Features | Interviews
Doseone
By Aaron Newell | 8 January 2007
Part One
CMG's Aaron Newell (CMG): How's Dax?
Doseone (DOSE): Dax? He's good, he's kind of heavy right now. I mean, he's quadriplegic, so there are ups and downs -- every month something takes him to the hospital. He had a complication last week with the medication pump that goes into his spine. So he has some very serious and delicate issues on his plate, but more often than not he's cruising, taking his life back; this last time he was in the hospital for four days though. And that's like an impromptu vacation to a terrible place.
CMG: Does he have absolutely no movement in his limbs?
DOSE: He is paralysed from the nipple-line down, so he has some sensation in his arms and full sensation from the shoulders up. He says it's like having gaff tape over your body, or two leather jackets on, when touched below the nipple line. He uses his shoulders and biceps, but he has no control of his tricep, so if he touches the top of his head he has to let his arm fall back down. He can open doors with remote controls and uses several different hand braces to eat, type, and work gadgets.he's moved his finger, his thumb, voluntarily -- we had a nice moment when we were recording where he was like "Guys, want to see my thumb move?", but it's haphazard, your spinal cord doesn't regrow. If it was one vertebrae lower his hands would have been ok, one higher and he'd be bedridden for life. And in his state there's so many things to take care of, he has to hire people to take care of him, and pay them. And then still have fun in the mean time. I'm making coffee want some?
CMG: Uh. What kind?
DOSE: Starbucks.
CMG: Isn't it totally against the Anticon ethos to drink Starbucks coffee?
DOSE: You mean, are we allowed to drink Starbucks?
CMG: I didn't think you were, I thought it was in your Constitution or something.
DOSE: It does happen, when you're on the road, in Europe, we succumb. Maybe we feel more liberated over there. Terrible but true. No one has a subscription to Sports Illustrated. But there are coffee addicts in Anticon.
CMG: I never would have thought you'd cave to Starbuck before Sports Illustrated. How'd you meet Dax?
DOSE: He was a buyer at Amoeba. This was back in the broke days when Jeff (Jel) and I were living together, when we were making The No Music, and we went in to sell CD's, Greenthink and Slowdeath, and Dax heard them, and knew we were using a doctor sample, and he had a fetish for that, and we hit it off. A few months later we were hanging out with him, and Jel and I were working on Themselves and basically finding ourselves, playing keyboards with one finger, and there was a yearning to open it up and Dax was the conduit for that, he knew Marty, Jordan, and Alex, the other guys in Subtle.
CMG: Were they all doing music together before meeting you guys, did you crash their party?
DOSE: They had, in fact, all worked together, and Dax always wanted them to be in a "real" group together, so I guess meeting us was the missing link or impetus.
CMG: So who does what?
DOSE: Alex is the fiddle player.
CMG: .
DOSE: .
CMG: So, uh, does Jeff still build his parts around his sp 1200?
DOSE: "Midas Guts" from the new album started as an old SP demo, that came up and was resampled and Subtleized. We do all this Frankenstein shit in this band, you'd forget who did what to which layers along the way. Purple just swiped at me, ow. OK Jeff's sensibility has influenced everyone, the way we play, we know when a part is for Jeff to finish, it's just this air about things.
CMG: Do you still take Purple jogging?
DOSE: No we're too old..and I don't have insurance, so I keep her in a glass canister on most days, I let her out when her coat yellows and she starts dragging her feet, then I have to sit in the canister while she is out sitting on shit..
CMG: Purple's your girlfriend, right?
DOSE: Cat.
CMG: So how does a Subtle song get born?
DOSE: Loosely. For the full lengths, I've been writing them all as one large record. For Hero : For Fool sort of continues A New White. I start them out by scoring them in this Retardo Montalban fashion, then I write out what I want the songs to sound like, sort of pictorially, and then I hand it to the band and everyone starts ingesting it and making demos. And then I get a tingle, when I hear certain demos, thinking of certain poems, you know what's going to work. And in constructing the record, sometimes the demos can find the words, and then sometimes you have to create brand new music around something we still need to conjure up. We usually do this by all improving in the same room together and then cherry picking the fruits and bloopers, this was our original song making process, back when we made all the EP's.we try and split time between our old and new ways of song making. And with respect to the demo-refining process, you have to continually improve, and then rearrange the improvements. Jordan, Jeff, and I do the most of the home-studio work, Dax would have, too, but he was in Texas in rehabilitation for most of the year. Marty and Alex then redo a lot of demo parts with instruments and add what they have been hearing in their head.
CMG: And your writing, I mean, I've read the lyrics for the new record. You definitely don't write in bars like a lot of other rappers, you write verse, and then vocalize it with a cadence that fits the music.
DOSE: The poem is written for speaking voice, I don't write in bars. Certain small stanzas are choruses, I can just tell that they want to be choruses, or, after writing, I'll go back and think "I think I meant for this to be a hook," they're just written to be that way. The poems know they're going to be songs at some point in my head. And in the song-making process, That's kind of a big key for me -- if I hear a small chorus stanza instantly over a demo, I know, it's like "that's the one," everything else, verse, parts, arrangement, will work around it.
CMG: How do you record your vocals?
DOSE: I do my vocals alone, and I try to push it, constantly changing it, it being the "ongoing song collection of me," and the way they're sung/rapped, going for a multitone and harmonies and overdubs where I hear them. On "Middleclass Kill," at the end of the mixing day there were 53 vocal tracks on that song, I drove our engineer crazy (Tony Espinoza at SF Soundworks). Once you start isolating things in the studio the tracks start piling up, there are overlappings of multivoiced shouting backups and harmonies, and there's two of those on backing tracks, me yelling "FACT" five different ways beneath singing, and then they're separated and there's the main verses, and then I'm always doing something for two bars for no reason. The other thing is when I do a couple of styles in a song, just with the nature of protocols -- you have to separate them out onto individual tracks to sit with similar vocals. It's a fucking process, but on this album particularly I think it paid off. Generally on a Subtle song I'll take up 14 tracks minimum, recording things the way I do.I really get into it these days. I listened to a lot of Kate Bush after the car accident, I think that might have had an effect in my exploration of a multi-tracked me. And before that, I thought I was breaking new ground all on my own, but Kate Bush and Mike Patton have been doing it for a while now, in a different but similar sculpt.
CMG: I was reading through the lyrics, and even from the first line on the album, about a gorilla and a carrot hanging from the stage, etc., I made a note: "He's writing in Dali's." Depending on your idea of what a good painting is you may or may not take that as a compliment.
DOSE: Oh yeah, it is.in college I found a Dali book in the garbage one night and read it cover to cover. Did you see his movie, the super gothic one with the ants pouring out of the hole in a palm?
CMG: Yeah, I saw a double feature with that and his animated thing with Walt Disney. I think that's where the Dali comment may have come from, the playful-but-eerie combination of images that you drum up right from the start of the album.
DOSE: Dali and Disney huh? Tale of Apes is a tale of two births. My births, one is all rap bravado, perfect spitfire on stage, commanding the crowd to repeat things with force no matter how esoteric. One of the reasons I got into what I was doing was because of the edge of it, the cultural edge, the fine point on the genre I guess you could call it. But then after exploring it a bit more, when I found all these different meanings to making, working with Yoni for example, finding out things all relate no matter how far apart they are.it's basically these two births, the first happened when I was watching a contemporary of mine -- to remain nameless -- on stage, and seeing myself in so many parts. But then our hero finds himself suddenly stricken with what exactly it is that he's doing.so he commands the crowd to chant."everything is empty and it runneth over," an old Why? line from our college days. That segues into a flashback to the Greenthink & cLOUDDEAD basement, and I suppose it's a commentary on my line of work, and how I choose to see it.
CMG: Funny you say "work." There's a theme running through the album, it seems -- it's the struggle to attain a "middle class" financial status for the artist. You often hear artists deal with the subject of paid "art" as an alternative to working a 9 to 5, like a critique on capitalism or whatever, but you don't often see any treatment of the lifestyle that being a successful artist affords you, unless you're complaining about being dirt poor, or, like, Kanye at the other end.
