Savage Tribe Familia – “110% real”
It takes a village to raise a child, but you’re not a man untill you join the tribe. This exclusive sect of hip-hop medicine men push their remedy’s through MPC’s, diamond tipped needles and microphone cords. The four members of Savage Tribe are not your average musicians they live the life like it’s a religion. Savage and Renessis are the original seeds of the crew and Subverse holds down the Saint Louis chapter. The Tribe is overseen by Mic Ave who passed in 06 but his influence is still felt with archived verses for future release. Savage and Renessis (A.K.A. Sav and Ren) were raised in the Saint Louis, childhood friends they attended the same high school. They often crashed on each others couches when they couldn’t or didn’t want to stay at their own places. They could be found freestyling under bridges and always noticed they were the last kids out at night.
Renessis acquired turntable’s at the young age of 14, after this they collected any piece of equipment and vinyl they could get their hands on, if it didn’t work they tought themselves to fix it. By the age of 18 they had original tracks and this marked the unofficial beginning of the Heavenly.Wharf.Music label which they release music on today(Click above image to check out some 2010 releases). That Summer Ren is accepted to Full Sail audio production school in Orlando Florida. The two vow to stay in touch and Ren jets down south for School. Savage and the rest of the crew stalked the streets of STL with their homegrown style of hip-hop looking for local spots to rock. A dirty downtown heavy metal bar called “Just Bill’s“ seemed like an unlikely place to meet like-minded people untill they started hosting weekly hip-hop night.
In an often strangely mixed crowd local artist’s DJ Spec, DJ Who? and Spark1duh became heavy on the scene. Savage always on grind mode contacted the venue himself and booked his own show on the strength of their tracks. After his first performance at the venue Sav was approached by DJ Spec impressed by the set, suggested they team up. The Sav and Spec live show’s were off the hook with similar influence their styles blended well and they were quickly noticed in the local scene. By 2006 they knew so many other artist putting out hot original music in Saint Louis, that they started looking for a way to get their own and their people’s music on the air waves. Always following Savage Tribe tradition of “Fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves” RawCoreRadio is launched on the internet.

Sav and Spec scraped up enough money to purchase some basic internet bandwidth. With Spec mixing live and Savage spitting hot verses as well as finding his niche as a radio personality, Rawcore Radio became an instant hit. Streaming online weekly at first the show soon grew to include guests and exclusive music, a lot of people wanted to roll through. The traffic along with the equipment it took to make the show made spots to broadcast from increasingly hard to come by. So Sav took some influence from the L.A. rave scene he had discovered on a recent trip, and they acquired a generator and went straight guerrilla radio style and started streaming from abandoned warehouses in downtown STL. They once invited so many people to a live show the cops got wind of it and turned everyone away from the location before the could even set up. They eventually were able to have 24/7 stream of music with live shows whenever they could get them in.
In around 08 Sav reconnects with his good friend Renessis who has landed a gig at Private Island Tracks a well-known studio in west Hollywood. Ren twist’s Sav’s arm (haha) to quit his gas station job and come to L.A. With last paycheck in hand Sav says goodbye to homies and heads out west to get back to Savage Tribe business and kick off Heavely.Wharf.Music (name inspired by the view from Beverly Hills Wharf Club). Sav continued Rawcore radio from L.A. it even started getting love overseas in places like Uganda from a missionary/hip-hop head friend of Sav’s named Cold Words who runs”Emcees for peace” an organization who builds wells and teaches music in underdeveloped countries. Rawcore Radio had gotten so big that Sav was faced with rising bandwidth costs and had also received a couple of copyright infringement letters from the FCC. The Rawcore project was shut down but not forgotten in 09. Here’s a track describing Sav’s early L.A. days by East Saint Louis Crew Loose Screws ft SAV called “L.A. Times (S.T.L.A.)”
So Savage Tribe Familia and Big Sofa Gang are the same people? I’m so much more confused than I already was.
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Haha for real, right. Sofa Gang is a side project of Savage Tribe, here is the catalog, enjoy. http://savagetribe.bandcamp.com/
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Tight all dai… Keep movin up and get it in like always.
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