Category: Interview

Interview: L’Orange

Mello Music Group producer, L’Orange, has long been a jewel in the label’s crown thanks to a string of successful collaborations, including albums with Kool Keith, Stik Figa, Mr Lif and perhaps most notably with Solemn Brigham, as the duo, Marlowe. He is about to extend that run with a new album alongside fellow Mello Music Group artist, Namir Blade. He recently spoke with Gingerslim about those collaborations, as well as working with concepts, his use of samples and a whole lot more.

How you doing, man?

I’m tired [laughs] and I’m stressed cos I’m doing a lot of shit right now. I’m moving across the country so it’s just a lot of shit to deal with. We bought a house earlier this month, so we’ve been getting it ready and then getting ready to move back to North Carolina.

Right, okay and what’s the reason behind the move? Is it just going back to your roots, so to speak?

Yeah, kinda. My wife is from the South, I’m from North Carolina and we both miss the South culturally, you know? I don’t know how much you know about The States and how much the culture switches from place to place, but yeah, we just kinda miss the people and so we want that change. And you know, I’m up in Seattle right now, up in the Northwest, and it’s a beautiful city but I don’t know anyone here. I mean I don’t know anyone there either, but if I’m going to live in one place, I’d rather it be my home turf.

Yeah that makes sense. I’ve actually just moved myself, from England over to Ireland, so I’m currently in the middle of nowhere. I’ve moved from a city – I’ve always been a city boy – and it’s just fields and mountains as far as I can see in every direction; it’s amazing. I highly recommend it.

I’ve always had a thing with small towns, they make me really anxious. I do prefer cities, but it’s not just that, you know if you’re in a big city and you wanna wear a chicken suit with a McDonald’s hat, while walking round the neighbourhood, you could do that and you may never see any of those people ever again [laughs]. So small towns have this effect that make me very anxious, everyone’s acting like they’re going to see those same people the next day. That just reminds me of family and I’m not interested in having family with like a thousand people, that just sounds so stressful [laughs].

[laughs] I can understand that.

Being by yourself in the country though, I can get down with that.

Well yeah cos I could walk around in a chicken suit and not see anyone, so it’s kinda like the exact opposite but with the same result.

[laughs] Okay yeah, you’ve gone far off in the other direction.

I’m more likely to see cows than I am people around here, it’s nice.

Yeah, see I always used to hate that idea, but the older I get the more I like it. I mean I basically do that anyway. The people in my neighbourhood, or in the city, like I don’t know those people so they’re kinda like scenery.

Yeah, totally. First off, I wanted to start with one of the things which first drew me to your music, which was your love of the old samples, which I gather are from 1940’s era radio shows. What was it that first made you decide to work with them? Is that something that interests you outside of music?

Yeah, it definitely does. The origin of that I don’t even really know necessarily. I think it came from when I was in my hometown, I would go to the only record store that had already been picked over, but a lot of the weirder stuff that I liked was still available because no one else really fucked with those kinds of samples. And so I ended up finding a lot of these weird audio cues and samples, and started using those early on. Then I started spending more time with them and I ended up really liking these stories, you know? A lot of what it is, is it’s like watching old movies, because you can suspend judgement. So it’s like if I’m watching a movie or a TV show, there are all sorts of opinions I have on what the characters are doing, what I would do, and even for ridiculous things like what I would do if I was the fucking cinematographer.

[laughs] Yeah like stuff you have no experience of.

Yeah, critiquing it with no experience, like I wouldn’t have done that. But then when you’re listening to these old things, it sort of suspends all that and so it’s sort of joyous for me, because I get to hear these people act and behave in ways that are so irrelevant to the way that I know life, that it all comes to me very pure. So, I really value that highly. And just as an audio format, it kind of amplifies that style of storytelling, because everything is so over the top, so it’s communicated in these very obvious ways. It’s all so silly and it just is the story that they want to tell. If it’s done correctly, and not all of them are, I enjoy a lot of these radio shows that, in my opinion, are not done well [laughs], like they’re very, very silly. But if it’s done well, I really think it’s… I’m going to stop myself, because I used to say I thought this was an undervalued format, but if you’ve seen in like the last 10 years, podcasts have just skyrocketed in popularity and it feels like this little fascination, this little hobby I have, is becoming so much of a shared interest.

I’m a big fan of the literary side, so I read a lot of pulp detective novels and stuff, so I think that’s what first drew me in when I heard The Night Took Us in Like Family, which I felt they added suspense to as well.

The most fun part of that for me though, is that very few of those – well maybe on The Night Took Us in Like Family – but as a greater point, a lot of the stuff I’m sampling is not about what I’m doing with the story. So, I find stuff that’s about educating people on the dangers of like kissing on the second date, and I can work that in so it creates this sort of comedic suspense, which I think probably matches something in my own personality, which is a little askew and maybe a little dark, and that’s why I find a lot of the things very funny.

Yeah, that’s cool, man. Jeremiah Jae is just one of the artists you’ve worked with over the years. How do you go about setting up the collaborations, because some of the names are more established legends like Kool Keith and Mr. Lif, while some are less well-known? Is it something you choose yourself, do people approach you?

It depends on the project. I really think every project has been different like that, so with Jeremiah Jae, I was just a big fan of his, I didn’t know him personally. I went to the label and told them that’s the dude that I really wanted to work with. So, I reached out to him and just said look you don’t know me but would you like to make an album with me? And I was really surprised he said yes. So that album just sort of came naturally like that, so he went from being a complete stranger before we worked on that, to being one of my closest musical companions. Really that guy is like inside my brain when we’re working on albums, unlike anyone else I’ve ever worked with. But with someone like Kool Keith, it was sort of mediated by the label and so Mello Music Group brought the idea of doing an album with him to my doorstep. I was really interested in the opportunity to do that, because it was very unlike anything else I had done; it remains unlike anything else I’ve done. And so I didn’t get to know Kool Keith or anything like that, I’m not chatting with him every other week, you know? So, it was sort of a distant way to make an album. I did get to talk with him throughout the project and sort of work with what he had brought to the table. Then someone like Solemn Brigham from Marlowe, he’s one of my oldest friends, and then Mr. Lif was actually put together by Adult Swim, they approached us with the idea of doing a record together, which I think we both really liked the idea of. So yeah, they all come together in different ways.

Quite a few of those albums have been concept albums, do you find that a more beneficial way of making music, because you’ve got that thematic cohesion running throughout?

For me it’s sort of my natural state of musicianship, as I think with respect to other musicians in the field, I wouldn’t count myself among the most musically advanced and I have never wanted to be really. I have always viewed myself as more of a storyteller and a sort of generally creative person, and so what I can bring to the artistry from my own experience, it helps me to create my own narrative because it makes my process more deliberate. Also, I tend to work better with limitations as well and so being able to structure my own limitations when I’m making an album, helps me differentiate what I would consider good and bad on any given album, because it’s not obvious to me. When I make a beat, I don’t have a sense of ‘oh that was a good one’, or ‘that was a bad one’, and so being able to create a map of what I envision for an album is helpful. But yeah, the stories and narratives do take shape more specifically as it goes, to the point where they have an extreme amount of detail that is not evident in the album, I wouldn’t say. I think some of it, through some sort of osmosis, does get to the audience though.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing your forthcoming album with Namir Blade, Imaginary Everything,  and in parts it sounds a lot different to the stuff you’ve done in the past, especially tracks like “Murphy’s Law.” Is that something that’s come about because of the artist you’re working with, or was it something you wanted to challenge yourself with anyway?

Kind of the second one into the first one. I had wanted to do some things differently lately and try to take a step in some of the directions that I’ve been interested in musically. So, there’s a song on the record that barely has any drums on and the majority of the album is around 140-150 beats per minute, which is something I hadn’t done a ton of, except maybe on the Marlowe albums. But even that was about 50/50, whereas this one is almost entirely like that. I also wanted to do something that intentionally took a break from the narrative, which was more difficult for me to do. So, I needed an artist that I felt was a strong songwriter and a strong enough voice that I would feel confident making an album without steering the ship in its entirety.

I know you’ve had a lot of difficulty with your hearing over the years and that you also suffer from hyperacusis, but you still seem as prolific as ever so I was wondering how you cope with the impact on your work? Is it something you have to adapt to a lot as things progress?

Well, the hearing loss was progressive throughout my whole life, so I kind of unconsciously created some workarounds to make my process a little easier for me. But losing all the hearing in my right ear suddenly, going from maybe 65-70% to zero, yeah there were some mechanic differences. I don’t mix my albums anymore and I haven’t for some time; the last album I mixed was The Night Took Us in Like Family. But beyond that, actually making music, the process of making has hardly changed at all. The only time if affects it is when I put in headphones and I hear things that I didn’t hear before. I have to be a little more involved with the mixing, because I need people I can trust around me to make sure I’m not missing something obvious, because my ears are not as strong as they used to be. But like I alluded to earlier, if I was a traditional musician I think it may have hit me harder, but losing an ear’s worth of hearing doesn’t impact me creatively. After my brain recovered from the sensations, I was able to work around it creatively.

That’s good to hear, man. I understand that Mello Music Group have been very supportive of you in that regard. They’ve always struck me as a label who seem concerned with the personal relationships with their artists; would you say that’s a fair statement?

Oh yeah absolutely.

I think I read in an interview from a few years back, that they worked on the promo side of things when you were having difficulties, so you weren’t having to constantly work on the music.

I mean yeah, they were a tremendous support to me throughout. I think what you might be referring to is the last surgery I had before I completely lost my hearing.

Ah right yeah, this would have been about five years ago, I think.

