Chicago hip hop duo Free Snacks hit the ground running last year with their irreverent debut Eat Good Tape and haven’t stopped since. Half of the foursome that make up Why? Records, Joshua Virtue and Ruby Watson (legally known as Alex Singleton and Sam Keefe), Free Snacks is keeping up the pace with the release of sophomore project Fast Food. We met up with the two on a lazy Sunday at Why? Records homebase in Bridgeport, where Virtue and Davis the Dorchester Bully (another ¼ of the Why? collective) take up residence, in the shadow of Sox Park, to jaw on the new record, inspiration, art, and the somehow how much cheetos slap. It was an inspiring conversation that gave insight into their process and passion for their art. 

RW : Ruby Watson
JV : Joshua Virtue

History

CCS: For those not in the know, how’d the two of you meet and start Free Snacks?

JV: Sam threw a four twenty party last year, it was was last year right? 
RW: Yeah, 2018. 
JV: So I was dating somebody who was a friend of Sam’s, and he was playing a set at the party. 
RW: It was my album release.

CCS: As Ruby? 

RW: No, I went by Dolan back in the day, which is my middle name. I actually just listened to that album in the car with Rich. 
JV: How you feeling about it? 
RW: I’m gonna put it back out. 
JV: YEAH YOU SHOULD! IT’S GOOD.
RW: It’s so good. 
JV: I was so mad he got rid of that album. 
RW: I thought it was bad, and then I listened to it today and I just need to remix it. It sounds so good, I was making some stupid beats. 
Yeah, we met at that party. I think Alex came up to me and said, “Yo that was really tight” and I said thanks and that was basically it. 
JV: We smoked a cigarette together and I was like “I rap too” and you were like “Cool.” 
RW: I wasn’t even comfortable as a rapper at the time, I was only comfortable to do that in my house. That’s why I threw that party. But then you came over that time and we were talking on the front porch about colors for an hour. Just talking about the color red. 
JV: I remember that. It was you, me and Viv, right? 
RW: Just talking about colors, and was all “I like this guy, I like this dude a lot.”
JV: Yeah, I had forgot about that, that was an interesting conversation. We were both like super faded and the last people at the party kind of shit. On that existential vibe shit, like “You ever think about the color red, man?”
RW: Then Free Snacks happened rather organically. I would send him a beat or two saying, it might be cool if you rapped on this, and then it got to the point where I was, “fuck, let’s just make an album.” And so we made an album. We made an album in three months and that was our first record. 
JV: Even before that, you were mixing and mastering my solo shit. That’s how we really started making music together. That project never really panned out, and after a certain point we decided to just make songs instead and that’s when you gave me the “Probly” beat, which turned into the first song on the Eat Good Tape. That was the first song we ever recorded together for that project. 
RW: The rest is history. 
JV: Now we’re best friends forever, always gonna be together. 
RW: Forever and ever. (both laugh) 

CCS: How did Why? Records come about?

JV: Shit, how did Why? Records come about? 
RW: That was pretty organic. There’s four of us, us two, Davis and Malci. Davis lives here and Malci lives down the street and we already fucked with each other as rappers and we were all making music together so we decided to turn it into something more formal to help people look at all of us. We all have the same goal in mind. I don’t think there’s a lot of people that are approaching rap from the same point and perspective as we are. 

PERSPECTIVE and Inspiration

CCS: What is that point and perspective? 

RW: For us it’s realigning art and intention. 
JV: Yeah. 
RW: To ask yourself why in every choice you make. 
JV: It’s an interplay between life and art. A lot of people just make art to inform life, but art is a result of life. So if you’re just doing it to make art, it’s cute but …. WHY? What are you getting out of it? What are you processing from it? I make art to process. Free Snacks is specifically to … well, if you listen to my solo shit or Ruby’s solo shit it’s going to be very different. Free Snacks is like junk food. It’s like: yo, you had a really shitty day and you’re on your way home and you know you can’t afford it but you really want that bag of cheetos. 
RW: And it’s slap…  
JV: And it’s slap, and you had it that night and it was so good that night, because your day before that was fucking trash, it sucked. 
RW: You can think about the cheetos and not think about your day. Brush by on the surface level, and that shit went slap, it went really hard. But if you really think about it cheetos are fucked up. That shit is fucked up, you shouldn’t be eating that. That shit’s hard. And that’s the silver lining in all the Free Snacks songs. 
JV: It’s a lot of fun, but if you really listen you’ll think “fuck are you ok?” It’s not cute. 

CCS: As solo artists and as Free Snacks where do you draw inspiration?

JV: We’re students of the weird and obscure. Anyone who’s pushing the envelope sonically. 
RW: Shit that you hear and think, “I didn’t know you could do that.” Also a lot of DIY in Chicago right now. I try to stay influenced and influenced by those around you.That’s how you build community and that’s how you build up all this weird shit. Because there are a lot of people doing weird shit, or want to do weird shit. Like Blacker Face. Rahim Salaam. A lot of people. 
JV: I really enjoy anyone who makes an effort to mangle things. To deconstruct. Ruby more than me, but we’re both big JPEGMAFIA fans. Just ripping shit apart, you know. Fucking it up. Even LOWERLIPDRIP now, they’re younger than us, and starting to pop off really big right now, they’re from Chicago. And they’re doing stuff that just sounds interesting. . . just dirty. It’s constantly breaking boundaries and breaking itself down and reinventing itself until it’s not nowhere near where it was at the beginning. The more I try to explain it the less sense it makes, it’s so convoluted. 

