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Hecho in El Lay - Los Angeles magazine

Hecho in El Lay

Mixing West Coast hip-hop with Mexican brass band sounds, the duo Akwid raps for a changing city
By Josh Kun

Los Angeles magazine, September 2010
When Sergio and Francisco Gómez were teenagers in South Los Angeles in the early 1990s, they lived across the street from a drug house. Watching the dealers from the windows of the small apartment they shared with their factory worker mother, they received a firsthand lesson in the finer points of the rock cocaine trade. But the drugs never interested the two brothers, who came to L.A. from Michoacán, Mexico, as young kids in the late ’70s. They were more drawn to the music booming from the car that seemed permanently parked in front of the house.

“They would bump hip-hop all night long,” says Francisco. “They always had their windows rolled down so the whole block could hear it. That’s when we first heard rappers like Toddy Tee and King Tee. It became the model of how music should be for us. We wanted to sound like those guys.”

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