Yeah, I handed in the album from mixing to go into mastering the night before my surgery, so they went in to doing promo within six weeks of me handing that in, so I was still recovering. So, they were extremely supportive, but I think more so than that was their willingness to be patient with me. Because my productivity really slowed down for those three years. I was kind of on pace to be doing multiple albums a year and trying to be ambitious with my collaborations, but if you look at those years, I really slowed down quite a bit and I just couldn’t maintain my workflow while I was going through all of those surgeries. There were three in four years and so during all of those it was a pretty rough time, and Mello was very supportive and patient with that. So that was very kind.

Yeah, that is kind. Now, I’m always interested in the early days of an artist’s life; was music a big part of your childhood? Did you come from a very musical household?

No not particularly… well music was a big part of my life, but I didn’t come from a musical house. It’s interesting you ask that, because I think what I’ve been telling you about how I view musicianship, very much ties into that. My mom is a writer, creative writing, and my dad was a poet growing up and a chair of creative writing at this college. So, I grew up with a lot of encouragement to write, a lot of poetry and a lot of fiction, and my mom also painted, all this stuff. And when I was very young, it was just my mom and I, and she would take me to her MFA classes and so I was just exposed to very creative people. Then I think I took way more interest in music than anyone anticipated; maybe looking back it may have been a way for me to carve out my own niche in the family, because I was the one who was always recording the radio with my tape recorder and making these little bootleg mixtapes when I was five or six. And I also took a really early interest in jazz, but I honestly couldn’t tell you why. It was just combing through stations when I was a kid, I just heard that and wanted more of it. So yeah, I appreciate that question.

I had the other experience, because I came from a family of artists and so I was convinced I was going to become an artist myself. But then when I came to do my first art exam, I realised I was terrible [laughs]. But then I ended up writing and so it is nice to find your own path.

Well, there you go [laughs], I think that’s kind of where I was too. I was a creative writing major in college and it was an emphasis on poetry, so with my dad having that sort of pedigree and my mom too, it did illuminate how good a writer I actually was, which is to say middling [laughs].

[Laughs] And so was it always going to be hip-hop for you, when you started making your own music? Did you dabble in anything else? You mentioned the jazz interest…

No, there were a lot of genres early on. I started playing bass, that was the first instrument that I was playing and that was when I was, I think, 12. I was learning a bunch of jazz riffs, learning a bunch of hip-hop riffs. The Digable Planets were my favourite hip-hop group in the entire world and so I was learning pretty much all of their songs, because the bass was so nice, so that’s what I really wanted to do. But I ended up playing with a lot of different people, because when you’re a bassist you get asked to do a lot of different things, and so I was in all sorts of genres. I think ironically, everything but jazz. I don’t think I was ever good enough at bass to play with a proper jazz band. A lot of experimental jam bands, some rock stuff, alt stuff, some live hip-hop groups, like all sorts of stuff. I probably started making beats when I was 15 and it just sort of carried on from there in the background while I was doing all this other stuff. Because I never really considered myself a musician, so I was running a recording studio and making beats, playing drums and guitar, in a band from time to time. And I really got pushed into production from all the other stuff because I discovered I really didn’t enjoy collaborating with other musicians [laughs] and the main reason for that I think is because what I bring to the table is something that I’m not going to be able to explain very easily. So I think I can create a little world where there is some value but it’s going to be really hard to explain to a John Doe, why we need to end the song halfway through the measure. I just want to pursue my instincts and I don’t want to have to have reasons for that.

Well yeah, that makes total sense.

I was working with an engineer on a song from Bushido, he was a mixing engineer I’d never worked with before, and he sent me the version back and the ending faded out, there was a nice 20 second fadeout. So, I said, “You faded that out, why did you do that?”, and he goes, “Oh it didn’t have an ending,” and I’m like, “No it did…” So he says, “The beat just ends though, kinda randomly,” and I’m like, “Yeah that’s how I end songs from time to time and this is one of them.” [laughs]

[Laughs] Just quickly going back to the collaborations, is there anyone left on your wish list who you want to work with, any dream collaborations?

Oh of course but I like to imagine that my next dream collaboration is someone I haven’t considered, or met yet. That’s how it was with Namir, I mean really it was an absolute pleasure to work with him. He’s on the opposite end of the spectrum because his musicianship is just incredible and he really finds angles for songwriting that wouldn’t occur to me, so it was really nice to work with someone like that. But I didn’t know Namir prior to a couple of years ago and I wouldn’t have thought that he and I would end up doing something together, and that’s almost kind of true of Solemn too. I never really thought that Solemn and I would work together again. And so yeah, maybe five years if you had asked me this question, I would have reeled a bunch of my favourite rappers from when I was a kid, that I was listening to at the time, but the most rewarding pieces of music I’ve contributed to or that I’ve had a very personal attachment to the origins of, like with Jeremiah Jae where you see something like that blossom into something that I’m really proud of. And the same with the Marlowe albums, you know? I’m extremely humbled and somewhat surprised by how many people continue to listen to the Marlowe records [laughs] – we didn’t see that coming.

Yeah, I remember they got a lot of love on BBC 6 Music over here, which was nice to see.

Yeah, that was pretty wild.

Okay so, just one more from me. You don’t strike me as the sort of artist who’s prone to resting, so what’s next for you after Imaginary Everything?

Oh yeah, I’m still working. I’m working right now. I would really like to get another record out this year. I’m doing a lot better, I’m feeling good and I feel like I have a lot that I can be contributing right now because I want to go in a lot of different directions musically, and so I’ll probably pursue some wild concept or something ambitious. Then I’ll finish it, listen to it and realise I just made the same thing again [laughs] but yeah hopefully it will be good and the people who like my music will like this too. Then I think Marlowe 3 is an inevitable thing that Solemn and I will be working on this year, especially because I’ll be moving back to North Carolina.

Well, that’s very good to hear, man. Now that’s it from me but thank you very much for talking with me, that was a really nice conversation, so yeah good to connect.

Yeah, I appreciate it, man.

***

Imaginary Everything by L’Orange and Namir Blade is out May 7 on Mello Music Group – pre-order it here. Follow L’Orange on Twitter and Instagram. 

Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Read his own hip-hop blog and follow him here.

Interview: Breeze Brewin

Photo credit: Michael Greenberg

Last month, after a long, long wait, independent hip-hop icon Breeze Brewin finally released his debut solo album, Hindsight. It didn’t disappoint, and has been receiving great feedback from critics and fans alike. Gingerslim recently spoke to Breeze Brewin about the new album and a lot more.

First of all, congratulations on the new album. How does it feel to finally have it out there?

Yeah, it feels great. I’m not going to front and say there wasn’t no apprehension. I wasn’t sure 100% people would dig it cos it’s been a minute, but once it came out, I was like, “It’s out!”, so yeah it feels good, man. This is the first time it’s just been me. Like I’ve got other stuff I’m proud of with Juggaknots and I’ve got other stuff I’m proud of with Prince Paul, and Indelibles… you know, all of that’s great, but it’s just different when it’s you.

I know that you were maybe concerned about putting a solo record out because of the impact you had seen it have on other crews like EPMD and Leader Of The New School, and you were worried it might have the same effect on Juggaknots, is that right?

Yeah, that was definitely a factor, man. When there are groups, in a lot of cases there is going to be a callout on one of the artists, and back then there was definitely that pull on me. But at the end of the day, I felt like I was part of a team and it’s weird to then be like “Yeah cool we’re a team and I’ma just slide off and do whatever I want.” Now that could be awkward with any group, it has been, you’ve seen it documented, but I’m in a family; my group is my brother and my sister. That’s my older brother and my younger sister too, so I’m right in the middle. My dynamic has always been the group, so to extract me from that in some ways felt unnatural. So, it took some soul searching and some long hard discussions, and eventually they were like, “Look whatever you do, we’re going to support you”, but it took a minute to get there. Before that I had been offered some opportunities but I just wasn’t ready for them. So, this is how it came out, years later, and it was worth it. The family is probably stronger than ever because it’s out on our label, so we’re all still working on it, just in different capacities. They’ve given me the space to do what I need to do musically, with absolutely no compromise, as well as the strategy we use for the label, which I feel is also very important. Like I don’t think we’d be on the phone right now, if it wasn’t for their energy and I feel like that helps to keep that team dynamic intact, which feels good.

Yeah definitely, man. Now, the album kicks off with a reference to Bush’s second term and finishes with a pretty withering attack on Trump, which shows the length of time it took to come to fruition. Did your vision for what you wanted the album to be change much over the course of that time?

Well, a lot of it was trial and error, so for three of the songs we had rolled them out early, very limited, just to see how people would react. Either we weren’t ready as artists, or as a label maybe, but people weren’t ready to receive it. So, in the end a lot of those joints were put on ice, a lot were unfinished and a lot were unmixed, but over the course of those years I still had it in my mind that it was gonna amount to something. And you know it’s kinda weird to have that, it’s kind of a weird format, but these are joints that I still felt did a good job telling my tale, my story, in regards to the idea of looking back. A lot of these songs are… they’re stories, but they’re still introspective. There are some songs that are damn near autobiographical, and there’s others that are inspired by an event, then I added more to it, you know? Like “The Uninvited,” if I was writing in a journal and it ended up rhyming, that would be “The Uninvited.” That’s my life, that’s all me; everything I’m talking about in there, that was a situation. Meanwhile something like “Eye Popper”…

[laughs]

…that was inspired [laughs] by a situation with a young lady. I’m not gonna go into detail…

Say no more, it’s fine…

I’m just saying that one was definitely based on a true story! [laughs] So I felt like it was enough of me and regardless of timelines, it told a tale, so you know I was just really careful. There were other joints done in that time that didn’t fit in for that purpose, but the joints on there did.

Yeah, I mean considering it was made over that sort of time period, you’ve done well to keep it cohesive. I’ve heard albums that have been made in similar circumstances and they lose some of that cohesion because of the timescale involved.

Yeah, at the end of the day, it’s definitely me. It’s definitely my feelings, whether it’s frustration, whether it’s some level of disappointment, whether it’s some level of dealing with uncomfortable situations, everything you hear, in some shape or form I have touched.