Beats and Rhymes

CCS: Speaking of breaking shit down, your beats are mainly sample based. Where do you find them?

RW: Life. (all laugh) 
RW: We both like to sample a lot. I’ll speak for myself but I’m sure it’s true with you as well, we like to use obscure samples. It’s really easy to sample Shintaro Sakomoto, something thats just an easy groove, but there’s so much weird shit you can sample and throw into a song and no one is ever going to realize it’s there, it’s just part of the song. It’s contextually part of the mess. 
JV: I will say, I do be sampling a lot of Shintaro Sakomoto though. 
RW: But you can freak it, man. You can take shit like that and destroy it and no one is ever going to know that’s Shintaro Sakomoto. You can fuck that shit up. 

CCS: Do you ever go crate digging or is it all online?

RW: I’m not much of a records guy. I actually work at a record store right now, and I don’t really fuck with records because I don’t have the money to be buying them. But I hear so much weird music at work, and that’s any easy way to find samples. Plus Youtube is king. You can get down a Youtube hole that never ends, just keep clicking on related videos until…
JV: I feel like I started just fucking with crate digging recently. Well, Sam makes all the Free Snacks beats, I make just a couple here and there. Everything comes from random ass places. Malci gave him a shit ton of royalty free samples and a lot of stuff on the new album is from that. There’s not a single thing on there that’s a sample, per se. 
RW: There’s also a beat on there, on the song “Bobby Hill,” is a field recording of my dog’s barking in my backyard. It’s so loud, it sounds stupid. 
JV: It’s great though. 
RW: Oh, it’s fantastic. 

CCS: So do you create a track first or do you have rhymes that you set to a track?

RW: Usually it’s track first. 
JV: Yeah, I don’t think we ever...yeah that’s the way it is…
RW: Well, it just kind of merges in weird ways, because I’m always writing, but I’m always making beats. Sometimes I’m writing to a beat, sometimes I’m not.
JV: Sometimes something you wrote to a beat you adapt to a different beat because it works better over that. I know that me and Ruby have a balanced rate of output. We both produce at the same rate, which isn’t really true of me and Davis with UDABABY. Davis is a much slower more meticulous writer than I am so the UDABABY stuff takes a long time to come out. Malci is, well a hermit more or less, and so he’s doing his own thing. He hops on stuff, but he’s doing his own thing. But Sam and I make music together like…(gestures quickly). Usually when Sam and I make music together we end up with two songs in a day. I think that’s why a lot of it came out really quickly. Eat Good was insanely fast. The fastest piece I’ve ever been a part of.

New Record

CCS: You two only met two years ago?

JV: Not even two.
RW: It’s not even been a year since that record came out.

CCS: And now you have another one coming. Speaking of Fast Food, where’d you all record?

RW: We did all the vocals at Jamdek with Doug Malone. We made the whole album and recorded it at my house. We took those to Jamdek and re-recorded all the vocals and I took it home and mixed it and mastered it. A big shout out to Doug though. 
JV: A big shout out to Doug. 
RW: We had a really good time.

CCS: You have any release plans in the works?

JV: Our album release will be at Observatory December 7th. With Blacker Face, Mr. River, the rap project of Blunt Corner, and Daymaker. It’s gonna be sick. This is the most planning we’ve ever done for anything we’ve released. We’re ahead of the curve on everything, tapes, merch. This is one of the products we’re the most proud of and everything has gone according to plan. We’ve taken as much time as we needed to take. That’s rare for us. 
RW: It’s a skill we’re trying to learn. 
JV: It’s always been put it out right now. 
RW: Like, I’ve finished it so get it out there.

CCS: That’s why people leak shit.

JV: I wish someone would leak our shit so bad. I want Frances (their manager) to put our shit on livewire and say its the new Gucci Mane album. 
RW: That’s funny too, cause Gucci just dropped an album.

What’s Next for Why? 

CCS: What’s next for Why? Records after this project drops? 

JV: That’s a good question. I’d say what’s probably going to be next is UDABABY 2. UDABABY LP I should say. We’ve also got some secret shit coming down the line that we’re not supposed to talk about. 
RW: There’s more solo projects in the works but people are taking their time with it. Next year is going to be fucking busy probably. 

CCS: Are you bringing on more artists? Or are you trying to keep it you four tight?

JV: That’s kind of the point. That it’s not a means for us to release others, but a means for us to release ourselves. 
RW: It’s more of a collective in that way. 
JV: It’s equal parts a collective and a label, I’d say. 
RW: We love to collaborate with people though.
JV: We do love that. 
RW: Musa Reems and everybody over there. He’s putting up numbers on Spotify, yo!

CCS: So is your solo material on hold at the moment for Free Snacks? 

