If Gabriel Alberro were a CD, he’d come with a warning sticker: prolonged exposure can lead to harmful side effects, like depression or melancholy.
Alberro is neither a hopeless pessimist nor, for that matter, crazy—though he did suffer a nervous breakdown at age 17 and once was kicked out of Valley High for threatening to blow up the school. His is a tortured soul, an ancient spirit, 31 going on 300. He’s seen a lot (dysfunctional family, violence), experienced a lot (lost love, an arrest, record industry shadiness) and traveled the country, somehow always returning to Vegas, his on-again, off-again home since 1986.
Pain has been the soundtrack of his life. Were it not for music, the 31-year-old emcee (hip-hop alias: Obnoxus) wouldn’t be where he is now, at the height of his creative powers, and wouldn’t be who he is: the proud owner of one of the largest bodies of locally produced underground/hardcore/crazy-ass hip-hop. On an Ubnawkshis record (he and producer Julian “Deadbeats” Rodriguez) you’re likely to hear Earth, Wind & Fire, The Doors, Led Zeppelin and George Clinton—“I grew up listening to them,” Alberro says—mixed with the paranoid aggression of Onyx and Eminem’s sarcasm. One reviewer called them the “Pink Floyd of rap.”
Alberro’s official resume dates to 1990’s Endangered Species on Black Market Records. He has been writing since his teens. Back then, it was mostly about the craziness he’d seen growing up in hardscrabble Miami neighborhoods. These days, he spits about personal demons, wack artists, the sad state of the world, abstract thought and, well, you know, painful stuff.
“A lot of the pain has to do with being abandoned by my father,” he says. “I’ve dealt with a lot of heartbreak. It was tough because I liked a lot of girls, but I was shy and had to sit on the sidelines and watch other guys get the girls. I’ve been in trouble. I’ve had issues with my peers. I was introverted, but I could write, so I let music speak for me.”
Alberro’s penchant for the pen would finally earn him notice from girls and his peers; he became a fixture at Valley pep rallies. In 1995 he formed Flavah of Behavia, got a manager and a studio in Los Angeles and, he says, captured the ears of record industry power brokers. They filled his head with champagne wishes and worked him like a pack mule—write this, record that. Life became one painful deadline. He couldn’t take it.
“I had the weight of the world on me; I f--kin’ snapped. I had a mental breakdown,” says Alberro, who eventually returned to Florida and earned an associate’s degree in graphic design and visual communications from an art institute in Fort Lauderdale. “I was just a baby at the time. I wasn’t ready.”
Over the ensuing 12 years, Alberro attacked music with ferocity—CDs, DVDs, collabos, guest appearances, videos and more than 100 recorded songs to go along with screenplays and poems and, a new muse, art.
“I tried to escape music,” he says. “I really got into art and that part of my life is blowing up now. [His work has graced artists’ logos, album and DVD covers, posters, postcards and clothing; he recently inked international representation.] But I kept coming back to music. It’s a burden and a passion. I’m a real artist, so this stuff burns in me.”
Of late, Alberro says he and Rodriguez—who co-founded Avalanche Entertainment—are chasing a more marketable sound. He wants to ease off the painful, melancholy stuff a bit—since that episode in LA, he’s had two meltdowns and still suffers from mood swings—while still pushing the envelope, as he did with 2003’s acoustic Fragmentz. Rodriguez calls this new path an alternative form of hip-hop. Alberro says it’ll be on some “Rolling Stones meets Gnarls Barkley meets underground hip-hop shit.”
Hopefully it’ll be fun ... and painless.