Photo by Robyn Von Swank
As a way to help combat the isolation of 2020’s Covid-19 lockdowns, Open Mike Eagle did the same thing many of us did: He formed a social pod. His two friends Video Dave and STILL RIFT came to his apartment for weekly whiskey-fueled Tekken battles. Soon, the friendly competition shifted to become group songwriting sessions, throwing beats by Child Actor and Quelle Chris on the stereo to see where the process might take them. That process led to an album, which led to a contract with Merge Records, which led to the debut album from Previous Industries.
“One thing that I’d missed in my life was [the fact that] rapping with other people encourages you to stay real sharp,” Mike says, who had previously worked with crews Thirsty Fish and Hellfyre Club. “I’d spent so long making music by myself and being so tuned to that particular kind of inspiration that I was looking forward to that group environment.”
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The three friends bonded over shared memories of bygone years, as Mike’s apartment became increasingly filled with old magazines like VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, Sears catalogs, and old technology like Discmans and Walkmans. The trio reminisced not just about old technology, but also the defunct Midwest convenience store White Hen, old chain stores like Montgomery Ward, and the drive-thru photo development chain Fotomat—all of which are name-checked on the group’s forthcoming debut. Those relics of the past became the conceptual heart of Previous Industries.
In a way, the group has been decades in the making. Mike met STILL RIFT when they were both sophomores at the Whitney Young High School in Chicago. “Me and RIFT were part of a small community of people at our high school who were active practitioners of the secret hip-hop arts,” Mike says. “We got together to trade stats. We were both rookies.” Like most teenage friendships, theirs began awkwardly. When neither recognized the other’s graffiti tag—MACO8, after the auto body shop, for RIFT, and STRYDE1 for Mike—their shared status as equals in irrelevance encouraged them to team up. “We don’t exist,” RIFT remembers thinking. “We should exist fast. We just went on a mission after that point: We’re just going to bomb every fucking day.”
Graffiti evolved into breakdancing. Mike and RIFT would hunt for vacant rooms in their high school and use them as unofficial rehearsal spaces. They met up with other students to breakdance or cypher until security kicked them out. Then they’d go to Promontory Point, a man-made peninsula on Lake Michigan, to battle with kids from other neighborhoods. In the spring of 1998 the two joined a hip-hop collective known as Nacrobats, which included members like Pugs Atomz, Offwhyte, and Psalm One.
Both RIFT and Mike would record their first songs before they finished high school, but the fact that the latter spent the summer with family in Los Angeles before heading to college at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale caused them to drift apart. It was as an undergrad at Carbondale that Open Mike Eagle met Video Dave—awkwardly.
As Mike recalls, “One day I walked into the cafeteria minding my business, very socially afraid, not knowing anyone. This group of guys starts going ‘There he is!’ and pointing at me. It was Dave and his friends [announcing] that ‘the guy who looks like Dave’ had just walked into the cafeteria.” (The incident eventually became a bar on “we should have made otherground a thing” on Open Mike’s 2023 album, another triumph of ghetto engineering.)
Video Dave remembers feeling conflicted. “It was a weird moment where I didn’t know if I was supposed to fight this guy,” he recalls. Instead, the encounter led to a friendship fueled by chess in the lunchroom, open mic nights at Culture, and hangouts with fellow undergrads-slash-aspiring-weirdos Serengeti and Hannibal Buress. For his 19th birthday, Dave’s sister bought him studio time in Chicago, which began his recording career.
After college, the three friends went separate ways. Mike put down roots in Los Angeles, earning his keep at the legendarily competitive Leimert Park open mic night Project Blowed. Dave moved first to Miami, then New York City, working as a cameraman for reality television shows. In Chicago, STILL RIFT—then known as Rift Napalm—made music with artists like Offwhyte and Meaty Ogre as part of the indie label Galapagos 4. He also made himself essential to the label on tours by being the one guy with an SLR camera. “People didn’t have cameras [like they do now],” he says, “so me having one at all was a major edge.”
In 2017, Dave moved to L.A. part-time to serve as a creative consultant on Mike and comedian Baron Vaughn’s live music-meets-comedy show for Comedy Central The New Negroes, which eventually led to those Tekken battles at Mike’s home. “It turned into Tekken-fest,” STILL RIFT recalls. “Even then it was just casual. I know him and you know him, and now we all know each other.”