DOSE: It's not even dealing strictly with the artist. The record has a lot of mentions of a tradition of this "Middle class no gamble grind," where you can trace your life's loop against your father's and his father's before that, this endless mill of debt over pay, a sure pursuit of the big payoff that isn't ever your own. And on top of that, on the record I'm trying to look for what my meanings are, or what I am, and finding it's best expressed by this vague almost new religion: "middle class." It's edgeless and spans the world, taking in the yolk of all folks. It promises nothing, but it's a grind and there's no return from that grind, you collapse into the end that's coming to you. And in a more poetic sense, middleclassdom is about being honest, and, the line between right and wrong, being all you know, never having too much time to completely explore either side of things, yet you can somehow osmose a great deal of both. Think of when you're young, teens, there's more options than someone who's on the top or already on the bottom, but sooner or later all those options transform into something else. I guess I'm talking about this doomed sense of "career forever," when that eclipses your youth, when you spend more time in that time than you did as a kid playing with toys, your life reaches a "seriousness" critical mass where you have no choice but to start that grind, to become it, really. And what does it leave you with, it's a transition period, you're swallowed up by something you didn't create, you find yourself all of a sudden sleeping in this bed on end, and it really does predict your future. Been watching all this Oz lately, and there's this talk of freedom all the time, and I've been thinking about it -- freedom's only what we take advantage of, where we choose to point it. So you're chasing a calling, then you find a way to work at it, and then after a while you're forced to make it your reason for being, by art or by bill, it's that period of transition, the eclipse, that I'm trying to write about, and how you can cheat on it. A lot of the motifs on this new record are coming from me having all my eggs in one basket: my art. That basket holds my bread and butter, about 90% of my relationships, and my fun, so there was a point when I realized that, all of a sudden, my particular middle class grind owned me to the bone.
CMG: Especially now that artists have 60,000 myspace friends. That's a shitload of responsibility.
Part Two
CMG: Do you get a lot of electronic demos?
DOSE: Jeff is better at listening to our friends’ music, because I have trouble with not saying things that are constructive. We offer a free of charge consulting service, it seems most of our Myspace friends are musicians.
CMG: So how does Jeff’s criticism differ from yours?
DOSE: He writes back.
CMG: Right.
DOSE: But I’ve listened to every single demo that I have, just recently I got right through to the last one. And that took a fucking long time. I have three that I have that are interesting. I have the world’s first electronic harmonica player, I have his demo. It’s not interesting, it’s not one of them.
CMG: What do you do with them all?
DOSE: I have this thing called “Art of the Demo,” a collection of the last twelve years in demo-getting, it’s really fucking amazing, a wonderful thing to listen to. I dunno if these people were meant to make music, but they were meant to make THESE SONGS. There are some really beautiful works of “demo” on there. They are all somehow “pure” because of it…
CMG: Who are the three chosen ones?
DOSE: SJ Esau, who seems to be very kindred to the Anticon ethos of be yourelf in a bedroom on a beat with a record running. It’s definitely the stand-out demo of the bunch. Then there’s Geskia, an electronic demo from a Japanese fellow, very pretty, very well-made. And there’s this one is this guy Tez, he’s a beatboxer from Paris who opened for Subtle. Simply brilliant, the recorded works are something he has been trying to get the hang of, but live he was stupendous.
CMG: Do you know Teki Latex, from TTC? You guys sound alike, I always wondered about chicken/egg there.
DOSE: OH! He’s the homey. I met him when TTC was on Big Dada, and I was on that label with cLOUDDEAD, and we were doing a tour, one of my first times in Europe, and he was one of the only people I truly connected with. And that was when Anticon was still in the space where we would record all in one house every night. He was the only decently English-speaking hip hop dude in Paris, and he really made me feel at home. He told me some story about when he was like 16 years, and he wrote for a rap magazine, and he used to get all the good interviews because his English was better than everyone else’s, and he was 16 years old interviewing Guru and that’s how he basically got into doing hip hop, that was the ‘realization’ part that got him working on getting as good as he is. And even though he can speak perfect English, and the market for French rap isn’t what it is for English speakers, he still writes his own shit in French, just because that’s his language, he has all these altruistic things behind what he does that remind me of what we do and how we abstain from certain things.
It’s funny, we talked about how that Guru thing might have been what pushed him to, you know, really start creating and getting involved in hip hop. Like, one of the things that pushed me was when I was in Jersey and I ciphered with Channel Live, and I was like “fuck that, I can hang with Channel Live.” So I think he kind went through the same thing when he was young. Gave him a sense of the men behind mics behind songs.
CMG: I have to ask -- what does Anticon abstain from?
DOSE: Oh, by that I meant general song factory behaviours, various effects that only come out in the music. We just keep certain things off of our music, and as a group, using the clinical definition of term abstain probably won’t work, we let quite a bit in as far as content, anything goes in that arena, but maybe we shop more “unwritten” tenets about who we will steal from, and we secretly feel good about who we won’t take from.
CMG: I remember you guys, back around the time of Stuffed Animals, Anticon was peddling a “everyone’s a biter” art-theory stance.
DOSE: We found ourselves pushing to be the best rappers we could be, without being corny, and we’d gravitate toward the people we thought were the best, all the (Project) Blowed cats, but it wasn’t like when we all met each other and various artists who wanted to add what they did to what other people were doing, that was the whole biter tag, I think, that we were hearing from people…people thought we sounded like Blowed just because we were different from NY rap or “regular rap.” That eventually subsided though, as we recorded toward our own identity. And at a certain point you sort of see your own identity, and then you can speak on it, and consciously shape it, but it takes a while, like that middle class critical mass -- the bad side of a beginning is that people who are into other things that you’re into might see you as a pale version of that. No pun intended there.
CMG: Funny you should sneak that in, as I was going to ask a related question. Last year I was criticized for using the term “post rap,” essentially because, according to the dude who wrote about it, it isn’t my place, as a white internet rap critic, to say what is, and what isn’t “post rap,” since rap isn’t my culture. Any comments on that -- white guys hijacking elements of non-white culture?
DOSE: I think there’s a complete and utter truth to that, but at a certain 200X zoom out, there is none. The achievements of jazz artists were somehow partially fuelled by the excitement of white people about jazz. Everything feeds into an art-form, that’s the way it works, that’s how creative and artistic bars are set, how genres get marked for innovation, you can’t partition something off. I mean, in my opinion, being a white artist in whatever this culture is…is relative, if you or anyone or society wants to prescribe a colour predominance, I have to accept my space in it. It’s obviously something I haven’t had a say in. And I haven’t had a say in the existence of this art form in front of me, either. But, I mean, this is what I was born to do, I haven’t made a million dollars and haven’t changed the world, but I don’t stop doing this, either way it’s in my gravity.
And just to address the “post,” I don’t think we’re really in “post rap” yet, and with a little distance, maybe down the road, I’m not sure it’s gone far enough for there to be a post. The way I see it, rap is doubling back on itself now, as it has always done, and there are these wellsprings of money that are, basically, making rap, “RAP,” they’re creating rap from money for money by money. And the artists involved are not really pushing things to their potential. The guys actually doing the music are made to look like superheroes, like hair metal rock, perpetually perfect sneakers -- even the way the videos look. And contrast that with, say, the “money earning Mt. Vernon” video. Actually, maybe there’s a post rap going on right now that has less white people involved than you’d think would be involved in “post rap,” but I think there’s all sorts of eras for rap. And I think both electronica and rap are in a similar maturity phase, turning back on themselves, into genuinely new places, and commercially successful avenues. Or, if you can’t say that, because of needing new “genre” terms, present and past, then maybe there are, simply, all these different musics happening, all sorts of interesting things that are by-products of the grey area that should be occupied by everyone, instead of getting into “blacks” and “whites” and “posts.”
CMG: So what do you say when, say, someone like Slug says that if he wasn’t making his music, then more kids would get sucked into the misogynistic Diplomats rap, and that’s wrong?
DOSE: Diplomats?
CMG: Umm…the Diplomats....
DOSE: …
CMG: Harlem rap crew, Cam’Ron’s crew.
DOSE: Oh is that what he’s calling himself these days? I didn’t even realize he was still making records.
CMG: I can’t tell if you’re joking, but that’s probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.
DOSE: Yeah man. New rap? What kills me is Rhymefest -- last time I saw that dude’s face I battled him and I mutilated him and he sort of stopped rapping and apparently Jeff saw him at college on campus but we never heard from him again. But that slays me he’s back on now, I heard he was ghostwriting for Kanye, and poof I saw his video. And I haven’t seen him in years, it was a great battle, very intense, that was way back at Scribble Jam, the one with Eminem.
CMG: I did my research. Reports on that battle are mixed, like, some say Rhymefest beat you and then bowed out of the final because he didn’t want to battle is homey Juice.
DOSE: Oh see, there you go that’s all backwards. In the semi-finals the two champs from two battles earlier that year, the Chicago and the Source battles, are in. That’s Juice and Rhymefest. These two had been in battles together seceral times, Juice always coming in first, Rhymefest second. The other two guys in the semis are two no-names from the Midwest, one being me, and the other being Eminem. Up to this point none of us had met, and we’re all acting all battle-savvy and standoffish, tough guys that we are.
So in the semi-finals it’s me and Rhymefest facing off, and Eminem and Juice. Rhymefest and I go first, and he is so garbage to me, that I can see his rhyming words coming, so I start saying them before he does, on beat, kind of like backups. Not to mention that this also reinforced the heavy amount of written-freestyle battle raps that Rhymefest and Juice and most of them all had, which is a big no-no to me. Some burner you thought of while you were staring at the guy during his 30 seconds is one thing, but bringing perfect 24 second prepared sonnets is another.
