Mystery Hole, Inc. :: Recent Entries

Title:	That Jesse gives good interview.
Date:	2009-06-23 @ 14:25
Security:	public

Last fall, I did an interview with Jesse Dangerously; there were supposed to be follow-up questions, but then he went on tour, and time passed, so I've decided after six months to go ahead and post the interview as-is.

Let's talk about nerdcore as a genre. Different varieties of rap seem to come with their own "uniform". You and other nerdcore MCs have sported a specific look: the dress shirt, tie and glasses ensemble. Is this simply a quirk of the genre, and is it necessary to have the right threads for cred, just like mainstream rappers flash bling to mark themselves as legit?

Well I want to say first of all (sorry I just watched your US presidential candidate debates on TV in a bar so I have all this measured, equivocating language in my head right now) that I don't personally consider Nerdcore to be a genre, per se. I think that it's a scene more than anything else, albeit a loose and nebulous one. There aren't really any stylistic hallmarks that you can point to as being essential to what Nerdcore is, just social networks and vague conglomerations of taste and identity.

That said, I would also like it to be known that I was wearing the shirt and tie before the term "nerdcore" was a twinkle on the tip of Frontalot's tongue! I started dressing that way to play hip-hop shows around 2000 or 2001, just to try and distinguish myself from my peers. Honestly I just was tired of looking like kind of a bum all the time, and hoped I would seem less scuzzy if I dressed it up a little. I guess it's not surprising that I'm not the only person who thought of using what is pretty much the basic male professional uniform in our culture as his rap costume, but it's also pretty common outside of circles where anyone has even heard of "nerdcore" as well. It makes my heart sink just a tiny bit further every time I meet a new rapper who's doing the same thing I do - just because I wish I'd been a little fresher with it, I guess. I'm willing to take suggestions for a new schtick, although I must confess I've got a pretty radical one in mind for the near future and I hope I can get it together for the spate of US dates I'm playing with mc chris in November.

I guess I should also say that I've never met or spoken to anyone involved with any branch or segment of what could reasonably be considered Nerdcore who appeared to be in any way or even remotely concerned or interested in what could reasonably be considered "cred" of any stripe. Definitely no-one has put on a necktie to prove anything, except maybe that they know how to tie a necktie, which now that I say it is pretty impressive in its own right. But not especially "credible".

Along those lines: mainstream hip-hop also loves its product placement. Brand names like Bentley and Christal become code for living large. Part of being a nerd in general is either ignorance or indifference to fashionable trends, but imagine nerdcore artists start scoring huge hits and raking in the cash: what would you imagine as potential status symbols of the style?

I think that stereotypical nerds are just as beholden to capitalist branding schemes as anyone else, they just get manipulated from a different angle. I mean some nerds probably feel like they have to wear Sean John jeans AND Axe body spray AND run a particular Linux distro to gain any kind of social advantage, but more often it's in the realm of gadgets, hardware and software that brand identities tend to get solidified in nerd circles. People take sides with regard to Microsoft - contrary to popular perception, some nerds are GAGA for Vista and whatever else comes out of Redmond - people think that OGG codecs lick the tar out of AAC (I only 61% know what I'm talking about right now), people think Marvel or Image or Dark Horse or Drawn & Quarterly is what defines them personally. TSR versus GURPs. Jolt versus IRN BRU versus thirty cups of coffee. In a competitive marketplace, it's next to impossible to escape the manufactured brand's infiltration of one's identity. I play DS instead of PSP and I read McSweeney's instead of Penguin and I watch Red Dwarf instead of Are You Being Served and the list goes on and on.

Do you ever see nerdcore breaking out of niche status, given that popular culture at large is embracing more of what have largely been geek pursuits (video games, cartoons and anime, etc.)?

Nope. Mainly, I think that rather than make the mainstream nerdier, wider acceptance of those pursuits once considered the domain of the dweeb just diminishes their dweebishness. It's no longer nerdy to play a video game or quote a TV show or be able to more or less correctly pronounce the name of a Japanese animator. The trick is, the public didn't get all obsessive like the nerds were, that's not why those things crossed over. Those things were very carefully diluted and mass-marketed and made more accessible. The masses aren't all of a sudden ready to dedicate their waking hours to getting past the third elevator stage in Donkey Kong, they're (we're) waving a baton at the TV to win a party game in a totally social context, in competition with someone who is at that same moment drinking beer from their fridge. Anime doesn't blow up if it isn't dubbed and all of the cultural references aren't stripped out to make room for new, shitty American ones.

