Music
Meet Gupi: Sonic the Hedgehog fan, Skrillex disciple and son of Tony Hawk
Get to know the electronic pop producer who was discovered by Charli XCX and signed to 100 gecs’ Mad Decent subsidiary earlier this year.
Spencer Hawk loves Sonic the Hedgehog, Skrillex, fast food and filming himself gallivanting around Boston for absurdist music videos. Under the name Gupi (that’s pronounced like the fish), the 21-year-old Berklee College of Music student makes hyper electronic music that crosses bubblegum bass, acid trance, glitchy house and dubstep. He’s really good at it, too. So good that he caught the ear of Charli XCX (more on that later) and recently signed to Dog Show Records, a Mad Decent subsidiary that’s run by Dylan Brady of 100 gecs.
The way he puts it, the most important features of his identity are his burgeoning music career and his lifelong infatuation with a certain anthropomorphic hedgehog. However, whenever people see his surname they can’t help but ask about it – so let’s just get it out of the way.
Yes, he is the son of legendary pro skateboarder Tony Hawk: the vertical pioneer who landed the first 900, racked up dozens of contest victories and licensed the video game series that so many of us grew up playing. Both of Spencer’s parents are supportive of his aspirations to make it in music, but he’s acutely aware of his inherent privilege as the child of a celebrity athlete. Contrary to what some internet haters have claimed, Tony hasn’t had any financial influence on his son’s career. That’s all Spencer’s doing.
I want people to know me for me and not as Tony Hawk’s son
“I try to make a very large point of not at all involving my dad, just name-wise or financial-wise, in any of my music things,” says Hawk. “Because I don’t feel accomplished otherwise. It’s just so disingenuous and takes away from the point to begin with, which is the music.”
Talking from his apartment in Allston, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Boston, Hawk is chipper, friendly, goofy and a good sport when the inevitable questions about his family name come up. As his profile grows, fans and journalists are beginning to realise who he is. He understands people’s curiosity but he’s very clear about how he wants to be seen.
“I want people to know me for me and not as Tony Hawk’s son,” he says. “Because that’s just been my whole life and I try to not let it drive me as crazy as it does, because I know where other people are coming from. But it does get to me a little bit.”
Naturally, Hawk has loved to skate since he was a child and he still enjoys doing it recreationally. How could he not? However, he always knew that it wasn’t something he wanted to make a career out of. In fact, it was his mum who really put him on the path he’s on now. She recommended he try guitar as a kid and, after a few lessons, he was hooked.
“She set it into motion but she wasn’t on my ass about it, which I’m very appreciative of,” Hawk says.
Gupi
© Gupi
He was in a band from elementary school through to early high school that played a combination of Led Zeppelin and Black Keys-type stuff and, for a while, rock music was his primary interest. But then, like many other teens who formed their taste during the EDM boom of the early 2010s, Hawk heard Skrillex and Deadmau5 and his musical interests were completely re-routed. He remembers watching Foo Fighters play a collaborative set with Deadmau5 at the 2012 Grammys and as the camera panned from the venerable rockers to the masked DJ behind the boards, Hawk thought to himself, "Oh, that’s crazy, I like that better.”
He started tinkering around on GarageBand to try to replicate what he liked about Deadmau5’s 4x4=12 album and Skrillex’s seminal Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites EP. Both were fundamental influences, but it's the latter who continues to be Gupi's guiding light.
“Skrillex is still a huge inspiration,” Hawk says. “Not even his new s**t but his older things. Listening back to, like, Rock ‘N’ Roll (Will Take You To The Mountain) and Kill EVERYBODY... I still don’t know how to make a song like [that].
“I can’t even compare it to anything today,” he continues excitedly. “Not even dubstep today. Some of the songs, there are dubstep elements but they’re not dubstep. It’s like crazy rave, electronic whatever – sort of what I’m trying to make.”
Skrillex comes to Austin City Limits
© Erik Voake/Red Bull Content Pool
Throughout middle school, Hawk would make albums and songs and just keep them to himself because he didn’t know how to upload them online. Eventually, he found Soundcloud and began linking up with fellow producers who were also making cartoonish dance music with a distinctly post-internet flair. Back then, he was producing under the name W3N and was asked to join a DIY label/collective of artists – some of who he’s still in close contact with. Shortly thereafter, he found PC Music artists like Sophie and Easyfun and spent the rest of high school becoming a student of their future-pop catalogue.
