When was the last time your favorite rapper asked you to think about legislation, bodily autonomy, or the foundational principles of freedom and liberation? If the answer is never, it’s because you haven’t been listening to Gangstagrass.
Gangstagrass is comprised of Rench the Mastermind (founder, producer, guitar, and lead vocalist), Dolio the Sleuth (MC, vocalist), R-SON the Voice of Reason (MC, freestyles), Joe Cleary (fiddle, harmonies) and Rick Mier (banjo, harmonies). Both MCs are based in Philadelphia; Rench claims Brooklyn and Cali; while the string instrumentalists contribute sonic strums that sound like they come straight from the Delta.
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The band’s origin defies genre and geography. Rench was raised in Southern California before settling in Brooklyn, New York, but his sound was shaped by both coasts’ hip hop traditions, along with a dual dose of bluegrass and boom bap. This collage of musical influences led to Gangstagrass’ first seismic moment in 2010, when the group’s track Long Hard Times to Come, featuring MC T.O.N.E-z, was selected as the theme for FX’s Justified. The track — a bouncy blend of Appalachian strings and classic hip hop lyrics — earned an Emmy nomination and introduced millions of viewers to a new kind of American music.
Their latest album, The Blackest Thing on the Menu, a sprawling, genre-busting masterpiece, was nominated across Grammy categories — yet ironically frozen out of the very innovative genre they helped pioneer. Gangstagrass didn’t just create space for “Black bluegrass” — with The Blackest Thing on the Menu, they remind us that Black bluegrass isn’t an invention; it’s a return. It’s a sankofa sound, reaching back to fetch what was left behind. And yes, there is a tune called Sankofa on the album.
“In the U.S., genre segregation is everywhere — radio stations, playlists, algorithms. Overseas? They just see it as American music. It just makes sense to them.” — R-SON, Gangstagrass
You could argue that Gangstagrass has built the Black bluegrass genre. You could just as easily argue that they simply reasserted an ancestral truth: Blackness lives at the heart of American music, especially in the strings — the banjo and the fiddle — that too often get scrubbed white in our popular (countrified) imagination.
And through Gangstagrass, those strings sing again.
It all starts with Rench
In a wide-ranging conversation with the band while they were doing a recent mini-tour in Montana (sans Rick Mier, who was not traveling with them at the time of this interview), I asked them how this genre-defying band came together. The entire group pointed to one person: Rench.
Rench, a bicoastal hip hop-head raised in a household that sported a country / bluegrass soundscape, started tinkering with the fusion of these genres in his Brooklyn studio in the mid-2000s. “Deep within my laboratory!” Rench jokes. “Honestly, it’s … about encountering different sounds in your life. Growing up, my dad’s music collection — he’s from Oklahoma — was full of country music. But we were living in California in the 80s, so at recess in third grade, it was all about putting down cardboard and doing backspins to Beat Street and Run-DMC.”
“I ended up loving both — the twang of country and the boom bap of hip hop. When I started producing beats for MCs, I kept thinking: You know what would sound great here? A little fiddle or banjo. But people just stared at me. So eventually, I had to start it myself.”
From this collision of sonic worlds, Gangstagrass was born — an unapologetic fusion of musical genres and a direct challenge to the false segregation of American music.
If Rench laid the groundwork, the voices / vocals of R-SON and Dolio the Sleuth have established a signature lyrical style that lives simultaneously in several genres of music. Rench and Dolio met in New York during an earlier iteration of the band; Dolio and R-SON knew each other from the time they both spent performing in and around State College. In the early 2010s, Rench needed an MC for a show in Philly and R-SON stepped in. He freestyle that entire first show, then immediately hit the road with Gangstagrass.
The MCs’ delivery evokes the resonance of Chuck D and KRS-One — booming, commanding, unforgettable. R-SON and Dolio don’t sound like anyone else. They sound like themselves. And they walk in a tradition of Black MCs who understood that volume isn’t just decibels — it’s presence. It’s resistance. It’s making sure you’re heard through the noise of the world.
America’s obsession with categorization once again revealed its limits. The Blackest Thing on the Menu is simply too Black, too bluegrass, too hip hop, too everything for boxes built to divide rather than unite.
At last month’s No Kings protest event in Philly, the hook from Up High Do or Die was on a loop in my mind. I was hoping to see R-SON or Dolio out on the parkway so that I could get them to do a live rendition of the hook to inspire the peaceful protesters during the march from LOVE Park to the museum steps.
