​ING PORTAL

D: How did you come across the idea to record an album full of Shakespeare lyrics?

 

7: When I was younger I did some theater with a relatively competitive troup. At the time, during study, I noticed the musicality of Shakespeare’s words. It was maybe 10 years later when I was a street poet in New york, I wondered if the lines could be delivered in a setting where an audience is expecting spoken word, or something very exciting, and if they would receive it well. I played around with it a little bit. I didn’t necessarily perform it live at that point, but I did notice that the rhythm was nearly perfect. Another 5 years later I decided to give it a shot and 21st Century Bard is the outcome of that. 

 

D: So you’ve had it kicking around for a while. When you sat down to measure it out and plan it out what were the obstacles in front of you? Did you work with another producer?

 

7: For this I worked with one other producer. He produced on every single one of those tracks. A Portuguese cat. He really has the perfect instrumentations. Going from his work, it’s what really put it together in my mind. That he had so many great instrumentals with a very consistent rhythm. He actually has a sound that is almost Bhangra music. I thought it would go really well with the translation of victorian style into almost a “chant”. That’s what strikes you when you’re doing it. It’s almost as if a chant is bubbling. So I cut some of the tracks and worked with what he had available for me and what I came up with just sounded really great. We both thought so. The hard part actually was probably the process of finding common themes between the selections and creating songs from more than one sonnet selection. That’s actually the triumph part, if you will. Once I had 9 songs I was ecstatic. I was jumping around. It’s really a beautiful thing to have gotten so thematically right, and then to come up with names for all these songs. The sonnets are only numbered. They have no names. Coming up with the title is just the icing on the cake. Sort of a proclamation of my own artistry. 

 

D: This project has a really interesting hit. Speaking of your artistry, what influences your rap. What hip hop and other genres do you listen to?

 

7: My musical tastes are varied. My older brothers were hip hop artists back when we were teens and I was a vocalist fronting a couple different bands. One in Brooklyn and one down in Georgia. Since then we’ve kind of switched places. One is a soul singer and most of what I do is hip hop. My influences are very vast, but I listen to some pretty standard stuff. ... Rocky, Beck. I like to focus on the music as artistic, as an art primarily. And that’s kind of coming from where my songwriting back in my rock band days came from. Or I should say, back in my gypsy punk days. 

 

Without focusing on the artistry like that it would be hard for me to take my street poetry and bring it to a hip hop audience. I did, and audiences in New York played a big part in that. Getting me to make the transition. Performing for cats at the Bowery Poetry Club, hanging out at the Nuyorican. When I was with RSMG is actually the time frame they were doing Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. Some of the poets I used to perform with were doing that. And doing quite well at that. I was a little envious. But to the label I was a hip hop artist, a rapper primarily. My manager was very diligent in showing me what the industry was about, the process of developing an artist, the A&R process, [When Russell shuttered the imprint,] distribution deals with Universal. I was pretty satisfied to continue with my imprint. [Universal/Motown.] To find my audience and take advantage of that deal. 

 

D: When you put out a classic like this it’s a challenging project. It’s not inherently a pop project. What’s a reasonable payout to this kind of undertaking?

 

7: This particular project I want to expand my catalog. I have a couple albums in the works. It’s not that I haven’t been interested in putting out a traditional hip hop album, the landscape has really changed and I didn’t want to put out anything that wasn’t going to get the right traction. For me this was a way of testing the market and testing my distribution options. When Dischord records put its entire catalog on bandcamp dot com; all of At The Drive In, Fugazi, everything; I thought wow. I think bandcamp is the appropriate portal for me to get the ball rolling with people who are from an underground frame of mind. It’s an unusual piece of work and you almost need revolutionary thinkers. That’s what Bandcamp, more than ReverbNation, has done. It’s really picking up the radical artists. Thom Yorke released an album exclusively through them. He as well did some kind of release with BitTorrrent. Those are the sort of guys I’m aiming for at this point. 

 

[21st Century Bard] is competing for a BitTorrent Discovery award. They give endowments to unusual works of art. It’s an application process that can take months. I’ve always been a champion of the open web. I blog quite a bit. I have thousands of followers on social media. I’m gonna practice what I preach. I hope that they will back me up and I will find acts who feel the same way and get all the crazy outliers, the nerdcore fans, the math-rap fans, I want them all. 

 

D: I’ve covered a lot of BitTorrent’s moves, new distribution platforms, etc. 

 

7: I was really glad to hear you guys were buzzing over there about radical distribution, portals and applications and that kind of thing. That’s really what excites me these days. 

 

D: Right on. 

 

Stream 21st Century Bard Here

 

 

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