Kid Apocalypse Brings Survival Of The Fittest To Hip-Hop

What happens when you mix rap with mutant melodrama? You get Kid Apocalypse, a.k.a. Quinn Allan, the nerdcore rapper who has been putting out music as the heir to Apocalypse since 2012.

Kid Apocalypse is back with his latest album, RE:GENESIS. The album features nine new tracks, including several on which Allan drops the Kid Apocalypse persona to rap from a more personal place.

ComicBook.com spoke to Allan about the new album, his inspirations, his thoughts on X-Men: Apocalypse, and what the future holds for Kid Apocalypse.

How did you come to choose Evan Sabahnur as your stage persona?

Kid Apocalypse: I hadn’t really been familiar with that character at the time he was originally published in Uncanny X-Force by Rick Remender. I had actually been introduced to nerdcore music before I knew of the character and I was becoming more familiar with that form of art. I’d been a musician for most of my adult life, and played a lot of music and was looking for a new creative outlet.

A friend had shown me some other nerdcore artists, like Mega Ran, and I saw what he was doing with the Black Materia album, where he raps about Final Fantasy VII. I saw him doing something like that, I thought, “Hey, that’s something I could do.”

I didn’t really know exactly what I would do yet, and a friend introduced me to Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force and “The Dark Angel Saga,” which is sort of the origin of Kid Apocalypse. I read through that trade paperback and I just fell in love with that character. I just thought, “What a cool idea.” I’ve always been a fan of Apocalypse as a villain. I grew up in the ’90s with the X-Men animated TV series, where he was featured as a pretty heavy villain, and of course, he shows up in comic books throughout the ages.

I’ve always found him very fascinating. I like the idea of the first mutant, and he’s shepherding evolution on the planet. He thinks he’s right, but everybody else thinks he’s evil and a monster. Then you’ve got this second generation version of him, this clone, who was raised to be a good person in a virtual world but also is a clone. I just like this idea that he doesn’t know anything about that. He was raised in this virtual reality, where that was his history. That was his past. He wasn’t really aware of Apocalypse when he first came out of the virtual reality world into the 616 Universe, and all the other characters, of course, know who Apocalypse is and they fear that he is just going to be the next Apocalypse. He thinks he’s a good person because that was the way he was raised. That inner turmoil, that nature versus nurture, I think, is what really stood out with that character and I thought that would be a really interesting thing to go with in a music format.

Mutants are already feared and hated by humanity at large, but then, within the mutant community, Apocalypse is even more alone. He’s not even really accepted by the mutants because of the ties to Apocalypse. It’s a really neat character, a really neat storyline, and I thought, “Wow, that could be a cool thing for me to rap about,” because, of course, the mutant story has a lot of parallels with the civil rights movement which, of course, has spawned a lot of music and hip-hop over the years.

What were your big inspirations when you got started as Kid Apocalypse? Was it mostly nerdcore rappers like Mega Ran?

KA: I grew up in California, so I grew up with West Coast hip hop. I listened to a lot of Dr. Dre and NWA and Snoop Dogg and that type of stuff when I was in high school when those albums were really popular. At the time that I started the Kid Apocalypse project, nerdcore, although it was around, it hadn’t really taken off as much as it has now. MC Frontalot was definitely around. He was doing his thing, and I’d seen Nerdcore Rising very shortly after I started Kid Apocalypse, which is his documentary film.

I would say, honestly, there’s actually a lot of ties to comic books in hip-hop, even before the nerdcore movement. You look at people like the Wu-Tang Clan, and they’ve got a bunch of references to various nerdy things, including their love of kung fu. You’ve got MF Doom, and obviously, he’s a riff on Dr. Doom, and he’s got some comic book related raps here and there. It’s everywhere. When I really start listening to it, I’ve heard references to Transformers in hip hop songs from the ’80s and ’90s.

