Blackalicious - Return to Australia

The Naked Dwarf chatted to Chief XL as they prepare to return to Australia.

ND: So what’s bringing you back to Australia?

Chief XL: We just love it. I love the fact I can be down there in December when it’s freezing here and it’s summer there.

ND: I just want to go back to the beginning of Blackalicious - you guys met in high school about 20 years ago can you give us a sort of insight into the sort of stuff you were doing back then?

Chief: Back then it was really for “name” just about battle rap and for me it was more about strictly break beat and that was really what we were raised by and how we started our musical journey together.

ND: How about lyrical content back then – has your outlook changed over the 20 years?

Chief: If you read an essay that you rote in grammar school and then you compare that to something that you did in high school and then you compare that to something that you did in college, your work reflects who you are and where you are. We started travelling through music together as children all the way into adult hood and now as grown men.

ND: It took you a little while before you started recording - about three or four years after forming – why did you wait so long?

Chief: Well we were recording but we were just doing demos. It took a while before we put out our first record. We had been doing demos and we had done the whole shop-demos-to-record-labels thing. 1990 was when I went off to UC Davis and that’s where I met the rest of the folks that would later become the Soul Side and form that label and in forming that label we created a whole vehicle to put out our records.

ND: You ended up eventually sign a big deal with MCA but kept roots with Quannum of course – what was the decision making process behind signing that big deal?

Chief: Really our aim was to keep reaching more and more people with our music. It didn’t matter if they [the label] were indie or major as long as long as our records would keep getting out. At the end of the whole “meer?” record cycle if you will we felt like we had pushed it as far as we could push it on our own and the next record we just needed more resources to be able to get the record out there. The thing with MCA was a logical progression for us.

ND: So you’ve kept a lot of creative control then?

Chief: Yeah, we have to maintain creative control with whatever we do.

ND: you spent a lot of time in San Francisco with a big jazz and indie scene there – how much influence did that have on your music?

Chief: WE actually spent most of our time on the East side in Oaklands which is different but is still deeply rooted in this whole independent scene. So we grew up with people who influenced our style there like Digital Underground and a long list of long legacies many of whom are artists that represent their own times and have their own fan bases. Musically, growing up in this area is just so rich.

ND: You have gotten to work with a lot of great guests artists as well as being influenced by them Gil Scott Herron being just one of them. Are there any artists that you are planning on working with in the future or you’re planning on working with?

Chief: Oh yeah well I plan on making music with many people. I hate giving a list because I always remember about 5 or 10 other people that I forgot to mention, but, you know, just to name a few I would love to work with Alicia Keyes and I would love to work with Aretha Franklin. I’m just a fan of music.

ND: You have a very spiritual side to your music and your style of hip hop has always been held up as an example of “positive” hip hop in comparison with gangster rap and the like – was there any hesitation in taking that more positive path?

Chief: The main hesitation is in having labels put on our music. We do music as who we are as people. So I thought of cringe at the whole thing of ‘positive’ because at the end of the day we’re making art. People always need for whatever reason a way to categorise things in their mind to figure out how it fits into their world view but we just don’t like to be put into anybody’s box.

ND: So when you listen to hip hop that is so lyrically different to yours, and so out of line with your world view – you don’t have any negative feedback for them?

Chief: You know the only categories that I put on music are good and bad and I’m looking for what, to me, is good. To me, what is good is creative, expressive and done in a way that’s innovative. That’s the sort of music that I always tend to go towards. If everybody had the same message the world would be a very, very boring place. That’s the beautiful thing about music as art – art can be a vehicle of expression of life experiences. I just don’t think anybody should be told to tell an experience that’s not theirs.

ND: What is a Blackalicious show like for those that may never have seen you before?

Chief: We really work hard to make our live show an experience. We really want people to feel like they walked away with something greater than the album they’re listening too. They can go home and put the CD back on a relive that experience they went through. We work hard to make our shows interactive and we work hard to make it, as we say, a transference of energy between us and the audience. We definitely looking forward to getting down there because at this point in our career we’ve really been to pretty much every country and the one common denominator is a genuine love of music. People say to us all the time well “what’s your favourite city” and we really don’t have one it’s just really every place that loves music because that’s what makes a Johannesburg crowd the same as a New York crowd the same as a Honolulu crowd the same as Tokyo crowd.

ND: With your various trips to Australia have you heard much Aussie hip hop and what are your thoughts on Australian hip hop?

Chief: Well you know I haven’t heard enough to say that I’m really versed in it. the last time I was in Australia we were introduced to a band called Upshot and I signed them to our level and the record is out here in America. We are always looking for new inspiration, we look forward to travelling to different companies to experience music from diff perspectives I just wish we could get more of it from home.

ND: how to you find hip hop from different countries when you take it to America – how do you go selling these wildly different cultural experience to that audience?

Chief: It’s difficult because media outlets in America are very, very conservative and they tend to be very careful of taking risks when it comes to art that is expressing popular culture from different world views so I think that’s what the biggest challenges are to international hip hop in America and that’s the main reason why we don’t see a lot of it over here.

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