Kevin “Kaze” Thomas and Bishop Omega host their web show, Intelligently Ratchet, each week on Facebook Live. WCHL/Chapelboro interviewed them about their show and their creative process. 

Kaze: I attended UNC-Chapel Hill. I came in with the intentions of being a political science or criminal justice major, or going into entertainment and rap. It’s crazy the extreme that I had. I ended up going the way of entertainment, the arts, and I studied radio, television, and film at Carolina. I did music and television for sometime, and I’ve done things at NBC. I worked for NBC for the last two years doing the entertainment news, and I’ve also been pursuing my own music. When the situation at NBC News came to an end it was kind of like, what do I do now? I wanted to find the best way to be involved in media and to have a voice. I’m not a stuffy dude, I didn’t want to be up there, like, tonight in Durham, a gun was shot. And to do entertainment in this area, those are the only spaces. You can be a weatherman, you can be a news anchor, you can be on the radiothere’s not many spaces. I was like, yo, what’s the next thing?

Kevin “Kaze” Thomas

Bishop: I started off in the same situation. I’m from Philly and I moved down here in 1995, when I was 15 . I got into rap scene down here, the hip hop scene, and that’s how I [met] Kaze. I worked in a mall at a men’s clothing store and I [rap] battled him in my store. We took the atmosphere music off and put some instrumentals on, and we battled each other there. After that he was doing Open Mic Mondays at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill. One day I came in with a date, and I was like trying to front, like yeah, Kaze, you should let me host, and he went, oh, you wanna host? And he handed me the microphone and walked away. I didn’t know what was going on. That was my first on-stage hosting gig. I’ve always been comfortable on stage, because I used to be an MC. From there I went into comedy.

K: Everything that we were doing was right here in Chapel Hill. On Microphone Monday, in 2003 and 2004, there’d be about 300 people trying to get in from Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greensboro. He was the comedian, and I would rap, and I also worked as an artist doing media things at NBC. We thought that if we joined forces, it would be balanced and well-rounded, and we could talk about serious stuff. So on our show, it’s just two friends talking, stimulating a conversation about important issues. Those instances in real life often go undocumented. There’s no show you can turn on and see that. It’s would be a bunch of guys in suits and waxing philosophical about my situation.

B: The reason why it works so well here is because we don’t have anybody telling us, you only get two minutes on this subject. We have our outline of the show but we don’t have to glaze over certain situations. If we want to get in-depth on something, we can spend 10 minutes on it because it’s our show. Some shows are more serious, while others are more lighthearted.

Bishop and Kaze

K: The idea to do Intelligently Ratchet really spawned from us always talking about doing something, sort of like the Daily Showinformation with the comedybut also like the Breakfast Club where they talk about hip hop and music and popular culture. We wanted to define that medium, that in-between, and we had to choose the best platform and the best format. Facebook Live was the new thing at the time, and we wanted to put it on a platform that would be as innovative as the idea. It allows people to see the show in real time, to comment in real time. I can look on the screen while we’re filming and you can comment on what we’re talking about in real time. We’re shaping people’s opinions.

Photos taken by Aleta Donald.

Intelligently Ratchet airs live on Facebook every Wednesday at 9 p.m. Visit the page here

Read part 2 of Humans of Chapelboro about Kaze and Bishop here