Why spend nearly every Saturday locked in hot bedrooms and basements? I don’t know; it’s a compulsion. A primal urge that grows every time we see another emcee spill his soul into a microphone and pour it into our consciousness.
Ever since I’ve been involved in ?indie? music, people have asked how the musical process works. How are songs written, and how do so many diverse small-time artists come to collaborate?
For underground rappers and bands that grind out their creative livelihood in basements, living rooms and community theaters, the process couldn’t be less glamorous. Some musicians, like New London Fire frontman David Debiak, sit curled-up beside a running dryer, staring at a scratched-up notepad and clutching an acoustic guitar. Others carry voice recorders all day, stealing into bathrooms to document a pithy new rhyme. And when you?re part of Milwaukee?s independent scene, there’s Saturday.
It all starts at my producer’s house. One of the last things an underground artist learns before gaining respectability is that “producer” is usually a synonym for the guy with a stash of old recording equipment. A producer’s home might boast stacks of mixers, condensers, Korg keyboards, ratty old guitars and completely legal professional software. But that doesn’t mean he knows how to use any of it. So, it?s vital to find someone who not only has had all that stuff sitting around the house awhile, but uses them even when he’s not smoking pot, snorting coke or shooting heroin.
This particular day, the “studio” is a small bedroom. We scrounge around the house for chairs and squeeze them between the door, amps and a lone mattress with thin sheets lain across the crumpled clothes that our host sweeps to the side with the middle part of his foot. The CD of beats produced by our bandmate with three bootlegged music programs and a pining for the fresh simple rap beats of the mid-?90s is looped through amps whose bass is so far off that it knocks a half-full beer onto the floor. No one makes an effort to clean it up.
The producer sits in front of a computer screen, blowing misshapen smoke donuts into his lap while a tracking bar glides across the mountains and plateaus of the beat’s sound waves. The lyricists sit in a silence punctuated by the horns and keys of a chorus that recurs every one minute and 25 seconds.
They grip tattered notepads near their final pages; some stare aimlessly into the bare walls while others scribble furiously. About a quarter-way through writing the verse, someone asks, “What should we write this song about?” Getting girls, being broke or chillin’ with the boys on the corner are all likely responses, but we go with fighting off an alien invasion of the ‘hood. Every beat already sounds like something, so the question seems like an annoying formality. It is soon agreed that the vocals should be recorded in a tiny room, and you’ll probably embrace the delusion that it will make a difference in the quality of a dinged-up, hand-held, steel-wired microphone.
Just then, another crew ambles through the door, reeking of smoke and carrying the warm quarter of Miller Genuine Draft 40s. If you ever wondered how collaboration happens, look no further than the blunts these emcees roll deftly on their knees as they sit comically on the flat mattress, now jammed halfway up the wall.
A new beat loops, but everyone is too stupid to write coherently. In the middle of a conversation that’s being yelled over the bass, one rapper’s solitary mumble inevitably rises to a conversational murmur. The guy next to him shushes the room and the producer dutifully turns down the beat a bit. All focus is on the lyricist with his eyes carefully shut as his brain deciphers a flood of poetry from the celestial wireless. The rapper’s voice rises and his eyes open as a queue of two or three rhymes builds in his mind.
Once he stumbles, the sharks swoop in and pick up the beat as if ? once the celestial wireless streams through a wall ? everyone can grab hold of a line. The producer finally thinks to press record and plug in a microphone.
That’s how the standard hip-hop freestyle track comes about and probably why album release dates are so frequently pushed back. A polished finished product is important like a trophy to a sports star. It signals tangible accomplishment, but at the end of the day, the whole damn thing is about quenching the urge to expel “complex verbiage in the least amount of space.”
Ah well, there’s always next Saturday.
Bassey Etim ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science and journalism. He’ll record vocals in your stinky-ass bedroom.
