If you ever need someone to rap on deadline, you might want to call Gallo Locknez.
The Pittsburgh-based rapper just spent the NBA season whipping up late-night rap songs for highlight videos on the league’s social media platforms.
“I would basically watch a game and get the highlights, and, for the most part, they would base the highlights around my lyrics,” he says. “They would post it up at about 9 or 10 a.m., so I would have to have it produced, written, mixed and mastered by like 2 a.m. It was pretty crazy.”
Just part of the payoff for him was seeing one of those videos on the Jumbotron while he attended NBA All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles.
On Sept. 15, Gallo will be featured on HBO Boxing with a track he wrote for the Pay-Per-View fight between Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin.
“One of the main reasons the NBA wanted to work with me,” he says, “is I had such a clean background and I had such clean music. Same with the boxing thing. They said, ‘We wanted to work with you because we don’t have to worry about TMZ pulling up anything crazy on you.’ ”
Gallo, who was born in New York City and grew up in the Poconos, moved to Pittsburgh three years ago with his wife and two daughters, in part, to be close to family — his sister lives here.
“I knew it was a real artistic place,” he says of his new hometown. “I knew there were arts going on, whether it be jazz, hip-hop. I like hip-hop. Obviously, that’s what I do. But I love MUSIC. And I love art — drawing, painting, graffiti. I appreciate all types of creativity. That’s what I love about Pittsburgh.”
While his dad was a musician, playing mostly jazz and rock, Gallo, who’s in his mid-30s, was turned on by hip-hop artists like DMX, Redman and Eminem in the late ’90s and wanted to learn how to do it himself.
“My father had a lot of equipment in the basement, and he didn’t really like me touching his stuff,” the rapper says. “But when he would go to work, I would sneak down there and mess around, and play keys and play the drum pad. I wanted to record, but I didn’t have any capability. What I ended up doing is, we had like 10 VCRs in the house, so I was like, ‘There’s gotta be a way I can record just audio into the VCR.’ ”
That’s exactly what he did. Somehow, when he was 16 or 17, he recorded his first raps on VHS. Early on, he made the decision to be a “clean” rapper.
“Honestly, I just like being different,” he says. “Everybody was cursing and everybody was talking about guns and drugs. And I like to stand out. I decided not to do that. I decided to go the clean route. Rakim was also a person who didn’t curse in his rhymes. He’s considered a GOAT, one of the best ever, and I respected that. And I didn’t want to limit my audience. A lot of people hear cursing and they just shut it off.”
Staying clean, he says, “opened a lot of doors for me.”
Two years ago, he released the album “March Forth.” In July, he followed that with “Sacrifice,” a five-song EP with Jflo that combines hip-hop, R&B and trap. He has a new full-length album, “Gallos World,” planned for the fall.
“The pattern with me is that I work pretty good under pressure, so we challenged ourselves to create this album in a week,” he says. “We did one song a day and finished the album in a week, which is why we called it ‘Sacrifice.’ We had to sacrifice time, sleep, to get it done. We’re both married, we both have children, so we sacrificed every day.”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.
First Published: August 9, 2018, 11:45 a.m.
