Saturday, April 12, 2008

Hip Hop Interviewed At The Onion A.V. Club

 

It's a lazy Saturday and not a whole lot is going on. So I decided to dig into the archives of one of my favourite entertainment newspapers/sites, The Onion A.V. Club, for some quality interviews. Let me share some highlights, from year to year. I'm focusing on the hip hop interviews, for the most part.

1999:

Aaron McGruder, creator of The Boondocks, talks about hip hop, the Star Wars prequels and The Boondocks becoming animated:

O: How is the animated version shaping up?

AM: Right now we're in talks with a bunch of different studios and trying to figure out the direction we want to take with it, whether we want to do television or feature films.

And this quote struck me as especially insightful:

O: When Lauryn Hill got all those Grammy nominations—and I like that album a lot—there was kind of a strange attitude in the media where, "Now hip hop is legitimate because there's a best-selling album."

AM: Well, that's always been the case. Black art always needs validation of some type. That's nothing new. But, yeah, okay, now it's on Time, so now it's official that hip hop has taken over music. Hip hop took over music a long time ago. That's some stuff that the intelligent among us learned not to pay attention to a long, long time ago.

2000:

Talib Kweli interviewed about the Nkiru bookstore, touring with the Roots and working with Hi-Tek on Train of Thought:

O: You co-own a bookstore with Mos Def in New York. How did that come about?

TK: I worked at the store for five years, before I put out the Black Star album, and the store is a part of my heart. The community needs things like that. It was a real no-brainer: The store needed some money, so we gave more and more money, and after a while we had given them so much that we were like, "We should just purchase it." At the same time, I'm not really a bookstore owner, since it's a not-for-profit organization. My mother really runs the store. Me and Mos purchased it, we put our money down, and we bought books for the store, but I don't really run it at all. I'm too busy with my career, but I used to really be into books when I worked there. That was my life. It was a place to read books, obviously; that was sort of the cherry on top of everything. But a big part of my affection for the place was from being able to work for a black-owned business that respected me when I wanted to travel, that let me have things like foundation meetings and open-mic nights there. It really allowed me to grow.

Posdnous of De La Soul talks about on the Native Tongues, De La's first three albums, and how he got starting rapping:

O: Your second album, De La Soul Is Dead, is a lot darker than your first. People saw it as a reaction to the way you were perceived after 3 Feet High And Rising.

P: It was definitely glued together with that aesthetic, but I think that at the end of the day, a lot of what we were going through with De La Soul Is Dead is what we had planned to do. Even if it wasn't the press bombarding us with, "Oh, they're hippies," or whatever, it was where we wanted to go anyway. We wanted to go somewhere else with the music than we had on 3 Feet High And Rising. I'm glad we did. I would never think it was a wrong move, because we saw that people unfortunately pay too much attention to visuals. Everyone had gotten so caught up in how we looked and what we were about visually, and once those visuals were over, people could consider the group again. Look at great groups like Arrested Development: They had so much to say, but when it wasn't cool to be dreaded and wear earth clothing and dashikis, everyone sort of moved on to something else. That's how rap listeners are: They're very fickle in who they support. And it's not even that we did it for that reason, but being artists, we never planned to just be all about visually showing you these flowers, or being lighthearted. As we grew, that's what we showed you. It's no different from documenting someone's life: You document a two-year-old's life up to age eight and he's gonna change, and that's what we did. We were changing as we were growing, and we had no problems showing it.

2001:

Chuck D on who he favours for president, BET and hip hop's changing audience:

O: I interviewed KRS-One recently. He talked about going to Public Enemy concerts, and seeing the audience being mostly middle-class white kids who all knew your lyrics. Does it seem odd that so much of your audience is white and middle-class?

CD: Well, America is basically white and middle-class. We just say what we're saying, and we looked at what we said as cultural exchange. Often, to have a full black audience there, you have to have the love of black radio and video outlets, and we didn't get that.

2005:

Afrika Bambaataa on the record industry, hip hop's unifying power and the Zulu Nation:

O: What were the goals and the structure of the Zulu Nation when you were just starting out?

AB: First was to organize the black community; when we say black, we're talking about the Latino, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexican, whatever. As we progressed on, we started adding what we called the Infinity Lesson. When we started our travels, we started incorporating all different people from different races and nationalities. The Universal Zulu Nation stands to acknowledge wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, and equality, peace, unity, love, and having fun, work, overcoming the negative through the positive, science, mathematics, faith, facts, and the wonders of God, whether we call him Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, or Jah.

Those are some selected highlights, but I'll link up a few more worth reading.

1999: Boots Riley of The Coup

2001: KRS-One,

2002: Paris, Danny Hoch

2003: RZA

2005: Rick Rubin

2006: ?uestlove

2007: Redman, Devin the Dude

Any other suggested reading?