Marshall Hugh has become a household name, thanks to his legendary performances at the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). Now the frontman of funk-hop collective Marshall Law Band, Hugh humbly started his career as a college freestyle rapper before tweaking his lyricism to incorporate activism and working to spark a grassroots movement for change.

I caught Hugh on his quarantine walk via Zoom for an interview. He walked through his parents’s neighborhood in Mill Creek, greeting neighbor after neighbor with a huge smile as he poured out detailed answers about life growing up, CHOP, and why people should be paying attention to current events.

Below is my interview with Hugh, edited for length and clarity.

How did you get involved in music?

It’s kind of a crazy story. I was an athlete in high school. I played basketball and football, but my family is more academic types. When it came to picking a college, I picked basically the best academic school I got into, which was Carnegie Mellon. I went over there and was playing basketball and football, but the buzz of playing sports at an Ivy-League-type school wasn’t the same, so I was looking for a social connection or something to be able to use my skills on a larger platform. That’s when music found me.

I freestyled during high school, but nothing serious. When I went to college, I ran into a good friend of mine. He went by Krispy. Krispy would be at all the parties freestyling and just killing it! I was the only one who would freestyle with him. That’s kind of how the music got started. Each and every day we would be freestyling. People knew us as freestylers, and we started making tracks. From there, I just got obsessed.

My majors were history and public policy, so I was grooving to be a politician. But I started realizing that unless I’m willing to do what these coders are willing to do for their passion, I’m not going to be successful. I’m up walking home from a studio session at three in the morning going through the library, and I’m seeing the same coders night in and night out, doing what they’re doing and loving it. When I had that revelation walking through the Carnegie Mellon library, I thought, “Yo, I’m out.” The hope was to be able to use my music as a tool to spark grassroots change. Then from there, I just came home. 

I got an internship at KUBE 93.3 on their promotions team, and that’s when music took over full time. I told my parents, “I’m gonna be a rapper instead.” And that’s when they were like, “Dude, okay. Then you’re on your own, buddy. Go figure it out. You can’t live here, you can’t have any of our money. But if you want to chase your dream, that’s your right to do so.” That was a tough pill to swallow, and I didn’t talk to my family for almost a whole year as a result. But in actuality, it’s brought us a lot closer, too. They’ve seen my commitment towards music, they’ve seen why I do what I do, they’ve seen the growth in my lyrics, and now our band is like a family-owned business. My pops is heavily involved in what’s going on.

Describe your songwriting process.

I got a couple of ways I do it. I’ll read something — I was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, Hero of a Thousand Faces, and his breakdown on things like shamanism and spiritualism and the afterlife. I would spend my morning drinking tea and reading, and then I would write a song about what I felt I just absorbed. When COVID hit, we were supposed to go on a 50-day national tour, and obviously that was canceled. I started making a song a day literally just to stay sane, just to feel like I wasn’t stagnant. I ended up going like 53 days in a row making 73 songs.

Before I went to sleep, I would put my phone on airplane mode, I’d set my alarm, wake up around 8 o’clock, meditate, stretch, drink water, put on a beat, and start cleaning my room. And I’d record. I got a microphone for myself. I wouldn’t tap out until I had finished at least a chorus, bridge, and first verse. Usually, around noon or 1, I would turn my phone back on. 

Another thing I’ve been doing since the revolution hit is drawing. I’m terrible at drawing. I’ll draw some sort of scene. I did that because I’m bad at drawing — it makes me feel uncomfortable. Within that discomfort is where those emotions get flushed out. I’ll do a little sketch and start writing based on that drawing I make. 

What are you hoping to accomplish with your music?

The simple answer is that we’re trying to change the world. We’re trying to spread love, spread unity, spread connection, and unite people through musical vibrations. That’s the goal.

Tell me about performing at CHOP.

The Battle for the Hill, when the protestors were fighting the police, that probably takes the cake. Just to play through tear gas and rubber bullets flying by, having police barreling down on you, and people saying, “They’re not gonna stop!” And we’re like, “We’re not gonna stop either! No matter how it goes, we’re committed to being up on this stage.”

I remember we were playing this song, “Kleos,” which is this triumphant song that talks about the journey. People were shooting fireworks, flashbangs were going off, and I just remember there being a moment in my head when I was rapping where I was like, “What is going on right now?”

What significance does performing at CHOP hold for you?

We performed eight times while we were out there. Two of them were at what you would call CHAZ or CHOP. The other six, it had no formation, no name to it, no intention of some sort of occupation. I came out there the night before [we started performing], and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much anger and pain and hurt, and so many people going different directions out here.” And I know me personally, I don’t want to be out here just screaming at the top of my lungs at the police officers. If that’s how other people choose to protest, I respect them, and that’s their right to do that, and more power to you. But when it comes to me personally, that’s not how I choose to protest. 

So I was looking around like, okay, how would I choose to protest? And because of my experiences at Carnegie Mellon, because the band is called the Marshall Law Band, because all of our music is socially relevant and we’ve been talking about police brutality for three, four years in our music, we were like, the only thing that we can do here is similar to Bob Marley’s One Love Peace Concert. We gotta get on that stage, and we gotta open up that stage for other speakers to talk. We gotta open up that stage for other people to express themselves. We have to create some sort of platform that isn’t just a bullhorn in a mob of angry people. We have to create a funnel system to send people that [think] more similarly to us into the fire, into the crowd, with a positive attitude to try and quail the potential of violence and the negative angst that’s in the air out there.

Why do you think people should be paying attention to what’s going on right now?

I’ve been living my whole life for something like this to happen. Whole generations go out, and the status quo of their life never changes throughout their whole generation — or it happens when you’re like, “Okay, I was born in the 1920s. I’m dying in the ’90s, and, yo, there’s computers now.” Technological advances, you can assume those are going to occur. Actual systemic change? This may be the last time in our life that we as individuals can take a stand for what we believe in and voice it and actually have our voice heard. 

I’ll give you the [Hillel the Elder] quote: If not now, when? What more do you have to be shown in order to realize that this is it? If you’ve ever thought about a revolution in your whole life, if you’ve ever thought about the world changing, this is probably the best bet you’re going to get. In my two decades, this is by far the largest social movement I’ve ever seen.