Music INSIGHT
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Invisible
by Benjamin Nunnally
Y
ou may know drummer Cameron Johnson from his run with Northeast Alabama punk band Beach Party, but he’s
back with “Golden Giraffe,” a new mixtape
that shows off his skills with a selection of
hip-hop and rap settled over his beats, adding new depth and intensity to the songs. We
were able to speak with Johnson about the
new tape ahead of the release of a video for
the first single, “Finally Moving to Oakland.”
I know you from Beach Party, and you’re
a good drummer. You could’ve gone anywhere in the band’s downtime, so why did
you choose to work on a mix tape?
It’s a project I’ve had going in my mind for a
long time, I’d say at least since Beach Party
started, right around the time the band started. I never did anything with it but it always
festered. It was after “No Ceilings,” the Lil’
Wayne mixtape came out, I was listening to
it and thought it would be really cool to play
drums over all these songs, live.Why not just
do that? It was a few years after the DJ AM/Travis mixtape, which was them basically doing
that, playing to a DJ’s set, already mixed songs.
But let’s not do the whole song, let’s split them
May 2015
INSIGHT