As part of QN5, Tonedeff and PackFM have cooked up a plentitude of dope music over the past decade. The New York rappers explain that their music isn’t driven by material success, but rather by the intention to inspire listeners and remind them that they aren’t alone.
“I feel like my favorite artists are the ones who are most honest about life in their music, and I feel like if you’re honest in your own music, then that will connect more with the listener,” Tonedeff told TheBeeShine.com. “Especially in hip-hop, there’s so much loneliness. Everybody is somebody else and pretending to be somebody else. I’m just trying to bring honesty back. Whatever I can drum up and filter out in terms of influences, just different types of music or life experiences and hardships and stress, fucking pain, whatever, that’s all going to come out in a very simple, honest form.”
He continued by explaining that he’s most inspired by his self-proclaimed hero, John Lennon. “Like my hero, lyrically, is John Lennon. And I always say this, the best quote I’ve ever heard in a song ever is ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’” he said. “For somebody to coin that and come up with something and whittle the experience of humanity down in one line like that, that’s genius. That’s the kind of shit that inspires me, just pushes myself so I can hit those kind of levels of inspiration.”
Brooklyn, New York native PackFM echoed his sentiments. “I guess there’s a lot of people out there who don’t feel like they have anybody they can relate to. I don’t try to be anybody else; I just try to be myself and I want people who are similar to me to try to latch onto what I do,” he said. “That’s why when I get out there, I try to bring everybody together and just feel like you’re all in the same place and you’re all a part of the same thing. It takes away from that loneliness that a lot of people get. I just really like to give people something that they can relate to without being pretentious about it. Just being that normal dude. I also like rapping. I get inspired to also make better raps at the same time. It’s the competitive nature of me.”
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