CakeDrank: August 2011

As one of the world’s most refreshing rappers, Spank Rock has owned us. Shame he thinks hip-hop is almost dead...

Spank Rock, AKA Naeem Juwan, has had a turbulent time since his groundbreaking, critically acclaimed riot of crude sex references and party time debut album ‘Yoyoyoyoyo’. It’s been six years between that and his sophomore offering, spectacularly titled ‘Everything Is Boring And Everyone Is A Fucking Liar’. He’s a thoughtful man, obviously somewhat introspective, and laughingly asks how long do I have when I ask him how things are.

How am I generally? This is gonna be a long interview! How much time do you have?

I'm good man. I've been having a lot of new experiences, so I'm trying to catch up with everything. It's funny, you know, I think when I put out my first record the music industry wasn't affected by the internet. It was really cool. Really amazing artist were getting attention and we were hearing things that we wouldn't have heard before. And now the internet is the fucking internet. It's like a monster it's like throwing shit into this cloud. This dark cloud.

It's been funny watching something that was a food tool for me in the beginning turn into something that is potentially ruining people's experience of music.

Because there's so much of it?

I don't think there being so much of it is a real problem - people can decide for themselves what they like and what they don't like. I think it's more about the way consumerism acts so quick and trends just come flying in and out. At first you could be like the biggest band for like a year or maybe two. Now you're the biggest band for a month or a week.

It's strange because I think it's affecting the way young kids are making music too. I think a lot of people make it to get a quick, instant reaction from people instead of really affecting them. Because ultimately you want people to like you and be famous and shit. You want to be 'oh shit, I'm the dopest band right now, I'm on every blog.' and you forget that you should be in the studio working and thinking about these things, but I feel like artists are thinking about their image and style and YouTube hits more than they are thinking about making music. I'm trying to figure out what all this means - if I have to redefine what success is for me.

Success for me is like if you were a big band in the '90s, then you had a lot of money and you sold a lot of records. Now it's like you can only make money from being famous - being a star and not from being a musician. So for me to decide that I want to be a good musician, means that I might have to potentially redefine what success means to me. (Laughing). It kinda weird

Last time I saw you was at the Smirnoff show - was that where you hooked up with Pharrell?

It's funny because he let me come on and rap during his set at that show. I was freaking out, I didn't know what the fuck to do with that, but I guess the collaboration with Pharrell maybe started there. I was on his radar at that time, but it's taken a while since then to actually get him in the studio.

Is that why it's taken so long for this album to come out? Trying to pin all the collaborators down?

A lot of fucked up shit happened actually! (LAUGHS) Everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. I remember starting the record in like a friend war with XXXChange and we weren't working together so I was like 'how the fuck am I gonna replace him?' To me he was like the most creative, interesting producer and we really connected. So I was bringing in this guy for some music and I was bringing in other guys to do other things. I had no idea what I was doing. I was going into Downtown studio on my own and inviting people in. I was in the director's chair for the first time. Before I'd just show up and rap, but now I had grander ideas of where it was going. So, things started off slow.

Then when I started figuring stuff out and had some song ideas. I was also dealing with what every artist has with their second album - people have reacted to your music from your first record and put you in a box and say 'this is what you do'. I was having a hard time knowing where to start off because everyone was coming in with a big heavy dance beat and asking me to rap about pussy and drugs, and I love rapping about pussy and drugs, but there was so much more in the first record that people missed out on. People were coming in expecting me to be Spank Rock, the crazy party kid, which I am, but I also have a lot of deep thoughts and politics referencing as well - There's a whole half of the YoYoYoYoYo album that no one paid attention too, they just paid attention to the party/sexy stuff and painted me that way in the media. There was quite a lot of fighting back against that so that kinda slowed things down for a bit.

Then once I was on a roll and I was killing it I thought I had all these great ideas, that's when my record label pulled out. No one was making a lot of money at the time and they'd given me a really good deal. They got nervous about me turning in a record and having to pay the second half of the advance and not knowing how it would compete with the rest of the industry. Unfortunately they wouldn't give me my files either so I couldn't go into the studio and work on them. It was sorta like I was shelved for six or seven months - I couldn't record music at all. All these little things kept happening and it took a long time. I'm stubborn and I wanna do the things I wanna do. I didn't get into this to work for a record company, I got into it to be an artist. Some shit fucked up.

This album isn't as lewd as the first one - there seems to be some kind of frustration in it and anger. Has that come from having to wait six months?

I think the frustration comes from politics. It's weird, you have this optimism when you see the world progressing and there's always this anchor which is holding everything back. Especially in America. We have a president right now who is so controversial and the two political sides in America are so split that nothing is being passed - it's just at a standstill. I think I also personally was at a standstill. You get angry when you want to move in the right direction - you can see where you wanna go but you just can't get through that door you know. There was some frustration from that

For me watching a lot of people in music get really famous and generically successful off of imitating a lot of things that I brought into culture was really difficult too.