So I pretty much mutilate him, and then Eminem and Juice went, and that was a great battle, totally full on, and it’s tough to say who won. Me, I always think the underdog wins when it’s close between a champ and a no-name, but the judges and most folks usually are disposed to feel the opposite. Anyway, they all called it a tie. So, basically, I should be in the finals with one of them. But then the fuckery runneth over. Rhymefest said I was talking over him during the battle, but saying his rhymes on beat -- I mean, I was arguing that that was an innovation in battling, not being a bad boy rulebreaker. So because Juice and Rhymeface are big shots, they re-arrange the finals.
Now, it’s me versus Juice and I can’t actually remember the exact order, but somehow I battled both Eminem and Juice. And then Juice battled Eminem, again. And while that was going on -- I mean, I was pretty pissed at the Scribble Jam judges right about then -- and so I started dissing the battle when I got my 30 seconds. I mean, to be honest I felt defeated by politics, and it took my killing fever out of me. I really didn’t want to win this big complicated slow cheat of a competition, and I have a kill switch and I really couldn’t turn it on Juice or Eminem once I felt all up in the cess pool battle politics. Too many writtens, too many favours for the famous guys.
My best memory from that whole thing is Eminem. Despite all the meanmugging, he and I had a beer between the semis and the finals. We were all cordial, both of us respecting each others’ moxy, we were the two unknowns in the whole thing and I guess there was camaraderie in that. We exchanged numbers and demos, and I listened to his when I got home, and I heard all his good battle lines on his songs. I just sort of forgot about him after that. A few months later I was recording the “Joyful Toy of 1001 Faces” 12”, and Jeff handed me a Source Magazine, and there was Eminem in Unsigned Hype. And the rest is history.
Part Three
CMG: It’s interesting, the extent to which some of your Scribble contemporaries have gone on to have very different, uniquely-successful careers. That Scribble class, around 1997-1998, a lot of them have done interesting things. Rhymefest has gone way beyond the battle circuit, Sage Francis has a hugely dedicated fanbase, runs knowmore.org, then there’s Eminem, Blueprint tried to invent a time machine. Slug’s particularly interesting though, he’s now known as the dude who gets some of the best tour money in non-billion-dollar hip hop.
DOSE: I guess he is isn’t he...Frankly, Sean’s got it, always has. The moment I met him I could tell there was a lot to absorb and learn from him, especially in his live conviction. He is one of my mentors or influences in that regard, and that being said, a lot of us from the class of '97 to '98 are all very similar and different. All of us were equally fuelled to rap in our own respective and righteous lights and, I think, compelled. For what ever reason, Cincinnati had this big ass magnet beneath it for several years, I was lucky enough to fall into its tow. And we are all somehow suited to leading in our own direction. I guess that marks the difference between this '97-'98 class and other things -- so many leaders being in one year’s herd.
CMG: I had a discussion about this a while back, how Sean has changed his sound, writing a little less “abstractly,” in order to snag more people, because, as he says, if those people aren’t buying his shit, they’re going to be buying into the Cam’Rons instead. You can read that as being a stance that a conscious move to broaden the fanbase, for certain acts, is an act of altruism: saving the kids from too much rap misogyny. For me, longtime fan, it’s a downer that we might never get another “God’s Bathroom Floor.” I’m like “forget saving the children, make another song like 'They’re All Gonna Laugh @ You.'”
DOSE: I dunno, I like to step back and think in a similar fashion about myself, except now the car accident, and what we’ve been through, really colours how I feel about what it is we are doing, as in our offer to the world. The accident’s aftershocks in our music, and the extent of Dax’s injury, are a result of the accident, which is a result of us chasing our dream. And it’s caused me to really think about why I’m doing this music, and to be more hands-on with its direction. Actually, I find myself thinking the opposite about that: not that I want to write more abstractly as I go, but I want to fulfil my particular and individual potential as much as possible. Sure, I might steal a line from Yoni, but I really want to do the most with me, with what I can do. It almost sounds Christian: “With this time on Earth, I don’t want to waste it,” with respect to my art and its translating of me. I don’t want to detract from my personality and my songs and the people that surround them, because everyone around me goes into my songs, it’s almost like a respect thing.
But with respect to what Sean is saying, he is very right. I think of myself in the same light I guess, you always want to reach more people, get them out of the possibly shitty music hole they may be in, that we were all once in. It’s tough knowing there’s millions of people using their ears a million miles from the real thing, but I don’t simplify -- I may have started adding clarity to my poems, and now they might resound more on first or second listen, but I dunno if we’re ever going to be an option to a core Cam’Ron fan. But then again, I‘ve been searching for a different listener to find us, looking for the person that is sensitive and into personal politics, which isn’t always the driving force behind a given rap song. And, come to think of it, it’s not so much an alternative; I don’t think anyone’s putting down the glock to listen to a Slug or Subtle record. There are some circles in which our songs will never be significant.
CMG: You and Slug weren’t getting along for a little while, tell me what that was about? I remember reading things like at an Atmosphere/Def Jux gig in New York someone on the stage yelled out “Fuck Dose One,” and someone wrote that you should “stay out of New York.”
DOSE: I think it was...a real relationship thing in a lot of ways. It wasn’t wholly bogus. He was hanging out with people who didn’t like me, I was hanging out with other people, not necessarily people who didn’t like Sean, but we just weren’t hanging out together a lot. As we spread, trust spread, and I heard more negativity coming from people surrounding Sean. He and I have always been sort of close, which is why it got to me, because I feel Sean is a soul-mate of mine. I don’t have many, I count them on one and a half hands, so to hear he’s got dudes on stage calling me a faggot or however it went down, that hurt. That was then, this is now…
CMG: Some folks think you wrote a song about it.
DOSE: “Good People Check” was not about Sean, but a collection of people I have met along my path, and I tried to write something that was about “you” if you think it is. It’s a song that doesn’t solve itself. An “if the shoe fits…” sort of ode…. But eventually someone said to him “That song is about you,” and we talked on the phone, had it out, then we kept our distance, had it out again, back and forth. But when we got in our car accident the first person to call me was Mr Dibbs, so I was there alone in the hospital with Dax, and I get a fucking phone call from Brad, and the next person to call me was Sean, and it killed me. Again this may sound Christian and corny, but when I heard Sean’s voice and I was in hospital, what I realized was that Sean and I know each other because of our connection, not the beef, and our connection is still there, always will be, the accident was a great leveller, proving that a lot of my relationships both old and recent are really important to me, including Sean, and big fat Brad.
CMG: And the accident ended up putting things in perspective for everyone.
DOSE: Well, put it this way. We weren’t on good terms, and we went from that to Sean helping raise a lot of money for Dax. A lot of money. The single greatest amount next to all the money Subtle put together, more than 20,000, from Sluggo and Rhymesayers. And Aesop Rock and El-P all gave out of pocket, too. I mean there was just this sheer influx of generosity. And we are all forever indebted, in that instant and undeniable way, that rises up around tragic goings-on. Subtle did quite a few shows, and everyone outside the music world came together as well, tonnes of money through Amoeba in California. Amoeba really championed Dax, in a way I’ve never seen a business stand behind an individual -- pretty remarkable actually. There was even an anonymous donor who gave many, many thousands.
But all that is simply a testament to Dax, more than anything else; that guy is of the highest calibre of people that I’ve ever met, he’s himself with people, at all times, he leaves a certain personal and perfect impression.
And, on another level, all the musician people, I think they donated because we actualized “the road’s” worst nightmare. We got into it, the crash, we are lucky everyone’s alive. But that is literally the nightmare that your girlfriend has when you’re on tour. It makes me feel good, to know that we’re all different spreads of the same personalities and un-plans, whether it’s me and Aesop and me and Sean or Marcus Acher from Notwist, we’re all very similar, we all have Up Syndrome.
CMG: What’s that?
DOSE: The opposite of Down Syndrome.
CMG: I’m not even touching that.
DOSE: Well, it’s a little healthier, actually. Because it doesn’t exist, no one’s sensitive about it, it’s politically correct by default.
CMG: What happened with North American Adonis, the project you had recorded with Buck 65 back in, like, 1998 or something?
DOSE: It’s all fucked up, half of it is erased. Buck is a very solo cat though, maybe we could do something together in the future, but he seems to do Buck things best, and I dunno if we’d ever do a whole record again together. But that record was 2 and a half nights, no sleep, in a bedroom. It wasn’t my best shit, pre-Circle writing, before I learned to edit.
CMG: You told me a couple of months ago that you had a big secret about the release of For Hero : For Fool. It’s out now -- you’re on EMI via Lex. How did all that come about? I remember when Lex was like a little offshoot of rap stuff that Warp boutiqued out...
DOSE: Basically Lex was a subsidiary of Warp. After the accident, A New White was still in the negative a couple thousand, and Warp didn’t want to pick up the option, they saw us as expensive, an unsound investment, as it were. Professional not personal…They weren’t really feeling Subtle, generally, and that, along with other things, was a part of Mr. Tom Brown’s decision to leave Warp. Since he has Danger Mouse on his label, he was able to get backing from EMI. And he really stood by us. We feel kept well in his care.