Okay, so given the timescales and the apprehension and everything else, what made you decide to put it out now?

Honestly it just got to the point where it was like now or never, and I felt like I’d been doing enough collaborations, which is cool but I also felt like it wasn’t really building up my catalogue; in my mind I felt like I hadn’t started my catalogue. And then I saw other dudes doing it, like those Black Thought releases, those were inspirational. They’re the legendary Roots crew you know what I mean, but I’ve got a Black Thought single from the early 2000’s, the import with DJ Krush. I can relate to that cos you’re attached to this unit, you’re well respected and you have your role, but then at some point I saw him kinda just do his thing, and I was like why not? You know I’m now in my mid-forties and I wouldn’t mind putting out three or four more. I’ve already got an EP on deck solely produced by my man Sebb Bash, so like I don’t want to stop now, you know? Now that don’t mean that I’m not going to work on another Juggaknots project, but right now I’m definitely trying to make up for some lost time. And honestly just with the type of time it is, there’s so much to say and with the way I approach things, with the storytelling, I think that may have had something with the way the album was received because other people are kinda moving away from that, but I think it’s just such an important component of the art form.

Oh definitely, man, it’s an essential part for me. Now, obviously being an educator became your main focus at one point, but you’ve still been doing features over the years as you said, so was there ever a point where you considered quitting rap? You strike me as the sort of artist who is always going to be doing bits regardless of whether anyone else hears them.

Yeah, that’s me [laughs]. I’ve got a lot of notebooks and maybe if there’s a month that goes by where I don’t open one of those notebooks, then it’s like what am I doing? But then the day after that month, I’ll be in the bathroom and four bars will come. So, I write them down and then I’ve got four bars all over the place. Then after a while you start to see commonalities between them, or even contrasts between them, and then it’s like yeah, I’m gonna piece them together. But I have definitely had moments where it’s like it don’t make sense anymore [sighs], but I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I didn’t give in to that. I think at this point now I wanna embrace it more and some days the rhymes are writing themselves, and I don’t know if that’s from years and years of manufacturing these verses, or if it’s a change in philosophy, because I definitely have had that. At some point I started thinking of this phrase, ‘production over perfection’, like that’s what I’m really trying to go with. I have had songs that I think are damn near perfect, I’ve been involved with those songs, and I think for a while it’s nice to say that, to feel that. Hip hop lends itself well to that, we know the songs; they have a feeling to them. But you can’t let that hold you back, those songs weren’t that before you made them, they were just another song, and then once you throw it out, people hear them, they take on a life of their own. Then who knows, maybe one day somebody will be like “Yo this joint really meant something to me”, but I would never have got to that point if it wasn’t for that philosophy.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of using music as a tool for raising political awareness, which I feel like we sort of saw a resurgence of during Trump’s time in office. Do you think hip hop can be used to engage young people in politics? Because I think it should be and it can be, but I also see plenty of fans complaining when their favourite artists bring politics into their music.

Yeah, I don’t understand that when it comes to music. To me music intrinsically, in its DNA, is a protest on some level. All music is protest music, whether it’s protesting about the love you have or don’t have, or you’re protesting because you’re dissatisfied with your station in life; it’s all protest music. So, you know as an artist do what you want, but have a point. If your song has a point, it’s protest, it’s activist, that’s what it should be. Now you know, I talk shit, I enjoy that, I mean that’s practice. That’s putting the stuff together and seeing mechanically how these words work. I’ve got a couple on the album, like “Bumpy Johnson,” but then that’s a song about not becoming a toxic male, it’s like an anti-toxic masculinity song, but I’m trying to go into the path that creates that. Or a joint like “Road Rage” is about trying to figure out how to maintain your cool when dealing with the stresses we all face. So I feel like I wish there was more of that in hip hop. But you know I get it because when it first started, dude had the microphone and he was getting the party poppin’ or whatever, and that’s dope, like I said that’s part of it. But once we ended up with “The Message,” there was no turning back. I feel like that was the blueprint for a whole new lane and I just think, I’m not going to do this and not be in that lane. As a black man, as a teacher, as a father and as a human being, I just feel like I should give you a bit of both. So a bit of fun, bit of talking shit. If you dig that cool, but I’m also going to be doing that whilst I’m building on some shit. I feel to have that tool, that weapon but not to use it? There’s something wrong with that.

No, that’s a good way to look at it, man. “King Oxymoron” is a great track, definitely a personal favourite, and I could tell from the IG video you released beforehand that you obviously had a lot of fun writing it. Are those your favourite sort of tracks, the ones where you just get to do wild shit with words?

I mean, I’m an English teacher [laughs]. At the end of the day there are certain writing devices that are a challenge – oxymorons, irony, paradoxes – these are tricky to even explain. So, I saw that and thought, yeah, I’m gonna do a whole joint about it. I’ma introduce the concept in verse one, then I’m gonna run through it in verse two and three, and I did [laughs]. And it’s like at some point, if you’re stuck teaching oxymorons, verse two and three. Let the students go through them, pick them out, explain which phrases are the oxymorons and discuss it. If I could be a part of that and still make heads bop, it’s a good day [laughs].

Yeah, that’s the dream right there, man.

Teaching is very important to me, that’s what matters.

It actually ties in with my next question, because I remember in your notes you said that modern hip hop connects well with the more progressive side of education, and I was wondering if you could expand on that idea a bit more?

I just think in regards to engaging students, giving students the different opportunities to express themselves with different topics, it’s just dope. A lot of schools today have some form of studio and I think that’s dope. So, I just think it’s a nice option but it’s also an immense resource. Hip hop’s 40 years old now right? You could go through different eras in time and, you know, you think about a song like “Devil’s Advocate,” it’s not the first, there are other songs like that. So, you can go through those songs and you can have discussions, you can have kids analyse stuff in the same way you’re going to analyse Shakespeare, or Baldwin. Like, why not? You can’t tell me you can take some of these Rakim verses and put them next to someone like John Donne, you can’t make connections to do with metaphysical poetry? It’s all there, so why ignore this resource which is accessible, which is differentiated… why ignore it because it’s, I dunno, non-traditional. That’s why something like Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music, that was massive, that gave me hope. I mean I’ve been using hip hop for years, there were even times I almost got in trouble for it, but I’m still gonna use it. I mean one of my favourite lessons of all time is teaching personification through “I Gave You Power” by Nas. When I did that lesson, and we’re talking 15 years ago now, the kids were mesmerised and it just felt like this is what I should be doing. And sometimes the kids bring me stuff. So like after we did “I Gave You Power,” one kid showed me “Nikki” by Logic, the joint about smoking, nicotine. I didn’t know about it and I was like oh shit.

On a related side note, growing up in England I was taught by an army of old white men who never taught me anything about black history. The only time I learned anything about that was through hip hop, it taught me more than 11 years of education in this country did.

Wow.

Yeah, it’s mad, man. So like just from Outkast naming a song “Rosa Parks,” I had no idea who Rosa Parks was at that point, so I went away and looked her up and then progressed to the civil rights movement from there. Or Ice Cube framing The Predator around the murder of Rodney King and the L.A. Riots, I had no understanding about any of that. It opened my eyes to a world that was never acknowledged in my own world.

Well that makes me feel even more empowered to utilise it, because I didn’t think about the exposure aspect. I’m just thinking purely of the raw bones, like concept to concept, but you’re right, the exposure that it lends itself to, in some cases it will show you a whole different world.

Exactly, man, and it was always a lot more engaging than the curriculum I was being taught here. I wish it could have been officially implemented in some way because it would have made things far more interesting.

Yeah man you know as an English teacher, I remember teaching Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, and the people in there, they’re grimy, they’re hood dudes. They end up stabbing each other in the back and then to introduce the idea that money is the root of all evil, they find the money at the bottom of a tree? Like come on, man, that shit’s fire. So, attach that and then maybe play “Dance with The Devil” by Immortal Technique, and you know those pieces of work aren’t that different. So, you can do that, you can compare and contrast – grimy / grimy, characteristic / characteristic, then irony at the end / irony at the end. And so, I’m wondering why are we denying the greatness of hip hop as a tool and as a resource? There are reasons why [laughs], like you said old white men vs. not old white men. But if you look at it, art for art, they’re kindred spirits.

Definitely, man, without question. I think I also read that you thought that the full version of yourself hadn’t been available to the world before, because you were always in the company of great people, so do you think this album is the cure for that? Is this the unadulterated Breeze Brewin we’re hearing and seeing now?

Ah yeah honestly, there is no compromise, I got everything I wanted. The only other level to that would have been if I could have produced the whole thing. But then at the end of the day it’s like I’m doing that for my ego, or to make good music? Well at 47 I’m just trying to make good music, I need to be in control of what I can control, my beats ain’t gonna get it done… in fact I did a song, there’s a version of “King Oxymoron” where I did the beat, and cats were like, “yo this is hard”, and I was like, nope not there yet. I did the “Parental Discretion” joint with Marco (Polo), where we talk about parenting, on Port Authority 2, and we traded off; I always loved that beat and he said, “yeah I got you”. That was in and of itself another decision, because there was pushback from other people who liked the other version because they’d got used to it, you know? But I knew that there was a higher level needed for that song and it wasn’t me. So, you know, it can’t really be about the ego, it’s gotta be about the music. And sometimes when you’re compromising and everybody’s an artist, you know it might still be dope but it’s also still a compromise, and there just wasn’t that on this record. It was nice, it was just like, “do what you think is right”. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with great people over the years. With Prince Paul it was like he had the script set up, with the first Juggaknots joint my brother was like, “These are the beats, fill ‘em up”. So, I’m not against that, but it’s just at this stage in my life I just wanted to be sink or swim, hit or miss… that’s gonna be my hit, or my miss.

