First Person: The Internet

Led by soulful vocalist Syd tha Kyd and Matt "Martians" Martin, R&B sensation The Internet serve up jazzy funk to KCET's Studio A.

Discover more about The Internet in their own words.

On the Band's Name

Matt: [On the name] I guess the main reason is that we all met via the internet [also] the new technology of the generations as far as social media. We just wanted to do six songs and put it out for free because we had been making like some cool ideas that didn't really sound like anything else we heard. We had the platform of Odd Future so we thought "Oh, it would be cool to put something weird out and have just a bunch of people look at it anyways." So therein The Internet.

Syd: It was a joke.

Matt: When asked where we are from, I was like East Point, and she said LA, and Left Brain who was originally in The Internet, but of course, Left Brain is all over the place, he was like, "Man, I'm from nowhere. I'm from the internet. Period, internet.'

Syd: We just started laughing.

Matt: Yeah we just started laughing out like "Oh, that's what we should be, The Internet." And everybody was like, 'I guess.' And we just stuck with it, and just kept going. So here we are.

On Forming the Band

Syd: Me and him met on Myspace in 2008, I think. He had started this group called the Super 3. I was a huge fan, so I messaged him on Myspace one day asking for advice or something because I was like: "Man I want to be in a group like The Super 3. I want to have a music partner." And he was like "Man, when you have a partner you have to split money." And I was like... I was like "well, that's a good point." And then we became partners.

Matt: Over the years she came to Atlanta to visit. I took her under my wing, when I came out here they took care of me so, it's just like a mutual thing, and just blossomed. I think I was just a teenager when I first talked to her. Like, 19.

Syd: Yeah I might have been 14.

Matt: Yeah. Wow.

Syd: I used to talk to random Odd Future members from back then just to get advice on my beats.

On Recording Odd Future

Syd: I lived in a big house. We have a guest house above our garage and my cousin was living there for a long time. At that time I had a studio in my bedroom, because my bedroom is really big too. So one of the rooms in there was my studio and the other room was just where I slept or whatever. So when my cousin moved out I moved all of this stuff into the guest house, I rebuilt it because it was all in shambles. I had my parents help me rebuild it, we redid the floors, ceilings, paint, everything. And then I made a studio out of it. And then one day I left the house and I swear half of Odd Future was outside of my house. And I didn't know why. I was on my way to get some food. And then Tyler [the Creator] came up and he asked me if he could use the studio. I guess he had heard about it because I had done a session with Hodgy Beats a couple weeks before that and I was like "Yeah if you want to wait until I get back from In-N-Out." And he was like "Yeah, cool." So I came back and then I just let them record for free because I really liked what they were making and I wanted to invest my time into it. So I got paid back.
At the time there was a lot of high school kids trying to make music. Whether they were trying to rap or sing or make beats. There was a lot of us, and there weren't that many
studios. You either had one in your house...

Matt: Or you had the homeboy or something.

Syd: Or you had a homie. You had that one homie. And they had just lost their one homie with the studio. They had a place, but something happened, dude shut that studio down. So they had been looking for a new studio. And at that time I was advertising studio time on Craigslist, Myspace, Facebook, all kinds of stuff. And I booked a session with this kid from Pasadena named Garon, and he was friends with Hodgy. So he brought Hodgy to the session and me and Hodgy just clicked right away, my mom made hamburgers, we ate hamburgers. And then he told Tyler, "yo we've got another studio to go to." And then I guess that's how they came through.

On the Odd Future Connection

Matt: Before all this. My thing is I was in Atlanta. And Tyler got onto me because we used to be on the same internet forum for The Neptunes because we're both really huge fans. So we used to just talk music and if anybody who knows Tyler, to talk to Tyler on a normal basis, you've got to talk music with him. If you talk about music that you know then he'll break down and be like "Oh, yeah.This person's tight." So that's how me and him initially got cool. And then he heard some of my music and he asked me to be a part of their first mixtape which was Volume 1. I think I was 18 when I first came out here. I used to just come out here every few months and just work. And do some music with Tyler, do some music with this person, work with Casey Veggies, just random. I really started to fall in love with Los Angeles, you know. Really that's what it was. I'm from Atlanta, and Atlanta's cool, but Los Angeles is a total remix of reality as far as compared to everything else. I think it has the best of every type of state in it, you know? It has the beach, it has the good city it's everything. So I just can't start coming out here. One time I came out here when they had just got back in The Trap, it was maybe about my fourth time out here. It was one of the last times that I was out here that they had The Trap in, and that was back when Syd had long hair. And it was basically a bunch of people who pretty much like, cool. Basically a bunch of just artists in there like the group met Overdose there that's doing their thing. Casey was there. Tyler was there.