Interestingly enough, Tom is the only person who was at my first show in London, in 1999, who still goes to our shows, except for one other fan who is 4.5 ft tall and also named Tom, who will probably be pretty happy to read his name dropped in this interview, so Hi, 4.5 foot Tom, how are you?
Anyway, Tall Tom gets the deal with EMI behind his amazing and abominable luck of having a Danger Mouse who just so happens to now be the biggest producer in the whole fucking world, and then we signed and expected we’d be on Lex and hoped to be on Astralwerks in the states. That sort of thing is just healthier for distribution, to have someone who is accountable and responsible for getting your music out on this side of the Atlantic. But, back when things were iffy between Warp and Subtle, we never really foresaw us getting a major deal with anyone like EMI or Astralwerks. But it was an odd and honest sequence of events that leaned EMI’s ear to our music, and the record seems to have spoken for itself, and we now have an iron-clad indie deal on a major circuit, which is basically the best you can do. The whip is pimp. And, like, a year ago at this time I was completely directionless, like never before, and now things present themselves and sublimate and one of the reasons I’m really excited about this is that it’s basically a little luck after such lucklessness. And I was just saying the other day how it’s nice to have this piece, this new album, an album that we’ve put more into than we ever thought we had in us in the first place, to be the first record that reaches a lot of heads. I’m sure something will be not-so-positive about upsizing, but we’re still on Lex completely, so we don’t have situations where the major dictates everything. EMI licenses our options, therefore we don’t get not put out in Germany because Ricky Martin is eating up the budget. Before we had a glass ceiling, we did well in the little indie shops, probably as well as we could ask for, but getting into these Virgin Megastores, etc., was tough. They weren’t having us, they saw us as a lost cause, and they can think what they want and order what they want, cool, but we just don’t want to see that happening to this record, the record that we’ve put everything into.
CMG: You said there’s one track on here that’s got 53 vocal tracks on it. How’s that gonna go down live?
DOSE: It’s a breeze man, it’s just a demeanor you have to adopt on stage, you gotta try to be as big as 53 vocal tracks all by yourself. I adore the difference between the two, actually, because I just start slapping people in the face and sweating like a fat kid and that alone feels like five more of my vocals. I do all the style switches you hear on the record, I hold myself fully accountable for the studio acrobatics, because it’s not just “the studio.” We actually build the songs up from how they feel when translated into live from a recorded birth, which might be a little backwards from how other bands work. And then Jeff and Marty and Jordan do backing vocals, and we really miss Dax on that, he’s the little baby Jesus of the backing vocal. And I do all my own effects; I have a chaos pad so I do all my own reverb and delay and whatnots, where my voice would need to thicken up, per se. But together we make a concerted effort to sound as big or encompassing live as we do on the record.
CMG: Are you going to take Yoni (Why?) out on tour to keep things as full as possible? I know a lot of people miss cLOUDEAD.
DOSE: I wish we could do that, I wish we could take Yoni and Andrew (Broder, Fog) and put off a huge show with those guys, but right now it’s not practical or possible. We don’t have enough draw as headliners to pay to feed ourselves or our own opening act, so on this tour we will just pick up the local guys to open for us where we can. And our friends where we have them. But Yoni’s doing his own thing, touring, chilling, actually he’s been touring and really busting his ass. In Anticon he has a solid place to go and come from with his sound, he’s doing phenomenally well, and this makes me grin. But with both of us, now, we’ve got our own separate fan-bases almost, but neither is at the point where he can support the other person on the road, yet, so we won’t be touring with him, it’s just a numbers thing. That’s one of the things if we were up a notch, have larger capacities, all I ever wanted to do was tour with Fog and Why?; it’d be like Phish and the Grateful Dead, “together at last,” but we just can’t do that. All I’m asking for this time is to have amazing, packed, sold out shows for once. And we’re building toward that. It’s like a slow huddle, but certain cities are getting really fucking good.
CMG: It’s gotta be a tough call, I mean, “Will the draw power of Why? + Subtle bring in enough more people to pay for itself…”
DOSE: Kind of. The reality of bringing another band out is that it’s hard on both bands, and there’s no one wanting to take a tour for nothing on the chin, since we just did a brief infinity of tours on the chin. If you bring another band, I mean, we brought Fog out for the last tour, and to do so we had to get money from Lex. This tour we’ll be flying with all the Myspace bands, all around the world.
CMG: Can you steal Dan Boeckner away from Wolf Parade?
DOSE: Ah, the Handsome Furs segue. Well Furs is Dan and Alexi, who is my fiance’s sister. Dan and I did three songs together with my “anything goes” style mixed with Dan’s own “anything goes” style. I don’t contribute to lyrics, I just add harmonies, but it’s my vocals and production. We’re working on that project soon, probably this winter when we both get back from tours. And we just finished one of our Subtle remakes “Middleclass Haunt.” It will be on our new 12” We’re doing another record of For Hero : For Fool reverse-remixes, where we send tapes off to people like Mike Patton and Fog and Hrvatski, who is the homey, Soft Pink Truth, Matmos, just like-minded dudes who take a part of one of our songs, distill it, build their own castle around it, and send it back to us, which we get and finish off ourselves, so it’s like a remixed remix. We send out the original parts and you send it back after hopefully, being inspired, like those rap b-sides where there’s a remix with a sort of new beat and a new verse at the end. These guys just take it, trace whatever they like, and then we take it back and build on that. I think eventually we could do a full remix record where the originals never really existed in the first place.
CMG: Just listening to the record, it sounds like the recording process without any remixing can be that complicated. In parts you can tell that Jel is using his SP 1200, in others the drums sound tapped out like they are on an SP, but they’re too crisp. How are you guys recording percussion?
DOSE: Some of it is traditional Jel drums that he hates that Jordan redoes live. And then Jeff will sample Jordan, and he’ll replay it onto the same part of the song, or a latter part of the same song. And it’s not even that simple because Dax and I both steal from Jel’s drums. I mean, when we play live Jeff plays a myriad of things, stuff he plays and doesn’t play on the record, he’ll play Jordan’s actual take, or we’ll copy Jordan’s take with live drums, and Jordan will sometimes play along, a lot of the time it’s just untraceable. But Jeff is one of the editor hat dudes, basically, he’s often the last say. No matter who does the programming and treatments, nothing goes past Jeff’s radar, just because Jeff and I have made several hundred songs together at this point. His ink is on a lot of stuff. Basically we say that he plays “zip disk.”
CMG: There’s one aspect of the record that I’m really taken by, the recurring appearances of a “hero.” It seems like you’ve written this around a lead character.
DOSE: That’s Hour Hero Yes. He disappears a lot though, but he also sometimes congeals in with his surroundings. And he is a certain character, so I guess he becomes the focus by default. With the Subtle albums, I’m writing a sort of backwards history in records, A New White is the thoughts, panics and milds, of the hero without any concept of the hero, really. All a melt of dreams and nervous lengths in the confines of a one bedroom appartment in Oakland. This record For Hero : For Fool is the actual taking of the hero to the world, into “real life” if you want to call it that, and he’s as much fool as he is all gusto, so he’s actually based on the concept of “rapper,” and some of the personal and modern conflicts in being that. My voice and experiences are in there, but I don’t do the linear “I”-heavy plot, it’s a poetic plot, sans the exact order of events, so the second song is actually a flashback, whereas me on stage is the reality, so the live performance intertwines with the text of the record sort of. And there’s a song called “Middleclass Stomp” in which, you know, it might not be explicit, but he finds himself at a merch booth, sequestered by people with awe in their eyes who express it with fifteen bucks for a t-shirt. It’s all there to hopefully cause people to wonder what all that is. I’m already like 4000 words into the next record. At the end of this record the character dies in his sleep, he makes a right in his dream and doesn’t come back, down a hallway, which leads into a post possible world.
Stepping back, this is setting myself up for a transition, as a writer, I thought it’d be nice if, when I’m 30, I’m not still writing about myself all the time, so this is the only thing that I thought I could do, write a small world slowly but surely, so the next record ties in all the motifs and objects and all the things that don’t make sense right now on these two records, so For Hero : For Fool is a series of scenarios, leading specifically and directly to the next, so after the competition on the rap song he decides to go solo forever and gets a raft, and then he decides to return to the world, he tries to cut a pop song, which is “Mercury Craze,” and then he doesn’t know where that left him after being the hot ticket, and still being himself, so each perspective is first person. But also third, as there’s a lot of outside commentary going on along the way. This album is supposed to be the same progression as A New White, only enhanced. Everything lines up and correlates -- “Red White and Blonde” from A New White pairs up with “Midas Gutz,” “F.K.O.” and “The Mercury Craze” pair up, the arc of the new album follows the arc of the old album, layered right on top of it. We wanted to reapproach A New White while splaying For Hero : For Fool to give it a ghost of what’s continuity, keeping where we were in mind, where we are.
CMG: Do you think you’ll still get 75% of the critics focussing on how nasal your voice can be?
