Charleston hip-hop and R&B showcase Cultura Festival returns to The Royal American outdoor lot May 6 to spotlight musical artists from throughout the state and the Southeast region.
“Hip-hop music allows me the space and the comfort of just being myself,” said Matt Monday, festival curator and hip-hop artist.
“It does something to hear somebody’s going through the same thing you’re going through — and that’s just music in general,” he said. “But hip-hop is directly correlated to the Black experience. The music is an opportunity to create empathy for those who don’t understand that experience, or those who care to understand, in a very vulnerable and authentic form.”
New Orleans rapper Curren$y will headline Cultura Festival, which is stacked with both Charleston-based and regional artists whose music spans progressive rap, conscious hip-hop, contemporary R&B and neo-soul.
Artists on the bill include Charleston acts Mike Brown, Tyrie, R Dotta and Illa Dell; Columbia-based Crucial BGR, Sun Rhe and Just Alex (also known as Melodik); Greenville’s own $wvnk and Hartsville-based Blueflame James.
Monday, a North Charleston native, said he founded Cultura Festival in 2019 to create a platform for the city’s stylistically diverse hip-hop and R&B music that was so often overlooked. Monday was a staple in the local scene for more than a decade before relocating to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2020.
The Covid-19 shutdown put a hold on Cultura Festival like so many other music events in 2020, which was the year Curren$y was originally set to perform. In addition to Curren$y, a nationally known artist who’s previously collaborated with Wiz Khalifa and T.I., this year’s Cultura lineup features four female acts Sun Rhe, $wvnk, Just Alex and DJ Shamrock.
“We make sure that there’s representation for women,” Monday said of the team behind Cultura Festival. “These women exist here, and they’re making this work. They’re making this art, and they’re speaking for a demographic that normally wouldn’t be spoken for in hip-hop.”
Monday said the inaugural 2019 Cultura Fest was a way to help correct the lack of promotion for Charleston R&B and hip-hop so the artists weren’t just “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” While there’s a lot of potential for the Charleston music industry to support the genres, he said, there’s been fewer opportunities compared to the space given to rock and alternative music.
“We definitely are fighting against the machine,” Monday said. “I think there’s just not a lot of access to play at a decent venue that’s not out on James Island or North Charleston with good sound … From a Charleston standpoint, because there’s such a lack of cultivation, it’s going to be a slower process. A scene can’t thrive without us cultivating it on a more consistent basis.
“There’s a ton of talent … but so few of them are given [an] opportunity.”
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