Music
How Clams Casino made internet history with 'I'm God'
Ten years after it became a cult hit, cloud rap's seminal track has finally been given an official release. We speak to beatmaker Michael Volpe about the incredible story of 'I'm God'.
Dig through your iTunes library, if you still have one, and you’ll probably find a copy of ‘I’m God’ by Clams Casino. It might be all of 64 kbps, ripped straight from YouTube, or still graffitied with metadata from a long since 404-ed blog. Such was the download game in 2011.
‘I’m God’ was one of the most far-reaching hits of hip-hop’s blog days, a track that everyone with an internet connection and an appetite for new sounds jumped on. It first surfaced in 2009 as a vehicle for rap oddball Lil B, before an instrumental version was set free onto the internet two years later. Never officially released, it quickly became a cult favourite: disseminated on file-sharing services and uploaded to YouTube by fans, where it went viral. One such upload has 25 million views; in total the track’s unofficial streams number 75 million.
But its legacy goes beyond just play counts. Infamously, ‘I’m God’ carved out a particular history in dark corners of the internet, while the comments section of its most-played YouTube rip has become a virtual graveyard where users commemorate lost loved ones.
Put in historical context, the track marked a couple of important micro-revolutions for music. For one, it’s evidence of a time when music was made and uploaded on the fly, before the music industry had learned to respond to the reality of digital consumption. In the late aughts and early 2010s, emerging producers and rappers would connect on email and build tracks together without ever meeting face to face. With no record labels in the way, they would chuck their handiwork on random file-sharing links or MySpace pages --- something that unintentionally lent the songs an impermanence. Finding the gems required keeping an ear to the ground; knowing who to listen to and where to dig.
For two, Lil B’s ‘I’m God’ also became the song that defined cloud rap, a sub-genre that would become pivotal in both hip-hop and electronic music’s evolution. The sound of cloud rap was murky and morose melodies paired with hip-hop drums, purpose designed to be spacious enough to be rapped over. As Eddy Lawrence writes: “It was more like being haunted by a rap song than listening to one.” Twisted, reverberated and decayed vocal samples were an essential part of cloud rap’s DNA --- and buoying ‘I’m God’ was an unauthorised sample of Imogen Heap’s ‘Just For Now’.
That sample prevented ‘I’m God’ from ever having an official release. But now, over a decade on, it’s finally been cleared and the song has made it to streaming services for the first time, released as part of Clams Casino’s fittingly-titled mixtape Instrumental Relics. To mark the occasion, we spoke to Clams Casino, aka New Jersey beatmaker Michael Volpe, about ten years as an underground hero.
So let’s go back to 2009 when you first made ‘I’m God’. Where were you at with your career then?
I was really early on. I didn’t get serious about putting my music out until probably late 2007, so it was not too long after that. I had just been reaching out to artists and rappers using MySpace, sending them beats to use for free.
The sending beats to rappers -- is that how you got linked up with Lil B?
I was a super fan of The Pack, this group he was in earlier on. So I reached out to him a couple of years later when I started getting serious about getting music out. A couple years after that, in 2008, was the first time we connected online.
Did you feel much a part of the electronic music scene then, or was your eye always on hip-hop?
At that time it was definitely all hip-hop to me, really. I was just making rap beats and sending them around. But people started asking me to put instrumental versions out and they spread around to people who listened to electronic music, which was just a whole world I wasn’t really aware of. And all of a sudden I became a part of it as an artist. I put out a bunch of rap beats -- stuff that was made to be rapped on, and sent to rappers. I guess there was something about it that could stand on its own, and a lot of people knew that about my music before I did.
What are your memories of making ‘I’m God’?
I remember not really thinking much of it. I mean, that was the only thing I really remember of it: making it and sending it out and not really thinking much of it. I thought it was a cool beat, but I didn’t really have a special feeling about it more than other stuff. I have felt stronger about a lot of other things that I made.
I sent it to a couple of people before Lil B but he was the first one that had the reaction of like -- he freaked out about it and emailed me back. He heard something in it that I didn’t really even hear myself. He immediately knew it was a special one before I did.
Do you remember where you first uploaded the song to?
It was probably just some kind of file sharing link, like Zippyshare or something. One of those random things that would pop up and then disappear. And I would have put it out on Twitter through that.
Did you know much about the legalities of clearing samples back then? Would it ever have occured to you to clear a sample in those days?
At that point I wasn’t even thinking that I could ever make money off of anything. I was just doing it to have fun and try and get my music out there; I didn’t get paid for probably any music until probably four years after I started taking it seriously. So at that time, legal stuff was the last thing on my mind. Clearing samples? I was just putting out music for free on MySpace and Twitter! Nothing was commercially released, so it never crossed my mind.