CMG's Aaron Newell (CMG): How's Dax?
Doseone (DOSE): Dax? He's good, he's kind of heavy right now. I mean, he's quadriplegic, so there are ups and downs -- every month something takes him to the hospital. He had a complication last week with the medication pump that goes into his spine. So he has some very serious and delicate issues on his plate, but more often than not he's cruising, taking his life back; this last time he was in the hospital for four days though. And that's like an impromptu vacation to a terrible place.
CMG: Does he have absolutely no movement in his limbs?
DOSE: He is paralysed from the nipple-line down, so he has some sensation in his arms and full sensation from the shoulders up. He says it's like having gaff tape over your body, or two leather jackets on, when touched below the nipple line. He uses his shoulders and biceps, but he has no control of his tricep, so if he touches the top of his head he has to let his arm fall back down. He can open doors with remote controls and uses several different hand braces to eat, type, and work gadgets.he's moved his finger, his thumb, voluntarily -- we had a nice moment when we were recording where he was like "Guys, want to see my thumb move?", but it's haphazard, your spinal cord doesn't regrow. If it was one vertebrae lower his hands would have been ok, one higher and he'd be bedridden for life. And in his state there's so many things to take care of, he has to hire people to take care of him, and pay them. And then still have fun in the mean time. I'm making coffee want some?
CMG: Uh. What kind?
DOSE: Starbucks.
CMG: Isn't it totally against the Anticon ethos to drink Starbucks coffee?
DOSE: You mean, are we allowed to drink Starbucks?
CMG: I didn't think you were, I thought it was in your Constitution or something.
DOSE: It does happen, when you're on the road, in Europe, we succumb. Maybe we feel more liberated over there. Terrible but true. No one has a subscription to Sports Illustrated. But there are coffee addicts in Anticon.
CMG: I never would have thought you'd cave to Starbuck before Sports Illustrated. How'd you meet Dax?
DOSE: He was a buyer at Amoeba. This was back in the broke days when Jeff (Jel) and I were living together, when we were making The No Music, and we went in to sell CD's, Greenthink and Slowdeath, and Dax heard them, and knew we were using a doctor sample, and he had a fetish for that, and we hit it off. A few months later we were hanging out with him, and Jel and I were working on Themselves and basically finding ourselves, playing keyboards with one finger, and there was a yearning to open it up and Dax was the conduit for that, he knew Marty, Jordan, and Alex, the other guys in Subtle.
CMG: Were they all doing music together before meeting you guys, did you crash their party?
DOSE: They had, in fact, all worked together, and Dax always wanted them to be in a "real" group together, so I guess meeting us was the missing link or impetus.
CMG: So who does what?
DOSE: Alex is the fiddle player.
CMG: .
DOSE: .
CMG: So, uh, does Jeff still build his parts around his sp 1200?
DOSE: "Midas Guts" from the new album started as an old SP demo, that came up and was resampled and Subtleized. We do all this Frankenstein shit in this band, you'd forget who did what to which layers along the way. Purple just swiped at me, ow. OK Jeff's sensibility has influenced everyone, the way we play, we know when a part is for Jeff to finish, it's just this air about things.
CMG: Do you still take Purple jogging?
DOSE: No we're too old..and I don't have insurance, so I keep her in a glass canister on most days, I let her out when her coat yellows and she starts dragging her feet, then I have to sit in the canister while she is out sitting on shit..
CMG: Purple's your girlfriend, right?
DOSE: Cat.
CMG: So how does a Subtle song get born?
DOSE: Loosely. For the full lengths, I've been writing them all as one large record. For Hero : For Fool sort of continues A New White. I start them out by scoring them in this Retardo Montalban fashion, then I write out what I want the songs to sound like, sort of pictorially, and then I hand it to the band and everyone starts ingesting it and making demos. And then I get a tingle, when I hear certain demos, thinking of certain poems, you know what's going to work. And in constructing the record, sometimes the demos can find the words, and then sometimes you have to create brand new music around something we still need to conjure up. We usually do this by all improving in the same room together and then cherry picking the fruits and bloopers, this was our original song making process, back when we made all the EP's.we try and split time between our old and new ways of song making. And with respect to the demo-refining process, you have to continually improve, and then rearrange the improvements. Jordan, Jeff, and I do the most of the home-studio work, Dax would have, too, but he was in Texas in rehabilitation for most of the year. Marty and Alex then redo a lot of demo parts with instruments and add what they have been hearing in their head.
CMG: And your writing, I mean, I've read the lyrics for the new record. You definitely don't write in bars like a lot of other rappers, you write verse, and then vocalize it with a cadence that fits the music.
DOSE: The poem is written for speaking voice, I don't write in bars. Certain small stanzas are choruses, I can just tell that they want to be choruses, or, after writing, I'll go back and think "I think I meant for this to be a hook," they're just written to be that way. The poems know they're going to be songs at some point in my head. And in the song-making process, That's kind of a big key for me -- if I hear a small chorus stanza instantly over a demo, I know, it's like "that's the one," everything else, verse, parts, arrangement, will work around it.
CMG: How do you record your vocals?
DOSE: I do my vocals alone, and I try to push it, constantly changing it, it being the "ongoing song collection of me," and the way they're sung/rapped, going for a multitone and harmonies and overdubs where I hear them. On "Middleclass Kill," at the end of the mixing day there were 53 vocal tracks on that song, I drove our engineer crazy (Tony Espinoza at SF Soundworks). Once you start isolating things in the studio the tracks start piling up, there are overlappings of multivoiced shouting backups and harmonies, and there's two of those on backing tracks, me yelling "FACT" five different ways beneath singing, and then they're separated and there's the main verses, and then I'm always doing something for two bars for no reason. The other thing is when I do a couple of styles in a song, just with the nature of protocols -- you have to separate them out onto individual tracks to sit with similar vocals. It's a fucking process, but on this album particularly I think it paid off. Generally on a Subtle song I'll take up 14 tracks minimum, recording things the way I do.I really get into it these days. I listened to a lot of Kate Bush after the car accident, I think that might have had an effect in my exploration of a multi-tracked me. And before that, I thought I was breaking new ground all on my own, but Kate Bush and Mike Patton have been doing it for a while now, in a different but similar sculpt.
CMG: I was reading through the lyrics, and even from the first line on the album, about a gorilla and a carrot hanging from the stage, etc., I made a note: "He's writing in Dali's." Depending on your idea of what a good painting is you may or may not take that as a compliment.
DOSE: Oh yeah, it is.in college I found a Dali book in the garbage one night and read it cover to cover. Did you see his movie, the super gothic one with the ants pouring out of the hole in a palm?
CMG: Yeah, I saw a double feature with that and his animated thing with Walt Disney. I think that's where the Dali comment may have come from, the playful-but-eerie combination of images that you drum up right from the start of the album.
DOSE: Dali and Disney huh? Tale of Apes is a tale of two births. My births, one is all rap bravado, perfect spitfire on stage, commanding the crowd to repeat things with force no matter how esoteric. One of the reasons I got into what I was doing was because of the edge of it, the cultural edge, the fine point on the genre I guess you could call it. But then after exploring it a bit more, when I found all these different meanings to making, working with Yoni for example, finding out things all relate no matter how far apart they are.it's basically these two births, the first happened when I was watching a contemporary of mine -- to remain nameless -- on stage, and seeing myself in so many parts. But then our hero finds himself suddenly stricken with what exactly it is that he's doing.so he commands the crowd to chant."everything is empty and it runneth over," an old Why? line from our college days. That segues into a flashback to the Greenthink & cLOUDDEAD basement, and I suppose it's a commentary on my line of work, and how I choose to see it.
CMG: Funny you say "work." There's a theme running through the album, it seems -- it's the struggle to attain a "middle class" financial status for the artist. You often hear artists deal with the subject of paid "art" as an alternative to working a 9 to 5, like a critique on capitalism or whatever, but you don't often see any treatment of the lifestyle that being a successful artist affords you, unless you're complaining about being dirt poor, or, like, Kanye at the other end.
DOSE: It's not even dealing strictly with the artist. The record has a lot of mentions of a tradition of this "Middle class no gamble grind," where you can trace your life's loop against your father's and his father's before that, this endless mill of debt over pay, a sure pursuit of the big payoff that isn't ever your own. And on top of that, on the record I'm trying to look for what my meanings are, or what I am, and finding it's best expressed by this vague almost new religion: "middle class." It's edgeless and spans the world, taking in the yolk of all folks. It promises nothing, but it's a grind and there's no return from that grind, you collapse into the end that's coming to you. And in a more poetic sense, middleclassdom is about being honest, and, the line between right and wrong, being all you know, never having too much time to completely explore either side of things, yet you can somehow osmose a great deal of both. Think of when you're young, teens, there's more options than someone who's on the top or already on the bottom, but sooner or later all those options transform into something else. I guess I'm talking about this doomed sense of "career forever," when that eclipses your youth, when you spend more time in that time than you did as a kid playing with toys, your life reaches a "seriousness" critical mass where you have no choice but to start that grind, to become it, really. And what does it leave you with, it's a transition period, you're swallowed up by something you didn't create, you find yourself all of a sudden sleeping in this bed on end, and it really does predict your future. Been watching all this Oz lately, and there's this talk of freedom all the time, and I've been thinking about it -- freedom's only what we take advantage of, where we choose to point it. So you're chasing a calling, then you find a way to work at it, and then after a while you're forced to make it your reason for being, by art or by bill, it's that period of transition, the eclipse, that I'm trying to write about, and how you can cheat on it. A lot of the motifs on this new record are coming from me having all my eggs in one basket: my art. That basket holds my bread and butter, about 90% of my relationships, and my fun, so there was a point when I realized that, all of a sudden, my particular middle class grind owned me to the bone.
