People Under The Stairs - I'm Your MySpace Friend - You Owe Me!
People Under the Stairs are heading our way for the Pyramid Rock Festival, The Dwarf caught up with Thes One to discuss the future of hip hop, the Internet and being party dudes.
People Under the Stairs can tour. In fact, Pyramid Rock will be their umpteenth show in 2007. The trick to touring success is that “we joke about everything. The second I pick [Double K] up to go to the airport to leave we start joking about shit – everything is fair game. We have a lot of fun on tour because we try and keep everything light-hearted”. And when they get back to everyday life, “you have to deal with it. When we hit the road we’re kinda like these, we’re the same dudes we are at home, it’s just we have to really be those people. You’re kinda on all the time. Sometimes I get tired on tour and I don’t want to go out and party but I just put a smile on my face and keep going. You come home and then you cry and complain and whine”.
“I think there’s more pressure to be these party dudes, like down with the underground and this and that. I mean, we are those people, but it’s difficult to be those people in every town, every night of a long tour. Sure we go to some peoples house parties after the show and they’re stoked because they can’t believe we’re hanging out and DJing in their living room, but we can’t do that every night after every show, or we’d die.”
I’d be pretty impressed if PUTS turned up at my house after a show to hang out, and “with the internet, you do that once and people find out and then it’s like if you don’t do it with them… and you know, it’s difficult because if a fan wants to talk to us he doesn’t have to go through a body guard or a manager, you know, we’re there. I’ll sit at the merch table and sell t-shirts to people. We’re really accessible, it’s just sometimes when you’re really tired it’s difficult”. But don’t let that stop you from going up and having a chat.
The Internet has assisted the band, and changed the music industry in a big way over the last 5 years, “I think in America as we’ve seen the entertainment conglomerates crumble that artists have had to become more accessible via MySpace and all these things because we’re not selling CD's out of stores that much anymore, so we either have to knock on a fan’s door or see them at a show and literally place the CD in their hand and take the money from them, or get to them online, or whatever, but those of us who kind of continue to do stuff, we have to adapt and be more hands on”. This doesn’t change the PUTS approach much because “we’ve always been that group, but I know a lot of these people from the mid 90s they don’t get it. I still feel like a lot of the hip hop dudes from that era would front on us and wouldn’t acknowledge us, even though we’ve done so much, because we just have a totally different attitude – we have to, it’s the way we survive”.
Things sure have shifted, “back when we were coming up to people we looked up to they were real inaccessible, it was a different time, I couldn’t email Chuck D you know, or something like that. And that was good at the time, I think that’s what made me and Double K work really hard to be who we are. We’re there for the fans”. This has also created fans who “definitely expect more, I mean most fans, especially in a certain age range, they don’t expect to have to pay for music because they’ve just been growing up never paying for music. So it’s difficult, they have a sense of entitlement that we’ve never seen before in fans, this newer generation. Generation Why-Should-I-Pay-For-It – I’m your MySpace friend, you owe me”! This begs the question “Dude you’re my MySpace friend? Next time I have to move I’ll give you a call, you can come over and move my MySpace couch”.
Seriously though, PUTS are a little notorious as before the release of Stepfather in 2006 they leaked a fake on the internet. “It’s hilarious to me because you’ve got all these dudes complaining and whining and crying, from Metaillica right down to the underground artists, about how they can’t make money anymore. So when it came to the time for us to release our album I just said, why don’t I release a fake album and then we can judge how far it goes. You know honestly, I don’t think that many people downloaded the fake album, probably a couple of thousand – which is a lot for a group like us that doesn’t sell a lot.”
When the internet first became a music tool “people were saying that it was empowering independent artists, because everyone had access to their music, but I think what they realised is that not everyone’s music needs to be accessible. Like there’s a tonne of people who make music and they suck, you don’t need to hear them. There are a lot of people that are talented and they’ve devoted their lives to music and we do need to hear them and we can’t because we have to wade through 2 million songs to hear the one song made by the one dude in his bedroom who’s actually talented. It’s to the point where we can’t be bothered to look for that anymore, and all the quality of all music has gone down because of this, and the one guy who’s devoting his life to it who actually is talented, he can’t make a buck doing it anymore so he has to get a job flipping burgers”.
People like “Rupert Murdoch and these people who run MySpace and all that, they like to make you think that you’re being heard, but you’re not really being heard in a way that counts – you’re another page to advertise on, and another way to keep track of what trends people are into at any given point in time. You’re just a marketing tool for corporations”.
This also leads to the biggest challenge facing hip hop today, “the rappers. Rap music is the easiest music to make, in a sense, if you can rhyme two words together – and most people who aren’t complete vegetables can do that – then you theoretically can be a rapper, start a MySpace page, get a beat from your homeboy, and make a rap song – everyone from my grandma to whoever can do that. I think that’s what’s hurting it, the fact that it was so difficult to be in the industry at a certain point in time, it weeded out all the people that didn’t belong, and hip hop was great. The only stuff that we heard was the stuff that was good enough to rise to the top and be released by a major label. And I mean it sucked for the artists cause being on a major was probably really bad for them, but for a listener it was awesome because we weren’t subjected to all these crappy groups getting signed you know what I mean, there was just so much competition that we only heard the Public Enemy and Tribe Called Quest and it was great”!
So the conclusion is the “catch 22 about hip hop, it’s the people’s music and the people are killing it”.
People Under The Stairs play Pyramid Rock Festival December 31st