Up high, do or die, forever with our fists in the sky!
Up high, do or die, forever with our fists in the sky!
“Anything I write for Gangstagrass,” says R-SON, “could also stand on its own, or fit into my solo work. There’s a consistent level of writing, a consistent space I move in. No bullshit. It all fits within the larger paradigm.”
“Last night,” their Philly-based manager Sleevs recalls, “we were at a house party where everyone introduced themselves. Later, R-SON freestyled an entire verse, weaving in almost every person’s name and details — stuff he picked up just from listening. It was incredible. And he does it all the time. Every show’s different. You’re never getting the same thing twice.”
No place for Black bluegrass?
Gangstagrass doesn’t just perform music. They build community in real time, one verse at a time.
Among the standout tracks on the album is Mother, a haunting, spacious meditation unlike typical bluegrass fare. “bluegrass usually sticks to bright, major chords,” R-SON explains. “We wanted something spooky, trap-like — minimal, eerie. We pared it down to just three notes, and let the banjo and fiddle players just go.”
But the lyrics for Mother have even deeper roots.
“It started as a poem,” Dolio recalls. “I wrote it in Normandy during the second Bush administration, when we were at war again. My younger brother was deployed. Writing was how I processed the anger, the grief. Music was therapy when therapy wasn’t an option.” Sleevs adds that the video for Mother was filmed entirely in Philadelphia, rooting this diaspora sound right back into Black American soil.
The verses on Mother prove the mettle of music and the magic of the MCs, with an exceptional feature from one of Philly’s finest — Reef the Lost Cause. The song is somehow about humanity’s betrayal of Mother Earth, the revolutionary potential of Black sons, and the political madness of our contemporary moment.
We’re in a fight for our life
Against people who use Christ
To justify their fuckin’ spite
The Bible as a gun, religion as a knife, it’s not right
The Right trying to take away your rights
And you say “Both sides,”
Let’s speak honestly
Let’s talk legislation, let’s talk policy
Let’s talk misogyny and bodily autonomy
Let’s talk about who openly wants to bring harm to me
The Blackest Thing on the Menu debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart, just like their previous album, No Time for Enemies. But while the fans and charts embraced them, the Recording Academy hesitated. “The same week we hit No. 1,” Rench says, “we got a note: Our album wouldn’t be considered for Best Bluegrass Album. They moved us to Best Rap Album instead. They even moved songs we had submitted for Best Country Song and Best American Roots Performance.”
This shiftiness on the part of the Recording Academy wasn’t about quality. It was about control — about what genres were allowed to look and sound like. There are too many racial metaphors for this, but the band’s frustration is real. “We live in the bluegrass world,” Rench says. “We play bluegrass festivals. We’re part of that community. But because of who we are — and how we sound — they didn’t want to recognize it.”
America’s obsession with categorization once again revealed its limits. The Blackest Thing on the Menu is simply too Black, too bluegrass, too hip hop, too everything for boxes built to divide rather than unite. Gangstagrass’s touring schedule is eclectic: Bozeman High School (Montana), Gillette, Wyoming, Adams Morgan Festival in Washington, D.C., and beyond.
But R-SON notes that the struggles they face are uniquely American.
“Here, genre segregation is everywhere — radio stations, playlists, algorithms. Overseas? They just see it as American music. It just makes sense to them.”
Sankofa, a bouncy, historically rich tune, embodies this philosophy perfectly. “It’s open enough that people absorb it naturally,” says Dolio. “It hits everyone — kids, teenagers, old heads. We’ve had three generations dancing together at our shows.”
Like the diasporic impulses conceptualized in Sankofa, Gangstagrass is a living archive. They fetch what was abandoned. They stitch it together. They make it dance again.
Before listening to Gangstagrass, you may not realize that you are missing acoustic strings in your life. The fiddle. The banjo. Two instruments born of Black hands. Two sounds that, in Gangstagrass’s music, are reborn as weapons of joy and revolution. Their music slaps. It sings. It teaches. It catches you off guard. It infects you with innovation, resistance, and the power of radical collaboration across cultures and time.
The opening track on The Blackest Thing on the Menu is instructive for experiencing their music, and it delivers another deep message for this political moment: The Only Way Out is Through. You will sing along with the chorus on the first hearing. You will feel it. You will know it intuitively. Gangstagrass isn’t just making music. They’re making a way.
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