Well, I’m glad you got there, man. That’s almost it from me, but just before I go, what’s next for you? I know you said you’ve got more things in the pipeline…

I got the joint with my man Sebb Bash, who to me is one of the hardest producers. That’s my dude, we worked at Fat Beats together back in the day.

And is that ready to go?

He’s gotta mix it, but it’s all written and recorded. It’s an EP with like five joints, mostly shit talking, but one with… a topic [laughs]. I’ll just leave it at that for now. It’s unfortunate the topic is needed, but it got addressed. So I’m excited about that and then besides that… there’s a lot of us, man, I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of dudes who came up in our era that I build with. I try to support them, they try to support me; great dudes that you know, that I talk to on a regular basis – Mr Len, J Treds – a lot of people that I still have a great relationship with. I’ve known these dudes for 25 years of doing music and we’re all still doing music, so we’ll see what happens, but I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

Well, I’m very glad to hear that, man. That’s it from me but thank you very much for speaking with me and good luck with the rest of the rollout.

Yeah well thank you, man. It’s been great talking to you and I appreciate the consideration.

Always, man. I’ve been a fan of yours for two decades now, so it’s an honour to do this.

Definitely, man. Take care, brother.

And you, man. Peace.

***
Hindsight is out now and you can get it here. Follow Breeze Brewin on Twitter and Instagram. Click here to read our Juggaknots interview from 2018.

Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Read his own hip-hop blog and follow him here.

Interview: Darkim Be Allah and Endemic Emerald

We may already be a few weeks into the new year but the shitstorm that was 2020 is still having a devastating impact on America. A lot of these issues were covered on Antediluvian King, the album by Wu-Tang Clan affiliate Darkim Be Allah, and producer Endemic Emerald, that dropped in November. We recently spoke to them about that and more.

[The following has been lightly edited for clarity]

Let’s talk about your latest project, last year’s Antediluvian King. Darkim, take us through the concept and theme from the lyrical perspective.

Well Antediluvian means before the flood, so that takes us back to a time when kings were Gods. So on this project you’re definitely getting a lyrical perspective from the point of view of the black man being God of the universe. Everything is brought up to date though. The knowledge and wisdom I’m applying has no birth record. It’s up to date because I’m applying it to what’s going on around us right now. So I’m the Antediluvian King in this day and time on this album.

And Endemic Emerald, tell us how you set about providing the soundtrack for Darkim’s vision.

After the first couple of joints I knew the angle I had to go for sonically. It took a little while to hone in on the specific sound Darkim required, but once we got going I knew the joints he was going to choose. Towards the end when we were finishing up the album I would just bring one beat down to the lab, knowing it would make the cut.

Darkim; People have talked how relevant a lot of Killer Mike and El-P’s lyrics on RTJ4 summed up how shitty 2020 was, but they wrote those songs pre-2020. There’s also a lot of relevance to the events of last year in your writing on Antediluvian King, but again, you wrote this before everything that’s happened. Can you speak on that?

It’s probably because in a lot of ways 2020 was the result of a lot of things getting more and more intense. Meaning it’s been happening all along but last year it was in your face in a bigger way that can’t be ignored. There’s been virus scares every couple of years since the ‘90s. I’ve never been through a pandemic before though. There’s been police violence, but never caught on tape as graphically as in 2020. There’s been civil unrest but we hadn’t seen worldwide revolts like in 2020. So if you’re the type of artist that’s in tune with what’s going on, you’re right on time because humanity as a whole is going through a lot.

You have some heavyweight guest features on the new album with Planet Asia and two joints with Tragedy. How did you choose who would make a good fit for this particular project?

Well first things first those are my brothers so it’s a good fit because it’s natural for us to be able to work together. As far as these particular songs go, I gotta give Endemic most of the credit. He’s been working on a lot of projects for No Cure Records. So there’s all kinds of feature combinations I know people are gonna love. The guest appearances on my album came out of us just being in the studio, doing what we do.

You also produce, and you made the beat, “Twelve Jewelz” on The Pick, the Sickle and the Shovel, the second album by one of my favourite groups of all time, Gravediggaz. It’s a RZA solo track, and he gets very deep. Considering how by this point he was already seen as one of hip-hop’s greatest producers, was that intimidating to produce just for him?

Not intimidating. It was definitely an honor then and it still is. I’ve been fortunate enough to have those types of high points in my story. I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to work with and earn the respect of a lot of high calibre people in music.

Endemic; I read that you and Darkim recorded a project several years ago that got lost in a dreaded hard drive crash. Was it a complete loss, or might we get to hear what that would have sounded like, one day?

Yeah we still have the demos as .mp3s, but they’re just rough mixes. I think we’ll drop at some point as a free download.

Working on a one emcee/one producer album like Antediluvian King gives you the chance to create a much broader, cohesive sound, rather than a bunch of beats that might get placed on different projects with different artists. Is that how you approach an album like this?

Most definitely. I like to make the tracks with the artist in mind. The overall sound was fleshed out in the early stages. Most of the tracks were produced using samples from ‘70s German progressive rock. I had a dope collection at the time and every new track just flowed out naturally.

Putting together an album in 2020 must have been way tougher than usual. How did being in the pandemic effect the process of making an album, getting it pressed on wax etc, for you?

Not too differently really. There were a few delays in getting in the lab at one point, but after that it was cool. We use a vinyl plant out of London and there were never any delays in the pressings or shipping. What did affect things most was pushing the release date back in hope of the nightlife scene reemerging, so we could throw a release party and set-up shows. That part has been the biggest disappointment as far as I’m concerned.

What’s next for each of you?

[Darkim] Next for me is my King Crush EP, which will be another solo project.

[Endemic] I’m releasing No Cure Records’ first ever released full length, Terminal Illness on vinyl in early 2021. It came out in 2009 but never saw a vinyl release, so I’m hyped for that. Some dope features on here too from the likes of Sean Price (RIP), Planet Asia, Killah Priest and Hell Razah, among others.

***

Antediluvian King is out now, and you can get it here. Follow Dakim Be Allah on Twitter and Instrgram. Follow Endemic Emerald on Twitter and Instagram. Interview by Grown Up Rap Editor Ben Pedroche.  

Interview: Preservation

Preservation is perhaps best known for his extensive work with Mos Def, his production for the GZA, Roc Marciano, Your Old Droog, Mach-Hommy, billy woods and countless others, and for being one half of Dr. Yen Lo with Ka. His most recent album, Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, is possibly his finest album yet. He recently spoke to Gingerslim about the project, and how it was influenced by Preservation’s time in Hong Kong.

How’s everything gone with the release so far? I’ve seen a lot of positive reviews in circulation.

It’s been good. Feels great to finally have it out on all platforms and physical.  Specifically I’m really proud of how the limited edition double cassette came out.  I always wanted to do a custom packaging with an exclusive element which is the beat tape.

I read that the album was created from a challenge you set yourself, where you wanted to make a project solely using records you had found while digging in Hong Kong. I was wondering what sort of records you had to work with initially and were they fairly typical finds for Chinese record shops?

A lot of the local records I was discovering in Hong Kong did not have much variation in styles of music, so it made it a challenge to find the right loops and pieces that would work with my style and the MC’s I was envisioning for the record. I had to listen to a lot of music before I found that one gem that popped out amongst the rest, so creatively it made me have to dig deeper. Most of the music from the 60’s and 70’s were based on what was popular at the time. Cha Cha, Go Go etc.. Most of the lyrics were sung in Mandarin with a lot of the records coming from Taiwan and Singapore. Then in the 70’s more songs were being recorded in Cantonese developing into Cantopop created in Hong Kong.

What had drawn you to Hong Kong initially?

I first went in 96 to visit a friend but later I came a few times to do shows with Yasiin Bey. Then in 2014 my wife relocated for her job to the Hong Kong office. Initially it was going to be a 6 month stay but ended up being 3 years. I always had a connection with the city growing up watching movies from there and being fascinated with the culture.

With regards to the album’s title, what do you view as the West’s illness and does the East really hold the cure / answers?

First and foremost my intention was to put what I consider the illest Mc’s from the west on the sounds of the East. During my 3-year stay starting in 2014, I witnessed the student umbrella protest movement in HK, mirrored with the negative news coming in from the West including Trump’s election, mass shootings and the continued police oppression and killing of black lives. The act of creating was my solace.  I feel there is a different way of going about healing in the East through more handed down traditional methods and also a strong respect for family. Turn on the TV and it’s obvious no region in the world holds the cure, but for me this experience was therapeutic and hopefully that resonates with the listeners.

The list of guest spots is beyond impressive. Did you have a fairly good idea of who you wanted to work with when you started production, or did it evolve more organically as things progressed?

I created a list of people I knew and worked with in the past and also artists that I was listening to at the time I was living in Hong Kong, like Tree, Mach, Grande etc… Ka was instrumental in bringing the album together and making a lot of those connections with artists I didn’t know personally. Most of the time I make music with people I already have a relationship with but in this case a lot of the artists were inspiring the sound I was making for the album so I was open to making new relationships through the music.

Did the album lead you in any new directions that you hadn’t envisioned when you began working on it? Did you notice any shift in your usual production techniques or anything like that?

In the past, I was doing music with loops and no drums, then during the Dr. Yen Lo sessions, I was learning a lot from Ka about opening things up even more and letting samples just ride. My thing is layering and creating a collage of sound. For Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, I felt like I was bringing some of the elements I used to do before and after Yen Lo and trying to blend them including adding drum loops here and there.  I think “A Cure For The Common” and “Lemon Rinds” capture that direction.

What is the Hong Kong hip hop scene like in general; is there much struggle with censorship or anything like that? For example, are there any politically-minded local artists making music?