I think it’s always kind of been there, and I think I was influenced a lot originally by people like Del the Funky Homosapien, with that album Deltron 3030. That was a huge inspiration to me. A concept album where you’re portraying this certain character, and again, that had obviously been out and that predated anybody ever knowing what nerdcore was.

At the time that I started the project, I don’t think I was super aware of a lot of the other nerdcore artists. I knew Mega Ran and I’d heard his stuff. I met him briefly at a signing he was doing here in town in Portland right as we recorded some of our first tracks. I asked to send it to him and if he would give it a seal of approval or something, and he’s been really nice about it. I’ve sent stuff to him.

We’ve had conversations and I ask him for advice every once in awhile on his path, because unlike a lot of other artists out there who might be doing something a little more generically nerdcore, he and I have that thing in common where a lot of times we’re portraying characters in a fictional universe in music form, whether he’s doing it through Mega Man or Final Fantasy or one of his many other video game raps and stuff that he’s done. We have that in common, so it’s good to be able to ask questions from somebody who has a lot more experience than I do.

Kid Apocalypse

Do you find playing this fictional character in your music to be a challenge or does having those boundaries help make things simpler for you?

KA: I think it’s a little of both. It’s definitely a challenge. It wasn’t at first, of course, because I hadn’t mined as much material yet. At the time that I started, that storyline from Rick Remender, from Uncanny X-Force, was still pretty fresh. They were still actually utilizing that character in that storyline, and then he very quickly moved over to that new book at the time, Wolverine and the X-Men, where he was featured pretty heavily he had something to do with the big crossover event, Axis. He was appearing, and that gave me new material to work on.

It was a little slower going than I would’ve probably liked, I think, at releasing music, so this last album that I just released, RE:GENESIS, has some tracks and stuff that I’ve worked on there from probably 2014 or something. For awhile, I was trying to mirror what was going on in the comic book world with what I was rapping about in my version of the character, but it got really difficult to keep up with it with all my other various activities going on.

Originally, it was this lattice work, if you will, for me to work on. “Okay, it’s all kind of laid out for me,” and I can just follow that where I want to, break away from where I want to, but I’ve always kind of got the skeleton of it there. And then as the character drifted away from the main focus of most storylines, where now he’s in the comics but very marginally, I had realized I can’t just keep writing that forever. I had to broaden my spectrum and look at other things about comic books.

I’ve certainly dropped the character, especially on this new album, in a couple of tracks, and am rapping from my own personal experience and background, but I’ve managed to still never get over to the DC Universe. I’ve managed to keep myself pretty firmly rooted in Marvel references, and maybe a little of the pop culture references outside of that.

That’s the interesting thing about the Marvel Universe is that it itself seems to have a lot of references to our real world, so it is kind of confusing.

So is this new album a kind of the mish-mash of tracks you’ve been working on for the last few years, or is there a sharper thematic focus you were going for?

KA: Certainly the mishmash is what came out of it. It’s a really difficult process for me. I mentioned that I used to play in a lot of band stuff. I’m actually a musician. I can play guitar, harmonica, piano, drums. I can play a lot of instruments, and so when it comes to writing songs and coupling those with my lyrics, that’s not a problem. But beats and hip hop music is a completely different beast, and I don’t have that skillset and I don’t have access to the same types of programs that most of these people would be using. I’ve always been relying on other people to collaborate with, and sometimes that’s a really difficult thing to get going, especially because none of us are doing this for a full-time job. Most of these people that I work with have actual jobs, and to get them to dedicate their time and energy for free and make these songs for me because I can’t just use copyrighted material, I need some original stuff, it’s been a slow going process.

Originally, when we did our first mixtape, the Enter Kid Apocalypse mixtape, we had a friend, Andy, and he made all the tracks for us. He was really nice about it. Of course, like I said, he has a full-time job, so he can’t always be available to do that, and we’re very careful that we don’t want to ask too much of our friends and make them feel like we’re a burden.