JV: Not really. 
RW: It’s in the works. 
JV: I just recorded fourteen songs at Jamdek a couple weeks ago, that’s nearly a record. We’re trying to think ahead more. 
RW: I’m probably going to re-release this Dolan record next week.
JV: That’s dope.
RW: Probably going to just put it out there. I’ll put it out under Ruby and just call it Dolan maybe. I mean, I probably won’t put it on streaming services I’ll just put it on Soundcloud or some shit. 
JV: We’re always dropping little shit. We get so ahead of ourselves, because we’re always making shit. There is constant output, so we have to be careful of how much stuff we allow ourselves to put out there. Most of the time we have to hold ourselves back from releasing stuff. We’re trying to mature as artists more. To value the art. 

CCS: Any tour plans in support? 

RW: Not at the moment unfortunately, but hit my line if you want to book us. 
JV: Well we kind of have a logistics issue with that, Sam let me borrow his car to go to Bloomington and it kind of…exploded on the way back. 
RW: It was a whole thing. 
JV: So we don’t have a car anymore. 
RW: The album cover. That’s us in my car. 
JV: That blew up literally two days later.
RW: So shout out...immortalized forever. 

Art and the Industry

CCS: What’s the main differences between your solo material and Free Snacks? 

JV: It’s really interesting, not dichotomy really, between Free Snacks and our solo shit, because me and Sam are in a word, not really Sad Boys, but we definitely use our solo shit to process…
RW: Depression 
JV: And you can hear that in it a lot of the time, but Free Snacks is celebratory. I like to think of the second album as the whole party. 
RW: There’s a lot of motions in a party.  
JV: You start out at the peak of the party.
RW: You’ve already pregamed! It’s lit! 
JV: It’s 11:30, everyones bumping as fuck already and it’s “Oh, shit what’s up!?” 
RW: You got the DJ going! 
JV: Everyone you know saw you as soon as you come in and they’re like: “Hey!” And you’re like… 
RW: Right motherfucker I did come! 
JV: And as you get deeper and deeper into the record, you popped a Molly at some point and shit got
weird. 
RW: A little twisted. Just talking to someone in the backyard, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.  
JV: The cops showed up for a second but you didn’t see ‘em. 
RW: And then you make it home, but you still have to go to work in the morning. 
JV: Yeah, that’s that last track... 
RW: There’s a couple features on the album. Shout out to Audra Nadal, Rahim Salaam, and there’s a little interlude by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. 
JV: Yeah, Nnamdi just talked shit on us for two minutes. 
RW: While he was in Spain with Lala Lala.
JV: In a sophisticated accent of sorts. It’s pretty beautiful. We have a lot of weird shit involved. Shout out to Musa Reems who's on there too. We’re trying to be more collaborative. We have a lot of loosies on the horizon as well. Stuff we’ll just drop on Soundcloud or whatever. I don’t want to get too caught up in the whole idea of art as a commodity. The idea that I have to make this album and put it out at the exact right time to get everything I can out of it. I want to make sure that we still stay free and loose and fun. Because that is what art is in the end. 
RW: And to keep asking why. Because that’s where it all started. 
JV: You can’t forget the main reason anyone starts making music. Because its fun. 

CCS: How do you all feel about the state of the industry? 

RW: The industry has always been fucked. 
JV: As soon as it became an industry it was fucked. 
RW: Even back in Tin Pan Alley days it was fucked, it was stealing music from other people, no one’s getting paid for actually writing music and making art. So the state of the industry is also just a reflection of the state of the world. Shits not great but there’s still so much good stuff there. 
JV: Well art was usurped by capitalism, naturally because we are a capitalist nation, so it was natural that hip hop would take that same route. It became so popular that all the rich white people decided they could make money off it. That’s why we don’t sign, we have no interest to sign. If it’s a really sick label that wants to make Why? a subsidiary, then maybe, but it’s got to be the RIGHT contract. 
RW: I was thinking about this as I was walking home from the Daymaker release show. It was two in the morning, so the clock rolled back, and I got home at the same time I left the show. I took that walk as Rahim would say, and I was thinking about the state of the world and art. It’s really easy to think that its the worst it’s ever been right now, but if you think about it, shit’s the best it’s ever been, and it’s also the worst it’s ever been because of the information flow. But it’s always been worse if you think about the history of the human race. Which reflects how art now, and the music industry now, is just as fucked up as the world is now, but there’s also so much good in it, and what we’re trying to do is continue to build that community and support it, because that’s the only way art is going to come out on top. 
JV: We talk about it as art becoming a system of community instead of a commodity. If we keep it as a community it’s so much better. It’s like we were trying to find a “legit” venue to do our release at, but it kind of worked out that the timing didn’t work. I’m really grateful to be doing it at Observatory, because that’s our community. It’s still alive. The industry is fucked but the people are good. It’s not really an industry as far as we see it...and I love Playboy Carti.
RW: And at the end of the day I’m still going to listen to Drake. 
JV: I listen to Drake too. I know its all a lie, it’s fine. We just got to get by. We’re all doing the best we can in the oncoming apocalyptic climate change onslaught that is life and death on this planet.