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Image via Campa
David Singer-Vine was already racing up Interstate 5 out of LA by the time his partner and management team read his resignation letter. He was headed towards Berkeley, his hometown, and then to Shanghai, where he hoped to disappear. “I was looking forward to becoming an ant in China,” he explains. It had been the most difficult decision of his life, but Singer-Vine had resolved to leave the music industry behind.
Singer-Vine is better known as Campa, the songwriter half of The Cataracs, whose 2010 record “Like a G6” (with Far East Movement and Dev) twice hit No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. International success hadn’t been easy, even for a record as irresistibly catchy as “Like a G6.” “I don’t think Far East Movement’s label wanted it as a single because they didn’t own enough of it, but it was unstoppable,” he says. According to Singer-Vine, The Cataracs owned about 75%-80% of the record. “Like a G6” opened every door in the music industry to The Cataracs, and they began to live the proverbial high life, often playing shows at $20,000 a pop. That life took its toll, and by 2012 Singer-Vine had fallen out of love with their music.
“We were playing the mainstream pop game, the label was choosing our songs for us, and we weren’t sure about anything anymore. I felt like I was losing grasp on what I wanted The Cataracs to be,” he says. He looked in the mirror after a show in Utah, realized he was miserable, and knew he needed to see what else was out there before he woke up with his 20s in the rearview. He decided to step out into the unknown.
The Past
To understand Singer-Vine, you have to go back to Berkeley High School, the place where The Cataracs first formed in 2003. “We were two light-skinned brothas trying to pop off in the hyphy game,” Singer-Vine chuckles. Hyphy ruled the Bay Area, but after scoring regional hit in 2006 with “Blueberry Afghani,” Singer-Vine and his partner, Niles “Cyranizzy/Cyrano” Hollowell-Dhar, gradually realized the hyphy sound, and the Bay Area itself, had a ceiling. They dove aggressively into pop in 2008 with the infectiously auto-tuned “Baby Baby (The Lover’s Anthem),” much to the dismay of their friends who swore by the likes of Andre Nickatina.
Yet even as their sound evolved, they eventually exhausted the insular Bay Area scene. “We’d played every little thing, every club. You don’t become a mainstream pop artist in the Bay.” Singer-Vine describes the Bay Area as a bubble that creates its own compelling brand of pop culture, but ultimately can keep that culture trapped inside. “You could see it with someone like Natassia (Kreayshawn). She was always so cool growing up and everyone knew it was a matter of time. And then she moves to LA, I mean fuck, I look at Miley Cyrus and I just see a girl who watched the “Gucci Gucci” video over and over.” The Cataracs knew the end of the pop music rainbow was hidden somewhere in that dirty Hollywood sign, so they headed down to LA.
If moving to the heart of the beast was one piece that allowed “Like a G6” to happen, the other was the appearance of female vocalist Dev. “We had been working with manly men, all these gangsta rappers,” Singer-Vine says. “We just wanted a female muse.” And as if on cue they stumbled upon the Myspace of Dev, who was living in Manteca, CA (on the way to farmland), and working at Gap. “It was cute and ambitious what she was doing,” Singer-Vine remembers. When they started to collaborate it became clear they’d hit on a magical pop formula. “Write a bass-heavy-ass song, with weird distorted bass, do our funny little raps, our Cataracs thing, and put Dev on the hook. It was a golden formula.” It certainly was. Slight variations of that formula produced hit songs like “Bass Down Low,” “Top of the World,” and, of course, “Like a G6.”
“I’d written the song for Dev,” Singer-Vine says of “Like a G6.” “All we did was take the thing I’d written for Dev, the ‘sippin sizzurp in my ride…,’ Niles made the beat in like 10 minutes, boom boom boom. It all comes from our sound. It’s like “Blueberry Afghani” with bits of the Vans song—shout out to Young L.” They passed the bulk of the record to Far East Movement, who wrote their verses, and then watched as a song they owned the vast majority of became a worldwide phenomenon.
“It validated everything,” Singer-Vine explains. “I’d sacrificed so much of my time. We’d worked with every big artist in the Bay, but everything looked like a big waste of time.” Before “Like a G6,” when he’d visit home and sit down at dinner with his parents’ friends, he’d feel like the black sheep, the one who kept telling himself over and over again, “It’s gonna work, I’m gonna do music.” “Like a G6” meant he officially had a career. One song changed so many lives: his, his partner’s, his managers’, Dev’s, Far East Movement’s, the list goes on. Singer-Vine could finally let out the breath he’d been holding in since high school. When The Cataracs first started they thought they were going to be the next Eminem. “We thought we were going to send a demo tape to Dr. Dre. That was our dream.” Now they had that type of wide exposure. They had a #1 song.
