We catch up with Uncommon Nasa to talk about the excellent new album with producer Kount Fif, City as School.
In one of our previous interviews, we talked about your poetry, and whether there is a difference between your rap lyrics versus the written prose in your poetry/short story book, Withering. The City as School CD comes with a full lyric book. Do you consider the album to be a bridge between both art forms?
I wouldn’t take the lyric book as a bridge being gapped per se, I just think my lyrics lend themselves to the page for some people and when offered the chance to have a book like that by the label, I jumped on it. I thought considering the theme of the record and the art layout we came up with it also made perfect sense to have a lyric book included conceptually as well. I think my lyrics holding their own in written form is important to me as well, it’s not just how I say something, it’s exactly what I’m saying word for word that I want to get across a lot of times. And there’s no better way to get that across then someone reading your stuff.
As with most of your music, New York City is a big influence on City as School. This time the focus is mostly on your formative years, growing up. Can you tell us more about the concept?
The theme grew naturally out of the songs I started to put together for this project. This is the case on all my records, I start working, I find a thread that ties the music together after the first few songs and then I push that theme through to the end of the project. I’ve focused on mortality and the future on a lot of my recent work, and this time out I really wanted to focus on life and what makes it worth living. A lot of that for me takes me back to my formative years and how thankful I am for a lot of my experiences. This record was a thank you note to all the good choices I made, I wasn’t exclusive to good choices, but I am thankful for them in particular.
The album reminds me of Masta Ace’s concept albums about coming of age in New York, especially A Long Hot Summer and The Falling Season. Did you draw any inspiration from Ace or other sources?
I have a lot of respect for Masta Ace, I was really happy to open for him and Marco Polo with Kount Fif down in DC this past Summer. “Music Man” and Slaughterhouse were High School anthems for me. But to be honest, I am aware of, but have not heard either of those records you mentioned from him. I think I’m just a sucker for coming of age stories, a lot of my favorite books and films fit that mold too.
Some of the story takes place in your high school years. What was school like for you in New York?
As I said in one of the interludes on the album, I grew up (and still live) on Staten Island. These days I live footsteps from the Ferry, so I’m basically in any other boro, but as a kid, I was raised way further south. My folks brought me up in side-door apartments. I have a unique experience of knowing what suburban life is like, knowing what small-town life is like while still being broke as fuck. Then also being able to immediately interact with the big city and with urban environments as well. It’s something only Staten Island provides. Don’t get it twisted, Staten may be the bastard child of NYC, but it is very much a New Yawky place. I say all that to say, my High School was even deeper south than where I lived during those years, it was a huge public school that had oddity classes like Auto Shop, Marine Biology, Law and Dental. Not sure if any of that is still true. I rapped in high school, but not physically in my high school, it was extracurricular. Most of my friends dropped out by the time I was taking rap at all seriously, or attended other schools on the Island. By my Junior year, I had 1-2 friends in the whole place, I had a pretty solitary experience. In Junior High, I was the typical “harrassed outcast” that you’d expect me to be, but by High School I was writing graff and knew most of the right people in the right crews to come off as somewhat intimidating. People largely didn’t fuck with me by that age, but they didn’t fuck with me by the positive definition of that term either. I had my sights set on mixing records as early as 16 and was interning in Manhattan at 17. I was just happy to get out of there, I was never one for traditional education in those years. I never for a moment had an interest in College, which with my economic and grade situation would have equated to 4 more years of bullshit High School lessons. So I was off to recording school and off we go. The rest is history, city as school.
You have features from several icons on the new album, including Sadat X and Tek (Smif-N-Wessun). What’s interesting though is that, for a record about your upbringing in NYC, you also feature legends from outside of the five boroughs: Guilty Simpson (Detroit) and Pep Love (Oakland). Other than being classic artists, was there also a sense they’d bring a different, non-NYC perspective to the story?
I think for me personally the record is about New York, but as you can hear on the interludes, for Fif he relates to the album from his perspective of growing up just outside of DC. So the album is universal, whatever city your from, if that city educated you through life experience then City As School is about you. With Pep Love I knew that beat would fit his flow perfectly, especially after I dropped my verse and knowing he was from the Bay Area I knew we could connect on the subject of gentrification or whatever you want to call that phenomenon of changing landscapes. With Guilty, that whole song is about the struggles of life and being appreciative of what you’ve got and outside of New York and Detroit, what cities represent that better?