When I got to time to do RE:GENESIS, I had written, gosh, probably 15 songs or so by the time we were actually ready to record. We met up with a friend here in town, Kielen King, who also does his own hip-hop project called Star Pilot. He had a huge library of music that he’d created over the years for his project that he never used, and he gave us access to that library and said, “Here you go. Take your pick.” We mashed up songs that we’d already written lyrically to whatever music he had. This is Jared [Yanez] and I, who usually raps with me. He does Dark Beast usually, and he also has done now Xavier and Deadpool on this album. Jared and I divvied up the tracks and found what matched with what, and we sort of went from there.

Of course, I’m in a school program right now. I’m finishing my second degree and it’s a biology program that involves working at the Oregon Zoo and working on exotic animals, so I’ve got a huge time commitment to that as well. As a result, it took us just over a year to actually record all of the tracks on RE:GENESIS. Because of time constraints, we weren’t able to get to every song that I had originally written. Certainly, there were things on the table that were a little more in continuity from what I’d written back in 2014 or so, that we just never got around to recording. As we were recording this album, I would be writing new stuff and really excited about the new material, and think, “Oh, let’s do this instead.” It took shape very slowly over the course of that year, and between Jared, myself and Kielen [King].

Kielen acted as an engineer and also as a producer, and he was really fundamental with this one because before this it had been Jared and I just doing whatever we thought was right, and it just stayed between us. Now we had Kielen, who is a far more experienced engineer, producer, and musician when it comes to hip hop, so he was able to give us his two cents, and he would suggest things and we would either take his suggestion and use it or stick with whatever we originally had.

It definitely wound up being more of a mishmash, especially when it came to the fact that I was starting to toe that line between a fictional character and my own reality. I wanted to test those waters out and see how people would react to the music I have made where it isn’t just strictly about this character, but maybe just about the nerd community at large.

And how has the response been?

KA: I don’t know if there’s been a lot of response to that. I’m not sure. It’s difficult for me to know how much people paying attention. I get some reactions from people, usually just the stuff that you see from most people, whether it’s re-posting or saying they like this. But sometimes I’ll get an actual comment or something saying, “Oh, I really like this lyric,” “This song is my favorite song,” and stuff.

I’ve been surprised at the ones I thought would be the more popular tracks. When I look at who is listening to what, it’s interesting to see, “Oh, people really like that particular song,” and it may be different than what I think would be the popular one.

It’s hard for me to say how much people are getting out of this. The thing is, Jared and I are pretty big fanboys of a lot of different properties, and we’ve had a lot of experience writing, whether it’s for scripts for feature films and short films, and we’ve directed a lot of music videos. Anyways, we have a familiarity with storytelling, and as a result, we can load these things pretty heavily with some obscure references. I’ve always been curious if there’s people out there that are actually catching every bit of little nod to this or innuendo to that that I’ve included in these songs.

Whether or not they’re catching every reference, or even bothering to notice that, “Hey, wait, this song isn’t from the perspective of Kid Apocalypse anymore,” I’m not really sure. I haven’t really heard back from enough people about that yet. But, certainly, no negative reactions. I took a bold step here with the first music video that we did in association with this album was strictly not in character. It’s the first time I wasn’t wearing makeup and it was from one of the tracks in the 1990s, which is very much from my own personal perspective and not from the perspective of Kid Apocalypse.

I think the reaction’s been okay. It’s slow going, like a lot of things. It’s the internet. My biggest fear, I think, is that I’ve overstayed my welcome. I don’t want people to think that I’m just this one trick pony and “He just does that Kid Apocalypse thing, and that’s all he does.” I’m trying out some new stuff.

 

Kid Apocalypse

As someone who has a vested interest in the character of Apocalypse, what did you think of his portrayal in X-Men: Apocalypse?

KA: That’s actually a question that comes up a lot. Obviously, people realize that, because I have this association with this character that I must have an interest, and it’s true, I do. Like I said, Apocalypse has been one of my favorite characters throughout comicdom. I just really dug that character.

