Matt Bar
"Both rap and folk are a part of me. I'm not some hippie with a guitar who can put rhymes together. There's integrity in each side of it, independently, and that's the key." These are genre-bending musician Matt Bar's perennial words. Leading a double-track career as a folk balladeer and a hip-hop MC, Bar began pioneering his eclectic style in 2001, when, just for the fun of it, he inserted a rap verse into a standard folk number at a concert in Iowa City. From the riotous applause, he knew he was onto something.
Bar's musical career is a triple split-screen between traditional hip-hop, traditional folk, and off-kilter folk-rap. An Iowa City, Iowa native, Bar attended college in St. Louis, where he began to perfect his sound as an acoustic singer/songwriter. With such influences as Bob Dylan and Elliott Smith, Bar's evocative finger-picking and scratchy vocals earned him a record deal with Produce Records, an indie label in St. Louis.
Yet despite his growing success as a folk troubadour, Bar wasn't one to be pigeonholed. His love for hip-hop continued to nag at him, until he joined forces with the Iowa City rap group Renaissance in 2004. For his folk-rap ambitions to come true, Bar knew he had to first refine his skills behind the mic. "I was often the only white guy on the stage with five black guys and I don't dance," Bar says with a laugh. "When you're the white guy, you better be able to spit; otherwise, it's going to be embarrassing. That put pressure on me to make sure to get better."
Now, with one foot firmly rooted in folk and the other in hip-hop, Bar's a far cry from the shtick he sought to avoid. Critics, booking agents, and highbrow arts councils have all taken note. Bar earned a grant from the Iowa City Arts Council in 2006 to record his debut folk-rap record Lying In Chalk, an album the Iowa City Press-Citizen dubbed "startlingly original and brilliantly realized, a triumphant front-to-back gem." Bar has also opened for Outkast, Jurassic 5 and Matisyahu stunning audiences with his distinctive, bipolar sound.
His cannon of releases include 2004s Rough Draft, a traditional folk album, 2006's Lying In Chalk, and 2007s Half Rap/Half Folk The Mixtape from 2007. The folk-rap ballad "Sing Your Tears" from Lying in Chalk was used for MTVs The Real World. Matt was also featured on NBCs Hip Nation Notes From the Underground. Matt is currently at work on an album of Bible raps which will be used as a platform for Jewish education. This was inspired by his job as a Hebrew School and stint as a graduate student and the Jewish Theological Seminary. "I wrote them because my students loved them and they were great jump off points for discussing the particular bible stories," Bar explains "I started getting asked to perform them at different functions. I didn't plan on these raps being something for my music career but the performances were really satisfying. They combine everything I love: music, theology, teaching and learning. If this is the direction my music career heads, I'm all for it."
This Summer Matt was granted a fellowship on behalf PICZ (Presentense’s Institute for Creative Zionism) to live and work on his Bible rap album in Jerusalem.