THERE'S A COUNTERCULTURE to Portlandia's narrow representation of Portland. In Rostam Productions' fictional X-RAY web series, writer and director Seena Haddad gives a lifelike glimpse of what it's like to come up in Portland's slowly rising hip-hop scene. Parts One and Two have been out since January, and Haddad is currently in the process of writing Part Three.
While he's always been an avid fan of hip-hop, Portland's scene was an abstract idea to Haddad until he found out about the closure of the Blue Monk in 2014, shortly after police shut down a hip-hop show at the popular SE Belmont venue.
"I started reading [about] that, and it kind of gave [X-RAY] a little bit of shape," he says.
After writing a first draft of the script, Haddad planned to have an actor from Beaverton play the lead role. But just around that time local producer 5th Sequence (Brandon Johnson) introduced Haddad to Mac Smiff, editor in chief of We Out Here Magazine (full disclosure, I write and edit for WOHM). Smiff helped Haddad develop a concrete idea of the Portland scene by bringing him to different shows around the city, including the very first Thesis show, where he met artists like Glenn Waco and Hanif. That's where he caught his first Mikey Fountaine performance.