Babah Fly
“You wanna know about Babah Fly? I’ll tell you about Babah Fly. He’s a good kid.”
Fly Jedi, now better known as Babah for his paternal sense, came up as a skateboarding, break dancing Arkansas kid that felt a little different.
“When you turn 18 you’re an adult there so people started wearing Dockers,” he said. “I was just wearing normal skateboarder stuff.”
It wasn’t until he heard Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock that he felt like he found his niche.
“I literally remember looking at the speaker and saying, ‘that’s the music.’ I had finally found it.”
When I sat down with Matt, (as he introduced himself) at the Gypsy House Café on Friday before a music/StarWars event he was putting on, he seemed completely comfortable and confident in what he has found to be his.
The first thing I noticed about him was that there is a bass tone in his speaking voice that I hadn’t heard on his CD or live. It made hearing him talk sound completely different. But unlike too many rappers who don’t live what they spit, as we talked about life, family and music it was evident that Matt off stage and Babah on stage are one in the same. As for the difference in sound, he attributes it to his background in Jazz.
“My style came from trying to make Jazz tones,” he explained. “But I stay feeling the beats.”
The beats are what keep him both behind the boards and the mic as a producer/emcee for himself and others. When he’s not formulating drums and electronic samples for himself as seen on his new CD, “Electro Sufi,” he is lending his talents to the Denver Avengerz and other acts in need of something new and original.
His originality and unique take on his purpose as a musician has kept him in the local scene for almost half of his life (he’s35).
“It’s a trip to me that I am still relevant in the scene when I haven’t really dropped anything in so long. It baffles me.”
Despite not putting out any major solo projects outside of mixtapes, his popularity has been based on longevity and sharing the spotlight with other musicians. A status he attributes to what he calls the ultimate strategy of being the “rapper’s rapper.”
“Most rappers are self-serving and are about what they can attain,” he said. “It’s a delusion I have that this music is going to change the world. The vibes I give you will inspire change. I want to get you inspired by your life and the culture of Hip Hop. There are so many strategies to become inspired and there’s a lot that can bring you down, but we always have music and dance to soothe us.”
Maintaining a positive outlook and outlet is what motivates this father of three to keep bringing his brand of Hip Hop to Colorado, something he says not everybody can appreciate.
“Not everybody likes my rhymes. The guy in the audience that beats his woman isn’t going to feel me, but he’s still say my beats are hard,” he said. “The most important thing in life is how I raise my children, so that’s going to reflect in everything I do. The music, in a sense, is like my lover. I would never treat a woman like that so my music says that- ‘be good to yourself and you’ll be good to other people.’”
Whether or not he is making or losing fans with “Electro Sufi” remains to be seen, though the traffic and plays of his new singles on Myspace portray a good buzz.
“Life is going to be heavy. If you have some way to levitate it it’s going to be easier. We can do that with music and thought. There’s a spiritual guidance of Hip Hop in this album-take the modern day hardship and give it that levitation, a levitation through spirit.”
He may always be a little different, but in the world of Hip Hop nothing is better.
Check him out!
Myspace.com/babahfly
~I started PopularLemonade.com as a project to show the world exactly what I was feeling at the moment - from women's sneakers to the new strain of independent hip hop to social and political matters which surround our community at large. 38thSquare.com was actually DJ Lazy Eyez's idea, and it filled the void that I was missing terribly from not supporting local hip hop in a regular manner after leaving Basementalism. 38thSquare features short, 5 - 6 minute video segments which Lazy & I produce. Each episode focuses on one shining member of the community, and we hope to display these artists in a manner which reflects their talents beyond the typical interview setting. Lazy has done a superb job with editing and directing the episodes.
~There was another blog out there claiming to rep for Colorado Hip Hop, but that was not the case. They were only putting it down for the music side of Colorado Hip Hop (And not doing a good job at that). They really didn't know that people were putting it down all over the city, they just knew about the people in there circle. I offered to help them out being that I get down with a shit load of people, but they replied " If you don't like the way I run my blog start your own"... So I did. 
~I have been involved in the local hip-hop scene since the early 90’s. First as a fan, buying albums from guys like BMW, Kut-N-Kru, Tha Homeboys, Direct Assault, Deuce Mob, and others. Later on in the mid-90’s I started making music and hanging around guys like Kingdom, Dez, and other artists making noise locally. Once I graduated from college in 1999, got married, had kids, I basically didn’t keep up with the scene anymore. Then several years ago I just happened to go to a show that featured artists like Spoke-In-Wordz, Distrakt, ManeLine, P.A.A.S., The Pirate Signal, and some others and I was just BLOWN AWAY. At the time I was writing for Westword covering just national artists when they came to town and there was hardly any coverage of the local hip-hop scene. Not because they didn’t want to, but because no one really knew about it. I started the blog in 2006 to basically get the word out about how much talent we have here in Colorado while at the same time getting myself reacquainted with the local scene in order to cover it properly for Westword.