Hong Kong has a large EDM scene stemming out of a heavy disco/club culture coming out of the 70’s and 80’s. Hip Hop isn’t that popular but has a small underground community. The Graffiti and street art element is very big and the B-boy scene got some things going on as well. There is a group called LMF from the 90’s still doing their thing. I think it was the only Chinese speaking Hip Hop group signed to a major label at the time. A lot of the younger mc’s now are doing the trap sound with some doing boom bap sound as well. As far as the lyrics go, I’m not exactly sure what most of the content is, but I would guess that some of it is speaking about certain day to day issues and political oppression. Censorship is definitely becoming an issue more and more especially with recent events including the student movements and the Hong Kong national security law.

Sticking with that subject, how did you and Young Queenz end up working together?

It was important to me to have a local Hong Kong artist be a part of this album and represent and draw the listener into the city. I was combing through YouTube videos of Hong Kong rappers, but couldn’t really find anyone that could match the vocal tones I anticipated would end up on the album. I asked Gary Leong who runs White Noise Records, a local vinyl shop that specializes in new music. He mentioned Queenz and hit me with his cd. It was heavily influenced by 90’s hip hop and you could tell he studied the craft – but it was his voice which stood out. Heavy and raspy, so automatically I felt that he could fit in the sound of the album.  Turned out that a friend knew his manager and made the link. I went to go see him perform at one of the few underground music venues in Hong Kong. The place was packed to capacity and headlining was LMF, the veteran hip hop group. Young Queenz took the stage with his crew, Wildstyle records and did a whole trap set. I wasn’t expecting that kind of sound because of the CD’s boom bap sound but saw in the moment that he was a special artist taking full control of the stage and audience.

I was wondering if you have any aspirations to use this creative model in any other countries?

Hong Kong is a great jumping off city to visit other countries in the region and I took advantage of that during my stay. So, I’ll definitely be releasing some projects related to the music I was fortunate enough to acquire during my travels.

***

Eastern Medicine, Western Illness is out now on Nature Sounds. Visit Preservation’s site for more about his music, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Read his own hip-hop blog and follow him here. 

Exclusive Premiere: Justo The MC & maticulous – ‘County of Kings’ + Interview

Today we’re excited to bring you the premiere of the new album from Justo the MC and producer maticulous, County of Kings. A follow-up to last year’s Mind Of A Man, the new project is more of what you’d expect from the true-school duo. Hit play below to listen now, and keep scrolling for our interview with maticulous.

Tell us what people can expect from the new album with Justo The MC, County of Kings?

First off, thank you for reaching out, it’s good to talk with you! I think what people can expect is the evolution in chemistry we’ve had making records over the past two years. I’m very proud of Mind Of A Man, the first record we did in January  2019. It was organic and we’ve really just relied on our ear and creativity to guide us through each project and County Of Kings builds upon that. You never want to make the same album over and over…

Its about only been about 18 months since Mind of A Man, and a year since the Bonus Room EP. Do you guys tend to record new shit pretty much non-stop, or do you just have plenty of music in the vaults ready to go when you feel the time is right?

When we first started working on songs it was just to see if it’d progress into a full project. Since finishing Mind Of A Man, we’ve been consistently working and building projects. Bonus Room came to be because we were in a really chill/vibe-out type zone for a few months while working on Mind Of A Man. The Bonus Room tracks did not fit the energy of the album, but it turned into a Summer EP.

Has the way you guys work together changed or evolved much since you first started collaborating?

For sure, working on this much music you develop a brotherhood. More ideas spark and get bounced back and forth and I think it makes the music better overall. All organic, nothing is forced or trying to fit in a certain lane, just trying to create high quality hip-hop from our perspective.

The first time you really caught our ear as a producer was with The maticulous LP in 2015, which we posted about a lot at the time. It had a great mix of emcees on there (Masta Ace, Your Old Droog, Guilty Simpson, Blu and more), and I’m curious as to how you chose who you wanted to feature, and do you craft beats with specific artists in mind?

Thank you. When I do producer projects I map out instrumentals and sequence it to have an album-feel as opposed to just a compilation of tracks. Once I have them all sorted, I’ll reach out to the emcees that I feel would best represent each sound. I also enjoy featuring artists that have never worked on tracks together before — for example RA The Rugged Man with Duck Down artists on “Body The Beat”, Blu and Masta Ace on “Bet Your Life”, Fame and Rah Digga on “Black Hoodie Rap”, etc. It’s fun approaching it from a fan point-of-view!

This leads nicely to the inevitable question about which rappers are on your list of who you’d love to have over your production. 

Black Thought, Anderson .Paak, Phonte, Freddie Gibbs, Nas… I could go on, haha!

How has lockdown been for you creatively? I think it was El-P who tweeted a few weeks back how a lot of artists probably thought they’d be mad productive during this time, but how art doesn’t always come out that way, when you have free time. How are you finding it?

El-P is 100% correct! It takes a while to figure out your own process as an artist and finding what process brings you the most fulfilment. My productivity comes in waves, and when I’m inspired I want to work all the time, and if I’m not I don’t. However, telling an artist they have unlimited free time can be crippling because too many times I’ve tried to force things and I end up regretting the time I spent.

Do you tend to work with rappers in person? I ask, because that cohesive sound you only get when a producer and emcee actually make music together in the studio is definitely something that Covid 19 is effecting. 

Working in person on any level is my favorite, whether it’s just playing beats, recording, or mixing. It’s more productive than sending e-files back and forth. You miss the energy and the collaboration of doing everything over the internet. This is not to say you can’t make dope music strictly that way… in my experience I’d say it’s been a 50/50 mix.

Lastly, what can we expect from you next now that County of Kings is out?

Justo and I are in the midst of our third album. All the beats have been crafted and lyrics written… recording and post production next. Our workflow is enjoyable because he doesn’t subscribe to a certain sound or whatever the flavor of the moment is. I’m always creating, stacking beats, sometimes you’ll hear where my vibe is when I post some snippets on my IG. I appreciate the questions, thank you to all your readers and supporters of the music!

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Purchase County of Kings here. Follow Justo the MC on Twitter and Instagram here and here, and maticulous here and here. Interview by Grown Up Rap Editor Ben Pedroche.

Interview: Elucid

GingerSlim checks in with Elucid to talk about his work with billy woods and Milo, religion, musical influences and more. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

Let’s start with the Nostrum Grocers collaboration with Milo from 2018 and how that come about; had you guys been planning on working on something together for a while? 

No it was a really spontaneous thing. From the moment I met Milo, we had an instant connection and then one day we were like, “Yo we should do an album…”. He was in New York for a couple of shows, we went to Willie Green’s studio and did the album, like that was it [laughs]. And we just put out a single not so long ago and that was the same thing – I went up to Maine, did the song, liked the song, did the video – 24 hours that was it! I mean that’s kinda like our process, we communicate back and forth through emails and texts, see each other when we’re in the right city; so yeah, it’s pretty natural.

And is that often your approach to collaborations, or is this set apart from the rest? 

I don’t tend to work on a lot of collaboration. I have done in the past, but I’ve been trying to narrow it down and now I’m only creating with people who genuinely inspire me. Milo was one of those dudes and of course billy woods is one of those dudes. So if either of them ever say to me we should work on something together, the answer is always yes, no question. I do wanna collab more, so there are a couple of people I’m going to be working on some things with. They haven’t come to fruition yet cos it’s moving a little slower, but yeah there’s a couple of things in the pipeline.

As I understand it, you had been putting out mixtapes for about 10 years before you released Save Yourself, and that was all self-released material. What was it that eventually prompted you to start working with a label? 

They just asked me if I wanted to put a record out. I did a show and (billy) woods was there. He said he was doing an album and wanted me to be on it, so that became “Freedmen’s Bureau” on History Will Absolve Me. Then from there we just stayed in contact, until Backwoodz said, “You wanna put an album out?”. I said okay cool, but it’s gotta be on vinyl though. They agreed and that’s it, there’s Save Yourself.

You and woods seem to have found a very good formula for working together. Have you noticed any changes in your creative approach since you two started collaborating? 

I think I’ve grown as an artist in general, as a solo artist. But then thinking about working as a team player, working with woods, how we might make a song is we’ll get a whole batch of beats, each have the same batch, and then he’ll demo his favorites and I’ll demo mine, then we’ll link up, play them and be like, “That’s cool, that’s not cool”, whatever. But then if he’s got something that’s really fire, then it’s like well how do I counter that? You know what I mean? Like I could come in the exact same way, but that doesn’t make it an interesting song. So I think maybe thinking like a team player, like what I can contribute, rather than what I can come up with all on my own, is easier; yeah it’s easier for sure [laughs]. So yeah, as a team player is where I’ve probably grown most.

I read that your parents were religious, and you were involved with the church in your youth, but you didn’t particularly enjoy being there. What sort of impact, if any, do you think that upbringing had on your music? 

Well I feel like you can never really run away from your past, that’s your default. The way that you were raised from zero to the age you leave your care-giver, that’s all you know, and that was a strong 18 years for me, right? And then from 18 to now, is just me forging my own path. I already had inklings of who I was, and things I believed, and things I disagreed with how I was raised, while I was there. So, at 14 being super conscious, like no I don’t want to go that way, I’m going to go this way. It’s still in the music though, it’s an immediate reference cos I know a lot of The Bible, a LOT. It’s also one of the greatest books ever written, if you remove the religiosity from it. You don’t have to believe, but there are some amazing fucking stories in that book, with super ill language, and I’m just drawn to how things are presented in that way. I like the idea of parables, I think that’s a really slick way to teach, you know? I can’t get away from it, but I’ve gotten away from it, if that makes sense?

And is that interest limited to Catholicism? 

It’s not Catholic…

Oh my bad, sorry I meant Christianity. 

Yeah so it’s Pentecostal, like a Black American spin on Catholicism or Protestantism, it’s a little different. Like I know Catholicism is super big, but like usually there’s no instruments there. My church was super lively; they had an amazing band, with musicians who played with some of the top 90’s RnB and soul acts worldwide. These guys were so talented and the choirs were amazing, so just growing up and seeing that, I didn’t want to be a performer at the time, but I was exposed to that kind of life, you know?

