The first time I asked Mito Fabie a.k.a Curtismith and Six the Northstar about their upcoming album, the answer I got from Fabie was, “If you like TikTok music, then this isn’t for you.” It was less a teaser and more a statement of intent. Naturally, I asked about it again a few weeks later for this interview.
“This is just my personal opinion but a lot of the music that comes out now is kind of filtered through the lens of TikTok and what songs are going to make people dance, or what part of the song is the trendy part,” says Fabie. “None of that thinking was incorporated into making this project.”
The rapper took off at the height of the 2010s. His CV, including his debut mixtape in 2015, Ideal, alongside EPs Falling Forward (2016), Soully, Yours (2017), and Dining Table (2019), garnered him the attention and early success a starting MC dreams of. He made headlines rapping in front of billionaire Richard Branson and was on billboards for one of the country’s biggest clothing brands. But apart from his 2021 album Museo, Curtismith has only released a handful of singles to take some time off to work on, well, himself. Since that time, a new crop of MCs have stepped up and hip-hop is bigger than it’s ever been. And now, with his latest collaboration with Six, he has a new, if not clearer, sense of what he wants to bring to the table. “It was kind of like, now when no one gives a shit about what you have to say… what do you have to say?”
Gold Fellas & The Diamond Dame, out on March 21 under Pool Records, is the first time the two have worked together on a full album. For Six, it also feels like the first time Fabie is presenting who he really is. “Mito, I’d say, like, easily one of my top five favorite MCs in the Philippines,” says Six. “I tell him, like, ‘I know how you really sound beyond what you’ve been putting out. I know how you started and shit…’ If somebody asked me to just play fucking two beats, he’s going to kill it. You better prepare a casket for the beat.”
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