Last Thursday, November 12, Tufts Concert Board brought Brother Ali (Ali Newman) and The Cool Kids (Antoine "Mikey Rocks" Reed and Evan "Chuck Inglish" Ingersoll) to Tufts University for a performance in the cage at Cousens Gym. Before the show, Nick Gang and Mitchell Geller got a chance to talk with the artists together. Though Ali and the Cool Kids come from different places stylistically, and hold seemingly opposing places in the world of hip-hop, they presented a fascinating picture of where hip-hop comes from, where it is today and where it's heading in the future.
Far from rapper Nas' bleak declaration on his 2006 album that "hip-hop is dead," these artists showed hip-hop to be very much alive and kicking.
Nick Gang: So I though we'd start off talking about some hip-hop history. You guys both talk a lot about your influences from the "golden age" of hip-hop like Eric B & Rakim, KRS-One, Brand Nubian, etc. What did you guys try to take from that music and what makes you different?
Evan Ingersoll: With my influences, it's not always just music. When you were little and you saw somebody on TV that looked cool, it was like "damn if I had some money I would dress just like him." And as you grow up that's just what you've encoded from the beginning because that's what you saw first. So obviously when it comes to the music, you're either gonna try and emulate that or try and make it better. I know it's 25 years down the road and we're supposed to sound more advanced, but the feeling shouldn't change. This is who we've been the whole time. I didn't have to throw [these clothes] on, you know. This isn't just an act. I didn't have to buy a new pair of shoes for the show, this is what I was gonna wear anyway. I felt like [the old school rappers] was doing that. They didn't have to go out and throw on the super expensive stuff for the club. They [were] probably wearing what they put on that morning to go to the store.
Antoine Reed: And ended up at the party at night, that's all.
Ali Newman: After touring with Rakim twice, the whole country, I can attest that that man is "crispy" (in unison with Mikey and Chuck).
Mitchell Geller: What's it like to have experiences like that? You grew up listening to [Rakim], he must have been a big influence on you, and now you can say you've kicked it with him.
AR: It's crazy, it's like meeting your super heroes, man, it's like some comic book stuff. Especially when you like a shorty lookin' at them and it all look like magic when you're little and you don't understand it. It's like meeting a super hero.
EI: It's a double edged sword though, because you can meet some people and they can be everybody you thought they wasn't, and you'll just be like "Damn, for real? This is who they are? I wish I didn't even walk in this room."… Like I ain't gonna say no names, we met a rapper that I really looked up to and we was there at a party and we was all chilling and everybody was smoking and it was a good ass time. He wanted to talk to a girl so he had everybody kicked the f-ck out so he could talk to the girl… who does that?
AN: The thing that I always try to remember is that these people could've started out as great dudes, but they didn't have the benefits that we had: it was uncharted territory. They didn't have it as easy as we had it. Even though we gotta grind and work. They didn't have it like that and I just assume that I caught them on a bad day or something like that and try to give them the benefit of the doubt … Because I'm telling you man, Rakim is every bit the person that you wish he was and the same thing with Chuck D. Chuck D actually is more -- the more I get to know him as a man, the more respect I have.
EI: Yeah, because it was a generational thing, like when it first started it had to be authentic. It had to be. There was no other choice. You didn't even know.
AR: You didn't even know you could fake it.
EI: You were the punk kid who was rapping over what they didn't even think was music. So what you had on you didn't even know was the uniform. And then you get the second generation that seen it happen and didn't know anything else so they emulated and it ends up being a couple steps short. And then you got the generation that watched everybody whack do it and that's where we at. We had a lot of bad examples of the stuff to stay away from. We wanna stay away from anything fake.
NG: One of the things I really like about hip-hop is the good storytellers. Some of them I can really empathize with but others are so different from my own life that it's like looking through a window into someone else's life. Are there any artists like that where you feel like, ‘wow I never saw things from that perspective?'
AR: Man, tons.
AN: I felt like some of these men were raising me. They were people that I look up to that taught me something about being a man. Stuff that I might not otherwise have been exposed to. Especially people like Chuck D [of Public Enemy], KRS-One and Ice T. You listen to them and you learn a lot about their life and the way they saw the world and the way they interacted with things.
