Best of the Bay-winning rapper Jon Ditty has always enjoyed an out-of-the-box existence, but he and producer DJ Hurley have fully embraced nonconformity and individuality on a new, Kickstarter-funded album, Factory Recall.
“Moving into your early 30s, it's super easy to fall into the mundanity of adulthood and become estranged to the ethics and ideals your youth,” Ditty, 31, told CL. “Sometimes that can be due to forces beyond your control, or, sometimes it's due to laziness.”
Ditty feels like he’s done a decent job of sticking to his guns over the years, but societal pressures to grow up or live up to certain standards can admittedly leave anyone feeling broken. It takes a certain wrangling with self-confidence to carry forward under that pressure, according to him, and that’s where Factory Recall — which is due on March 30 via The Low Five Records imprint — started to become a working title for the album.
“Send me back! I don't need to fit your schema,” Ditty explained, adding that writing the album helped him learn a lot about himself.
Expertly directed, filmed and edited by Adam Danger Smith, a new video for lead single “Safe Music” looks and feels like a rallying cry against the urge to acquiescence to society, and it finds Ditty asking questions (“Are you here for the drugs or the music?”) while also delivering a straightforward chorus that would be disheartening if the song didn’t ride so hard (“I’m too weird to be famous,” Ditty raps, “You’re too whack to not stay local”).
The duo will celebrate the release of the album during a Spring Beer Jam concert at Dunedin Brewery on Saturday, March 30. There’s no cover for the show, which gets going at 8 p.m. Unless your home is Pottery Barn everything, you should watch “Safe Music” below.
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This article appears in Mar 21-28, 2019.