Know The Score: Clams Casi­no on how Kids changed his life

The first time musi­cian and rap pro­duc­er Clams Casi­no (real name Michael Volpe) saw Kids, he was hud­dled around a TV set with a group of fel­low teenagers in the back­room of a New Jer­sey skate shop. ​“You could instant­ly tell it was dif­fer­ent,” the now 32-year-old remem­bers. ​“The film already had this leg­end around it so it felt like we were break­ing the law just by watch­ing it or something.”

With its unflinch­ing look at sex, drugs and tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty with­in a gang of New York teens, Kids became instant­ly noto­ri­ous: New York Times’ crit­ic Janet Maslin described the film as a ​“wake-up call to the mod­ern world.” The way it recon­fig­ures the AIDS cri­sis as some­thing that could also impact white het­ero­sex­u­al teenagers shook mid­dle Amer­i­ca, mak­ing par­ents ques­tion exact­ly what their chil­dren were up to dur­ing the Clin­ton years – their worst fears manifested.

Yet for Clams, Kids was mere­ly an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what life was like for young peo­ple from ​‘round the way’. The inti­ma­cy and grit­ti­ness of the film’s set­ting, cou­pled with an abun­dance of wide-leg trousers, tie-dye t‑shirts and Con­verse, cap­tured ​’90s street cul­ture in a way that felt total­ly authen­tic. ​“There was just some­thing so real about Kids,” he says. ​“The way those kids spoke to one anoth­er was so spot on it almost felt a lit­tle voyeuris­tic, but the fact we were see­ing real teenagers on the screen and not sug­ar coat­ed ones made it a real­ly excit­ing thing.”

But if Kids’ aes­thet­ic, which has since been copied by every­thing from HBO’s Eupho­ria to Jon­ah Hill’s Mid90s, won Clams over, it was the film’s gloomy sound­track that tru­ly changed his life. The music switch­es flu­id­ly from dis­so­nant indie (Daniel Johnston’s ​‘Casper the Friend­ly Ghost’) to urgent street rap (A Tribe Called Quest’s ​‘Oh My God’), reflect­ing the way teenagers can go from embody­ing supreme con­fi­dence to feel­ing com­plete­ly dis­con­nect­ed from their sur­round­ings. It also spoke deeply to an aspir­ing musi­cian who rel­ished blur­ring genre lines.

“The music cap­tures every emo­tion you can think of,” Clams explains, ​“there’s that inten­si­ty of being this horny teenag­er, then con­fu­sion, before going back into fun and then the haunt­ing come­down. The sound­track shows how being a teenag­er is a roller-coast­er ride, emo­tion­al­ly, in such a per­fect way. It was also one of the first times I saw kids who liked punk just as much as rap. It was like val­i­da­tion that I wasn’t alone.”

A lot of the songs, par­tic­u­lar­ly Sebadoh’s ​‘Spoiled’ and Artifact’s ​‘Wrong Side of Da Tracks’, have a nat­ur­al lo-fi sound. It’s as if they were record­ed straight from a bust­ed cas­sette machine, adding to the sense that the char­ac­ters on screen are rough around the edges and still find­ing their place in the world. This is a promi­nent aspect of Clams’ own work. One of the archi­tects of the DIY sound of Sound­cloud rap, best known for his pio­neer­ing work with the likes of Lil Peep, Mac Miller (who even made a mix­tape ded­i­cat­ed to Kids), A$AP Rocky and Vince Sta­ples, Clams’ pro­duc­tion is full of stabs of dis­tor­tion and the unmis­tak­able hiss of tape – some­thing he says he learned direct­ly from the film.

“I was blown away by those gran­u­lar tex­tures on the Kids sound­track, and I think that came out when I start­ed doing pro­duc­tion myself. Kids is embed­ded deep in my brain some­where and just comes out with­out me think­ing. If you lis­ten to those dusty drums [on Lil B’s ​‘Unchain Me’] then you can see how the Kids sound­track changed my ear. There’s so many con­flict­ing gen­res, but they all fit togeth­er and it makes per­fect sense. It’s hard to achieve that as a pro­duc­er, but it’s some­thing that I always try to do.”

This is evi­dent in Clams’ lat­est record, ​‘Moon Trip Radio’, which splices var­i­ous gen­res to cre­ate an atmos­phere that’s unashamed­ly moody and melan­cholic. None of its songs would sound out of place on the Kids sound­track, with intro­spec­tive cuts like ​‘Twilit’ and ​‘Solil­o­quy’ cap­tur­ing that exis­ten­tial dark­ness that grows as teenagers begin to expe­ri­ence grow­ing pains and make bad decisions.

Clams is a man of few words who doesn’t give much away; hap­py exist­ing in the shad­ows rather than being a celebri­ty rap pro­duc­er who flex­es on Insta­gram. But it’s clear that he wouldn’t be where he is today if he hadn’t walked into that skate shop and watched a film about a bunch of foul-mouthed rebels.

“It’s just one of those films that shakes your core and stays with you. The themes of broth­er­hood, matur­ing and feel­ing like you don’t fit in will nev­er not be rel­e­vant. It was scary in many ways, par­tic­u­lar­ly what hap­pens to Chloë Sevigny’s char­ac­ter, but it also showed the world what real­ly hap­pens. You can’t watch Kids and for­get about it, and I want peo­ple to have that feel­ing after they lis­ten to my music too. It should stay with you.”