After a brief, torrential downpour, the sun has come out in force and a few members of Bawal Clan linger in a convenience store parking lot in Metro Manila. They’re waiting for some friends to join them for a skateboarding session before the release party later tonight for their debut album, Paid in Bawal. The clan is a rap group, but they embrace the breadth of their city’s sprawling creative scene, actively recruiting members from overlapping subcultures, including visual artists and skaters who don’t make music. Of the 13 or so members on the roster, eight are rappers and five make beats.

The convenience store we’re standing in front of is in Poblacion, a red-light district that’s the latest destination for creatives and night owls. Streetwalkers proposition passersby and dealers offer fake Viagra just outside the city’s liveliest bars. Tonight the party’s at Boogie, a new venue opened by the owners of the forward-looking clubs Black Market, 20:20, and B-Side. It’s a smaller space, covered in graffiti by a local artist named Chase and plastered with classic photos of old-school markers and 1990s-era rap albums.

Ankhten Brown, a Filipino-Jamaican member of the Bawal Clan who grew up between New York and Manila, skates around the parking lot. He jumps onto an aircon box and tries to stall on a window ledge, much to the annoyance of the employees watching from the steps. “You gotta be creative as a skater here, because there’s just no space. Make use of every little thing possible,” he explains with a wide grin on his tattooed face. 

Once it’s clear none of the other members of the group will show up this early, they give up on the lazy skate session and drift over to a Japanese-inspired food stall hidden down a nearby side street. Apparently the staff are friends of theirs, and the new album can be heard blaring from the kitchen. The team order some shots of lambanog, a strong local spirit, and before downing them everyone yells, “Bawal!”

Nearly the entire crew is Filipino, but many of them have spent a long time in the US. They gravitated to each other a few years ago, while they were each working on their own projects, and eventually they decided to form a group. Their name started out as an inside joke: the word bawal means “taboo,” and they’d often call out the phrase yung bawal—“that’s forbidden”—when hanging out together. Then their main beatmaker, playing on the “Young” prefix that rappers often add to their names, adopted Yung Bawal as his moniker. When they formally became a collective two years ago, they chose Bawal Clan to make the casual breaking of taboos their ethos.

Even now, two years on, the crew still inserts “bawal” references whenever possible, and every time, it boosts their energy up a notch. “People like our music because we say whatever we want to say,” says MNL$ (pronounced Manila Money), one of the crew’s rappers who grew up in California and had a successful music career in Korea before moving here. “We’re all really rebellious. We stand by our individuality.”

By now we’re standing in front of the Boogie, waiting for the party to start. Someone blasts the album from a parked truck, offering a taste of the music that will be played later that night. The tracks range from angry and abrasive mosh pit music to sleek, thoughtful expressions of love to classic boom bap. On the Street Fighter-inspired “Yoga Flame,” cartoony bleeps are paired with a “Shabba“-type hook that works as playful club music. The gothic trap of “GTFO” is grounded by distorted bass and chamber music keys and even features a verse in Spanish by Ankhten. “My mom is Spanish-Filipina, but I also picked up a lot of Spanish in New York,” he explains. Despite the variety of moods the tracks capture, it’s a solidly rap and R&B album.

With the diversity of their members and styles, it’s hard to pin down what Bawal Clan is about entirely. On one track someone will be rapping about violence, and another artist will be talking about burning sage to ward off negative energy. With such a large roster, they cover a lot of ground. Occasionally, seven rappers will make it onto one track, but the average is more like five or six per song.

Bawal Clan’s members come from a variety of creative backgrounds, some with careers outside of music. DZ SVG (pronounced “Dizzy Savage”) is a screen actor who’s bounced back and forth between Manila and Las Vegas for half of his life. A few of the members have even spent years living in Europe. “I think our international outlook gives us an advantage,” says DZ. There’s also Lex Luthoor, who’s Nigerian and grew up in Spain before moving to the Philippines in high school. “We consider Alex just as Filipino as everyone else in the crew,” MNL$ chimes in. “My boys have my back,” agrees Lex, who speaks fluent Tagalog. While Filipinos themselves can be very diverse, there aren’t many white or black people in the country so they stand out, and Lex has faced a lot of discrimination. “But these guys are like my family,” he says without pause. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Their different views jostle side-by-side within their verses. Whatever comes to mind, if they like it, they go for it. They don’t let anyone tell them what to do. One word they regularly use to describe themselves and their story—in addition to “bawal”—is “organic.” It’s how they came together as a team, how they create music, how they learn. It’s about going with the flow and seizing opportunities as they come. They don’t just rhyme in freestyle, they freestyle their lives. They’ll get to where they’re going however they see fit. Just don’t stand in their way.

Facebook: ~/BawalClan
Instagram: @bawalclan

Contributor: Mike Steyels
Photographer: Iya Forbes