Fun Crusher: An Interview With El-P

After Company Flow disbanded and Def Jux – the label El-P operated – had become a world renowned outlet for the backpack avant-garde between Brooklyn and Boston, El Producto has produced singles and whole albums with artists as diverse as Mr Lif, Alec Empire, Trent Reznor, Killer Mike or Zack de la Rocha. At the same time, he never lost focus of his solo endeavours with four albums, plus countless singles and collaborations. Although mostly within the realms of synth-laden, futuristic sonic patterns and musical out-of-the-box thinking, El-P has always kept a strong b-boy stance in all of his productions.   

RBMA: So, legend has it that you ran into Mr Len at a birthday party. How did this turn into your first physical release as Company Flow?

EL-P: I was 17 in 1993 when we put the first single out. Bigg Jus wasn’t in the group yet, it was me and Mister Len. We put the first Company Flow single out, it was called “Juvenile Techniques”, and I was like, “That’s it, I’m a rapstar.” [laughs] Y’know, a twelve inch. So, I was like, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to school anymore, everyone can suck my dick, I’m famous now.” That’s not exactly how it works, but I was pretty excited about it. So, the next thing we put out was in 1996 essentially, which was Funcrusher. And some of the 12"s around that.

RBMA: How did your parents respond to that idea? At least your father must have had some perspective on what it means to be a professional musician. Was he concerned?

EL-P: My father was a pianist in the 70s and 80s. He played in clubs, bars and restaurants and stuff like that, but he wasn’t really in the picture for the most part. He and my mother split up when I was about six, it was really a single parent household, my mother and my two sisters. My mother, actually, it was her idea. She just sat me down, like, “Look, asshole [laughs], either you’re gonna figure out how to drop the chip on your shoulder and you’re gonna do the school thing and you’re gonna shut the fuck up, or you come up with another plan. You’re not gonna not do anything.” And the fact that she even looked at it like that was what changed it for me, and she found this place [Center for the Media Arts in Manhattan] and came up with this plan for me. I thought, yeah, I’d love to do this, I’d love to be in a studio all day trying to learn. That’s what happened. I’ve been essentially in a recording studio for school. I was out of the system, I wasn’t doing what I didn’t want to do anymore.

I had a very difficult time as a kid doing anything I wasn’t interested in. That included [laughs], essentially, school. I had an attitude, shockingly. She was very supportive, my father wasn’t quite as understanding about it, but he didn’t really have much of a vote at the time anymore. That’s just the truth. It was a great time, an interesting time. I was a little lost for a while, but that set me on a path where all of a sudden I could see through the bullshit. It kinda saved my life, in a lot of ways. I was a little bit of a wild kid. Putting my energy into music was the best thing that ever happened to me, obviously. It became my life and it was the right gamble.

RBMA: At what point did you guys realise you had found a formula that worked and might actually add something new to the rap canon of the time?

EL-P: We knew what we were doing, while we were doing it. We did. [laughs] I’m not even gonna lie. Our whole thing was like, we would come and punch the fucking door open and just strangle everyone behind the door. We were just like, ‘FUCK EVERYBODY.’ That was our vibe. That was the way we thought about it. We would come in and just stomp all over everybody glossy, smooth, mellow bullshit. We want our music to be the equivalent of a violent home break-in.

RBMA: There was always something distinctively post-industrial, metropolitan about your sound. From a central European point of view, Company Flow became an epitome for what it must be like to have a bad time in New York City.

EL-P: Co Flow wasn’t really about having a bad time, Co Flow to us was about having a good time being bad. We saw the humour in uncomfortable situations. Basically, it was just us trying to say the most fucked up shit that we could say, but that we still meant. One of the things that we made sure was we were being ourselves. We used words the way we wanted to use them, and we didn’t give a fuck if anybody understood or not, and a lot of people didn’t understand it. But what happened was that people heard the record and they felt something. They hadn’t heard what we had done before, but I think that it reminded them of a spirit of something they recognised about hip hop music, something that hadn’t been tapped into for a while. I think Company Flow was a little bit of a wake up call in terms of just an energy. It gave a little bit of a voice to rebelliousness again. It just came at the right time, people were really open to that.

That’s also because we were fans. The biggest hip hop fans in the world. So, we felt we were tapped into what we needed as hip hop fans. At that time, I feel like hip hop was hitting its really big commercial phase and there were a whole lot of uncomfortable commercial hip hop hits happening. Everyone was getting glossier and wearing the suits – it wasn’t anything that we identified with. We were from New York, we took the train, we did graffiti, we drank 40s on the stoops! We were just fucking knuckleheads. We wanted to be smart, tough knuckleheads.

RBMA: Then, somehow these knuckleheads started to stir up a bidding war amongst record companies. By that time, Rawkus was far from being an obvious choice for a left field rap group.