Syd: A lot of people came over that day.

Matt: A lot of artists that are popping in LA were at her house that day playing demos, like their first demos. And it was crazy to think back and we don't realize where everybody's going to go. But that house was special, there was something very special about that studio. And that was before everybody, we had to piece up on five dollars to get somewhere when nobody had money, so to have a place where you can come lay quality music was like a huge deal.

Syd: I used to buy and sell musical gear on craigslist, and that's how I ended up with all of my equipment. I would buy stuff. If I couldn't sell it back I would keep it. But usually I could sell it back for 20 bucks extra, right back on Craigslist, and then I would just stack up all those new twenties, and go buy some new gear. And now I have a studio in Hollywood. So it's come a long way.

It was like headquarters.

It was competitively creative. For instance, I could walk in one day and Left Brain might have slept there and woke up and is making five beats at the same time. And I'll walk in and just sit down and watch him make beats for an hour or two. That would make me want to go make beats, and make beats better. Like "Oh, he does that. I'm going to try that on my next one." And I started getting a lot better through watching Left Brain and Tyler make beats. Now everybody makes beats: Mike G, Hodgy Beats, Earl, everybody makes beats now. But yeah, it was always just too many people, but it was never a bad thing, it was never a problem.

Syd: Yeah I mean it was either that or we go out somewhere and they don't know what we're doing. At least I was at my house. We weren't doing anything crazy, we were just making music. And they at the time didn't know what music we were making. So they didn't hear any of the Tyler stuff. And when they did, they definitely weren't happy about it and they tried to convince me to stop working with him low key. But I stuck to it and then they realized I was serious about it, I really like what we were making, and then they understood it too.

On Odd Future

Matt: To me it's a very unique attitude. I think it's weird because people always talk about that Odd Future sound, but when you listen to the actual music, and the albums, and the songs that are actually on the albums, the sound that people say we sound like is nothing like what's actually presented. People like to base the Odd Future sound off maybe two or three songs that are popular and not the actual meat of the discography. So I think the attitude represents the generation we're in.

Syd: Rebellious kids.

Matt: No, it's not even kids, it's celebrities. Everybody is rebellious, politicians are a lot more blunt and a lot more open. The screen is being broke down because of the internet and because of technology. So the censorship is going out the window. So we can't act like, you know...

Syd: We can't act like we don't know what this is.

Matt: Yeah. They know what's going on like social media. When we were teenagers MySpace was the social media. And if you were on MySpace and you posted anything close to being subjective, like any type of craziness, you were deleted, gone. Nowadays every social media has nudity, everything's right there for the basic user.

Syd: The world's becoming desensitized.

Matt: Yeah, I think it's an expression of energy that can't be caged. And I think that knowing Tyler personally and as an artist, I know it's a method to it, and it's a reason to it, and it's an underlying reason that he's doing it. And I think it's just a sound of the times and it was needed like that for artists to come out and be as real as he is, because his opinions are too real for some people but it's needed. I think it's what the future is about as far as our people that we look up to.

Syd: Yeah I mean when I started first listening to Odd Future you hear all of the profanity and all of the topics or whatever, and it's shocking. And after sitting and mixing all of it and recording all of it you become desensitized, naturally. That stuff doesn't pop out at you anymore which to a certain extent can make life better because you're less subject to offense to a certain extent. Like...

Matt: Tougher skin, too.

Syd: Yeah nobody can really hurt me on the inside anymore you know? Even just hanging out with those guys, your skin just gets tougher.

Matt: Super thick, yeah.

Syd: Your skin gets way thick because you walk in and anything you're wearing is subject to jokes and anything you did yesterday, subject to the jokes.

Matt: Anything you didn't do!

Syd: Yeah. You can either shoot back, or be like "Alright man." But you can't cry, you can't walk out and not want to come back, then what's wrong with you type thing.
On the Evolution of Sounds in South L.A.

Matt: I think it's just different demographics. Like there's still gangster rap. There's still people in the hood rapping about guns.

Syd: Yeah, and there's so much of it that you wouldn't even realize is there but I mean, you know. Nipsey Hustle isn't going anywhere, and there's so many kids like Nipsey or who want to be like Nipsey that are trying. I mean, I run the studio, so I see all kinds of people who you would never have heard of, might never think is doing anything. I see all kinds of people with all kinds of sounds come through with the same goal. And that's still out there. I think what happened was, it's trends, you know?

