"MC Hopie Spitshard Lives up to Her Name" - YO! Youth Outlook

Peep the whole interview on www.youthoutlook.org!

MC Hopie Spitshard Lives up to Her Name

Profile, Donny Lumpkins,
YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia, Jun 02, 2009

Editor's Note: YO! caught up with Bay Area-based MC Hopie Spitshard to talk about her Great America beginnings, her fall-back legal career and her musical influences. Donny Lumpkins is a contributor to YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia. Donny Lumpkins is a contributor to YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia.

At a Starbucks in Daly City, surrounded by college students cramming for tests and workers getting their java fixes, I sat down with Hopie Spitshard – a 25-year-old female MC from San Francisco.

Believe me, she knows what you’re thinking if you’re hearing her name for the first time and she has no qualms with calling you an asshole for it. She seemed almost irritated when I asked her about her name, like I was one in a long line of guys to say: ‘So what’s that “spits hard” about?’

“With this ADD society and how much time and effort people put into finding out who they are as artists, you probably have a split second to get your point across and tell them everything about you,” Hopie, real name Kae Hope Ranoa, said. “So my name is a declarative sentence. It has a subject, it has a verb and it describes everything I do. It’s like: ‘Hi, my name is Hopie Spitshard and I spit hard.”

Hopie & The Native Elements

In the sweaty, male-dominated world of indie rap, the five-foot nothing Hopie – who moved to the Bay from the Philippines when she was three-years-old – just wants the respect any MC would get for delivering a dope album.The Diamond Dame, Hopie’s second independent release, is full of heavy 808-bass infused beats where Hopie’s flow double dutches over the track with surprising skill and poise. She lists influences like Monie Love, MC Lyte, Lil’ Kim and Left Eye. She told me that, more than anything, she wants people to know that she’s no joke when they hear her rap. It seems to be working. Del the Funky believes in Spitshard so much so he dropped a verse on her record, just because she asked.

Her name might be all you need to know about her as an artist, but there is more to this pint-sized, self-proclaimed Diamond Dame that isn’t so easily summed up in one sentence. Hopie just finished her second year of law school at UC Hastings. When she’s done with school, she hopes to pass the bar and become an attorney at a legal clinic for low-income clients. She told me law school takes up most of her time during the school year, and that it’s difficult to juggle both rapping and law.

“I worked at a law office before I went to law school,” she explained. “I would work 40 hours a week. I’d get off work and then I’d go home and rap, then spend the whole night at the studio and then come back in the morning smelling like hella drank and cigarettes and it was all good, but law school takes hella more time than anything in the whole wide world!”

But there are good parts to being in school.

“Summer time is rap time!” Hopie says as an anxious grin takes over her face. She looked like a kid waiting at the window for the rain to pass so she can go shoot stuff in the yard with a slingshot.

Spitshard couldn’t give me a clear answer when I asked which she was more passionate about, law or rap. She says her parents are supportive of both, but her mother doesn’t like it when she does shows on school nights and insists that she stops swearing on her records.

“She just doesn’t understand but she tries,” Hopie said. “She’s still proud of me in her mom way.”

But as far as money goes, she told me that right now – neither of them are easy on the wallet.

“Law helps the rapping, because when I'm not at school I’m working,” she said. “But law school is a big money-sucking machine and so is rap. Neither of them is helping my financial situation.”

But being broke isn’t stopping Hopie, from spitting bars or taking the bar. She’s already mostly done with school and is looking forward to her new EP release called Raw Gems. Even though Hopie couldn’t tell me which she liked more, rap or law, it was pretty obvious where her heart is. She told me she fell in love with hip hop when she recorded herself raping to Left Eye at Great America and realized she liked the way she sounded.

Close to the end of our interview, when the coffee fumes started getting to me, I asked Hopie if she plan to quit rap when she becomes a lawyer and, by what she said, it doesn’t look like rap is the one in danger of being dropped in her life.

She came in close, almost to whisper under the loud cappuccino machine: “Here's the secret,” she said. “When I’m done with law school, get my degree and pass the bar, I’m gonna focus on music full time. I just want to have a fall back.’’