self-titled - no. 3 - (Page 62)

Adam, you wanted to be a mainstream rapper? Doseone: I wanted to just rap. I was the real thing for the ’90s. Why?: Adam was evil. He was just really super dark. Doseone: And I’m going to go back to that. After I’m done with this record, I want to do some battling again. For real? Doseone: Yeah. The pressure is different for me now. I can’t not speak about it in shaman terms, but now I zone out completely—in another place. I can’t wait to go back and battle these over-clothed pretenders. Has a lot changed since then in the freestyle battle scene? Doseone: Oh, that shit now is all pre-written. Why?: The battle days were very distinctive to that time. It’s not like that anymore. Doseone: It’s very pop now. The only contest I have ever been in was Scribble Jam, but over time I battled hundreds of rappers in my life. When I rapped, I tried to be intellectual. And that’s what attracted me to Yoni’s style. He wrote this one poem Why?: I was crap back then. Doseone: You read this one poem about “packing up babies in toilet paper,” and I didn’t get it at first, and then he said it again at the end of the poem. I was like, “Oh, fuck, that’s so dope.” I realized then that I didn’t want to write from my head. I wanted to make more poetry. At the time you were my only poetry influence. Why?: We got each other more serious about writing. Doseone: I remember the day you came home with a poem: “Parking meter, bird feeder.” Why?: [Laughs] That’s so embarrassing. In high school I would write in a journal. Adam was real serious about that sort of thing. Sometimes I would write a poem or whatever just to do it. It started to get focused on music pretty quickly after I started writing seriously. [Odd Nosdam joins us in the room.] When did you first meet up with Why? and Doseone? Odd Nosdam: I first met his brother Josiah [also in the band Why?] in elementary school. We went to school together from first to twelfth grade. The first time I met Yoni, me and Josiah wrote a book together. I drew for it. I remember going to the Wolfs’ household and just hanging there. Why?: I think I met you before that. Odd Nosdam: As time went on, Josiah and I stayed pretty good friends, but after high school I didn’t see him much. Back in ’98 I started making music. Why?: Dave was really thugged out in high school. Adam: Dave and I were more wiggery than anyone. We were ethnically transposing ourselves. Odd Nosdam: I had a skin-fade back then. I grew up in a predominately black neighborhood in Cincinnati, and rap was the music I heard all around me. That was the music that clicked for me. I was so young. I didn’t really understand what I was listening to. I equated rap music with music like Lionel Richie. There was no difference to my ears. But then I stopped listening to hip-hop in, like, ’95 because of the direction it went. Back then, though, I was like the only white kid in my entire high school listening to rap. I was known as that. Did that make you a pariah? Why?: [Laughs] What the fuck did you just call him? Odd Nosdam: I was much more accepted by the black crowd than the white one, for sure. In a Wire cover story a few years ago, one of the quotes equated Nirvana to the blues like cLOUDDEAD was to hip-hop—warping the music until it became something entirely new. Doseone: Well, I don’t think that’s true. Why?: Adam isn’t a conventional rapper. Doseone: That was because of always having dope rappers around me and wanting to be different. The kids at our high school went out of our way to seek out the newest shit in rap. Odd Nosdam: I met Adam in ’98, when I was thinking the newest shit was Dr. Octagon, and Company Flow was the only thing happening in hip-hop. Doseone: I had this whole shelf with all the far-out shit like Buck 65 I showed it to him, and he was like, “Where’s this shit been?” Buck has been around for that long? Doseone: Sole has been rapping since ’92. Buck’s been around since then. Odd Nosdam: Can I finish my story real quick? I started making music in ’98, and that’s when everything changed. I went straight-edge and sobered up, went vegan. I was in art school. I met Yoni in a record store where I was selling photocopies of paintings I was making of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. And they were actually selling. I had this cassette of music I was making. Why?: Was that me or Josiah? We ran into each other. I can’t remember where though. Odd Nosdam: Maybe it was Josiah. And he told me you guys were in a band together. I came by a practice and hung out, and that’s where I met Mr. Dibbs. We sat in my car that night, and I played them some early beats. When you say you were making music, what does that mean? Odd Nosdam: I had an eight-track, and I was sampling. Why?: Really dark beats—spaced-out. Real bass-y. Doseone: We were sample-happy at our apartment at the time. We were looping everything, but Dave had a sound. I was listening to some of that early shit the other day. You still have all of this? Doseone: Oh, I keep everything. Why?: I don’t have shit. http://www.buck65.com/ http://www.myspace.com/timholland http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=6477786 http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID=6477786

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of self-titled - no. 3

self-titled - no. 3 Contents Titus Andronicus A.C. Newman Los Campesinos! Zombi Arthur Russell Gentleman Jesse Circlesquare Oneida Cut Off Your Hands Frances and the Lights School of Seven Bells and Free Blood ...Trail of Dead’s Conrad Keely cLOUDDEAD

self-titled - no. 3

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