The movie, X-Men: Apocalypse, I feel like it got a really bad rap and I’m not really sure why. I liked Days of Future Past, and I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite of the X-Men films, but I thought it was pretty good. I think that Apocalypse was just as good if not better than Days of Future Past, and I just can’t quite wrap my brain around why people loved Days of Future Past but crap on X-Men: Apocalypse. I thought even though, yes, Apocalypse in that movie is very different than any version we’ve seen previous to that, that doesn’t necessarily bother me if they’re doing things differently. I, of course, realize that not everything that works on a comic book page can be translated to a screen.

Oscar Isaac was a different choice than I think most of us had in mind when we’re thinking of this giant strong man, really domineering presence, versus this guy who we got, who was a little more smooth talking and charismatic and portrayed himself as a cult leader. He could convince you of things, and he was still kind of terrible. He melted people and stuff and turned them into walls, which is pretty horrifying. He certainly did his job.

The movie had flaws like they all do. We could sit here and nitpick these movies to death. There’s some point where you’ve got to suspend your disbelief and just say, “Okay, I’m in this.” I enjoyed it. I think I saw it two times in the theater, which to pay for it twice means you must’ve liked it.

You mentioned that it took a long time to record and release this album. Now that it’s out there, are you already beginning the process of the next album? Will you be dropping the persona even more in the future?

KA: That’s a good question. I think the momentum I built up while releasing this album and getting it out to press and doing my music video, that’s certainly gotten me excited again, and I’ve been pretty prolific in writing right now and listening to a lot of new hip hop tracks and stuff that I hadn’t heard before from different artists. That’s really made me excited to get back to it. I have been writing a lot.

Without giving too much away, I would say that my Kid Apocalypse isn’t long for this world. One thing, and to get into a little bit of drama that came out of this particular record, Jared and I, he’s been involved in all the Kid Apocalypse stuff up until this point, but we’ve had a bit of a falling out over this album and it really had to do with a topic that we had a disagreement on since the get-go, which is, “How far can we take this?” This is a character that is copyrighted and trademarked and owned by Marvel, who is owned by Disney, who, of course, has more lawyers and more money than any other company you could probably think of. We always have tried to be very careful about how we present ourselves because, of course, we don’t want to invite unwelcome attention, meaning a lawsuit.

We had our successes and it’s gone out there and it’s hard to tell what their awareness of it is. If they’ve seen it and they just think that we’re distinct enough to where we’re not stepping on their toes so they’re fine with it, or they just don’t know about it. Certainly Rick Remender, Jason Aaron and a few other Marvel employees at times have shared my stuff, but obviously not lawyers. We’ve always gone back and forth on what’s violating copyright law and what’s not, what’s considered fair use, what’s considered parody, and we don’t have a lawyer ourselves, so it’s always at our own discretion.

This album, this time around, we were a lot more careful than we were on the first few releases we had done. The first time that we were doing it, we were sampling things like the music from the X-Men animated series in the ’90s. We had quotes in there from Xavier from some of the movies, and things like that. We started doing what a lot of hip-hop does, which is pull things from things you really like, and you sample and use sound bits and stuff like that, but as we moved forward, we pushed a little more towards “Let’s keep it original. Let’s not have to rely on anything that’s copyrighted because we’re obviously toeing that line.”

I think with this we really pushed for all original music, no quotes, and really trying to keep ourselves as original as possible, and I originally had thought it would be good to be able to charge some money for this album because I’ve always given away my stuff for free. Of course, these things don’t cost anything. It costs me money to make all this stuff, and of course, it would be nice to see a little bit of a return on that. We got into this big disagreement over whether we should or should not charge for it, but I think ultimately we decided not to, but I also thought this might be some of the last stuff we do under this particular project.

I have plans. I don’t want to say anything just yet. I’ve got ways around it, but I don’t expect to see Kid Apocalypse be doing much more.