CMG: Especially now that artists have 60,000 myspace friends. That's a shitload of responsibility.
Part Two
CMG: Do you get a lot of electronic demos?
DOSE: Jeff is better at listening to our friends’ music, because I have trouble with not saying things that are constructive. We offer a free of charge consulting service, it seems most of our Myspace friends are musicians.
CMG: So how does Jeff’s criticism differ from yours?
DOSE: He writes back.
CMG: Right.
DOSE: But I’ve listened to every single demo that I have, just recently I got right through to the last one. And that took a fucking long time. I have three that I have that are interesting. I have the world’s first electronic harmonica player, I have his demo. It’s not interesting, it’s not one of them.
CMG: What do you do with them all?
DOSE: I have this thing called “Art of the Demo,” a collection of the last twelve years in demo-getting, it’s really fucking amazing, a wonderful thing to listen to. I dunno if these people were meant to make music, but they were meant to make THESE SONGS. There are some really beautiful works of “demo” on there. They are all somehow “pure” because of it…
CMG: Who are the three chosen ones?
DOSE: SJ Esau, who seems to be very kindred to the Anticon ethos of be yourelf in a bedroom on a beat with a record running. It’s definitely the stand-out demo of the bunch. Then there’s Geskia, an electronic demo from a Japanese fellow, very pretty, very well-made. And there’s this one is this guy Tez, he’s a beatboxer from Paris who opened for Subtle. Simply brilliant, the recorded works are something he has been trying to get the hang of, but live he was stupendous.
CMG: Do you know Teki Latex, from TTC? You guys sound alike, I always wondered about chicken/egg there.
DOSE: OH! He’s the homey. I met him when TTC was on Big Dada, and I was on that label with cLOUDDEAD, and we were doing a tour, one of my first times in Europe, and he was one of the only people I truly connected with. And that was when Anticon was still in the space where we would record all in one house every night. He was the only decently English-speaking hip hop dude in Paris, and he really made me feel at home. He told me some story about when he was like 16 years, and he wrote for a rap magazine, and he used to get all the good interviews because his English was better than everyone else’s, and he was 16 years old interviewing Guru and that’s how he basically got into doing hip hop, that was the ‘realization’ part that got him working on getting as good as he is. And even though he can speak perfect English, and the market for French rap isn’t what it is for English speakers, he still writes his own shit in French, just because that’s his language, he has all these altruistic things behind what he does that remind me of what we do and how we abstain from certain things.
It’s funny, we talked about how that Guru thing might have been what pushed him to, you know, really start creating and getting involved in hip hop. Like, one of the things that pushed me was when I was in Jersey and I ciphered with Channel Live, and I was like “fuck that, I can hang with Channel Live.” So I think he kind went through the same thing when he was young. Gave him a sense of the men behind mics behind songs.
CMG: I have to ask -- what does Anticon abstain from?
DOSE: Oh, by that I meant general song factory behaviours, various effects that only come out in the music. We just keep certain things off of our music, and as a group, using the clinical definition of term abstain probably won’t work, we let quite a bit in as far as content, anything goes in that arena, but maybe we shop more “unwritten” tenets about who we will steal from, and we secretly feel good about who we won’t take from.
CMG: I remember you guys, back around the time of Stuffed Animals, Anticon was peddling a “everyone’s a biter” art-theory stance.
DOSE: We found ourselves pushing to be the best rappers we could be, without being corny, and we’d gravitate toward the people we thought were the best, all the (Project) Blowed cats, but it wasn’t like when we all met each other and various artists who wanted to add what they did to what other people were doing, that was the whole biter tag, I think, that we were hearing from people…people thought we sounded like Blowed just because we were different from NY rap or “regular rap.” That eventually subsided though, as we recorded toward our own identity. And at a certain point you sort of see your own identity, and then you can speak on it, and consciously shape it, but it takes a while, like that middle class critical mass -- the bad side of a beginning is that people who are into other things that you’re into might see you as a pale version of that. No pun intended there.
CMG: Funny you should sneak that in, as I was going to ask a related question. Last year I was criticized for using the term “post rap,” essentially because, according to the dude who wrote about it, it isn’t my place, as a white internet rap critic, to say what is, and what isn’t “post rap,” since rap isn’t my culture. Any comments on that -- white guys hijacking elements of non-white culture?
DOSE: I think there’s a complete and utter truth to that, but at a certain 200X zoom out, there is none. The achievements of jazz artists were somehow partially fuelled by the excitement of white people about jazz. Everything feeds into an art-form, that’s the way it works, that’s how creative and artistic bars are set, how genres get marked for innovation, you can’t partition something off. I mean, in my opinion, being a white artist in whatever this culture is…is relative, if you or anyone or society wants to prescribe a colour predominance, I have to accept my space in it. It’s obviously something I haven’t had a say in. And I haven’t had a say in the existence of this art form in front of me, either. But, I mean, this is what I was born to do, I haven’t made a million dollars and haven’t changed the world, but I don’t stop doing this, either way it’s in my gravity.
And just to address the “post,” I don’t think we’re really in “post rap” yet, and with a little distance, maybe down the road, I’m not sure it’s gone far enough for there to be a post. The way I see it, rap is doubling back on itself now, as it has always done, and there are these wellsprings of money that are, basically, making rap, “RAP,” they’re creating rap from money for money by money. And the artists involved are not really pushing things to their potential. The guys actually doing the music are made to look like superheroes, like hair metal rock, perpetually perfect sneakers -- even the way the videos look. And contrast that with, say, the “money earning Mt. Vernon” video. Actually, maybe there’s a post rap going on right now that has less white people involved than you’d think would be involved in “post rap,” but I think there’s all sorts of eras for rap. And I think both electronica and rap are in a similar maturity phase, turning back on themselves, into genuinely new places, and commercially successful avenues. Or, if you can’t say that, because of needing new “genre” terms, present and past, then maybe there are, simply, all these different musics happening, all sorts of interesting things that are by-products of the grey area that should be occupied by everyone, instead of getting into “blacks” and “whites” and “posts.”
CMG: So what do you say when, say, someone like Slug says that if he wasn’t making his music, then more kids would get sucked into the misogynistic Diplomats rap, and that’s wrong?
DOSE: Diplomats?
CMG: Umm…the Diplomats....
DOSE: …
CMG: Harlem rap crew, Cam’Ron’s crew.
DOSE: Oh is that what he’s calling himself these days? I didn’t even realize he was still making records.
CMG: I can’t tell if you’re joking, but that’s probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.
DOSE: Yeah man. New rap? What kills me is Rhymefest -- last time I saw that dude’s face I battled him and I mutilated him and he sort of stopped rapping and apparently Jeff saw him at college on campus but we never heard from him again. But that slays me he’s back on now, I heard he was ghostwriting for Kanye, and poof I saw his video. And I haven’t seen him in years, it was a great battle, very intense, that was way back at Scribble Jam, the one with Eminem.
CMG: I did my research. Reports on that battle are mixed, like, some say Rhymefest beat you and then bowed out of the final because he didn’t want to battle is homey Juice.
DOSE: Oh see, there you go that’s all backwards. In the semi-finals the two champs from two battles earlier that year, the Chicago and the Source battles, are in. That’s Juice and Rhymefest. These two had been in battles together seceral times, Juice always coming in first, Rhymefest second. The other two guys in the semis are two no-names from the Midwest, one being me, and the other being Eminem. Up to this point none of us had met, and we’re all acting all battle-savvy and standoffish, tough guys that we are.
So in the semi-finals it’s me and Rhymefest facing off, and Eminem and Juice. Rhymefest and I go first, and he is so garbage to me, that I can see his rhyming words coming, so I start saying them before he does, on beat, kind of like backups. Not to mention that this also reinforced the heavy amount of written-freestyle battle raps that Rhymefest and Juice and most of them all had, which is a big no-no to me. Some burner you thought of while you were staring at the guy during his 30 seconds is one thing, but bringing perfect 24 second prepared sonnets is another.
