Twenty years after the release of his first album "Odličan CD", the Bosnian rapper Frankie says "I won't throw in the towel, I'm still on the road" in the new song "Chapters".
With this single, but also with the exhibition of the same name "Chapters", Adnan Hamidović, known to the hip hop audience under the pseudonym Frenkie, is marking his anniversary, and until May 23, the audience in Sarajevo will be able to see posters that announced his performances in the past period, photographs, excerpts from notebooks in which he wrote down verses, but also, for him, perhaps the most important segment - the graffiti that introduced him to the world of hip hop.
In an interview for "Vijesti", Frenki reveals that after the Sarajevo exhibition, he would like the audience from his native Tuzla to see the exhibition, as well as those from the region, including Montenegro.
As he says, working on a new poem and preparing an exhibition at the same time was not a difficult task for him, because he had help.
"I had a great team that took care of most of the things for the exhibition. Adna (Muslija, curator of the Manifesto gallery) and Benjo (Benjamin Čengić, director of the Manifesto gallery) were a great help and actually did most of the work. I just presented them with the materials I had and some of my ideas, and then they arranged it all nicely and made a selection," he said.
"The song was written a little earlier, or rather the lyrics were written a little earlier, and when we saw that the exhibition was becoming a reality and that it would probably happen, I decided to record it so that it coincided with the exhibition, because I think it fits thematically very well and of course it also served as some additional PR and advertising for the exhibition," Frenkie continues.
"So everything went smoothly without any problems, I also had a great team that did the video, it's Sunray, I've been working with them for the second time, before that we did 'Fraze', so everything went smoothly and smoothly and there were no problems. Actually, I was really happy to do this, to be active again because I was a bit lazy and lazy, because nothing special happened over the winter. We had some performances, but it's more or less routine so I was really happy to be productive and active again," said the rapper, adding that he was also pleased with how the exhibition opening went.
"We had 400-500 people at the opening, so some friends joked that I should do this more often, instead of concerts," shared Frenkie, who was particularly interested in getting out of his comfort zone.
"It was super interesting to me because it's a different format and I think it was interesting to the audience because they got a little better insight into our whole journey and growing up, what it was like in the early years and how it all grew together," adds the rapper, who was also happy to remember his own beginnings in hip hop.
"It was very nice to browse through all those old pictures, sketches and return to that period... I have already mentioned in a few interviews that it was somehow my favorite period of my career, because I was so persistent and with a lot more love. We looked at it less as a business matter," recalled the interviewee of "Vijesti".
However, Frenkie also believes that perhaps we shouldn't go back too far into the past, look back and think "how things were better before."
"You still need to live in the present, and even in the future, plan some new things, but there are also anniversaries... I think 20 years is a big deal," he concludes.
"We decided to dedicate ourselves a little more to it and to mark it in the right way, and now after the exhibition we are going to some new victories, new projects, a new album, etc. It always brings back beautiful emotions for me when I look at those old pictures and I saw the same in the visitors to the exhibition... My friends and people who have been listening to us from the beginning, who are my generation, know a lot about those works, about the first concerts, because they were there themselves. So I'm glad if those beautiful emotions have also awakened in them," says Frenkie.
The exhibition marking the anniversary is divided into five chapters, as the title suggests.
"The first chapter is actually just graffiti, because that was my entry into hip hop. I first started doing graffiti while I was living in Germany in the late 90s. The turning point came with the first album, with 'Excellent CD'. That's when a career started to form, something started to happen. The first official release for a record label from Zagreb, and that's when music entered the scene with a bang and even took over the top spot," the rapper recalls the event from two decades ago, adding that after that he neglected graffiti due to increasingly frequent performances.
And while "Excellent CD", which was reissued on vinyl to mark the anniversary and can be ordered on the website menart.hr, was given space in the second chapter, in the third the attention is focused on the album "Putanja".
"This is the third chapter, which marks my collaboration with Kontra and Indigo. And the fourth chapter is also our joint albums. So that the fifth chapter is a return to graffiti, which happened before and during the corona pandemic, when everything kind of stopped and when I again had a lot of time and the need to get a little more active in terms of drawing," he explained, emphasizing that the fifth chapter of Manifesto also includes his last three solo albums.
"Everything is intertwined there, it starts with graffiti and then moves on to music, then we go back to graffiti and everything is beautifully packaged and people can literally see my growing up in that hip hop culture. Additionally, we have another room in the basement, it's Chapter minus one, as we jokingly called it, and there are old archive footage from shows, from old graffiti festivals and performances. So people also have that multimedia part so they can see how we used to look young, thin and beautiful and what it was like backstage at those concerts," joked Frenkie, who has kept almost everything on display for years.
"Fortunately, I have preserved the vast majority of that material. I don't know how I was so smart and lucky that I managed to do it. Especially when it comes to those posters from the first parties and concerts, I had all of that in one of my archives. And as for the sketches from some of those earliest works, that's all from my archives. The greatest luck in the whole story and perhaps one of the key reasons why I decided to make an exhibition is that we really had a lot at our disposal," he points out, noting that he only exhibited 20 to 30 percent of his archive in the framework.
One wall in the gallery is dedicated to the lyrics of his poems, many of which have been recorded, and visitors to the exhibition can see the process of their creation.
"I scanned my old notebooks where I wrote all those texts and you can see the process of creation. It's quite messy and messy, because everything is dotted, crossed out, added and deleted... It's just as raw as it is in reality and as it looks in a workbook," he describes, and hopes that his fans outside Sarajevo will be able to see it for themselves.
"I hope and I will really try, we will apply to other galleries, that is definitely our goal. After Sarajevo, I might first move the exhibition to Tuzla, because after all, it is my city and most of the exhibition is actually about Tuzla and the Tuzla hip hop scene. And then further, in the region... If someone shows interest, we would be happy to come and set it up in other cities," emphasized the rapper, who will dedicate himself to working on new songs after the exhibition.
"I'm working on a new album, it's not finished yet, but we won't stop halfway. I hope we can release it maybe even at the end of this year," hints the rapper, who is no stranger to collaborating with his Montenegrin colleagues, but for now, there are no plans for joint songs.
"I don't have any specific plans for collaborations right now, they're all still early sketches. If I recognize a song where it could fit in well, of course, why not," replies Frenkie, who follows the Montenegrin scene, and takes the opportunity to mention it.
"Dedduh from Who See contacted me when he saw the exhibition and congratulated me, and I was very happy about that. I also talk to Noyz regularly, we should go draw, since he is also actively doing graffiti... and I am in touch with Random, I follow everything they do and publish," Frenkie revealed.
I have life experience now, and as a younger person, I have more energy and time.
Considering that he marked 20 years of his musical career with the exhibition, but also with the song "Chapters", Frenkie also made a comparison between his work at the very beginning and now.
"Those first years were much more honest, without much calculation and thinking. And I wrote texts back then without any deep analysis, because as a kid you believe that you are talented and that you are doing it well, that there is no need to analyze it now. That approach has been lost a bit over the years, because later you analyze your work more professionally, more seriously before you publish it," he explains.
"Back then, of course, there was a lot more energy, strength, will and time. It's a little different now, but I have another thing that I didn't have as a kid, and that's life and general experience with music. I have a lot more of my own topics that I can write about, because I've been through them, like fatherhood, as a kid I didn't know anything about it, now I even have a song about it," joked Frenkie.
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