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As all of this was happening, Open Mike Eagle’s career was hitting new highs. In addition to his increasingly successful indie albums, he founded the Stoney Island podcast network, which included his own podcast What Had Happened Was. He also landed voiceover work on Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, in addition to the development of The New Negroes.
Unfortunately, his big television break arrived just as cable was hemorrhaging viewers. The New Negroes was canceled after a single season. That started a domino effect that he addressed on “Everything Ends Last Year” from his 2020 album Anime, Trauma, Divorce, in which three defining partnerships—a marriage, the show, and his previous crew Hellfyre Club—with Busdriver, All City Jimmy, and R.A.P. Ferreira—all flamed out.
Which was another reason he formed that pandemic social pod with Video Dave and STILL RIFT. “In my mind it all goes together,” Mike says. “The quarantine era being in a sorta miasma blur. While we’re doing Quarantine Drive-Time Radio and I’m settling into life in a new apartment, Previous Industries started to come together in the midst of all of that.”
Quarantine Drive-Time Radio was Open Mike Eagle and Video Dave’s daily commuter hour radio show on Instagram Live. It was Mike on the controls playing songs, and “Prime Minister” Video Dave, in a patterned kufi, offering a weather report of folksy meteorology, like: “The best weather comes from inside.” Off-air, STILL RIFT would come over for Tekken 7 and Street Fighter 5 battles. Those hangouts evolved into five months of weekly songwriting sessions, and the idea for Previous Industries began taking shape. “The concept of the group came before any of the songs,” Dave says. “It came from Mike’s compulsion to collect old magazines, and me and Rift being like, ‘Oh damn, you got this?’ That turned into the vibe that we started working under.”
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On “Showbiz,” the first song on Service Merchandise, each rapper begins their verse with an interpolation of Shock G’s opening salvo from “The Humpty Dance,” an invitation to gather around the new fools in town. Other Previous Industries songs have inspiration drawn from various older projects. “Circuit City,” for example, from Open Mike’s 2022 album A Tape Called Component System With The Auto Reverse quietly introduced the concept by namechecking a defunct department store. “We seeded it throughout all of our projects,” Mike says. “When things seemed good enough, we’d put songs to the side to be on my album or Dave’s album.”
The hints kept coming. Video Dave’s 2023 album ArticulatedTexTiles boasted two songs from his quarantine writing sessions with Open Mike and RIFT, “PardonInterruptions” and “ImprovementWords.” For Open Mike Eagle, the sessions rejuvenated his competitive spirit, inspiring him to deliver another triumph of ghetto engineering just 10 months after its predecessor. That album features RIFT and Dave on two songs as well as fellow Chicagoan Hannibal Buress, under his alias Eshu Tune, in a dedication to Chicago station WFLD 32. In January of 2024, the trio posted images of bygone chain stores on social media ahead of the release of the “Showbiz” b/w “Braids” 7-inch on Merge, officially introducing Previous Industries to the world.
Throughout Service Merchandise, named after the catalog showroom retail chain that ceased operation in 2002, there’s a palpable feeling of a braintrust at work. Open Mike says that writing verses would often lead to conversations that revealed personal stories about his friends that he’d never heard before. On ArticulatedTexTiles, Video Dave radiated a “cool uncle” energy that couched the confessional in the whimsical, but with Previous Industries, those same confessions are delivered in a stinging, sobering deadpan. STILL RIFT’s style is the stealthiest of the three, and his bars yield more questions than answers: “Suicide taught me odds from evens/ Debt collection caught me all my demons.”
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But Previous Industries isn’t interested in peddling nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. RIFT says the group viewed these shuttered businesses as part of a coded language. On “Pliers,” the trio first turn the household tool into a synonym for pressure, then a metaphor for vices. The laid-back production on “Roebuck” belies lyrics that recall a childhood spent thumbing through the Sears catalog knowing that most of the products were out of their parents’ financial reach. “I would not feel sad at all,” Dave croons, “if I could buy everything in the catalog.”
“We are talking about very painfully personal things no matter what you might think about the verses,” STILL RIFT says. “We come from similar backgrounds and took very different paths to somehow end up back in the same place. This weird parabolic route that we took, when we started interacting with each other, that cross-pollination helped all of our styles blossom.”
Open Mike Eagle agrees, adding, “Rapping is better with friends. That’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over again in my career.”