Returning to your written prose versus music, “Best Laid Plans” in particular sounds a lot like a short story. I’m still intrigued about how you take an idea or experience, and decide if you want to communicate it through song or as written word?
At this stage in my career I’d say most of what I’m writing in prose and short stories is fiction and most of what I’m writing for my songs is autobiographical to some degree. So that’s really how that flow chart works with ideas. I’ve taken stabs at writing non-fiction before and that exercise actually helped me become a better fiction writer and like any fiction writer I’ve worked real-life experiences into my characters. I know I’ve also played roles on songs that aren’t me speaking from a personal perspective, but representing the point of view of a villain, etc. But yeah, mostly the music is about me, the writing is a work of fiction right now. For “Best Laid Plans” that’s all true, me and some friends really did all that shit and tried to start a record selling business in the analog pre-internet era. We were young entrepreneurs and shit, haha. But to me, I wrote that because I’m hoping that when people hear it they are not just entertained by my story but can relate it to some shit they tried to do to get money that in retrospect makes very little sense. I think we’ve all been there.
City As School is produced by Kount Fif. In some ways its quite a different sound to a lot of your previous work, synth and keyboard heavy in parts. How did you connect with Fif, and what’s your working process like?
I connected with Fif through Man Bites Dog Records, they put out Written At Night and City As School. Working with Fif was pretty smooth because he really had an ear for what beats to feed me. I’d say what’s on this record is about 60-70% of the beats I was presented with. So obviously I took to his production pretty easily. The challenge for me is always about compromise and collaboration, finding where my vision ends and his begins is the puzzle to solve. I think we landed in a really good place and the blending of our philosophies created an album that I couldn’t have made with anyone else, including myself. Every collaboration with a producer is different, because of my background a lot of producers give me a lot of autonomy over the final product, but Fif had a clear vision he wanted to see in addition to mine. I respect that and I think in this particular case the album succeeded as a piece due to that.
Lastly, you quit Twitter in 2018. It’s a decision I have a lot of respect for, and we could all do with time out from social media. What made you stop using it, and why Twitter specifically (you are still active on Instagram)?
I recently recorded an episode of my podcast (Dope Sh!t Podcast) about this with Samurai Banana. Shameless plug in case anyone wants to do a deep dive with me. But in brief, to recap that, it’s all the obvious shit. Twitter really makes us into the lowest common denominator of ourselves. I worked in radio for a while and I came to know the term “schtick”, it’s what hosts do on air. They oversell particular aspects of themselves, so the talented hosts are able to remain authentic to some degree, but ultimately it’s pomp and bullshit to get ratings. I think that’s what Twitter is, at least what it was for me. I never said anything I didn’t believe at the time, but who really needs my fucking opinion? Even if I’m positive about something, it’s just comment, comment, comment. It’s a time suck. Just because someone likes New York Telephone, now they need to know my opinion on the Washington Nationals World Series championship? Nah, they don’t. It’s irrelevant, I’ve become a firm believer in making myself, as a person, scarce but making my art readily available. That should be the goal of any artist. Punditry isn’t art. Some people might be thinking, “you don’t have to use twitter that way”, but I did, I only had one speed. There are many other reasons I got off there too, including being more prolific and focused in all aspects of my life and in having real connections with people again – like actually getting lunch with a friend and speaking….I get into a lot more detail on the podcast. I also quit Facebook in the same calendar year, for what it’s worth. Fuck em all. I’m on IG for now, and I’m kind of active on it currently because I’m promoting this record. But my normal stee is to post a picture of a cool building or a cat about once a week and I don’t follow any motherfuckers on there. I keep it pretty low key. We’ll see how long I hang around on it, it’s mostly just pictures, so it’s really a different vibe then other forms of social media.
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City as School by Uncommon Nasa and Kount Fif is out now. Follow Uncommon Nasa at his official site and on Instagram. Interview by Grown Up Rap Editor Ben Pedroche.