DISCLAIMER: There are very few things I fawn over. I mean weak-at-the-knees-cell-phone-picture-buy-everything-for-sale-will-you-sign-this-refresh-the-homepage fawn. I get psyched on album leaks and deep-dish pizza from Chicago. On new operating systems and Japanese arcades. Hilarious tattoos and good fonts. But the only thing that causes me to regress to starstruck teenager at an American Idol show is anticon. Records emcee Doseone (Adam Drucker in the album booklets). I recognize that this makes me uniquely unqualified to write anything concerning him that does not appear in my AIM profile alongside my favorite lyrics and a shout out to my BFF. You should too.
The first time I saw Doseone his band Subtle was opening for TV On The Radio. Within fifteen minutes of the show’s beginning the rapper, donning a self-painted black and white vest, was prancing around a similarly striped bust screaming, “BLOOD! BLOOD!” and throwing plastic forks into the audience. Since then I’ve seen him sing to skulls, launch into ten minute tangents about deceased futurist Buckminster Fuller (responsibly for that awful, awful dome/ATT ad at Disney’s Epcot Center) being angry about not being on the guest list, and tell horribly off-color jokes about the Jonas Brothers’ mother. This weekend he spent the greater part of five minutes blindly throwing confetti filled eggs into the crowd while chanting, “have an egg” at no one in particular. Subtle was always a show full of moments that exploded.
But every circus trick had a point and every text-your-friends thing done on stage was tempered by the fact that the point of Subtle, and most of the Doseone canon, was that “there is no God, you will die, life is depressing.” The antics were not meant to be simple comic relief, though he acknowledged that that was a factor as he didn’t want to be seen as “taking [myself] too seriously”, but rather a part of the story he wanted to tell (a story which spawned a limited edition dictionary/poetry book and an interactive flash site.)
But with the story still incomplete Doseone has returned to his work with Themselves (as “traditional” of a rap group as one can get when the music is nonlinear ruminations on… something I still haven’t totally figured out.) After their show at The Beauty Bar, Ani and I spoke with Doseone about this change in medium.
GW Hatchet: With so much built around and into the Subtle mythology why have you returned to Themselves?
Doseone: We put everything we had into Subtle. Our hearts, Dax [Pierson’s] body (the multi-instrumentalist of Subtle who was paralyzed in a car accident while on tour) – but the world was indifferent to the music of death in an uncertain genre. And it’s like fuck your indifference, your ambivilence. But, you know, six people had their lives on the line for this and we, we just couldn’t. So Jel and I decided to just be what we are [rappers].
GWH: Does that mean Subtle is done?
D: The world didn’t want it. We made no mistake in pursuing music that had never been made before but people downloaded it or didn’t care.
GWH: Subtle was always more metaphorical than your other projects. Will this style of lyricism go too?
D: My block, the slang from Subtle never goes away. Subtle was about choice and the absence of choice. We’ve been working on this [Themselves’] record quietly for awhile and all of that is still there. The meaning is that this is human, it’s the overlying metaphor.
GWH: But why are you returning to a rap project?
D: Rap is where this started. I wouldn’t paint if it weren’t for rap. I wouldn’t write prose if it weren’t for rap. [Jel and I] always come back to something we love. We grew up loving rap, but so many rappers are… we created a reality that never existed. We never realized that so many rappers were fake. That rappers were backup dancers. And it’s like, people used to come up to the merch booths after shows, back when we just started, and would say ‘Hey man, you know I’m an artist too and I really appreciate what you’re doing,’ and we would talk. Now people come up and are like ‘Yo, I’m DJ Franztap, this is my MySpace.’ What the hell does that mean? Do you, do you like what I am doing? Am I supposed to like you now?
GWH: Even with that you’re still pursuing rap?
D: We’re starting again. I’ve actually been teaching kids in Oakland how to battle and I’m going to go back to it too. I think we’ll do this until we die.
(this following did not actually occur but when I tell the story I will claim otherwise)
GWH: Thanks, you da man.
D: No, you da man.
A.
