Respect. Interview: K.L.U.B. Monsta Talks “Vacant Thrones” Music Video and Being from Birmingham, Alabama

Photo Credit: K.L.U.B. Monsta

Birmingham’s K.L.U.B. Monsta has been making a lot of noise and they are collectively looking to push southern rap. They recently dropped the single and visual for their latest cut “Vacant Thrones” which is performing very well on Youtube. The unique hip-hop trio is made up of J. Dotta, Joshua, and Kel Ricks and they are turning heads with their Wally Sparks hosted project Canvas. I recently hopped on a call with them to discuss their new music video and latest project. Check out the interview below!

RESPECT.: What is KLUB Monsta, who does it consist of and what does it stand for?

K.L.U.B. Monsta is a talented group of young men from Birmingham, Alabama. The members consist of J. Dotta, Joshua, and Kel Ricks. The K.L.U.B. is a acronym that stands for Knowledge. Learned. Under. Birmingham. We were are all raised in the city of Birmingham and the city has directly affected our views on life. We feel like the Knowledge that we learned here created a brand of Monsta’s. A Monsta that wants to aggressively attacked Rap music, Videos production, Merch creation, and overall Artistic branding. We feel like what we have learned in this city created a powerful Monsta.

RESPECT.: Please explain the impact the state of Alabama has on your music?The impact the state has for us is there is so much cultural history here in Alabama, with the common knowledge of the civil rights movement being formed and protested on the streets that we walk on still today. We don’t overlook that at all we accept it and allow that to shape who we are as men. To us Alabama has so much musical history as well and we want to be able to carve our names alongside the musical greats that have came from this state.

RESPECT.: Tell us about the making of the “Vacant Thrones” music video.

From the cover art to the videos our approach has been to write our own stories and created our own narratives. So apart of that notion we took on the challenge of writing and creating treatments for videos and visual ideas. Vacant thrones was one of the first visual treatments we created. We want to shoot something that was weird to look at and had the viewer wonder what the hell is going on. Joshua came up with the idea to create is wardrobe as a ode to Rap legend Master P. The visual starts out as a picture and if you notice in each verse the artist is moving but everything around him remains still. Just a idea that we came up with and it was no other person we could think of that could help us with that concept but our long time friend and collaborator director Tig Knight.

RESPECT.: Give us the background of your latest project. What made it come together and what was it like putting it together?

The When Gawd Ready album has been a 3-4 year labor of love. It has had so many up and downs in the creating process. From J. Dotta battling with a deep writers block to Joshua questioning was music really the right direction to focus in on. What made it all come together was the stellar production from the likes of Rafeal “Anthem” Brown, SWAT Team, A.P. Suaze, Skoolie Escobar, and FTN-Hghts Skip. These guys had some production that we all enjoyed creating to. Every new beat that came in to our email, one of us was booking a session with Brian “B Flat” Cook our long time engineer to lay vocal ideas. The production really revived our sense of artistic purpose and we cant thank these producers enough for helping us create a distinctive sound.

RESPECT.: What else would you want the people to know?

Our simple pitch to people is give this “When Gawd Ready” album 49 mins of your time, we live in a musical space where there is new music dropping everyday the landscape is a bit saturated with rap that sounds awfully familiar. We asked for your 49 mins and want you to gauge the question whether a unknown group from Birmingham Alabama is in the conversation of one of the best hip hop albums in the past 5 years?