It is no longer geeky to spend five hours on your computer every day any more, because it's no longer difficult to spend five hours on your computer anymore. It's all been democratized and made fashionable and sexy. So what I'm saying is, the average mainstream person who IMs all day and watches Cartoon Network anime dubs and plays Madden over the Xbox network is not now identifying with the lovelorn pimple-farms who would IRC and mail-order fansubbed Kodomo No Omocha and get a killscreen on Pac-Man.

If anything, the province of the nerd is fast diminishing. For that matter, I'm going to come right out and say that I think a lot of cats who identify as "nerdcore" aren't nerds at all. They're just using "nerd" to stand in for "not gangster" and essentially allowing tacit racial stereotypes to say the rest. Quite a bit of nerdcore could be redefined quite simply (and quite racistly, don't get me wrong) as "whitecore" and it would mean exactly the same thing.

You're doing some shows with mc chris in November. Clearly, he's a big fan of yours, but he's also famously gone back and forth on whether he wants to even be associated with the label "nerdcore". What do you think goes into identifying oneself with the style, for yourself and other artists?

I think it's simply a matter of taking the best look you can at other people who self-identify with the label, and determining whether what you think they're doing really matches up with what you think you're doing, or would like to be doing. That's why, early on, for me it was easy to look and see MC Frontalot and MC Hawking identifying this way and being like "yeah, me too! I'm making what you might call nerdcore, too!" and then once Frontalot blew up a little and all the dots were connected that introduced me to characters like mc chris and YT Cracker and Metamystics and Optimus Rhyme and Glenn Case and other talented, nerdy hip-hop artists, it seemed like it was about to be REALLY cool. But then something happened that is probably totally unique to a scene that lives on the internet, which is that the next generation appeared immediately and an overwhelming number of them had totally different values and interests and since there were more of them and the concept of paying dues has absolutely no heft in a scene that lives almost entirely in the realm of free uploads and downloads... the ratio of total crap overwhelmed even the considerable number of talented newcomers (Beefy, Router, I'm not going to make a complete list but I don't want to get played out like mc chris and have everyone think I'm dissing them personally just because I don't say their name specifically - there's just a lot of people and I'm sure to forget some).

So once that happens, someone who's been making hip-hop in a serious way for his or herself for a not inconsiderable number of years is well within their rights to take a step back and ask themselves, "What do I stand to gain or lose by continuing to be associated with this crowd, which I have no control over?" And I think the good and bad is hard to completely suss out, because I do like discovering artists I've never heard of who are really talented and/or sincere. But I don't like being lumped in with a so-called movement that shares very few values with me on the whole and - most damningly - is crammed to the gills with people who don't especially like rap and think it's funny to make fun of it.

I also - for my own part - just don't think I am nerdCORE after all. Like I've done my time in those trenches (mixed metaphor, ugh), I've got obscure anime references and PC game references and D&D references and comic book references peppering my material, but that's just one facet of who I am as an artist. The latest song I demo'd has two lines in it that stretch out a D&D metaphor but the rest is a combination of personal reflection and classic battle rhymes. So is the CORE of that song nerdy? No more than any other thoughtful writing, in my opinion, and if everyone who approaches anything with any serious contemplation whatsoever is a nerd then it just doesn't mean anything to be a nerd because that's every single person at some point.

About you specifically now... What led you to this particular career? Did you consciously choose hip-hop as opposed to other musical styles?

Bubba Sparxxx once said, "I ain't choose to rap / rappin' chose me". I was so immersed in and devoted to hip-hop from the such an early age that creating it just bubbled up organically to some extent. I also took drum and percussion classes from age 12 to grade 12, and was a proud member of a jazz/indie rock band called Yeshe13 that gigged a fair bit around Halifax from 1997 to 2002, but even that was very much informed by the culture of breakbeats that I was absorbing from listening to and learning about hip-hop. That band sputtered and died at a certain point, but my rap career never did because all I needed to make that happen was me. I couldn't break up with myself or lose touch with myself or forget to show up at my house one weekend, so me and my 4-track were always able to make something happen.

I guess also if we take it back to scenes, the hip-hop scene in Halifax was where I felt at home, and that's what led to me eventually having a particular crew that I was/am down with. I was much more invested and involved in that scene than the (basically nonexistent) artsy indie jazz scene. I didn't make friends with a lot of other bands, but I did make friends with a lot of other rappers. So it's possible that was part of fostering my desire to contribute my own material. Fortunately, in a meatspace scene, the neophytes are necessarily afforded less attention than the veterans, so I got to spend my uncomfortable early years of mostly sucking in relative obscurity, and started to emerge into more attention after (some might say WELL after) I had developed my style considerably. I just wanted to mention that to contrast it to what I was complaining about in Nerdcore earlier - my generation didn't get to rebrand Halifax hip-hop as being exemplified by us until we put some years in on the ground floor.