I feel like I wrote certain songs on this album for certain people too. I wrote one song with my nephews and my little sisters and family, so there are some songs you wouldn't want them to listen to. Also I wanted to challenge myself to learn how to write in different ways.

Dance and Famous I really like - there's a bit in Dance that reminds me of rave culture and I'd definitely want to listen to it when I was fucked up.

Wow!

Do you see yourself as electro or hip hop? There are always people who will try and pigeon hole the likes of you and Amanda Black and Santigold. You all hang out and do a lot of things together. Do you ever think about which box people put you in?

I think we all can do a lot of different things to music. Amanda can sing and rap her ass off - she also knows a lot about music as well - she grew up listening to Mary J Blige and SWV, but also listening to Riot Girl. If you do that then you have an inner conflict of what you want to be RnB or Riot Girl? Santi's the same thing, she can sing, she can rap, she's one of the best song writers. What she likes in music isn't what the record industry would expect her to like.

They don't know how to push a black, female artist into culture when she has moments when she sounds closer to the Clash or Siouxsie Sioux and these weird influences where the audience they assume she has wouldn't be able to connect to. It's hard to figure out how to be yourself, when everyone needs to market you or sell you or something. You’re doing your shit thinking you've got a great taste in music and you can rap and you can sing and they're like 'yeah - you've got to fit into a box.'

We had a conversation with the guys distributing this record and they were asking which genre it should be put into. They were saying if they put it under hip-hop then I'll be competing in the hip hop charts and the range of what hip-hop sounds like in America is very small. But if they put in under electro, then it won't be on hip-hop's radar, and if it goes under pop then we'll be competing with fucking Katy Perry or Beiber so you can't go there. It's this weird thing. Whee do you put an eclectic artists? I think people don't care about the patience it takes to connect spiritually with like an artist who doesn't do something you can connect to immediately.

Like, for example, I wonder how absolutely amazing Gaga would be if she was in the music industry if she was in the '80s. Because I feel like all she has all these great ideas and they just fall into trance land. The song starts off so rad and cool and then the chorus hits and you realise you're just listening to a trance remix of Whitney Houston. You're like why did this happen? She's a brilliant writer, but because she has to fit in these really generic situations to sell music it just crushes everything. When you get artists like me and Santi and Amanda Blank that don't budge too much our careers start to suffer (LAUGHS).

The three of us are always on the phone together being like 'my life is falling apart' but championing each other align - we are a super group even if we're not making songs together.

Dance is the song I wrote for my 8-year-old nephew. I always think of the Muppet Babies when I sing that song. Famous is so like cheesy.

Boys Noize mixed the entire album and he produced I think maybe produced four songs on it. He approached me in Australia a year ago. He was like 'Why haven't you put anything else out? What's going on?' And i was like (pretends to cry) ' I can't figure it out. Everyone's quitting on me, this fucking sucks.' I was at a point where I just didn't know how I was going to get it done. He said if I needed any help then he's got me, so I played him some of the demos I was working on and went to Berlin that winter and finished it. It's what I needed. He was totally patient. He helped mend a little wounded bird (laughs)

Did you feel like you had something to prove?

I used to think that I had something to prove, but then I was like 'it's pointless'. I'm scared to say this because it's in an interview, but I feel like it's irrelevant. Who am I competing with? If there was actually people that I respected that i was competing with, then I might feel I had something to prove. But it's just like I htinkg the state of hip-hop is one definite fucking mess. Creativity in general exists in very small, specific spaces. Every time i step into the studio with someone, they're like "Yo, let's do something like this." And it's always some retro let's recreate some fucking thing. I can't see how that has anything to do with anything I experienced in the last two months. It has nothing to do with all the cool, new music that's being produced in London. I'd rather go and look at Animal Collective or Dan Deakin and think how I can flip that in an interesting way, instead of going back to the fucking '80s and '90s and reliving these bullshit things. SO it's hard for me to say I have anything to prove.

Who am I proving it to? No one cares! It's not even like a competitive spirit amongst each other to make things that are creative and interesting. The competitiveness right now is about how famous you get and who you're working with and how much money you're making. The only way to make money in the music industry it means you’re producing Beyonce records. And as much as I think Beyonce is a wonderful talent, I think it's pretty generic. It's not I'm inspired by, I'm spending all day listening to Connan Mockasin and Late Of The Pier and I spend all day listening to Metronomy thinking that these guys really are on to something. Connan's on another level, you don't hear him trying at all. That's the way I want to be, like a force of nature - but that's not how people relate. I'm already proven amongst my friends, I guess the public has nothing to do with it

CakeDrank

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

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Wednesday, August 17, 2011

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Yay or Nay Presents Spank Rock

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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

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Monday, August 1, 2011

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