How did it feel to have made a song that was, by many metics, a huge success, but not actually get to reap the financial rewards of it?
I felt like I was just happy about what it was doing musically. I wasn’t too worried about that. I was like, I did a song with one of my favourite artists ever! I couldn’t believe I was doing that. And then after that, people started to recognise me and my music and for what I felt were all the right reasons. Everything that I’m trying to do is be unique and make stuff that hasn’t been done before, or make sounds that I’ve never heard before. And to be recognised for doing that, for people to think ‘that was something new’, I was just so happy that was all happening.
So fast forwarding to 2020, how and why has the sample been cleared now?
I guess just everybody getting on the same page. We wanted to put it out officially for years, we tried to clear it and we couldn’t really get it done for a long time. But it wasn’t a steady thing, it wasn’t like I’ve been trying to do it for ten years straight. We tried to do it once and it was like ‘alright, not really working out’ and then we’d think about it again a few years later. It was an on and off thing.
What actually got it across the line now?
I guess there’s a lot of people involved. There’s Imogen as the artist and then it’s like, that song came out on a major label so there’s a whole other side of her label and the legal side. It’s a lot of layers and a lot of people involved. So I guess just navigating all of that and making it work took a long time.
You’re looked at as one of the originators of cloud rap. Were you aware back in those early days that you were at the forefront of something new?
I always knew that in anything that I was doing, I was trying to do it a different way. That was one of the main things I was conscious of: I always wanted to be doing my own thing. But it all just fell into place pretty organically. I’d been quietly making that music for a few years, just crafting that sound and working on it by myself. And then it all just started being released. So I was aware that I always wanted to be doing something different, and hopefully be recognised for being as original as I can. The other stuff just built pretty organically.
I’ve read comparisons to your sound and witch house, which was happening around the same time. Were you a witch house fan?
Nah, that’s one of the things I had no idea about. I had put out my instrumental tape of rap beats and then independent labels had reached out to say they’d heard the mixtape and wanted to hear more music and do a project. So I started listening to what they were putting out before I was like, oh this makes sense, it sounds like a lot of the beats that I do mood-wise and texturally. But before I put my instrumental tape out, I had no idea about any of that stuff. It wasn’t until they reached out that I started looking into it a bit.
‘I’m God’ is from that era where we all just downloaded shitty quality mp3s from random blogs -- there’s so many incredible tracks from that time that weren’t official releases, or had uncleared samples, or were unofficial remixes. And now they are maybe being lost to the sands of time a bit as our iTunes library is left to die and we all shift over to streaming services. Is that something you think about?
It’s true, it’s pretty much a blackout period, I imagine. I don’t even know where all the stuff that I’ve downloaded or used to collect around that time is; I don’t know what I did with it, or if it’s just on old computers that I don’t have anymore. It’s going to be interesting, in the future, to see what comes back or what people find from their archive of that time. But it’s definitely a weird period where a lot of stuff is going to be lost or forgotten.
Are you worried any of your music will be lost?
Well a lot of my stuff, probably half or more than half, isn’t on streaming services. So I guess I should try to start working on getting it all switched over -- I’m trying to now, getting samples cleared. I see a lot of other people doing that too.
Is that part of the motivation for doing these official releases?
I guess you’ve got to look at the future of streaming too -- that’s not a physical thing, either. Is that going to go out eventually? The way we’re doing it now is not going to last forever either. It’s all digital. It’s even less like owning something than when we used to download stuff and save it to our computers. That was one step below a physical CD, but at least we downloaded it and put it on our own harddrive. Now it’s even less than that.
When all the streaming stuff goes to whatever the next phase stuff is, I imagine some stuff will be lost too. It just seems like streaming is even more of an intangible thing. That took me a while to get into streaming stuff because I was just so used to physical things for a long time. I’m into it now because I don’t have much of a choice, but it took me a while to switch over and get used to that.
Do you still have an iTunes library?
No, I gave up on iTunes a while ago because I just got tired of the process of having to plug the phone in and there always being problems. I just got so tired of the iTunes process. Nothing ever went right.
Lastly, how does it feel to have made a song that’s resonated really deeply with so many people?
It’s the best thing that I could shoot for. The best thing I could ask for. Making music -- I do it because I like doing it for myself, but when I’m able to see how it can affect other people positively, it’s a whole other level. There’s nothing really better than that, for me. It’s one of the main things that keeps me interested in making music, to keep pushing and doing new things, challenging myself, and keep making music. It’s one of the biggest motivators to me and it makes me happy to hear that.