EL-P: When the Rawkus thing happened, Rawkus didn’t have any real identity. Rawkus had been putting records out, they had tried some rock records, they had tried some dance records, they tried a couple of hip hop records.

We took a bunch of meetings after Funcrusher sold a lot independent. For the time, it was a big deal. We must’ve sold, I don’t know. We sold a lot of records. And it was just 100 per cent independent, like, out of our fucking pockets. So, we had a lot of interest from different labels. Everything from major labels to indie labels, and we took a lot of meetings. We probably took about ten or 12 meetings, because we were like, ‘we want to do the next step.’ What’s the next step, we don’t really know.

So, we started meeting with people. We went with Rawkus, because Rawkus was willing to give us the type of deal that we wanted. In our minds, we had cracked the code, we had found out how to get money while doing the music we wanted to do and not kissing anyone’s ass, and not having to deal with anyone and not having to fucking play the game. At the time that was a little bit unheard of. There wasn’t really an independent hip hop label, really. Like, no new breed, you had your old school ones and shit, but they were based on a major label model. So, we were probably one of the first groups in indie hip hop to be like, “Alright, we’re gonna do a 50/50 split, we gonna own the masters, or fuck off.” And Rawkus were the ones that, when we held our terms up, they were still there.

RBMA: So, when the whole Rawkus scenario started to collapse the way it did, it had already been promoted as a solid movement for years. Was there some kind of communal feeling shattered, when you parted ways with Rawkus?

EL-P: Everything has its moment, you know, Rawkus had its moment. At the time, we left Rawkus because we saw it as a sinking ship. We left before it maybe even started to sink. Actually, the truth of the matter is that the reason we ended up leaving is a little more complicated. Basically, Company Flow broke up. We did a bunch of touring and we just couldn’t get along after a while. We were just sick of each other and we broke up. Then me and Len stuck together, and we were doing the instrumental album Little Johnny From The Hospitul, that was our follow-up. Which was a weird thing to do [laughs], pretty much unheard of. It was like, ‘Oh great, you had this big successful record, sold 200,000 copies for us that was huge, and you gonna follow it up with no lyrics.’ So, Rawkus didn’t want to get behind the record. We thought that they were gonna, we went on tour and they didn’t support it, and we got really pissed off. We were like, ‘What the fuck, I thought that you were supporting this record.’ That kinda was the beginning of the end for me for Rawkus. It started me feeling, ‘You know what, I think I wanna do my own thing.’

So, at the time it was a little contentious. We were also young and it is easy to point the finger. When you’re a kid, everyone else is wrong. Now that I’m older and I’ve run a record label for ten years, I realise how fucking hard it is. Of course the difference being is that Rawkus was started by a bunch of rich kids and [laughs] Def Jux wasn’t. I saw the ending of Rawkus a little bit from a distance, because I stepped away before a lot of people did.

But the thing about it is, everything has its time and everything peaks and everyone’s interest in that thing peaks, and then they move on. And that’s the problem with a record label, isn’t it? Especially when it represents something to people. And the reason it represents something to people is not because of the record label, but because of the music they put out. And that music makes people associate it with a time. If you have a string of, say, five great records, people associate that with a movement. Happened with Def Jux! Then eventually, if you look at everything coming out under the idea of it’s being a movement, then you could just say, ‘I am not into that movement anymore.’ I don’t really think record labels are built to sustain attention like that. I think artists are, it’s about the artists and their albums.

I guess it’s a long way of me saying I don’t look back on them harshly or with too much criticism because, let’s be honest, man. They were the purveyors of a lot of amazing records. And they really helped a lot of people. I really understand that now, more than I did back then.

RBMA: Most critics saw a distinctive aesthetic shift for your solo works when I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead came out. In hindsight, it actually does seem like a template for the sound of Cancer For Cure.

EL-P: I think that I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead represented a musical shift for me. Production-wise, there were a couple of major changes to the way I was doing things. I was using different gear, and I had started working with a different mix engineer. It was a sonic step up, which was something that I was looking for.

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead had the use of more live instruments – there were people playing guitar and there were some people playing bass and I was playing much more on it. It was much more about synths and outboard gear, manipulation of sound as opposed to sampling records as much. There was still plenty of sampling on it, but it had shifted away from being the main focus and had become more of a combination of those things. And I think Cancer For Cure is coming out of that record, it’s taking the DNA of I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead and even doing some more in that direction.

RBMA: Also, there are some major changes to the songwriting on Cancer For Cure. It seems that the stream of consciousness rap style has made way for lyrics that are more song-oriented and more hermetic in content.

EL-P: Yeah, I definitely always start with music before I write. Words come to me throughout the day, randomly, and I write them down, but in terms of a pattern, a cadence, a melody, an idea, a hook or even the subject matter, music is what inspires me. So, I work really hard to just get something so the words pop into my head. A lot of times, I don’t even end up using what made me write. Sometimes, what makes you write is just the simplest thing in the world. Or even sometimes just looping up someone else’s record that you like.

