AEW superstar and current tag team champion Shane “Swerve” Strickland recently spoke with Grapsody to hype up this Sunday’s ALL OUT pay-per-view in Chicago, where Swerve and partner Keith Lee will be defending their titles against The Acclaimed.
During the interview, Swerve would give his thoughts on Max Caster, how the two are quite similar due to their rap affiliations, and whether a rap battle is in their future. Highlights can be found below.
How he and Max Caster are similar but different:
“That was something I was already honed in on, prior to that. I wanted to make sure I didn’t want to step on what Max Caster built. I didn’t want to step on that. ‘No, this is where your lane is, I’m respecting that to stay in that.’ I didn’t want to crossover and then we have this clash and people are confused, ‘he’s rap, but he’s rap.’ No, he’s hip-hop influenced, he’s rap. Me going into the lane of hip-hop mogul, it put me in a different lane and people were like, ‘I get it, he’s like Diddy’ and he [Caster] is an actual rapper, a battle rapper, like Wild N Out,’ so people already separated us and it’s never been a clash or the fan base wasn’t confused about that. Even though I’ve been wrestling longer than Max, I could be like, ‘You have to stop doing that, I’m doing that.’ No, you’ve built this. You’ve built yourself up with this. I’m going to respect that. You keep doing that and I’m not going to do anything to clash with that. There were times when creative was coming up with things and I’m like, ‘Ah, no, that’s Max. I don’t want to do that. I want to keep that to Max.’”
Talks the possibility of a rap battle between himself and Caster:
“No, no, no. You never saw Diddy rap or battle anybody because he’s an artist, he’s a mogul who makes music. I’m a mogul that makes music. That’s my influence. You see the connections with Kevin Gates that puts me in a whole other lane as well. See me at the Grammys, that puts me in another lane as a mogul. I wanted to make sure there was a distinct difference between that. When you see me and Max inevitably come together on screen, there is a distinct difference between the different types of raps or hip-hip influence between the two of us. That’s for people who aren’t well-versed in it or don’t know the difference. We have to make that for people who don’t know hip-hop like that and educate them.”