Newsfeed
Printer-Friendly ModeFriends keep hip-hop group going despite distance
March 17, 2008 —
Chris Cerbus and Matt Wazbinski graduated from Midland High School last spring. Wazbinski went to Southwestern Assemblies College in Texas, and Cerbus came to SVSU as a communications major. What makes the two unique is the fact that they are a clean party hip-hop group, and they released their first album as T.M.A. last spring.
The album was titled Showtime, and they have a second album releasing this May entitled Money Talks. As a clean party hip-hop group, T.M.A. tries to keep its free of references to drugs and violence or profane language.
"We have a different sort of voice," Cerbus said. "We don't talk about the 'gangster' life because that's not who we are. We grew up in Midland."
Despite the distance between Cerbus and Wazbinski, they have still managed to work on and record their second album.
"I basically carry the load right now," Cerbus says, "but I'm not trying to take the glory, and Matt understands that."
The two are in constant contact over the phone and online, continually sharing song and lyric ideas, giving feedback and developing their sound. They met in fifth grade when Wazbinski moved across the street from Cerbus, and they quickly became best friends.
"We always had a binder with us and were always making lyrics and writing them down," Cerbus said.
They started to put actual music together last winter shortly after Cerbus met Zach Rokosz, currently a Midland High junior.
"His two older sisters graduated with us," Cerbus says. "I was over to their house one day, and he and I started talking music. Pretty soon he said, 'I record instrumentals.'"
Rokosz has his own instrumental recording studio, and it wasn't long before Cerbus and Wazbinski were putting their lyrics together with Rokosz's beats.
As T.M.A., they have had their songs played at Midland Loons games, L.A. Dodgers games, at the Northern Club in Midland and recorded a song entitled "Deja Vu" for Deja Vu Nightclub in Saginaw.
"We try to put on positive songs with a good rhythm without them being like 'f-this' or 'f-that,'" Cerbus said. "We feel we can reach an audience of anywhere from 10 to fifty-year-olds with our music. Plus, we are always being humble to all those that we meet and help promote us."
Cerbus encourages people to look up T.M.A. on either MySpace (www.myspace.com/tma555) or iTunes. For copies of the cd, contact him on MySpace.