AR: Yeah, it's all about perspective, that perspective is what interests people. When you see it from someone else's perspective and you're like, ‘damn I never thought I could see it that way but it makes sense now.' That's what draws you in man. It's trying to see who can come up with the illest perspective. You could say the same thing as this dude over here but if you're saying it from another angle that hasn't been touched.
EI: You really don't know how bright colors are to other people. That's one of the things that's always been cool about rap. What [Brother Ali] was saying about raising, there's stuff that rap did for me that my parents wouldn't even know to do. I got a lot of stuff from Wu Tang and that series of albums. I picked up almost everything I did off that, all my jackets, the way I wear my boots. At a certain age you're not advanced enough to start anything so you had to follow them. Definitely a lot of Raekwon [of the Wu Tang Clan] influenced me. Just watching all of those old videos. I remember coming home in second grade and seeing that on the TV. That changed my life.
MG: A lot of rappers have been hurt by internet piracy and blogs, but you guys seem to have been helped by that, releasing most of your work for free online and on your MySpace. How do you feel the internet has affected you guys and hip-hop in general?
AR: In the first place, you know, you're able to spread info way quicker… but you know it helped us out a lot in the beginning because people could get our stuff a lot quicker. They didn't have to wait for singles to get put out, they could just grab five songs at a time, you know, rip them off MySpace or if they saw them on YouTube or somebody's blog or whatever they found it on… they were able to just have them instantly. But the other side of it is that it's way less personal so the opinions sometimes are kinda like skewed and it could be for multiple reasons. It could be somebody who's just f-cking around or somebody who's actually got a valid opinion, but you never know because it's such a faceless thing, so it's better to rely on somebody you trust, somebody whose ear you trust to find stuff rather than go take the opinion of people you've never seen -- those are just text boxes, really those ain't even people, so you gotta kinda just take it with a grain of salt.
MG: So you think that's really changed hip-hop in the last couple of years?
AR: Yeah, definitely that's changed it, man. Sometimes it makes people a little bit less patient because you can get stuff so fast. People are impatient for the next thing…it kinda shortens the attention span a little bit. To fight that you could just keep coming out with ridiculous stuff all the time, I guess, but it definitely shortens up the attention span since you get everything so quick, and you don't wait wait for release dates.
MG: Your video dropped yesterday for "Knocked Down." MTV compared it to a modern Chicago hipster version of [Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre's] "Nothing But a G' Thang." How do you feel about that? You release it, Twitter about it a couple hours ago, and then MTV is already talking about it a few hours later. Four years you've been in the game, how are you dealing with your fame?
AR: Yeah I don't even known man… It's hard to sit back and look at that. It's dangerous to do that anyway, man, so I'm just gonna keep moving forward.
EI: It's cool when people like your music, and I do appreciate that, but the whole fame, like "are they gonna let me in because I'm famous," I'll kick it out with everybody else.
AR: Behind the rope like a zoo animal and stuff, you don't even get to hang out with everybody else. It's not all it's chalked up to be. It's not what you should get into music for because you will be disappointed. If you get in for the fame you will be disappointed and you will be taken advantage of.
EI: You'll see what happens. I mean, you've seen what happens to that. We want to be the ones to show you what happens if you just make the music.
AR: Be cool. MG: So you're just trying to keep it real? EI: Just keep it realistic. AR: It is. It's keep it real to you… if it ain't real to you it's not something you should be doing 9 times out of 10.
EI: And sometimes people don't know, man, they just don't know any better. We know we set an example, man. Everything you talk about and you read about. You got like VH1's "Celebrity Baller Special" and whatever, and how much you gotta pay to get into this club, and you should just go to the bar down the street. You'll probably find cooler people there.
NG: I know you guys produce all of your own beats. When it comes to writing songs do you make a beat and then write verses around it or write rhymes first?
EI: I just make stuff and then after I make it, when I have the rhythm, I'll start writing some raps to it. Sometimes by the time I listen to it, it'll actually be about something. Then we'll come up with a little diddy, just a little something that fits in with the beat. Then we have our chorus.
AR: I gotta hear the beat first, I don't like writing without a beat. It's gotta talk to me and tell me what I gotta be saying and what I'm supposed to feel like. It's always collaboration between me and the beat. Everything I do is specifically for that beat. You can tell when somebody wrote something for another beat and then just slapped it onto a song. It lacks some heart or something like that. I always have to jam out to a beat and just hear every sound in it and match up with it.
