|
|
-- Shaheem Reid, with additional reporting by Greg Kaplan
NEW YORK — With his unwillingness to conform musically and his
love for underground music, you'd never figure acclaimed subterranean rhyme
slinger El-P would look up to a certain rap world do-it-all from New
Orleans.
"Master P is a personal hero of mine," El-P admits, sitting on the living
room floor in his Brooklyn apartment and squeezing a Master P doll.
It's not P's gold teeth, his $3 million bedroom or even his sometimes
elementary lyrics like "Mary had a big ol' butt/ In them tight-ass jeans
it'd show/ And every club that Mary was at/ Them thugs were sure to go"
— it's the No Limit colonel's keen business savvy.
"Master P is an independent mogul," El-P said, continuing to give props.
"Not that I'm necessarily shooting for mogul, but the guy knows how to run a
record label."
As CEO and the top artist on his own Definitive Jux label (formerly Def
Jux), El-P is becoming as comfortable putting out records as he is making
them.
"I decided that I was gonna create this label, and I was going to put myself
in the center of that," he said. "[I wanted] to help the cats that I think
are talented to do their thing. I think a good type of company is a company
that has an idea or a sense of purpose, a philosophy, and really that's the
only thing I have and the people around me have. I've had some experience in
this, and that was really the creation of it.
"Most of the action goes on downstairs," he said, referring to his home
studio. It was in his lab that he carved out the complex wordplay for his
latest album, Fantastic Damage, on which he ferociously attacks
social misdoings.
"Strangely enough, a large percentage of the audience knows all the lyrics.
My lyrics, if you know my music, you can't really follow the bouncing ball,"
said El. "I wanted to make an album that was human and real and nervous."
There was no anxiousness in 1996 when El-P (formerly El-Producto) and former
partner Bigg Jus signed with then-upstarts Rawkus Records. The duo debuted
on the label in 1997 with Funcrusher Plus after having sold their
first album, Funcrusher, hand-to-hand in the street.
"We were in the position to be offered a bunch of different deals from a
bunch of different labels," El recalled while tidying up his apartment and
apologizing for the cat urine odor. "Rawkus was a label that was looking for
an identity at the time. They didn't have any, nor do they now. Rawkus was
the only label that was desperate enough to bend to our wills. We got down
with them, and through their connection with us and through their connection
with Mos Def and Talib Kweli and a couple of other cats, started to
represent to a lot of people the new sound of hip-hop music."
The downstairs area of his apartment is where El-P has spent a large portion
of his post-Rawkus and -Company Flow life producing for other artists.
"You know this couch has actually seen probably every underground rapper's
ass in the history of hip-hop," he boasts, showing off his modest piece of
furniture. "Zack de la Rocha's ass, Dan the Automator, Mos Def has recorded
here."
El-P is hoping that he and his label's crew of artists, the Def Jukies, can
share in the success of some of his past collaborators.
"I've been making music for years," he said. "But I'm a new face. And that's
cool to me. It's a grass-roots thing. We're the hip-hop equivalent of what
the indie-rock scene has been doing. We believe that if people get exposed
to it, they'll like it and buy it."
If not, he still feels lucky to be following his love.
"Self-employed people just like to hang around in their neighborhoods all
day," he said, laughing. "It's the gift of doing music, I guess."
###
 What do you think of this story? You Tell Us...
E-Mail this story to a friend
|
|
|
