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Subtitle Interview
I hate to try to be all profound and shit, but let’s get serious here for a second. Subtitle could be exactly what the Los Angeles music community needs for a bit of cohesive growth. He’s steeped in the LA underground hip hop tradition as a member of Weekend Science Experiment (with Mums the Word), West Coast Workforce (with Megabusive) and Labwaste (with Adlib). He’s shared the stage with such luminaries as Aesop Rock, Anticon, Shape Shifters and Living Legends. Yet, he’s intensely interested in music, in general, and the LA rock underground in particular. Both of which are fitting because he lives underground in a futuristic half-mile deep steel-walled burrow. No, I’m kidding, but you come across the word “underground” a lot when you read about the dude. I guess it’s because his music (and the performance of it) is pretty unconventional, a true amalgam of tastes and styles. He released an EP on GSL in early 2003, and has a lot of shit coming out in 2004, including a solo LP.
We sat down with him, after his show at Qtopia, over a free hot dog at The White Horse. Murs was there, too and said a few things.
Note from Kim, our intern who transcribed the interview: There were some dudes at The White Horse getting really excited about playing pool, so I couldn’t understand some of the words, sorry.
How’s the hot dog?
Good. It’s a good hot dog. It’s not that warm anymore. I’m wondering how much dog is actually in the hot dog. Funny thing, speaking of weird meat, this morning I threw away some really wild bologna in my refrigerator. This bologna actually had new life growing off the sides…
And bologna can go a long time…
…A long time, bologna’s like that bomb shelter atomic food…My refrigerator doesn’t work, so I don’t get a lot of vegetables. This is probably the healthiest thing I’ve eaten in a week.
I’m glad we could help.
Thank you.
Had you played Qtopia before?
No, I’d been there a couple of times, but this was the first time I played there. I guess none of us were prepared for what went down with the system...Just for you guys out there in Print Land who weren’t there: at the Subtitle show earlier, it was running off a CD Discman that wasn’t loud enough. So it was a lot of me falling and jumping back and forth between the stage and the speaker, to try to monitor myself and stay on beat. It’s not like I’m up there with a DJ, or a penguin dressed like a DJ, or a dog or some shit; it’s just me. And I could be telling jokes, or I could be doing that.
How do you like playing with punk rock bands?
I love it. I’m glad you asked that question because it’s a question I’ve wanted to answer, but no one’s asked. Before this year, I’ve played with a couple bands here and there. And most of my ground’s covered in underground hip hop, you know, trying to get out there. I stopped messing with a lot of hip hop stuff because it was getting kind of burnt to me, you know. I wasn’t able to do the stuff I wanted to do, like records I was trying to do weren’t coming out. I was making music that I wasn’t really into making, just so it would come out. And then it wasn’t coming out anyway. I was like, why am I bothering? So I just locked myself up in a rehearsal studio for a year and started working on music. That’s when I met Sonny Kay and Omar and them from GSL, and that whole relationship just caught on from seeing them at shows. I did a couple of remixes just to give them because I like the GSL label a lot. And once that all solidified, people saw me around and heard that I was this new rapper, or whatever, and fools asked me to do shows, “Hey come do a show; we’re throwing these fucked up shows, come rap…” And I’m like, “Cool.” My early shows were like me rapping but breaking a lot of shit, throwing shit, breaking glasses. I was doing the bar circuit a lot around Hollywood. That probably got me a rep for being abrasive and weird. We’d go on stage wearing weird stuff, weird glasses, a cymbal around your neck attached to an 8-ounce steak, just whatever. And falling off the stage…full flailing…I busted my hip real bad at The Garage. I’d throw myself into concrete walls and all kinds of shit. My hip still hurts now. I did four separate flips into a wall and landed on a pile of mic stands. That’s what happened–
how my hip got put out of place.
Do you like doing collaborations or your solo stuff more?
