Everyone has a breaking point.

This is the general idea behind the Sharkey and C-Rayz Walz collaboration album Monster Maker.  Sharkey breaks down the concept further: “I feel like the world is the monster maker and I feel like everyone, no matter how good of a family you’ve been raised by, or how good of a person you are, is capable of being that person that is sitting in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic for an hour one day and on the verge of going out and blasting people.  Everyone has those moments where they feel like they can cross the line, everyone has that seed in them where they’re capable of doing something monster-ish.”

An innovative concept requires inventive execution.  As such, Sharkey enlisted the help of a monster of a lyrical kind: Stronghold’s C-Rayz Walz. C-Rayz describes his work on the album: “Each track is like a different emotion or theory or relation, everything that you go through before you just fuckin’ lose your mind.”  The applicability of the monster analogy cuts even deeper, as Walz notes “we’re really monsters of our craft because that’s what they turned us into.  Doing all this good shit without really getting recognized for it right and we just go in and say yo we’re gonna do something that’s better than everybody’s shit.”

In this industry, the struggle for recognition has been known to make monsters out of the meek.  In fact, such a metaphorical transformation may serve as a precursor to success.  Sharkey points out “it’s the frustration that’s built up and accumulated in everybody…the want to release it sometimes isn’t always a positive release, sometimes it’s an evil release.” 

If anyone was due for a release, it’s Walz, who describes the two years leading up to Monster Maker as, quite simply, “the makings of a monster.”  With the odds stacked against him, Monster Maker served as the catharsis for a string of misfortunes.  “I had label woes, my project changed up, my album didn’t sell as well as I thought it would, I lost all my possessions in my storage shit, all my merchandise, all my music and basically my whole life’s possessions.  All I’ve got in my house are basically my clothes and CD’s.”  As if that wasn’t enough, Walz continues “I fired my manager, my tour fell through, my brother got killed last summer, I had to go to the wake on my birthday.  I’m still going through shit with my son’s mother, I ain’t seen my son in months.  So it’s like I have every excuse to just flip out.  And the overall climate in New York is hell so why not bug out here?”

While Walz’s life was less than sunny, Sharkey was in his hometown of Washington D.C. working with a myriad of artists, including Grand Puba, Jean Grae, The Pharcyde, Eminem, Rick Rubin and Public Enemy.  Sharkey also released his debut, Sharkey’s Machine, to critical fanfare (4 stars in URB Magazine, Washington Post’s top 10 albums of the year) and eventually ended up linking up with Walz.  Walz remembers that the two traded phone calls and emails until one day some songs finally made it his way.  “I checked out a couple of his records and I was like yeah that shit is definitely sounding like nothing else in the world.  We vibed and clicked, and that’s how I like to do a feature anyway, if I don’t like you as a person I don’t care what the check is.  We did a show, it was a real good vibe.  Got up, went to his house, met his family, went in the booth and knocked out a song in like thirty minutes, a joint called “Pain To The Picture,” and that shit came out so ill in thirty minutes.  That shit is monstrous, and it basically started from then.” 

Although Sharkey’s pairing with Bronx native C-Rayz Walz may seem odd to some, according to Walz they really have a lot more in common than people may think at first glance.  “Sharkey’s a maaaad underrated producer, arranger, concoctor the same way I’m a maaaad underrated artist, composer, performer, thinker.  We both put in a lot of work and have had long careers in this music industry and I don’t think that we really got that good weather, it was a lot of gloomy days, but I now think the world is definitely gonna see something.”

After completing Monster Maker, Walz unequivocally feels that Sharkey is “the best producer I’ve ever worked with.  Sharkey beats are everything,” Walz explains, “they’re rock, they’re synth, they’re techno, they’re Hip-Hop, boom-bap, they’re everything.  So he killed all those fuckin’ producers, he made a monster and now he’s here to bite everybody’s fuckin’ head off man.”

Sharkey is indeed ready to do damage, in that he aspires for his music to be an outlet for others.  “For the most part it’s about giving somebody something that’s maybe an outlet for them, just like music’s an outlet for me.”

Sharkey and C-Rayz Walz have tapped into their creative geniuses to create that something and what they’ve created is, simply put, a monster.