So do you think that’s where it all stems from? 

I don’t know, I just knew I was a writer, and then the writing and the poetry spawned into this rap thing, and then all of a sudden, I find myself on stage. And then like learning to be comfortable on stage, learning to be able to present my work to a room full of people; a rap show is very different from a poetry reading [laughs].

And does that interest extend into other religious and philosophical areas? 

Oh for sure. That was the thing with Christianity, it was super limiting and it didn’t provide all the answers I wanted. It also left out many other schools of thought about philosophy and spirituality that I was interested in. I guess I don’t subscribe to any religion right now, but I respect a lot of them and there are jewels to be learned in all of them. And lowkey they’re all very similar, they come from very similar origins. You can even go beyond the three main world religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – you can go beyond that and start reading things in Ancient Egypt and be like, “Oh that’s where those stories originally came from!”. The story of Jesus is not an original story, it was told thousands of years before he ‘walked the planet’. So that’s when I started getting into this universalist approach to spirituality and thought.

Now for me, one of your most intriguing releases was Valley of Grace, which had the accompanying film. What was the inspiration behind that project? 

Ah, man, basically being in South Africa. I went to Johannesburg and Cape Town in the summer of 2015, maybe ‘16, and my wife was there, she was still my girlfriend then, and she was working at a law centre, working towards protecting sex workers in South Africa. So being there, she’s at work for at least 8 hours a day, and I’m in the flat just hanging out, you know? So I go out, I get lost; I find weed, I go back; I drink a lot of coffee, I make music. The she comes home, I cook dinner, we hang out – do the same shit over and over. So I was felt like super free, like super, super free. I love that feeling of like being in a place where I don’t speak any of the five languages that are spoken there, that real alien feeling. Yeah I really like that, and so I started dipping my toes in and that’s really what became Valley of Grace; everything in South Africa, when I came back to New York at the end of the summer and I recorded it all in my house, that’s what became the record.

And is that audiovisual medium something you would like to experiment with further? I know you were involved with the Paraffin video too. 

Oh yeah totally. That’s the latest thing for me, definitely. I didn’t have anything to do with the filming for Paraffin, that was all Joseph, but I did all the music and the little cuts, so I’m very interested in scoring. So I think on the next project I’ll have a greater hand in the score, and also like the visual side of it. I really liked how that Paraffin video turned out.

Yeah it blends with the music perfectly. 

Joseph just really gets our vision, he really gets it. He did the video for “Barbarians” too. He really gets what the fuck we’re trying to do out here.

What’s next for you? Any projects lined up? 

I’ve been working on things, but nothing as a project. You’ll see it though, you’ll know [laughs]. Yeah, I don’t really work around projects like that; even with Valley of Grace I was just making songs and then when I got back to The States, woods was like, “So what you been doing over there?”, so we’re talking about the music and he said I should let him hear it sometime, so I did and then he was like, “Oh this is a record, you should put this out.”. Then we cut probably six or seven songs, put the rest on a record and that was Valley of Grace.

That’s cool though because normally if someone is working on a project, they will be looking for some sort of cohesion, but you’re doing it purely organically and more spontaneously. 

Yeah, I don’t believe in that, I don’t look for that. It all came from my mind, so however cohesive, or not, that’s who I am; that’s what my mind was going through at that exact time. If it doesn’t sound cohesive that means I was fucking crazy [laughs]. And that’s okay! That’s where I was at that particular time. That’s what I love about albums. It’s a clear definition of who you are, what you were thinking, what you were going through in this particular place in time. It’s so pure, it’s such an ill caption to me. That’s why I can’t wait to actually put out the second record, you know? I don’t know when it will be, but I know it’s going to be really ill. The new Armand Hammer album is coming too and I think that’s going to be a nice surprise; people are going to be very surprised by that.

Okay so aside from the church’s influence, what were your earliest musical memories?

Oh man. Well both my parents are musicians and they weren’t always super churchy, that happened when I was a kid, so there was a shift, you know? But even after that they still played a lot of things. They had a crazy vinyl collection and in that collection you had things like Sly & The Family Stone, Funkadelic, Al Green, James Brown, Denise Williams, Stevie Wonder; like just very ‘from the soil’, black American soul music, funk music, RnB music. So I grew up on all that shit on vinyl and then my uncle was a DJ, so that was my first experience of rap as a child, like 5 or 6 years old. There are videos of my breakdancing at people’s weddings as a child, so rap has always been here, you know what I mean? So yeah, he got me into Rakim, Public Enemy, BDP, De La Soul, all that era; he was there putting me onto it when I was super young. And then as well I am just the sort of person to venture out and explore beyond these genres, these boundaries; so when the internet came along, like much later on, it was like oh shit, now there’s stuff like Bad Brains, just things outside of rap. Or even getting deeper into regional rap. Growing up in New York City, but being a fan of things like Outkast and Goodie Mob, before they were like these established names, when they were still on the come up. Like those first albums, I was a big fan of them when they dropped.

And do you remember the point you realized that’s what you wanted to do?  

I still don’t feel like I’ve made that decision. Things just kinda come along and I do them. If someone asks, I do it. But I’ve never sat down and thought right this is what I want to do, I’ve never had that conversation with myself, it’s just sort of presented itself. I do what I do, I never actively pursued rap that way. Like I have a whole other life outside of the music thing. That’s why it’s a blessing that people recognize what the fuck I do out here, you know? I’ve got a song on Shit Don’t Rhyme No More called “1010 Wins” and it goes like, “I’m the man who the man say is the man”; I did that song every night on the last run and that shit has never felt more true, honestly. And that’s not even gassing myself up, it’s actually true. Like some of your favorites out here text me my own lyrics and be like, “Yo you’re fucking dope”, like the world’s favorites, and it just feels good that people are out here seeing me. And the past few years, those records we’ve put out, the Armand Hammer shit went off, the Nostrum shit went off, so I’m very curious to see what’s going to happen in the next 365 days. Yeah, it feels good man [laughs].

Yeah man, I bet. 

Well you out here, man! I see you on Twitter, you’ve been supporting for the longest time, so it feels dope to be here and like see you in the flesh, and know that this person has been checking for what I do, that shit is ill, thank you.

No, thank you man, and that’s me done anyway, so that’s a good point to end on [both laugh]. 

***

Buy Elucid’s music here, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to The Wire, style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow, Front Magazine and more. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Follow him here. 

 

 

Nobody Beats The Baz

Words by Dave Waller.

A few years ago, many followers of Mass Appeal’s Rhythm Roulette series noticed a glitch in the Matrix. Alongside the regular films of 9th Wonder, El-P and Large Professor testing their beatmaking chops on random records, there emerged a clip fronted by a middle-aged English bloke in wire-frame specs, a needle-sharp v-neck sweater and a lemon shirt, clutching a carrier bag from Lidl. “I’m Barry Beats,” he said, before ducking through the door of a record shop. Inside, he blind-picked an INXS 12”, some AC-DC and the Hair soundtrack. Then he got busy in Pro Tools and duly unleashed heat.

The clip somehow found its way into Mass Appeal’s official rotation, and has since racked up close to half a million views and hundreds of comments – the vast majority of which can’t get over how someone as unhip-hop as this guy could be banging out that kind of beat. There are a lot of Ned Flanders comparisons. Walter White. Lenny from Memento. He was called the ‘dirty old man of hiphop’, and a ‘korny ass mutha fucker’.

Then there was this: ‘If this cat had 2-3 dead boys n his closet and one cut up and stuffed in his bed I would tell anyone thats not even the craziest shizt I seen him do.’ [Sic]

Indeed, despite all the confusion, there was one sentiment that drove the response: this weird-looking dude is lit.

Digging for a living

Should you ever find yourself in the town of Camborne, deep in the rural English county of Cornwall, you’ll feel the past. The town is dissected by long terraces of granite cottages built back in the 18th Century, for men who spent their lives underground in a perilous hunt for tin. Back then, Camborne was the richest mining area in the world. But all that bustle, industry and purpose is now a distant memory, hanging heavy over the town like the mist that still hugs its hills. These days those streets are dotted with bored kids, old folk and shops struggling to survive.

Today I’m in a particularly weird example of the latter, one full of thick carpet, lavender and trinkets. I’m here following local resident Barry Beats, clad today in slick bottle-green wool-felt slacks. He strides purposefully up the stairs, past Miss Molly’s Tea Room and a terrifying display of old Dutch dolls, and through a room of floral drapes and paintings of pink carnations. Well-honed instincts lead him to a corner annex, where he discovers a rich vein of old vinyl. “This one looks good,” he says, extracting a battered copy of Non-Stop Latin Party. Price: 20p.

Newcomers may be happy speculating over the contents of Barry’s locked attic, but those of a certain vintage may be aware of the man’s real secret – he was once half of production duo The Creators, going under his old alias of Si Spex. As well as doing remix work for Dilated Peoples and Nas, The Creators released one full-length LP, The Weight, back in 2000. It was a transatlantic banger, with Mos Def and Talib Kweli, El Da Sensei and Dilated all gracing the mic.

In the wake of that LP, Barry got hit with label troubles, and his MPC got shut in the loft while he went out delivering Chinese takeaways to make ends meet, and to fund a troubling addiction to model railways. But now Barry is back and dropping his debut solo release, the instrumental ‘2 Sides of Barry’, on King of the Beats records. The sound is what Barry calls ‘new bap’: crisp, tight and funky with hard drums and playful edits. On the first side of the record, everything is sampled. On the other side, Barry deftly twists software instruments to perfectly ape ’70s easy listening LPs from the charity shop crates.

