sat down with Gangstagrass— Dolio The Sleuth, B.E. Farrow, Rench, Sleevs, Danjo Whitener, and R-SON, the Voice of Rason.

There’s a quote they have that keeps coming back:
We all do better when we all do better.
Can’t get better than that.

That quote opens up a longer story. One that passes through blackface minstrelsy— an old form of Entertainment in the United States where white performers painted their faces black and acted out cruel, exaggerated versions of Black life, earning premium wages while doing it, taking work, money, and stages away from Black performers, turning real people into jokes and stereotypes.

Those images didn’t stay on the stage. They moved into songs. Movies. Cartoons. Into culture.

This is a story about Music. About memory. About relationship. About Afrofuturism— not as escape, but as continuity. A future imagined with the past fully in frame.

This is Gangstagrass. Join us, won’t you?

Since this conversation was recorded, the band has changed. B.E. Farrow and Danjo Whitener are no longer part of Gangstagrass. So this episode holds a moment. A particular configuration. A sound and a set of voices, right then.

Sleevs isn’t in the podcast cover photo. But she’s featured in the photo in this post, and in our past episode, The State of Journalism.