Most people link hip-hop and urban centers, particularly US cities. I assume there are both advantages and disadvantages to trying to make it big as a rapper when one hails from Canada, and even more so from Halifax and not, say, Montreal or Toronto. Talk about that.

I think anyone hoping to make it "big" these days is in for a "big" surprise. The challenge for musicians now is to make it happen at all, to find any sustainable role to play. I'm not just bringing that up to be pedantic, it's like this: making it "big" entails garnering the attention, admiration and loyalty of people who don't really give a crap about what you're doing in general. If you are an up-and-coming accordian polka whiz and you are appreciated only by people who love accordion polkas, then you might not even be able to make a living in the arts (especially in Canada, unless you can get some hefty grants, especially in Canada). However if you can break through and be THE accordion polka artist that everyone thinks they need to hear when they're getting drunk, then you're big. But that's when the mainstream's pre-conceived notions about who an accordion polka player ought to be. Surprise - the hypothetical person in this story is a woman who grew up on a Native reservation. All anyone will EVER ask her about in interviews is "why is a native woman playing accordion polkas?" because they think that's a clever and quirky angle.

However if she's just playing in the normal accordion polka circles and trying to make it on a modest level, sure some people might point her out in a crowd as "that native chick" but among aficionados of the accordion, she's ultimately going to live and die by her prowess on the instrument and songwriting ability and stuff like that. Things that mean absolutely nothing to the mainstream at large.

So it is with hip-hop. Almost every municipality on this continent has let's say at least two people who make and/or DJ hip-hop. No matter where you are, there is SOME potential for a scene. When you're inside of that scene, what matters is what you contribute to it. When you're noticed outside of that scene, what matters is the preposterous notion that anyone from where you're from could possibly have ever heard of hip-hop, let alone decided to make it for themselves.

But that's a hilarious conceit that shows how out-of-touch the surprised party is, because EVERYONE HAS HEARD OF HIP-HOP. Everybody heard about hip-hop thirty years ago when it first came out, then twenty-five years ago when the new school blew up, then fifteen years ago when it was all over clubs and MTV, then ten years ago when the soap opera of artist shootings popped off and ever since then it's been absolutely escapable by every single person who knows anyone who owns a television or has purchased any music made in the last decade. There's very little that's genuinely regional when it comes to pop culture in the 21st century, it's all democratized by national broadcasting networks and enormous marketing campaigns.

And anyway, Halifax is small but it's urban. Hip-hop found a home here earlier than it did in many parts of Canada outside of the denser urban areas because we're home to the oldest community of indigenous blacks in Canada, and that's a population that happens to be almost completely ghettoized for a variety of reasons. So the new folk medium didn't strike that populace as terribly foreign or alien when news of it made its way up here. There were already disco DJs and funk collectors, like there are anywhere a record player can be found.

So basically it's not that weird. The weirdest thing is that our popular culture continues to perpetrate the idea that it's weird. It's like the major media outlets are afraid that if they couldn't express surprise at where an artist is from for 2/3rds of a profile piece, they won't have anything to talk about at all.

Speaking of which: hip-hop is now a global phenomenon, and rappers from different countries are displaying distinct styles. Is there anything you see distinguishing Canadian MCs, or are they still too close to the source, culturally and geographically, to have that much of a different voice?

My answer to both halves of that question is yes! Canadian rap is extremely influenced by US rap, obviously. But there are certain styles of enunciation that I've only heard from Canadian MCs, and sometimes it really is easy to at least narrow down the region where that MC's from using only their style to guide you. But I mean, even though there's a pretty distinct "prairie rap" accent/cadence for example, there are also many MCs from that region who would be impossible to place. People also travel around and have their own distinct backgrounds - Guelph, Ontario has a stereotypical style of technoshamanistic heavy wordplay which is largely due to the influence of their most popular export, Noah23, but he's also to some extent an import from the southern USA and I'm sure part of his lightning-fast tongue-twister styles are influenced by the southern propensity for double-time bounce raps. Plus there's cats in Guelph who rap with him and have no discernible influence of that nature.

I can't put my finger on what's different in many cases, but even if you took a grip of the most commercially successful Canadian rappers like Kardinal Offishal, Swollen Members, Classified and Maestro Fresh Wes... people might accuse any of those artists of trying to sound more American, but if you have them rap next to any US artist, I pretty much guarantee you'll be able to tell which one is the Canadian without prior knowledge.

There definitely are lower-level Canadian artists who try with all their might to duplicate the hot US styles, especially in this trap-rap era, but they still by and large sound very little like they're from New York, Compton or Atlanta.