It’s a sound he knows well. “My brain is programmed with a default mode to sniff out records wherever,” he says. “The other day I went to the car park at Carn Brea Leisure Centre, which had three stalls of records. One guy just kept pulling Bags for Life with records in out of his car boot. Then I popped into Pool Market, which had four stalls next to a fun fair – one of which was a pick-up truck with the entire back-end full of records. I’ll always be diverted to get records.”

I watch as Barry contorts among the cramped shelves, hunching his back, his knees creaking to the floor. These days he could just sit on his arse with a mug of Yorkshire Tea and sample stuff from YouTube. But, he says, “the discovery is the joy”. He goes off to pay for his pile, smiling as he recalls once finding a solid break on a Wombles record. Then, much to the bafflement of the shop owner, he tries haggling for 50p off.

Chopping it up

We head back down the stairs and sit in Molly’s Tea Room, to share a couple of saffron buns and blow the dust off Barry’s stash – which includes Peter Skellern’s ‘You’re a Lady’, a Pebble Mill LP and a flexidisc selling the Magicair ‘salon-style home hair dryer’. It doesn’t look promising. But, as Barry says, that’s the alchemical art here: creating gold where you really have no right to.

“Pete Rock’s work on Rahzel’s ‘All I know’ is ridiculous,” he says. “He uses Dorthy Ashby’s ‘Windmills of your Mind’, and what he gets out of it is just bonkers. The original isn’t really funky, but the way he chopped it is. That’s probably my favourite chop of all time – you can hardly even hear the little bits he took.” He bites into his bun, and then starts salivating over the back catalogue of DJ Premier. “He’s great at taking something from nothing,” Barry says. “On Royce da 5’9”’s ‘Boom’, the original is by Marc Hannibal, ‘Forever is a Long Long Time’, which is just really lightweight and terrible. Premier makes it sound so powerful and meaty.”

Many subscribers to Barry’s ‘School of Beats’ YouTube series have the same reaction to him. With his idiosyncratic approach to Ableton, he’s inventing his own methods to get the sounds he wants from the gear, recalling the early days of DJs first manipulating turntables to turn forgotten funk records into hip-hop classics. He’s a craftsman: drums are sampled, cleaned and chopped, and days can pass while he perfects a particular bass line. Barry points out that he came up in the age of the MPC, when it could take 40 minutes just to fill the pads – only to find what you had was crap. He’s now happy building a community around his generous online tutorials, but he still mourns that lost sense of struggle. “There’s no secrets in beat making now,” he says. “Back in the day you had no internet and had to learn it yourself.”

Barry’s own route in to hip-hop was typical for rural British kids in the ’80s (meeting breakers at the local monster truck show, getting LL Cool J tapes in Woolworths). But he was soon taking it further, following a growing curiosity into playing with four-tracks and early samplers. It was after a chance meeting at a Cornish holiday park that he hooked up with fellow Creator, Juliano, and the digging became serious. In the mid-90s, when break insanity was at its peak, and the top US producers were paying crazy dollar for records they knew their rivals hadn’t touched, Barry and Juliano would travel to the US to serve them with these mysterious European slabs. “The likes of Buckwild were getting paid $10k a track,” says Barry. “They’d do two or three tracks a week, and would go out and chuck thousands of dollars around at record fairs. We’d go over there with Top of the Pops records, and we could trade them for killer US funk breaks. I couldn’t tell you how many Playschool records we took over.”

It was, he says, an insane time – and not just because of the inflated market for local charity shop finds. Here was a Cornish lad who’d scored a backstage pass to the centre of hip-hop’s Golden Era. “After one record fair, I’m sat in the driver’s seat of Q-Tip’s Mercedes, next to Pete Rock. Tip’s in the back, and they’re playing our demos. They’re both freestyling over the beats, going: ‘Yep, that’s a good one’.”

And then?

“A week later I’m back in Cornwall, stood at the bus stop in Troon.”

Or your Honda or your Beemer…

There was a story about jeeps that emerged back when Q-Tip and Tribe Called Quest were still yet to release Low End Theory. The group would apparently make copies and rush them direct from the studio to the parking lot to hear how the bass sounded in the ride. They were crafting an album for a particular context, a certain time and place. A few weeks after our sojourn to Molly’s Tea Room, Barry offers to give me a test drive of the still unfinished ‘2 Sides of Barry’. I’m stood waiting in the centre of Camborne when a dark blue Hyundai i30 pulls up, and Barry stretches across to the passenger window. “Jump in, pard,” he says. I sit on a Fruit Salad chew.

Barry kicks off my tour of Camborne’s back streets. Pointing as we pass one property, he tells me it’s home to local ghost hunters, Terry and Tracy. “They reckon they’ve got the best ghost footage in the UK,” he says. “They wanted me to clean up the audio on it. It’s probably just interference from local radio, but they’re convinced it’s little girls.”

The album kicks off with the familiar bells and Fender Rhodes from Bob James’ ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras’, instantly mangled into new shapes under some scratched spoken word. Barry explains how, for the first side of the record, he wanted to take hip-hop staples and find a way to flip them in a way that still feels fresh. Soon massive uplifting drums rumble under ‘Harlem Shuffle’, while Bobby Byrd’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’ is chopped to within an inch of its life under an extended cameo by Clay Davis from The Wire. This all serves to set up the sample-free second side, where somehow the absence of crusty source material doesn’t change the quality of the sound at all. Everything feels like it’s culled from the same crates.

As the sound bounces off the surrounding pebble-dash, Barry keeps interjecting to explain bits he’s added and bars he’s cut, or to ask whether a particular vocal sample really works. This is minor detail stuff, but like a true beat scientist he only hears all the details that are missing. Judging from his mental unrest, Barry still has hours yet to spend trawling through arcane hair dryer sales records before he’s happy. In an age of constant throwaway ‘content’, he’s like an industrial craftsman seeking the precise nugget that will give the whole work the timeless cohesive sheen.

“A scratch may take only minutes to do, but you could be there for days trying to find the sample,” says Barry, as he pulls up to a red light. He slips a Fruit Salad into his mouth, dropping the wrapper casually on to the slip-on resting patiently by the clutch. “I don’t know how Premier does it.”

***

Barry Beats’ 2 Sides of Barry is out now . Download via Bandcamp here. Vinyl copies available from King of the Beats,  complete with free Barry poster and postcard. The vinyl release will be marked with a secret LP drop in charity shops around the UK. Check out Barry’s Instagram/King of the Beats for clues.

Dave Waller is a writer based in Cornwall. He occasionally lurks on Twitter as @diameterdave. He’d like to keep writing about music from different angles. 

Interview: Uncommon Nasa on ‘City as School’

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.

***

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. 

Interview: Rodney P

Rodney P has been a major presence on the UK hip-hop scene since the mid-80s, first finding success as part of the London Posse, and through the 90s and beyond as an acclaimed solo artist. He’s spent most of 2019 making music and touring as part of the super group KingDem, alongside fellow UK rap icons Blak Twang and Ty. GingerSlim spoke to him about that and more.

You’ve recently been on the KingDem tour. How did it feel to have it finally out on the road?

Yeah man it’s good, it’s always good. I mean I do a lot of shows over the course of the year anyway, but this one feels a bit special. We’ve never done it before, the audience has never seen it before and the response has been amazing so far, so yeah it feels good.

 Yeah I mean in my memory, it’s a pretty monumental line-up.

Yeah I think as far as UK hip hop goes, it’s not bad at all [laughs].

Does it take much to plan something like this?

Yeah, in a word [laughs] but no, honestly we wanted to do it and we pooled together, so with that in mind it’s been pretty easy. The logistics can be a bit hard, like getting everyone in the same place at the same time, all being on the same page, working out show times; all of that stuff takes organising. But we’ve all been willing so it hasn’t been that hard, it’s all been doable.

You guys have all been friends for a long time, what made you decide to do this now?

I was asked! Tony (Blak Twang) and Ty had already been having a conversation about it because they shared an agent, so they came and asked how I’d feel about going on tour with them. Now we weren’t KingDem then, we didn’t have the name or anything, it was just going to be a UK hip hop tour. It showed a unified strength all of us going out there together and it just felt like a good idea and a good time for us to do it. As the sort of elders of the scene too, it was kind of a way for us to support the artists that are coming up behind us and also help to reinvigorate the sort of hip hop that we like. And that’s not to take away from anyone else, or take away from the grime scene or the drill scene or the trap scene, or whatever name you give it, but there is a style of hip hop that we come from that hasn’t really been getting much light or much credit. So this was a way for us to show some love for where we come from and what we do, and for the kind of artists who are coming up now too. And that is all part of a long-term plan cos at the moment this is just us three out on the road, but in the future we definitely intend to highlight more of the stuff we like and the kind of artists we like, who we’d like to help promote.

That’s really good to hear, because I was actually going to ask what your feelings are on the current state of hip hop as a whole, not just in the UK?

For a start there is hip hop and there is rap music, which I don’t think are necessarily the same thing. But I do think it’s in a very healthy space, there are lots of really good creative artists out there doing work, trying to get themselves seen and heard, and as I said this is definitely a way for us to try and be a part of that. I mean rap music in the UK is going to No. 1 independently, so whether you personally like those songs, you can’t knock the hustle and dispute the success that these young guys are having, and the doorways and pathways that they’re opening up. And all this is done independently too, they’re not being dragged to the water, these guys are finding their own way to the water and you’re going to have to follow them. So I think it’s fantastic, I think the scene right now is probably the strongest and healthiest it’s ever been, and that says a lot coming from someone who’s been here practically since the beginning.

Now when you and Bionic first started making music, it was very rare to hear people rapping in an English accent. What made you guys decide to take that risk?

We just thought it was necessary. Plus we came from a more dancehall and reggae background where that conversation was already happening – let’s stop pretending we’re Jamaican, we’re from England, you know? So within sound system culture it was quite normal, well maybe not normal, but it had been broached. Then we took that mentality and applied it to hip hop; we didn’t reinvent the wheel but we were the first within the hip hop scene to start doing that consistently.