Skrillex is still a huge inspiration
Before enrolling in Berklee’s brand-new electronic production programme (he says his class are the “guinea pigs” of the major), he had no formal mentors, just internet friends and YouTube tutorials. He started putting out music as Gupi in 2016, teaching himself everything up until that point.
“It’s kind of a cool shared experience of people my age,” he says. “We heard Skrillex, we wanted to figure it out, there was no one to teach us, so it was just, like, Ableton/GarageBand time.”
He’s still completing his degree, but Hawk is already collaborating with his idols and on his way to becoming an established figure in a weirdo electro-pop world that heralds everything from "nightcore" and dubstep to pop-punk and metalcore. About a year ago, Charli XCX discovered his 2018 mini-album, All, and asked him to do a session with her for her 2019 album, Charli. She didn’t use his contribution, but he still got to interact with PC Music owner A.G. Cook, Dylan Brady and his friend/longtime Charli XCX producer Umru in a makeshift studio, which was completely new to him.
“They had an Airbnb that A.G. and Charli rented out and there was a little guest house there, too,” he says. “Umru and I were working on a song in the living room and A.G. and Dylan were working on a song in the house. We had our stations and there were cats walking around, it was pretty cool.”
That’s what put him on the radar of Brady, whose career would blow up later that year due to the popularity of 100 gecs’ debut album, 1000 gecs. By the end of 2019, Hawk had his first proper Gupi album, None, ready to go, but he was initially too timid to submit it to Brady for a release on Dog Show. After a friend eventually urged him to send it, Brady quickly responded, “Oh, fire,” and the rest is history.
Charli XCX
© Brent Stirton / Red Bull Content Pool
Gupi’s association with 100 gecs makes total sense. His music evokes the same moods, colours and playful energy. None is the sort of racket you’d want thumping in the background while you gleefully careen through a video game map. Most of it is unrelenting instrumental music with squelchy sound design and ecstatic exuberance that calls to mind early Skrillex. However, the album’s high point is the wily Thos Moser – a late addition to the album that wasn’t even in the tracklist Hawk first sent to Brady.
The track, which features perma-auto-tuned vocals from Hawk’s close friend Fraxiom, is a four-and-a-half minute bubblegum bass journey that feels like an hour – but in the best way possible. Conceived by the two of them after a surreal experience at a Taco Bell, the song (and its equally overstimulating video) is essentially a 5G-speed account of their rascally shenanigans in Boston, a city they felt like total misfits in until they found each other. It’s a ridiculous, but undeniably great pop song.
To them, it was one elaborate inside joke. The track contains bars about specific 100 gecs concerts (“Give myself to the gecs pit / Break my spinal / Those NYU kids wreck s**t / fallen tiles”) and cult pop icon Caroline Polachek (“Check like Caroline Pola”). However, a friend filmed them performing it live at a house show in November 2019 and the video began circulating online. Before they knew it, strangers were Tweeting at the pair about the song and Thos Moser became something of a meme in their own, small corner of the internet.
“It got to a point where, in January, I used it to soundcheck something, and one of my friends was like, ‘Wait, that song is you guys? I’ve just been hearing it on the timeline, that’s crazy.’ I [was] like, ‘What the f***?’”
After listening to 100 gecs, I was like: ‘I feel like they get it’
Even stranger, Hawk has continued to receive messages from fans who feel an intimate connection with it, something he and Fraxiom never expected to happen.
“Something that really meant the world to me was that a lot of people had DMd Frax and I was like, ‘Hey, I really needed that. I had been looking for a way to express myself and I feel like I found this and it really resonates.’ And I’m like, ‘Damn, that’s crazy.’ Just because it’s fun, goofy stuff.”
Those messages are of particular significance to Hawk because that’s how he felt when he first found 100 gecs. Despite growing up with a celebrity father and a loving family, Hawk always felt like an outsider, especially when he first moved to Boston. It wasn’t until he met Fraxiom, who introduced him to 100 gecs, that he found the community he’d been looking for. Which he describes as: “People that are okay with me having a Sonic decal on my wall.”
“I felt very isolated when I first got here because I couldn’t click with anyone at my school and anyone else really,” he says. “I couldn’t fully express myself around anyone I would meet. And after listening to [100 gecs] I was like, ‘I feel like they get it.’ It was very cool. Everything feels very full circle and it’s very neat.”