Today I was thinking how much more I like being in a group than solo. But then, when I’m in a group, I keep thinking about how much more I like being solo than being in a group…
It’s like having a girlfriend…
Yeah, that’s the thing…two minds are better than one with certain things, but if you’re pretty autonomous and just like working on your own conditions…Like [my show] tonight, for instance, just going up there and popping in a CD and knocking out a dope show that’s 13 minutes and 43 seconds long, it’s cool. And it looks crazier because it’s just you. It’s not like 300 dudes. It’s not like you have an entourage on stage, fucking waving banners and shit. It makes it more honest to me. I don’t walk around like I’m some velour suit wearing fool, but I don’t sell out the fact that I rap. I do that shit, you know, and I’m representing hip hop. But I want to try to get it back to, you know, the punk aesthetic of it…Like, “This is it,” you know, “Here you go.” That’s why I like doing shows with more rock groups because it’s not so prima donna-ish, where motherfuckers wanna lay down, you know, “I can’t play right now, my eye’s hurting.” These [rock bands] are dudes that’ll cut themselves on the chest with broken glass, like, go do Math homework on their chests or something–while playing the show–and still kill the show. I just kinda took that aesthetic and ran with it. With this shit it’s like everybody’s in the same boat more or less. I’m just another dude trying to go do a show. “Hey what’s up, I’m Subtitle. What time do I go on?” …
…I do like The Fallen. I do like Shoot Out the Lights (bands he played with that night); I liked Radio Vago before that–that’s who I went on tour to Europe with. This was my first night seeing [Shoot Out the Lights]. They were dope. They did a cover of that Outkast song, “Dracula’s Wedding.” They fucking killed it. She, [the singer] was dancing all Kabuki and shit. All this stuff right now, it makes me happy. It’s more than just a gang of groups in a room. You know, you go to some of these clubs and it’s like, at 10:30 this fool performs and they get them out. Then, 11:00 this other fool performs, and they each have their own crowd. Tonight you saw [what audience] was there for each performer, but everybody stuck around to see each act. Everybody was stoked because it was a good mix. People were checking out shit that they normally might not have fucked with. It’s a new kind of camaraderie; it’s like a new scene. It hasn’t happened a lot before because it might not be in everybody’s best interest, like, “Damn, I can’t risk losing $200 on some dive bar because I want to get five of my favorite accordion groups and a rapper.”
(laughter)
You’re working on an LP?
Yeah, (laughs) Oh shit, (to recorder) the hot dog just flipped over...Um…what I have coming up new is a full-length album tentatively titled Technicalifornia. A lot of different people are producing tracks for it, instead of me trying to sit there and produce the whole thing myself. Omid, this dude on Mush, did the single, Octavious did a couple songs–he’s on some wild stuff. One with Busdriver. And then, Alias from Anticon gave me two beats that are bangin as hell…I got a list of stuff…
That sounds like good fucking people to work with.
Yeah. That dude Nobody, I have a beat from him. And that’s a dude that you can get one beat a year from, or one beat every ninety years, and it’ll be a great beat. I definitely was lucky about that. I was saving this up for all the favors and shit…“Remember? I shined your shoes back in ’94.” (laughs)
When’s that set for?
March or April. The single comes out in February. And there’s a lot of other stuff on there that I’m not going to say, that’s going to be a surprise…I’ve got some other stuff coming out, too–I’ve got a record coming out on Plug Research. Labwaste, that’s coming out on GSL, this project I did with Mums the Word, that’s coming out on GSL…
(We get talking about Project Blowed)
I’d like to say something about Project Blowed. I used to go there a lot when I was younger, not that much younger, but younger. It’s gotten a bad reputation as of late because there are people there that are into actually rapping, and there are people there that are into being there because it’s the thing to do on a Thursday. Then a lot of kids that are coming, are coming from out of town, and they don’t know. They see fools freestyling, and they think anybody in there is from Blowed, which isn’t generally the case. Like a lot of the better, premier rappers aren’t even rapping; they stand around. Some of the doper, younger dudes like Teradactyl, or Otherwise, or Busdriver or somebody will come out and really try to do it…
(Murs hands an issue of Fran to Subtitle, opened to an ad.)