So I pretty much mutilate him, and then Eminem and Juice went, and that was a great battle, totally full on, and it’s tough to say who won. Me, I always think the underdog wins when it’s close between a champ and a no-name, but the judges and most folks usually are disposed to feel the opposite. Anyway, they all called it a tie. So, basically, I should be in the finals with one of them. But then the fuckery runneth over. Rhymefest said I was talking over him during the battle, but saying his rhymes on beat -- I mean, I was arguing that that was an innovation in battling, not being a bad boy rulebreaker. So because Juice and Rhymeface are big shots, they re-arrange the finals.
Now, it’s me versus Juice and I can’t actually remember the exact order, but somehow I battled both Eminem and Juice. And then Juice battled Eminem, again. And while that was going on -- I mean, I was pretty pissed at the Scribble Jam judges right about then -- and so I started dissing the battle when I got my 30 seconds. I mean, to be honest I felt defeated by politics, and it took my killing fever out of me. I really didn’t want to win this big complicated slow cheat of a competition, and I have a kill switch and I really couldn’t turn it on Juice or Eminem once I felt all up in the cess pool battle politics. Too many writtens, too many favours for the famous guys.
My best memory from that whole thing is Eminem. Despite all the meanmugging, he and I had a beer between the semis and the finals. We were all cordial, both of us respecting each others’ moxy, we were the two unknowns in the whole thing and I guess there was camaraderie in that. We exchanged numbers and demos, and I listened to his when I got home, and I heard all his good battle lines on his songs. I just sort of forgot about him after that. A few months later I was recording the “Joyful Toy of 1001 Faces” 12”, and Jeff handed me a Source Magazine, and there was Eminem in Unsigned Hype. And the rest is history.
Part Three
CMG: It’s interesting, the extent to which some of your Scribble contemporaries have gone on to have very different, uniquely-successful careers. That Scribble class, around 1997-1998, a lot of them have done interesting things. Rhymefest has gone way beyond the battle circuit, Sage Francis has a hugely dedicated fanbase, runs knowmore.org, then there’s Eminem, Blueprint tried to invent a time machine. Slug’s particularly interesting though, he’s now known as the dude who gets some of the best tour money in non-billion-dollar hip hop.
DOSE: I guess he is isn’t he...Frankly, Sean’s got it, always has. The moment I met him I could tell there was a lot to absorb and learn from him, especially in his live conviction. He is one of my mentors or influences in that regard, and that being said, a lot of us from the class of '97 to '98 are all very similar and different. All of us were equally fuelled to rap in our own respective and righteous lights and, I think, compelled. For what ever reason, Cincinnati had this big ass magnet beneath it for several years, I was lucky enough to fall into its tow. And we are all somehow suited to leading in our own direction. I guess that marks the difference between this '97-'98 class and other things -- so many leaders being in one year’s herd.
CMG: I had a discussion about this a while back, how Sean has changed his sound, writing a little less “abstractly,” in order to snag more people, because, as he says, if those people aren’t buying his shit, they’re going to be buying into the Cam’Rons instead. You can read that as being a stance that a conscious move to broaden the fanbase, for certain acts, is an act of altruism: saving the kids from too much rap misogyny. For me, longtime fan, it’s a downer that we might never get another “God’s Bathroom Floor.” I’m like “forget saving the children, make another song like 'They’re All Gonna Laugh @ You.'”
DOSE: I dunno, I like to step back and think in a similar fashion about myself, except now the car accident, and what we’ve been through, really colours how I feel about what it is we are doing, as in our offer to the world. The accident’s aftershocks in our music, and the extent of Dax’s injury, are a result of the accident, which is a result of us chasing our dream. And it’s caused me to really think about why I’m doing this music, and to be more hands-on with its direction. Actually, I find myself thinking the opposite about that: not that I want to write more abstractly as I go, but I want to fulfil my particular and individual potential as much as possible. Sure, I might steal a line from Yoni, but I really want to do the most with me, with what I can do. It almost sounds Christian: “With this time on Earth, I don’t want to waste it,” with respect to my art and its translating of me. I don’t want to detract from my personality and my songs and the people that surround them, because everyone around me goes into my songs, it’s almost like a respect thing.
But with respect to what Sean is saying, he is very right. I think of myself in the same light I guess, you always want to reach more people, get them out of the possibly shitty music hole they may be in, that we were all once in. It’s tough knowing there’s millions of people using their ears a million miles from the real thing, but I don’t simplify -- I may have started adding clarity to my poems, and now they might resound more on first or second listen, but I dunno if we’re ever going to be an option to a core Cam’Ron fan. But then again, I‘ve been searching for a different listener to find us, looking for the person that is sensitive and into personal politics, which isn’t always the driving force behind a given rap song. And, come to think of it, it’s not so much an alternative; I don’t think anyone’s putting down the glock to listen to a Slug or Subtle record. There are some circles in which our songs will never be significant.
CMG: You and Slug weren’t getting along for a little while, tell me what that was about? I remember reading things like at an Atmosphere/Def Jux gig in New York someone on the stage yelled out “Fuck Dose One,” and someone wrote that you should “stay out of New York.”
DOSE: I think it was...a real relationship thing in a lot of ways. It wasn’t wholly bogus. He was hanging out with people who didn’t like me, I was hanging out with other people, not necessarily people who didn’t like Sean, but we just weren’t hanging out together a lot. As we spread, trust spread, and I heard more negativity coming from people surrounding Sean. He and I have always been sort of close, which is why it got to me, because I feel Sean is a soul-mate of mine. I don’t have many, I count them on one and a half hands, so to hear he’s got dudes on stage calling me a faggot or however it went down, that hurt. That was then, this is now…
CMG: Some folks think you wrote a song about it.
DOSE: “Good People Check” was not about Sean, but a collection of people I have met along my path, and I tried to write something that was about “you” if you think it is. It’s a song that doesn’t solve itself. An “if the shoe fits…” sort of ode…. But eventually someone said to him “That song is about you,” and we talked on the phone, had it out, then we kept our distance, had it out again, back and forth. But when we got in our car accident the first person to call me was Mr Dibbs, so I was there alone in the hospital with Dax, and I get a fucking phone call from Brad, and the next person to call me was Sean, and it killed me. Again this may sound Christian and corny, but when I heard Sean’s voice and I was in hospital, what I realized was that Sean and I know each other because of our connection, not the beef, and our connection is still there, always will be, the accident was a great leveller, proving that a lot of my relationships both old and recent are really important to me, including Sean, and big fat Brad.
CMG: And the accident ended up putting things in perspective for everyone.
DOSE: Well, put it this way. We weren’t on good terms, and we went from that to Sean helping raise a lot of money for Dax. A lot of money. The single greatest amount next to all the money Subtle put together, more than 20,000, from Sluggo and Rhymesayers. And Aesop Rock and El-P all gave out of pocket, too. I mean there was just this sheer influx of generosity. And we are all forever indebted, in that instant and undeniable way, that rises up around tragic goings-on. Subtle did quite a few shows, and everyone outside the music world came together as well, tonnes of money through Amoeba in California. Amoeba really championed Dax, in a way I’ve never seen a business stand behind an individual -- pretty remarkable actually. There was even an anonymous donor who gave many, many thousands.
But all that is simply a testament to Dax, more than anything else; that guy is of the highest calibre of people that I’ve ever met, he’s himself with people, at all times, he leaves a certain personal and perfect impression.
And, on another level, all the musician people, I think they donated because we actualized “the road’s” worst nightmare. We got into it, the crash, we are lucky everyone’s alive. But that is literally the nightmare that your girlfriend has when you’re on tour. It makes me feel good, to know that we’re all different spreads of the same personalities and un-plans, whether it’s me and Aesop and me and Sean or Marcus Acher from Notwist, we’re all very similar, we all have Up Syndrome.
CMG: What’s that?
DOSE: The opposite of Down Syndrome.
CMG: I’m not even touching that.
DOSE: Well, it’s a little healthier, actually. Because it doesn’t exist, no one’s sensitive about it, it’s politically correct by default.
CMG: What happened with North American Adonis, the project you had recorded with Buck 65 back in, like, 1998 or something?
DOSE: It’s all fucked up, half of it is erased. Buck is a very solo cat though, maybe we could do something together in the future, but he seems to do Buck things best, and I dunno if we’d ever do a whole record again together. But that record was 2 and a half nights, no sleep, in a bedroom. It wasn’t my best shit, pre-Circle writing, before I learned to edit.
CMG: You told me a couple of months ago that you had a big secret about the release of For Hero : For Fool. It’s out now -- you’re on EMI via Lex. How did all that come about? I remember when Lex was like a little offshoot of rap stuff that Warp boutiqued out...
DOSE: Basically Lex was a subsidiary of Warp. After the accident, A New White was still in the negative a couple thousand, and Warp didn’t want to pick up the option, they saw us as expensive, an unsound investment, as it were. Professional not personal…They weren’t really feeling Subtle, generally, and that, along with other things, was a part of Mr. Tom Brown’s decision to leave Warp. Since he has Danger Mouse on his label, he was able to get backing from EMI. And he really stood by us. We feel kept well in his care.