And did you experience much of a backlash at the time because of that approach?

Yeah absolutely. I mean look at how many years it took for it become the norm, we put out our first record in ’87. All through the 90’s there were still British rappers rapping with fake American accents. And the push back was from in the scene too, a lot of London Posse’s early audience weren’t hip hop fans. It was kids who were into Madness, The Specials and The Beat, and had an understanding of punk rock. That was our first real fanbase. I took a while for us to convince the UK hip hop scene that this was the way forward, everyone was like “Well it’s hip hop music, it’s supposed to sound American”; that was their argument. So it took a while, but we were right and our argument won, now here we are. You get laughed out of the club if you come out with a silly American accent now.

Good.

Yeah good [laughs].

As someone who has managed to maintain their longevity in a scene that does tend to swallow artists up quite easily, what do you think is the key to remaining relevant?

I think for me it was always about being brave enough to do other stuff and also having that passion. I’m passionate about the scene, I’m passionate about hip hop, about hip hop culture. I was a breakdancer and a body popper, I did graffiti, I did all of that shit. So regardless of whether I was having success doing it, I’d still be involved in it. A lot of people got their heart broke because they didn’t find the success they were looking for, you know? I was lucky enough to be able to make a living and also have this passion that has stayed with me. And plus I like to think I’m quite good, so… [laughs].

Do you think it has anything to do with working with different producers and branching out into other genres? I know you and Die worked together, for example.

Absolutely, that’s part of it. Like I said, it’s about being brave enough to do other stuff. I think for a lot of people they get quite insular and nerdy like, “Oh hip hop has to be this way, or that way”, but for me hip hop has to be about self-expression. You can take it wherever you want to go with it, as long as your heart is true to it and I’ve always done that. Plus I’m a Londoner and a raver – I like garage, I like DnB, I like house, I like the experimental shit – so when I’m making the kind of hip hop I like,I want to throw all of that in the mix and see how it comes out. You know, I’ve had amazing times working with the Dub Pistols, working with (DJ) Die, working with Skitz, working with The Herbaliser, all this other kind of stuff I do that keeps it entertaining for me, first and foremost. So yeah, fuck anyone else, I do what I like [laughs].

You’ve been involved with a couple of documentaries over the years, including The Hip Hop World News and Beast, Bass & Bars; are there any other subjects you would like to tackle in the future?

We also did one about pirate radio, The Past Pirates. But yeah we have some other things in the pipeline. I definitely want to get more into archiving and telling the story. I’ve got another documentary in production at the minute, which is a lot more UK hip hop based. Then also I want to try to do some stuff outside of the music as well, to help tell the story or the narrative from within the culture generally, not just musically. So yeah, look for me! I’m also hoping to do a book as well, so I stay busy, I hustle, bruv [laughs].

Well that’s it from me, man, but thank you very much for talking to me.

All good, man, it was a pleasure.

***

The KingDem album from Rodney P, Ty and Blak Twang is out now. Follow Rodney P on Twitter and Instagram.

Gingerslim has been a hip-hop fan since 1994 and has written for various blogs and websites since around 2006. During that time he has contributed to style43, Think Zebra, Headsknow and Front Magazine. His main interests in rap are UK hip-hop and the underground movement in America, with a focus on Rhymesayers Entertainment and the once mighty Def Jux label. He lives in Bristol and has a beard. All other details are sketchy at best. Follow him here. 

Interview: Frank Nitt

Following the release of the new Frank N Dank album, St. Louis, we spoke to Detroit legend Frank Nitt about the new project, working with J Dilla, and more. Interview by Matt Horowitz.

In your opinion, what are the primary differences between the original/bootlegged 2003 MCA version of 48 Hrs/48 Hours and the widely-released 2013 Delicious Vinyl edition? 

The Delicious Vinyl version was the actual album as we intended. The 2003 version had extra songs and bad mixes.

Is it true J Dilla (then still known as Jay Dee) had to go back in and make more synth-driven beats, after MCA rejected the original sampled-based version of 48 Hours?

[laughs] No it was actually the opposite. We turned in the same version of the album that we put out via Delicious Vinyl, and the executive at the time said we love it but we need something more for the club and radio, and that is where “Take Ya Clothes Off” and “Off Ya Chest” came from. Unfortunately that executive left and went and signed Chingy to Capital, and the new exec, who was also the president, told Dilla he wanted more of his sampled driven beats because that’s what he knew him for. The original 48 Hours was recorded to more sample-driven beats but about seven songs in, Jay decided to strip all those beats and keep the vocals, and that’s where all the synth joints came from. Side note: he decided to change all the music after going to the studio while Dr. Dre was working on a D12 record in Detroit. After that he said “I’m about to play everything”. 48 Hours is the only sample-free J Dilla produced full album.

What’s the current status of your group, The Joint Chiefs, with DJ Rhettmatic? Do you fellas have any immediate plans to record and release a proper follow-up to your 2013 FWMJ/RIK EP, The Smoke Musik?

Ahh man, Rhett is my brother. Incredible dj/producer, better person! We have kicked around the idea of doing another joint., but Rhett is like a head of state, lol. He has a school, gigs, touring and still goes to lunch with his mom on sundays. It’s not easy to lock him down. If he reads this tho, I’m ready let’s gooooooo!

What’s one of your personal favorite J Dilla stories or moments from your time spent recording, hanging out, touring, etc. together that most people might not have ever heard about before?

One of the things that standout is a conversation we had one day sitting in his Lexus 450 outside the Nevada house. He told me “I wish I had a nigga like me when I was you”. At the time I didn’t get it, but later on, it’s like that old saying “Those who can’t do teach”. I had a teacher who was doing.. he not only showed me the game but showed me the pitfalls and traps in real time because he was still living it as he showed me.

How did yourself and Dankery Harv (AKA Dank, your partner in Frank-N-Dank) get involved in recording “McNasty Filth” from J Dilla & Madlib’s beloved album together as Jaylib, Champion Sounds?

At the time we were in the studio and hanging all the time anyway, so when he decided to do the LP and got a batch of beats from Madlib, we sat in the studio and went thru beats. We vibed to all of them but me and Dank didn’t vibe quite as hard to the “Mcnasty Filth” beat as we did to some of the others, and Dilla was like “ohhh y’all gotta write to this” [laughs]. He put the beat up and went upstairs for the night so we could record. I don’t think he thought we would be done by the a.m., but when he came back with the morning blunt we had our parts done. He actually put us out after that [laughs], because now he had to sit and write his parts.

What’s the current status of The F.D.R. Project featuring yourself, Dank, and Young RJ? Are there any plans for a proper follow-up to F.D.R. from Frank-N-Dank & J Dilla’s 2007 European Vacation CD+DVD set?

At this point we don’t have any plans to do anything new, but you never know.

Who did yourself and Dank recruit to submit production work for Frank-N-Dank’s latest effort, St. Louis? 

It started wwith King Michael Coy (Her, Dr. Dre, Anderson Paak). He did three joints, and we went to guys we worked with before like ToneMason, Lancecape and of course a Dilla joint (“Young Buck 1995”, made in 1995). And for that newness we went to Cazal Organism (son of Mellow Man Ace) and Japanese producer Mitsu The Beats, for that fire.

Do you ever see Frank-N-Dank’s J Dilla-produced stand-alone/non-album singles, such as “Move,” “Pause,” and “Push” ever being packaged together and re-released as a more full-length, widely-available project?

Maybe, but those are all on different labels. We would need a great level of cooperation to make that pop [laughs].

Have you spoken to Madlib since the release of your collaborative album, Madlib Medicine Show #9: Channel 85 Presents NITTYVILLE? Any chance of you guys reuniting for a follow-up? I would personally LOVE to hear you rhymin’ alongside Guilty Simpson again?

Madlib is my dude. We haven’t spoke about that but would I be down. Shit yea! And Guilty is a no brainer. I’m waiting on him to send me a joint for one of his projects now!

What was it like getting to work with more non-traditional Hip-Hop producers, such as DJ Sepalot for Fracture’s Outrageous EP and Dutch producers I.N.T. Kid Sublime, Wouda, Elsas, Y’skid & Kid Sundance on Frank-N-Dank’s The EP?

It was dope. I’m all for a little musical exploration., and all those guys have their own approach to making music and its fun for me to try to meld my style to theirs.

Who are the current artists signed to your imprint, Digipop’s roster and what’s your next planned label release?

We have Serious and my son Joz B (you can hear them on a few of my solo/group projects) – they both should be working as we speak. I gotta send em some beats though.

Aside from what we’ve already discussed thus far, do you have any additional high-profile collaborations, all-star team-ups, long-vaulted gems, etc. that have yet to be released unto the terribly unsuspecting masses?

We have a few things coming in 2020. And when I say we I mean the whole fam. I’ll be playing more of an executive role but bars a cometh as well as some new beats. Maybe a beat album. Stay tuned.

***

St. Louis by Frank N Dank is out now. Follow Frank Nitt on Twitter and Instagram.

Matt Horowitz has been a hip-hop fan ever since he first heard Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) back in the mid-90’s, which positively or negatively changed his life ever since, depending on who you ask. He single-handedly runs online music publication The Witzard, and has been fortunate enough to interview Eothen ‘Egon’ Alapatt, Guilty Simpson, Ice-T and Mr. X, Dan Ubick, Career Crooks’ Zilla Rocca & Small Professor, Cut Chemist, and J-Zone, amongst countless others. He enjoys writing about and listening to hip-hop, Punk/Hardcore, and Indie Rock on vinyl with his lovely wife, while drinking craft beer, red wine, or iced coffee. To paraphrase both Darko The Super and the Beastie Boys: “Already Dead fans, they want more of this… I’m a Witzard like my man Matt Horowitz!”. Follow Matt here.