“Akon and Usher are way over their rambunctious stages of being artists,” says Campa. “They each have families, so even if you wanted to act a fool and mess around, it just wouldn’t be right. The most surreal thing for me on tour was getting to sit in a room with Usher and have a one-on-one with this dude I grew up listening to. That was like, woah. I just had a conversation with Usher and he knows who we are and he’s giving us all this advice, telling us about the first time Kanye opened for him. Usher is a perfect human being.”

What’s even more impressive than a first major tour with two of the best is to have landed it before Dev or The Cataracs released official albums of their own. Instead, The Cataracs have been producing singles for other artists (Hollowell-Dhar’s forte) and building their own following on the label Indie-Pop as well as the Internet, where the boys initially discovered one of Dev’s laptop-recorded “diss tracks” on MySpace.

“Artists of the younger generation who were hyphy artists would communicate on MySpace,” says Hollowell- Dhar. “One kid who was in touch with us put us onto the Blast Off Kids, which was actually the name Dev had at the time, it was her group. It was just kind of there and we found it. You listen to a lot of crap music all the time, sifting through the Internet. But something was real distinct about her voice. I suspected there was something magical there and there was.”
The Cataracs’ lastest superstar collaboration was even more magic for the group; the work they did for Snoop Dogg’s “Wet,” which appears on Snoop’s most recent album Doggumentary, topped charts internationally.

“It just happened,” says Campa. “Snoop Dogg’s manager knows our manager and—bam—he heard the beats and wanted to do it. He called us from France just to tell us he really liked the song and that he was going to feature it.”

“The Snoop thing went bigger than we ever thought it would,” Hollowell-Dhar continues, “and so did the few tracks we have on 50 Cent’s album.”

The hype certainly can’t hurt their ongoing exposure, but Hollowell-Dhar admits, “Honestly, we just really want Dev’s album and our album to be incredible. As much fun and profitable as it is to make music for other people, [our albums are] really our focus right now.” With so many singles and brand names under their belt and a following that got them each picked up by Universal, their electro-rap energies are finally primed for mainstream releases.

(Continued in the pages of RAGGED…)

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