Photography by Dan Thorson Photography | Shot at The District
“I’m just the dude that makes stuff move.”
When V the Noble One, or Vaney Hariri, showed up in the local hip-hop scene in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, there was hardly a Sioux Falls hip-hop scene, period.
A handful of groups like the Noblemen (a trio V was part of), HeadHunterz, Slamhound, United Ballaz, Night Shield and Urban Illz had to take charge to make it happen by producing their own shows start to finish since venues were hesitant.
“There was really no hip hop, so at the time it was us,” recalled V.
Willing to take a loss out of pocket with each show, their passion for music kept the groups going, and the audience numbers followed suit. Their efforts and crowds didn’t go unnoticed by local businesses.
“What you don’t realize was, even though we were spending a few thousand and—for ourselves—taking losses, we were still putting 300-600 people in a room,” he explained. “So if we were eliminating that overhead, there was so much money to be made by venues.”
Slowly, but surely, the Midwest caught up with the hip hop movement as the music category grew in general worldwide.
“Nobody wanted to deal with the headache at the time, and even now when there’s a hip hop show the police are on speed dial because of the anticipation of whatever,” said V. “[Venues] had to accept hip hop to make money.”
That’s why it was refreshing for the genre’s O.G. (original gangsta) to shoot the cover story at The District, a new music venue created by Jered Johnson and crew, who launched the entertainment agency Pepper Entertainment around the same time V began performing. This made it easier for local shows to book venues.
“It’s interesting because we all started these roads together,” said V.
Now V is releasing his third solo album, Pray for Reign, a more mature side. Or dare we say, a more noble approach?
One of the biggest evolutions from 2008’s The Head and 2011’s The Fifth Element is a live band backing him up.
“This album is what I like to think of as rap grown up,” he described. “I tried my best to make it more musical in terms of instrumentation and more inviting for all listeners without losing who I am as an artist.”
His early work, the Buffalo, N.Y. native says, was “all over the place conscious,” ranging from thought-provoking to lyrical to sexist to violent and more. This comes with the hip hop territory, though, as it’s a newer form of expression.
“The way hip hop works is, a lot of people criticize hip hop because of the fact that some of the content is so juvenile—misogynistic, materialistic and those types of things,” said V. “What people don’t understand is hip hop is 35-40 years old and a young art, so its audience and practitioners were both juvenile.”
Now that a lot of the original hip hop aficionados are older, V says the music will follow with more realistic, everyday themes. This is what he aimed for with Pray for Reign.
To read the entire article, check out the April issue here or on stands now!
{Bonus} An image/concept we didn’t use for the April issue:
We sat down with V and he wanted to show how he has grown as art artist in one image. We played around with the new him (on the left) and the former him (on the right). After playing around with it, we decided not to publish it.