Matt: I think that's why we blew up so big.

Syd: Being in a gang stopped being trendy.

Matt: I think it blew up so big because it wasn't that voice. There hasn't been a black guy that straddles that line. The majority of Tyler's fans are white, let's be honest. And I think that's a walk of life, you know? Like, there's gangster rap, and there's those fans but, I feel like we tend to put things in certain boxes so that it's easier to identify but, you know. Tyler's a certain type of black guy from L.A., whereas Nipsey Hustle's a certain type of black guy from LA. So you have those different walks of life, and it's great that you can get those way different point of views of LA. You've got Tyler's point of view of LA which is sunny, skate, everybody happy. And you've got Nipsey Hustle which is, hustling. You know? I think it's great. And I think it's great that we're forced to look at different lanes and different psyches of living through the music.

On Defining their Sound Against the Odd Future Archetype

Syd: What's funny is that Tyler listens to the same music that we make. He doesn't really listen to...

Matt: He low key makes it sometimes. You just have to hear it.

Syd: He makes jazz and funk a lot. I mean, last time we saw him he was talking about making a funk album too. if you knew Odd Future back in 2007 then you know that there is no "Odd Future sound" that's just one sound, you know? I'd call our sound an Odd Future sound just because you'd have to hear some of the stuff Tyler made some years ago back in The Trap that could have been on our album, you know? And that's why they asked us to release our first album as the first album from Odd Future Records. Because we all know, the people on the inside, we know all the kinds of music everybody makes. We make all kinds of music. Hodgy wrote a song for me a few weeks ago that sounds like Prince. Like, you would just never know. And my manager Clancy when he heard the first album he wanted to prove to people like, we aren't just one sound. It's not just craziness and fantasies and all kinds of stuff. It's neo-soul, it's jazz...

On the Creative Process.

Matt: It varies. You know, on the last album we had songs that I'd made a year ago that we remade live. Songs that she made years ago that we remade live. Then we had songs that would be in rehearsal and somebody would start playing something and we would be like "save that, just remember some of those chords" and we'd go back and make it. So our creative process is pretty much...

Syd: For the first album it was he would start a beat or I would start a beat and then we would just... We couldn't figure out anything else to put so we would switch off. So I would just put three instruments in, be like "I'm stuck."
Matt: And then I'd put three instruments in.

Syd: And then he would come and put three instruments on...

Matt: And then she'd find something else new and... So that's how we used to do it.

Syd: So that's how the first album went but now that we have... We have a band now, so we'll just be in rehearsal and our band is, as you could probably tell, they just want to keep playing. They don't want to sit silently so we end up hearing a lot of different ideas during our rehearsal.

Matt: I think the creative process is very definitely different for all three albums. This album, we're taking much more of a Quincy Jones step as far as how we produce, as far as taking a step back and...

Syd: Yeah, because we're working on the next one.

Matt: Yeah so we're more so directing the band now, more so telling them what to play, who to get on what parts. So I'm finding that you go way more in depth with that I like being hands on but when you have somebody like our keyboard player Jamil who is like extraordinary where you can just tell him...

Syd: And he'll do it.

On Writing Music

Syd: You start thinking too much. Personally, I can't write when I have to write a song. if it's like "Oh, we have this album. We have 12 tracks and we've written six. We need to write the other six" I can't do it. You tell me I have to do it, I can't do it. But if I'm just sitting in the studio one day and the beat is on, and I'll just hear something in my head or something like a few songs off the last album, a few songs off both of our albums are about that way where we thought.

For instance for Sunset on Feel Good, I woke up one morning, and checked my text messages and there was so much going on. And the first thing that came into my head when I got up was "Life is a mess." And that ended up being the first line in the song, because for some reason I was working on the song the night before, couldn't come up with anything but then I thought about that and was like... And the rest of the song I swear just came.

We have one song that we made that's about loosening up, about just going with the flow.
We have another song we made about timeless music, compared to timeless relationships.

Matt: Yeah the music is pretty much going to speak for itself. I think we've got a nice platform to where we have a night where we can feed a nice amount of fans really good music. So we just really want them to come out when they pay money to come see us to really give them a really good show so that they come back. They bring their mothers next time, they bring their grandmothers, their brothers. That's the main thing. We want to make music that appeals to every age group in the family, so you can take your whole family to an Internet show.