NICK LOWE PT 1 (of THE BUSHES and HURRICANE NICHOLAS)
August 05, 2006

I met Nick Lowe in a bar, he was drunk and told me about he might spend his art money to buy a PA for an E*Rock show. I was like wow. The dude is seriously amazing. And if you read his responses aloud you'll understand how he talks and how fucking amazing this dude is. I find myself saying that all the good things that happen to him are completely deserved. You can look at his artwork in the book LA ARTLAND or on Black Dragon Society's website, and if you do so you'll hopefully understand how righteous this dude is. Sticker out soon. Feel it, feel Hurricane Nicholas.

TRUDI: How did you get into the rap game?

NICK LOWE: Well, to be honest, I'm not in the rap game, I'm in the song game. I don't want to write raps, I want to write songs, and rapping the only way know how.

Let me start at the beginning.

I love rap music, hip-hop music, or whatever kids are calling it these days. I remember hearing my first rap on the playground back in '89- it was this kid named Sikander and he was reciting "principals office" by Young MC, I think that’s what the song is called, it's that song where the hook is "off to the principals office you go." I got really excited, I never heard rap music before because my parents didn't let my sisters and I watch TV, and it wasn't in the culture like it is now. I heard the beastie boys before that but it was when I was driving in the car with my dad, and it was too abstract.

The first tape I ever bought was Whitesnake, but then walking out of tower records I wished I had bought MC Hammer. Why I chose Whitesnake I have no idea; I guess I just liked the name. Also, hip-hop radio in the bay area was awesome back in the day- at 3 in the afternoon you could hear really raw underground stuff. This was on KMEL, which was the bay area equivalent of Power 106(LA). I started listening to a lot of rap on the radio and recording it on to tapes, and then, with the help of the pause and rewind button, write the raps down and memorize them so I could recite them to kids at school.

I wrote some of my own raps here and there- I had failed US government and I was taking it a second time around, but I was in danger of failing it again, so I boned down and wrote and performed a rap for the class, hoping I could get some extra credit. It wasn't an assignment or anything, I just wrote it and showed up to class with it and asked if I could perform, the teacher said sure. So I did it, and it felt good. I felt like I had rap in my bones, and whenever the subject of rappers or hip-hop came up, I felt like I had the inside scoop on rapping.

Spring forward to college, when I met Ry Rocklen in the fall of 1998. I immediately responded to his art and he was the first person in my life that I've met where I said "oh wow, so that is what a real artist is like." We talked briefly of forming a band, I think the original idea was a cross between Radiohead and Belle and Sebastian because that is what we both liked. And we both liked Paul Simon, but he didn't enter the conversation all that often. Ry got a grant to do an art piece, I think it was called "triple threat" and it would be a Macintosh computer, a big Mac sandwich, and a mac ten, on a shelf or a Plexiglas box. With the money he got from the grant he bought the computer and recorded an album.

He had this friend Eric and they were in a rap crew in high school together called the tree, but most of the people in the crew boned out, so then Ry was like "oh well, I guess we're just the bushes." I spit a rhyme for Ry, and then it was like "boom, that's it, we're the Bushes!" We were in a drawing class together at the time and when we were supposed to be drawing we would just go off in the corner and work on raps together and perform them when critique-time came.

That was the start and we have written about a rap a year since 2001, wait, maybe two raps a year. Ry makes all the beats on his computer and an assortment of Casio keyboards.

Ry and I are both kind of deep in the "art game" and that takes up most of our time. I make all my money drawing and painting, but recently it has become more of a job than a pleasure, actually I have hated doing it for about two years- I have mostly been scrambling trying to do what other people want me to do. Cause, in that game most of your work gets bought by collectors that you don't know, and they end up putting your pieces in storage. The politics of everything gives me a headache, and I've been unable to separate working on a painting from talking with the gallery-man on the phone about how important it is that I do a painting this size for an art fair by this date, and it should be very detailed, because that's what people want to buy, and you can make the most money off something that's very detailed and colorful. It dictates my process.

I love to perform, be in front of people, spit rhymes in front of people. I want to be creative but I want to see my audience. I want to grab the mic and slap hands. I just want to sit down and make beats with ableton live and write rhymes in my notebook and also write rhymes on Microsoft word, and take those rhymes on the road and rock it from California to Kentucky and all up in Canada, like a traveling minstrel in the days of old. I want to meet other musicians who are doing the awesome. I just want to keep practicing and getting better. I ‘m actually a pretty shitty rapper, but I feel I can write bad raps and make them better one millimeter at a time. I am just getting started. Blakka! Blakka! Blakka!

TRUDI: Also, you're definitely a hip hop head, but you're performance and openness to an audience is something that defies the conventions of rap performance, even in the backpacker scene the performer appeals to their own sense of ego, and there is definite separation, a defining line, of celebrity(on stage) spectator, but you seem to break, play with it, or maybe even oppose it (as do those who get you pumped) . Care to talk about audience/talent relationship and how you approach it?

NICK LOWE: One of the things I love about making art is putting something you're uncertain about into the world and seeing how people react to it. If there is an audience watching you perform, you're lucky, no matter how small the audience is. Even if it is only five people watching you, they are taking twenty minutes out of their busy days to see what you are doing. Do the math- the audience is collectively giving you one hundred minutes. People are giving, so you have to give back. I try to get hype- be a larger than life character, but at the same time be a little open and vulnerable. I guess I am a “freak in the streets and a geek in the sheets”. I am up on stage getting buck wild but when the mic is not in my hand I am kind of shy and socially awkward. I try to treat it as music because I love music. I don't want to be seen as the goofy white guy with the rap-art project. There are a lot of people in the art world who make art about hip-hop. Well, if you really love hip-hop, you should make hip-hop, duh. I would much rather listen to Reasonable Doubt than look at a painting of Jay-Z.

Posted by trudi at 12:46 AM | Comments (1) | FOREVER | << | >>

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