Playing double duty as a rapper and a producer – when you’re a producer, what you want to do is inspire the person that you’re producing for. And in this case, it’s always me, so I have to inspire myself to write. And once I do write, a lot of times, I get inspired from what I wrote to then change the music. It can be frustrating working with me. Sometimes people get really frustrated because I’m the type of dude who will record something and you come back the next day and it’s a completely different song. And that’s how I’ve done all my best work [laughs]. And I always get really pissed off when people don’t let me do that. Where I’m just like, ‘What do you mean I can’t change the entire song? it’s better, don’t you understand that? This is better.’ But sometimes people are like, ‘No, fuck you, El. I didn’t write to this.’

For me, I was very much about stream of consciousness writing forever. In a lot of ways, it’s the basis of my writing style. But what changed was that I started to want to say certain things. So, I had to teach myself how to write a narrative. As I’ve gone on with these records, I’ve trimmed the fat a little bit, I’ve tried to narrow in on what I’m trying to do and make it more eloquent and say it in less words. Whereas when I first started, it was like, ‘Oh I’m just going to ramble until I find a point.’ [laughs] So, it’s a little bit different, you try to just grow as a writer. I’m into, ‘How can I say this musically, say everything I want to say and do it as eloquently as possible,’ or how can I do it in as short a time as possible, how can I say it so it means exactly what I’m trying to say, not that I’m trying to talk around it.

RBMA: What’s so intriguing about the whole concept of interrogation? There are at least two whole songs and one very prominent use of that metaphor on the record. Did you have a Raymond Chandler, hard-boiled novel phase or what was it?

EL-P: No man, I watched the news. In my mind, what better signifies the corruption of human experience than interrogation? The idea of hurting someone or controlling someone in order to get something that you want is one of the most simple concepts that you could possibly apply to what is really going on on this planet. The truth, and what that reveals, all of those relationships – and that’s why maybe it’s been a theme, because I think my mind is a little bit blown by the existence of this. For me, it’s worth examining. Probably since I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, the infamous Room 101, that had such a huge impact on me as a kid. It was terrifying to me and fascinating. Then, to be an adult, and watch our country employ those tactics openly, that was very, very, very powerful to me.

RBMA: What’s interesting about the different songs in which you play around with the theme, your narrative I takes on both sides of the power structure.

EL-P: Yeah, I took both sides of the coin. It’s too simple to just say, ‘interrogation is bad.’ That’s not really what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that within the reality of that, within the relationship between people in that reality, there is truth. There is some really serious truth. And there’s more than one kind of truth. I think that’s what attracted me to that. Coming back to it a little bit, I didn’t feel like I was done with it. And I probably won’t do anymore interrogation stuff, but in my mind there are almost infinite possibilities when you look the relationship and the power struggle between people and the way that they implement control over each other. Sometimes people don’t realise that they are in fact the victim in that situation, the people who think they are controlling the situation. They’re a type of victim, they’re a spiritual victim. They’re spiritually corrupted.

RBMA: Another rather obvious motif of the album is, of course, death. Which is also interesting as you and your former Def Jux cohort Aesop Rock both struggled long with your new albums and then both returned with records centred around death and extinction. Also, you both dedicated your albums to Camu Tao [of Cannibal Ox and the Weatherman supergroup who died of cancer in 2008].

EL-P: Definitely Camu’s passing was a big part of this record. In a way, it was the reason the record started. And he was a big part of my life, so he was a big part of the record. Because these records are who I am at the time. You know, I’m a changed man in a lot of ways because of him passing away, so yeah, he’s imprinted on this record. It’s not directly about Camu, but certainly his passing got me thinking about mortality. More than anything, I think it informed me in my life, and in the record, his influence is more about hope. One of the things that happens sometimes, when someone unexpectedly vanishes from your life, there’s a lot of ways you can deal with that. You usually go through a bunch of different types of ways of dealing with that. But at the end of day, it’s one of the most visceral and direct reminders of how lucky we are to not be dead.

And I think that this record in a lot of ways is inspired by that idea, and this record is in a lot of ways, the narrative is a fight for sanity and a fight for trying to stay alive. The long and short of it is that Camu definitely was a huge part of this record because he was a huge part of my life, and that changed me in a lot of ways.

I think that you need to become a new person every once in a while, I think that you need a new reason to be, you need to refine your perspective and you need to refine the way that you intend to be and the things that you’re fighting for need to change. They need to get refined. And sometimes it comes in forms that you’re not expecting. Camu dying, it changed me, it changed my music, I think. So, I don’t have to be writing about Camu for him to be involved, for him to be there. That’s what I mean, really. He’s become a part of me, and that experience has become a part of me. Everything I do, if I sit and have a cigarette, that’s somehow related at this point, because that’s who I am.