Pivot Gang 145

Pivot Gang is a hip hop collective formed in 2011 and hailing from the West Side of Chicago. Members include Saba (rapper/producer), Joseph Chilliams (rapper/producer), MFn Melo (rapper), Frsh Waters (rapper), daedaePIVOT (producer), Dam Dam (DJ/producer) and Daoud (producer), as well as the late dinnerwithjohn aka John Walt (rapper) and squeakPIVOT (DJ/producer).

The group is tight-knit and members knew each other since they were adolescents and sometimes even before – Saba and Chilliams are brothers, dinnerwithjohn was their cousin, and Melo is their high school friend; Frsh Waters and squeakPIVOT were also brothers and they both meet Saba and the other guys in their teens. daedae met the crew in 2014, while Daoud and Dam Dam were later additions.

Some members of Pivot Gang, such as Saba and Chilliams, were involved in Chicago’s YOUmedia program alongside other notable Chi-town rappers Chance The Rapper, Noname and Joey Purp.

Regarding the origin of the name Pivot Gang, Chilliams said:

We were walking around looking for a name and we had our first photo shoot. We went to a record shop in Wicker Park in Chicago and I was like looking through the DVDs. They had cheap ass DVDs like cheap as hell and I’m a big fan of Friends, so I went and got this Friends season one, it was like $3. I ended up talking to the checkout like everyone behind the desk like at the counter, we had like a 20-minute conversation about Friends. I was like, “Fuck, people really liked this show.” I went home that night and I wrote a rap and I said, “Moving couches called us the Pivot Gang.” It was a very important scene in Friends when Ross is moving a couch and yelling “Pivot,” and one of my favorite scenes.

Regarding the meaning of their name, Saba said:

Pivot was really about just moving from one step to the next, which is what we used to do with couches, which is why seats and couches is so important to us. We’re gonna all sit on the same couch cuz this is representative to us of being in that basement in 2010/2011, this how we had to sit, we wrote all our songs on one couch.