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But unfortunately for Singer-Vine, as is often the case in the entertainment industry, the victory began to feel hollow. “Music labels are so unoriginal, they suck so bad,” he begins. “When you sign a contract to a major label, all they want is to turn a profit off your music. I read about these artists I look up to, and just their attitude about music, like they never had to compromise once. I used to really envy them because, holy shit, we had to compromise so much.” Eventually, he stopped believing in the music.
By 2012, The Cataracs were closing in on a decade as a duo, and were growing apart. “The Cataracs was really based on a friendship,” Singer-Vine explains. “We were just making music so naturally, he’s like my brother, and it was working, but 10 years go by and you grow up.” Both members of The Cataracs had strong opinions on music and began to disagree, to drift, pulled in different directions by a variety of factors. “I used to run into my friends closing in on getting their degrees. I just started wondering what life would be like without The Cataracs,” Singer-Vine says. And once he started wondering, he couldn’t stop. The Cataracs had consumed his life for so long (“I don’t even think I had a date to prom”), but now every performance was painful. Their label wanted them to be the next LMFAO, to be the next kings of party rap. “You could take all the money away from me, I’d do anything not to be that,” Singer-Vine asserts. He realized the only way he was going to extricate himself was by making a clean break. He didn’t just want to leave The Cataracs, he wanted to vanish.
Singer-Vine looked at where in the world all his friends were and saw he had a close childhood friend living in Shanghai. “Perfect,” he thought. He wrote a farewell letter to his partner and management team, and before anyone could try to stop him, he was gone. Suddenly he was free, tootling around Shanghai on a little bicycle he bought, invisible. But as the months passed in China, he found himself being drawn back to music. He tried not to google “The Cataracs,” but couldn’t escape writing songs, or checking up on music. He kept trying to figure out what to do next with his life, but ended up writing song after song, a few unfinished screenplays, and then more songs. “Above everything, I’m a writer,” he says. “I was a big fan of Dr. Seuss growing up, so I love when you put words together, and sometimes they have a little jingle to them, a little rhyme.” As he wrote, he finally started to get a sense of who he was musically apart from The Cataracs, and also who he wanted to be. And though he’d once declared he’d never come crawling back to Los Angeles, he found himself doing just that. But it wasn’t the same LA he’d run away from.
The Future
“The music industry has changed so much for the better since I left,” Singer-Vine says. “Labels are on their hands and knees. We have artists like Lorde, fucking normal, relatable people that are being well received. Radio is more open than it’s ever been to something more unconventional.” As a pop artist, Singer-Vine himself is both unconventional and relatable. When his talks about his inspirations, he cites an unlikely pair: Elliott Smith and T-Pain. “The cross of those two dudes together made me think I could put out my emotions through music.” Singer-Vine wants to combine Smith’s tortured emotions with T-Pain’s careless storytelling, his ability to “make bitches wet” with autotuned crooning. He’s a fan of big ballads, cheesy ’80s songs, and songs about love that never mention it explicitly. He’s channeled all this into his new solo project as Campa, a name he once thought he’d abandoned when he left The Cataracs.
Singer-Vine put out a free solo album in 2011 titled Would You Hate Me If I Took A Sip?, but never got much attention for his Campa material. Even as part of The Cataracs, he made most of his money writing for other artists. But a few months ago something strange happened. He woke up one day and suddenly the internet was awash with teens singing along to a three-year-old song of his called “Little Devil.” He had blown up on Vine, the video snippet counterpart to Twitter. “Praise the kids on Vine,” he says. “That’s why I’m doing this new project.” The Vine explosion of “Little Devil” has given Singer-Vine hope that his particular brand of pop may have finally found an audience.
The Cataracs always aspired to be the “normal guy” pop stars, an aesthetic Singer-Vine believes is being embraced more now than ever before by the mainstream. His solo material is a touch goofy, a touch plaintive, but subtly clever, and undeniably self-aware. “I want to write desperate love songs,” he says. He knows what he’s doing. It’s no wonder teens have gravitated towards “Little Devil,” which is unabashed and compelling in the way my 16-year-old cousin’s Twitter is, and mine will probably never be. “You might hate my new music,” Singer-Vine says, as much to me as to you, the reader, and to the world at large. But for now that doesn’t matter, because perhaps for the first time in his life, he’s going to do it completely on his own terms. The only one he has to answer to is Campa.
Stream Campa’s new single “Crush on You” (produced by Nic Nac) below.
