He was Mike Volpe, a hospital intern and physical therapy student in his early twenties who just looked at music as some weird hobby. In 2011, my friend Ryan Dombal tracked down this figure who’d fascinated so many of us, and he learned that Clams Casino was just some guy, which somehow made him more interesting. When Lil B stepped away from the Pack, the Bay Area post-hyphy pop-rap group, and became a mantra-chanting internet enigma, he got a lot of his gravitas from Clams Casino, the mysterious producer who supplied him with dazed, gluey beats - Kanye West/Just Blaze-style sped-up soul samples, transformed into woozy, drifting fantasias of sound.
