By Billy Malone
TIFTON- Singer and songwriter, Clint Johnson is from Atkinson County and studying writing and communications at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC) and currently has millions of streams for his music that has been mostly self-produced so far.
The love affair with music started early on for Johnson. He remembers as a kid switching back and forth between the CMT, MTV, and VH1 listening to music and watching music videos. He was a percussionist in the band growing up and briefly participated in the ABAC music program before switching majors.
Johnson’s stage name is RVSHVD, which can appear confusing at first with the lack of vowels in the name. However, you pronounce his stage name as Rah-shad. Originally, he started out producing his own hip hop songs and considered changing his stage name to Clint Johnson once he started making country music, but ultimately decided to keep it as is.
“I thought at first, now that I am getting into country music, I could change my name to Clint Johnson since that is a country sounding name already, but I decided against it because of the uniqueness of the name RVSHVD,” Johnson said. “Right now, I just don’t want to confuse people with having two stage names.”
His music can be classified under a new break-out genre, country trap. You can find the traditional country twang in Johnson’s voice surrounded by the typical country music instruments such as a guitar, bass, and drums. The difference in the music Johnson makes with the typical country music is his incorporation and meshing of hip-hop drums in final production.
Johnson is already making good friends in the country music industry for his niche genre that he wants to jump in. Willie Jones, country singer who came from making his own hip-hop music at first too, invited Johnson to Nashville to hang out and get to know each other. Johnson said the invitation went well and he enjoyed the experience. Jones and Johnson now are friends and associates in the industry.
One piece of what makes Johnson’s story worth noting in the Tift County community is he produced a large portion of his music inside the dorms at ABAC since he has been a student at the school. He now lives in an off-campus apartment, but for the first few years while living in the ABAC Place dorms, he set up his own makeshift recording studio in his bedroom where he shared the space with three other roommates in the four-bedroom apartment.
Something he struggled with at first was understanding how to use the producing software and mesh his own songs. Johnson says he could not find anyone who would teach him and kept hearing people recommend ‘just Google it.’ Eventually he did research it on his own and found that it was something he had no trouble doing.
Luckily for Johnson, he set his bedroom up well so that his recorded music wouldn’t have the random sound of dorm antics in the background. He began publishing
his music on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Title, Google Play, Amazon Music and more. His numbers of streams have since gone through the roof compared to when he got serious about being a musician in 2017.
For Spotify alone, in 2018 he had 1k streams, 158 fans, 3k minutes of his music streamed and played in 19 countries around the world. Today his music on Spotify has
6.7 million streams, 221.2k hours of his music streamed, and with over 541,000 listeners across 89 countries.
On Apple Music Johnson has 5.6 million streams total since his first song was uploaded there. 100,000 people subscribe to him on YouTube along with the 9 million views he has total on his videos. He built this following out of a dorm room in ABAC’s upperclassmen housing.
With the several hip-hop albums he has produced along with his country music singles he has started putting out, Johnson knows his work isn’t near over. He realizes he still has a long way to go, but the progress from 2018 to 2020 is something that to feel proud about.
Some critics of his music do not like the inclusion of hip-hops drums in the country genre and the occasionally rapped lyrics because they feel it strays too far away from the way the country music genre was originally played Johnson said. That being said, he is a proud South Georgian who says he makes music about the rural lifestyle he grew up in and hopes others from rural backgrounds can relate to.
“This is what I grew up on, I grew up on country and hip-hop music.” Johnson said. I wanted to find a way to mash them up and blend them.”
What Johnson refers to as, “the hood,” he means the rural and country setting most people in these parts can relate to. When his lyrics dive into topics that could be found in hip hop songs, like drugs and violence, he is speaking about personal experiences with hardships that he and the people he grew up with witnessed. The ongoing problems with drugs and violence that plagues many rural communities are one of the hard to talk about truths that come up in his music.
Right now, I am not as big as I want to be, but I’m so close to is, my foot is right there at the door,” Johnson said.
Currently, Johnson has a distribution deal that he signed with Empire. The Distribution deal helps getting his music out and promoted. The deal helped push Pandora to add Johnson’s new single, “My Side of Town,” on a country music playlist with millions of listeners.
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