Murs: [unintelligible]
Subtitle: (to recorder) OK, there’s a wild dog right here...um and it’s on K Records. It’s a Cocker Spaniel that looks like it’s having a jovial time and it offended Murs…
But, yeah, Blowed is sick, and I just hope more new blood goes to Project Blowed. So they can give all the original gangsters there, you know, get their hearts back to beating fast again.
Murs: Kale (I guessed on the spelling –Kim) and No Can Do got their asses whipped at Scribble Jam this year, and I bet money on them just because they’re from LA. I never met them, and they said they were from Project Blowed, they trained there, and they fucking lost. First round. Got tore up. I lost forty dollars and looked like an ass.
Subtitle: Murs lost forty dollars ‘cause of Kale and No Can Do, shame on y’all. Shame on y’all, losing people’s money, saying you’re from Blowed.
Murs: Otherwise wouldn’t have let that happen.
Subtitle: Naw, but then they would’ve just not let Otherwise win. Otherwise would’ve just got affronted on by somebody wearing a Smurf suit, talking about he likes Otherwise’s face or something like that. It wouldn’t have been the same kind of battle. Naw, Otherwise wouldn’t have let that happen. (to Murs) Do you remember Dr. Rap?
Murs: Uh huh, best thing that happened to Blowed.
Subtitle: There was this dude, this 62-year-old German man, Dr. Rap. It’s funny because I’m in the newspaper somewhere for saying I helped teach him how to rap. What happened was, he had a wild seizure, and after he recovered he could only talk in rhyme. So one of his patients told him about Project Blowed, like, “You need to go over there and bust some shit and really get that going.” I swear to God. He was the coolest motherfucker. He’d come over wearing wind-breakers and shit. Yeah, he’s come over and battled fools; he’d even come to sessions and shit. Then he changed it into Dr. Flow. He was a bad motherfucker.
Murs: He was a Blowdian.
Subtitle: So every time a white person says to me, “Is it safe for me to go to Project Blowed?” I’m like, “A 63-year-old man who’s white as hell, German man… Aryan, was up there kicking raps… with the brothers…in the hood…getting a good response… Yes, it is safe for you to go to Project Blowed.” (to Murs) Do you remember that old pimp, looked like Charlton Heston? Like the black Charlton Heston? He had a long-ass conch, and he drove a Maxima, and he always tried to pull me into his car and smoke a blunt and talk to me about rapping. I forgot his name, he had a real crazy-ass name like Lick ‘Em Low or some shit. This fool always rapped about pimps, and he’d always come and redo Da Brat’s “Funkdafied”.
Murs: That was when Blowed was a world unto it self.
Subtitle: Exactly, and you will not see that anymore. That’s why I say what I say. I was surprised that people liked me at Blowed when I went and rapped there; I was amazed. I hadn’t been in like two years, and I was supposed to go on the 8th. I just went on the 1st to get the fuck out of there. Then they are like hitting the lights while I’m rapping, and I start jumping into the crowd while the lights are out, so it looks all crazy and stuff. Then everybody’s like, “Yeah man, that was cool. You did good with the lights. You presented yourself.” Chu told me I presented myself well, which is a miracle.
Bartendress: Last call.
Subtitle: It’s time for us to leave the bar. So I’m going to stand up… um… wwwla2thebay.com, go there for no apparent reason and see stuff.
Murs: www DOT. You forgot the dot after the www.
Subtitle: www dot LA… man, I’m thinking you’re pretty intuitive by now; you don’t put a www, unless you have a dot after it…Oh, um, buy whatever Murs puts out because he needs the money for his Cadillac. Buy whatever I put out because I’m very, very poor, and I have a harpoon rip in my jacket.
Murs: What about your heart disease.
Subtitle: I have a bad heart, too, Marfan Syndrome. I may be dead at 35. So buy my record so I can go pay my insurance bill. And I love my young lady, and Shannyn is my friend.
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