Lots of kids are fans of Angry Birds, but only one has turned his love of the game into a hip-hop track featuring some of the genre's most legendary figures.
Sidney Max is the now eight year old son of veteran rapper Andres "Dres" Titus, best known for fronting Black Sheep. At six, Sidney followed in his father's footsteps by writing a rap. But rather than rhyming about "hoes we knows," he wrote about his favorite video game, Angry Birds. Dres videotaped the result, which was quickly noticed by Rovio, the company that created the game.
Just a few years later, Sidney has teamed up with his dad (who is no stranger to brand partnerships, as his group's biggest song, "The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)" was used in a famous 2010 Kia commercial) and the iconic producer DJ Premier to create the song and music video for "Here Come The Birds." The video keeps it real by including graffiti artists-turned-muralists TATS CRU, as well as Dres and Primo.
The video for "Here Come The Birds," which is premiering exclusively here on Forbes, is the centerpiece of a week-long hip-hop themed tournament on Angry Birds Friends, the social version of the game. I got on the phone with Kai Torstila, marketing director at Rovio Entertainment, the company that created Angry Birds, for more detail about how hip-hop, gaming, and evil pigs all fit together.
Forbes: Can you give me a little background on how this project came about?
Kai Torstila, Marketing Director, Rovio Entertainment: A little while ago, we spotted this kid on YouTube, Sidney Max. He was rapping about Angry Birds. We were really impressed with what he was doing.
We already highlighted it in our social media when he did the original, but then we got in touch with his father Dres, and started discussing doing something together. It took a little while, but it started building up something pretty massive. It turned out that Sidney is a huge, huge fan of Angry Birds – he’s a little bit like a Wikipedia of the game. That got us thinking, hey, why don’t we do something really big around this?
We have Angry Birds Friends, which is the social version of our game where do weekly tournaments. We were like, why don’t we create a whole tournament around hip-hop and around Sidney? Of course Dres got super-excited, and we started talking about how we need to produce the track better and think about all these different elements.
Dres is well-connected to DJ Premier, and they started discussing it. Premier laid a track and Dres wrote some lyrics together with us – we gave him a little bit of inspiration of what it could be about. Then they went on to actually recording the track. We thought it would be cool to make an Angry Birds-inspired music video as well, to promote the track and promote the game and promote Sidney.
F: Can you tell me about the tournament – what it is, how it relates to hip-hop, and how it works?
KT: You can play Angry Birds Friends on
Every so often, we do special tournaments with a theme. Because of the whole collaboration with Sidney and the song and video, we decided to celebrate with a special dedicated hip-hop tournament. It includes the track, so you can hear the music in the game itself. The designs are hip-hop themed. The backgrounds resemble the New York skyline, where Sidney’s from. There’s other things like graffiti as well.
F: What connection do you see with hip-hop and your audience? Was it just that there was someone rapping about Angry Birds, or do you think the connection goes any deeper?
KT: The Angry Birds story has always been about putting the fans in the center of things. When Angry Birds turned five, we created a contest where fans got to design the levels. We also took in all of our partners from along the way – people like
The partners gave us themes. UNICEF's was, give all the children in the world the chance to go to school. So they designed a level that is about kids going to school. The pigs, who are the bad characters in our games, are blocking the way to school, so the Angry Birds have to help you get there.
We’ve always brought our partners and fans right into the middle of the story. And when you look at the original clip of Sidney rapping about Angry Birds, it was like, we have to do something with this, because this child is a huge fan and he’s also super-talented. And then it just kept building up, and we thought, what more can we do? We always want to do things in the biggest possible fashion, so when we have the opportunity to work with Dres and Premier on the track and the music video, this is the kind of level where we want to operate. This is the perfect storm of a fan with a special skill that we can bring into the center of our work, and that’s what we as a company enjoy doing.
F: Who is the audience for the video and this campaign? The reason I ask is, the video is filled with hip-hop treats that kids might not get parents might. It features TATS CRU, a very well-known graffiti crew. Obviously, it has DJ Premier. It has references and people that an adolescent audience audience might not appreciate, but an adult one would.
TATS CRU member Wilfredo "BIO" Feliciano painting in the video for "Here Come The Birds"
KT: You hit the nail on the head there, which is part of the tricky aspect of this. Angry Birds is universal. It goes from the kid to the grandmother. We always have to cater to a very broad audience.
The beauty of what we try to do in the video is Dres and DJ Premier come from the roots of hip-hop, and we totally respect that they’re amazing talents and amazing guys. We wanted to weave some of those elements in, but also give it the fresh angle of Sidney’s age group. Also, considering the fact that Sidney’s a kid rapper, we want to cater to all the gamers that will come to Angry Birds Friends, and that age group is slightly older.
We wanted to have something for everybody who comes into the game and we managed to do that pretty well. But as I’ve said, the age group is pretty wide, so that’s why it has older hip-hop culture, but also has lots of fresh elements from Sidney’s age.
F: So there is a difference in terms of demographic between the regular Angry Birds and Angry Birds Friends? The latter tends to be a little bit older?
KT: Yeah, that’s right, because it’s a social game. It doesn’t require you to be logged into Facebook, but being logged into Facebook is a pretty big deal when you have that social element. That ages that group up. We have had a lot of different games with all kinds of themes. We haven’t had that many directly music- or artist-specific ones before, and we’re going to bring more of that into it as well. The richness of the hip-hop culture is a no-brainer. The whole thing was meant to be.
F: As you said, you want to do more music-themed things in the future. Why do you want to do that, and what directions will you go?
KT: Rovio Entertainment is an entertainment company with games at its heart, but we take music very seriously. So if you listen to the soundscapes of our animations and our games, you’ll notice that we’ve always, from the very beginning, wanted to excel at all levels, whether it’s graphics or music. Music is essential for us.
Especially with the full feature movie coming next year, music has an important role. Hopefully we’ll find other interesting projects with fans that are creating things from the musical perspective, and we can bring those in. We’ll keep on doing those collaborations.