Interestingly enough, Tom is the only person who was at my first show in London, in 1999, who still goes to our shows, except for one other fan who is 4.5 ft tall and also named Tom, who will probably be pretty happy to read his name dropped in this interview, so Hi, 4.5 foot Tom, how are you?
Anyway, Tall Tom gets the deal with EMI behind his amazing and abominable luck of having a Danger Mouse who just so happens to now be the biggest producer in the whole fucking world, and then we signed and expected we’d be on Lex and hoped to be on Astralwerks in the states. That sort of thing is just healthier for distribution, to have someone who is accountable and responsible for getting your music out on this side of the Atlantic. But, back when things were iffy between Warp and Subtle, we never really foresaw us getting a major deal with anyone like EMI or Astralwerks. But it was an odd and honest sequence of events that leaned EMI’s ear to our music, and the record seems to have spoken for itself, and we now have an iron-clad indie deal on a major circuit, which is basically the best you can do. The whip is pimp. And, like, a year ago at this time I was completely directionless, like never before, and now things present themselves and sublimate and one of the reasons I’m really excited about this is that it’s basically a little luck after such lucklessness. And I was just saying the other day how it’s nice to have this piece, this new album, an album that we’ve put more into than we ever thought we had in us in the first place, to be the first record that reaches a lot of heads. I’m sure something will be not-so-positive about upsizing, but we’re still on Lex completely, so we don’t have situations where the major dictates everything. EMI licenses our options, therefore we don’t get not put out in Germany because Ricky Martin is eating up the budget. Before we had a glass ceiling, we did well in the little indie shops, probably as well as we could ask for, but getting into these Virgin Megastores, etc., was tough. They weren’t having us, they saw us as a lost cause, and they can think what they want and order what they want, cool, but we just don’t want to see that happening to this record, the record that we’ve put everything into.
CMG: You said there’s one track on here that’s got 53 vocal tracks on it. How’s that gonna go down live?
DOSE: It’s a breeze man, it’s just a demeanor you have to adopt on stage, you gotta try to be as big as 53 vocal tracks all by yourself. I adore the difference between the two, actually, because I just start slapping people in the face and sweating like a fat kid and that alone feels like five more of my vocals. I do all the style switches you hear on the record, I hold myself fully accountable for the studio acrobatics, because it’s not just “the studio.” We actually build the songs up from how they feel when translated into live from a recorded birth, which might be a little backwards from how other bands work. And then Jeff and Marty and Jordan do backing vocals, and we really miss Dax on that, he’s the little baby Jesus of the backing vocal. And I do all my own effects; I have a chaos pad so I do all my own reverb and delay and whatnots, where my voice would need to thicken up, per se. But together we make a concerted effort to sound as big or encompassing live as we do on the record.
CMG: Are you going to take Yoni (Why?) out on tour to keep things as full as possible? I know a lot of people miss cLOUDEAD.
DOSE: I wish we could do that, I wish we could take Yoni and Andrew (Broder, Fog) and put off a huge show with those guys, but right now it’s not practical or possible. We don’t have enough draw as headliners to pay to feed ourselves or our own opening act, so on this tour we will just pick up the local guys to open for us where we can. And our friends where we have them. But Yoni’s doing his own thing, touring, chilling, actually he’s been touring and really busting his ass. In Anticon he has a solid place to go and come from with his sound, he’s doing phenomenally well, and this makes me grin. But with both of us, now, we’ve got our own separate fan-bases almost, but neither is at the point where he can support the other person on the road, yet, so we won’t be touring with him, it’s just a numbers thing. That’s one of the things if we were up a notch, have larger capacities, all I ever wanted to do was tour with Fog and Why?; it’d be like Phish and the Grateful Dead, “together at last,” but we just can’t do that. All I’m asking for this time is to have amazing, packed, sold out shows for once. And we’re building toward that. It’s like a slow huddle, but certain cities are getting really fucking good.
CMG: It’s gotta be a tough call, I mean, “Will the draw power of Why? + Subtle bring in enough more people to pay for itself…”
DOSE: Kind of. The reality of bringing another band out is that it’s hard on both bands, and there’s no one wanting to take a tour for nothing on the chin, since we just did a brief infinity of tours on the chin. If you bring another band, I mean, we brought Fog out for the last tour, and to do so we had to get money from Lex. This tour we’ll be flying with all the Myspace bands, all around the world.
CMG: Can you steal Dan Boeckner away from Wolf Parade?
DOSE: Ah, the Handsome Furs segue. Well Furs is Dan and Alexi, who is my fiance’s sister. Dan and I did three songs together with my “anything goes” style mixed with Dan’s own “anything goes” style. I don’t contribute to lyrics, I just add harmonies, but it’s my vocals and production. We’re working on that project soon, probably this winter when we both get back from tours. And we just finished one of our Subtle remakes “Middleclass Haunt.” It will be on our new 12” We’re doing another record of For Hero : For Fool reverse-remixes, where we send tapes off to people like Mike Patton and Fog and Hrvatski, who is the homey, Soft Pink Truth, Matmos, just like-minded dudes who take a part of one of our songs, distill it, build their own castle around it, and send it back to us, which we get and finish off ourselves, so it’s like a remixed remix. We send out the original parts and you send it back after hopefully, being inspired, like those rap b-sides where there’s a remix with a sort of new beat and a new verse at the end. These guys just take it, trace whatever they like, and then we take it back and build on that. I think eventually we could do a full remix record where the originals never really existed in the first place.
CMG: Just listening to the record, it sounds like the recording process without any remixing can be that complicated. In parts you can tell that Jel is using his SP 1200, in others the drums sound tapped out like they are on an SP, but they’re too crisp. How are you guys recording percussion?
DOSE: Some of it is traditional Jel drums that he hates that Jordan redoes live. And then Jeff will sample Jordan, and he’ll replay it onto the same part of the song, or a latter part of the same song. And it’s not even that simple because Dax and I both steal from Jel’s drums. I mean, when we play live Jeff plays a myriad of things, stuff he plays and doesn’t play on the record, he’ll play Jordan’s actual take, or we’ll copy Jordan’s take with live drums, and Jordan will sometimes play along, a lot of the time it’s just untraceable. But Jeff is one of the editor hat dudes, basically, he’s often the last say. No matter who does the programming and treatments, nothing goes past Jeff’s radar, just because Jeff and I have made several hundred songs together at this point. His ink is on a lot of stuff. Basically we say that he plays “zip disk.”
CMG: There’s one aspect of the record that I’m really taken by, the recurring appearances of a “hero.” It seems like you’ve written this around a lead character.
DOSE: That’s Hour Hero Yes. He disappears a lot though, but he also sometimes congeals in with his surroundings. And he is a certain character, so I guess he becomes the focus by default. With the Subtle albums, I’m writing a sort of backwards history in records, A New White is the thoughts, panics and milds, of the hero without any concept of the hero, really. All a melt of dreams and nervous lengths in the confines of a one bedroom appartment in Oakland. This record For Hero : For Fool is the actual taking of the hero to the world, into “real life” if you want to call it that, and he’s as much fool as he is all gusto, so he’s actually based on the concept of “rapper,” and some of the personal and modern conflicts in being that. My voice and experiences are in there, but I don’t do the linear “I”-heavy plot, it’s a poetic plot, sans the exact order of events, so the second song is actually a flashback, whereas me on stage is the reality, so the live performance intertwines with the text of the record sort of. And there’s a song called “Middleclass Stomp” in which, you know, it might not be explicit, but he finds himself at a merch booth, sequestered by people with awe in their eyes who express it with fifteen bucks for a t-shirt. It’s all there to hopefully cause people to wonder what all that is. I’m already like 4000 words into the next record. At the end of this record the character dies in his sleep, he makes a right in his dream and doesn’t come back, down a hallway, which leads into a post possible world.
Stepping back, this is setting myself up for a transition, as a writer, I thought it’d be nice if, when I’m 30, I’m not still writing about myself all the time, so this is the only thing that I thought I could do, write a small world slowly but surely, so the next record ties in all the motifs and objects and all the things that don’t make sense right now on these two records, so For Hero : For Fool is a series of scenarios, leading specifically and directly to the next, so after the competition on the rap song he decides to go solo forever and gets a raft, and then he decides to return to the world, he tries to cut a pop song, which is “Mercury Craze,” and then he doesn’t know where that left him after being the hot ticket, and still being himself, so each perspective is first person. But also third, as there’s a lot of outside commentary going on along the way. This album is supposed to be the same progression as A New White, only enhanced. Everything lines up and correlates -- “Red White and Blonde” from A New White pairs up with “Midas Gutz,” “F.K.O.” and “The Mercury Craze” pair up, the arc of the new album follows the arc of the old album, layered right on top of it. We wanted to reapproach A New White while splaying For Hero : For Fool to give it a ghost of what’s continuity, keeping where we were in mind, where we are.
CMG: Do you think you’ll still get 75% of the critics focussing on how nasal your voice can be?