Let's hear about your dream team – what artist, DJ, and producer would you most like to collaborate with?

It's a long list, I'm into building with almost anyone. It would probably be not that hard to get me to get in the studio with my worst enemy, although they better be ready to get shown up and contradicted, if not outright dissed on the track. But if I'm dreaming, I would want to go back and pull someone out whose material I always loved but who I don't think gets enough shine anymore. I want to work with people like Chip-Fu or OC or Lord Finesse or Jamalski, and I'd love to get beats from someone who used to be a maniac with samples but can't work that way anymore since they're trying to eat off major labels and just take on all the legal responsibility of the copyright violations myself so they can cook me up the sort of thing they would have made in 1992, so someone like Mister Lawnge from Black Sheep or the Dust Brothers or Muggs or DJ Lethal. But I don't want to become one of those countless myspace impresarios who paypals Kool G Rap two thousand dollars for a hot 16 and never meets the guy and can never be certain he didn't sell that same verse to three other mixtape DJs that week. Like, I get that people do that as a business move or whatever but anyone who's genuinely a fan of that artist is playing himself by taking it to that level. I'm not even saying that paying someone for their work is wack, but if you don't even get to be like "would you like to make a song with me", then all you're doing is trying to buy the illusion that you're down with someone you're not down with. And in my mind, that's a questionable objective.

I guess a more direct answer to your question is that I want the job Newport used to have, I wish I was the third Sebutone.

You're not just an MC: you've done radio and columns on hip-hop, so it's fair to say you have an amount of expertise regarding the hip-hop world. Tell us about some of the talents out there that you think aren't getting enough attention.

Toolshed. I could rattle off a long list of my friends, but that would be somewhat disingenuous since a lot of those guys are getting considerable attention in their own way. But the group Toolshed from London, Ontario has never really got any shine at all - and I'm not saying it's not their own fault because outside of the studio and the stage they are lazy fuckin' bums - and they are amazingly talented. Distressingly talented. I want to encourage anyone who reads this to google "dehsloot" and try to find their stuff because it's unbelievable.

On the same token, ginzuintriplicate is almost totally unknown but in my opinion, he's one of the best artists to ever come out of Nova Scotia. I want to also say "the world" but it might be mistaken for hyperbolizing. Again he's a close friend of mine - my second cassette was a collaboration with him and fellow Dartmouth MC Savage Poetic) - but his material is just raw and heavy and so sophisticated. He's never released anything since that tape in '98 but he promised me that he's in the process of polishing up a collection of the songs he's made since 2001 or so and I can't wait for it to materialize. If there was anyone in the world I would drop everything to promote, it's him. He lives in Osaka, Japan now though so it's hard for me to kick his ass at all.

Back in Halifax there are some really young cats who I want to warn you about, too. It wouldn't be fair to say they aren't getting enough attention since they're just now putting in the early work on their first records and doing shows and battles, but there's a group of two teenage boys called Hell-0, and it's two rappers and they're insane. One is named Heartz and the other is Demikz and if they shaved their heads you would mistake them for Quo (the kid rap group managed by Michael Jackson that had Redman on that single way back in the day) but the only things I can say about their rhymes is the talent is off the charts, they're a pair of brilliant prodigies, and if Heartz would stop saying dumb shit about girls I would give him more high-fives than I already do. Which is a lot, but come on dude.

There's also a dude named Sampson who makes beats and rhymes like it's 1993 so you know I want to have his kids. He also gets the occasional stern look from me about content but I cannot front on the styles.

Out west there's a rapper called Epic who hails originally from Saskatoon and his opposite-of-rap (but fully hip-hop) style might not be for everyone (it wasn't always for me), but the more I paid attention the more I realized he was one of the most honest and emotionally effective rappers I'd ever heard in my life. Sure he has white hair and bad knees and works a day job for Canada Revenue, and sure the first time you hear him you are well within your rights to wonder if he's ever heard a rap before... but then you realize he knows at least twice as much about hip-hop as you do, both its history any how it works, and you realize that he's giving you something that almost no other rapper could ever give you... and then you see him rock a show, and hundreds of people are eating out of his hand. And you realize none of the shit you usually listen to hip-hop for matters right now - this man is a genius and a true artist. His last album is called Aging Is What Friends Do Together and I wouldn't recommend missing it.

As for rappers who aren't my personal friends... well, obviously if I know about them they're getting SOME attention. I'll probably kick myself for not mentioning a few of them but I've already talked your digital ear completely off so I should probably put a cork in it at this point.

:: +Memory :: Tell a Friend :: Speak

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