Back to the Future

The music of a crew like Jurassic 5 is a welcome reminder of the way things used to be. In a time when hip-hop music is no longer a burgeoning movement, when the genre is represented to the masses as a "blinged"-out jiggy representation of the honest, street born movement that spawned such acts as Public Enemy, Ice-T, NWA and Freestyle Fellowship, this six-man crew from the heart of Los Angeles — DJs Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist, and rappers Chalie 2na, Akil, Mark-7 and Zaakir — drop beats and rhymes that pay homage to the old masters while blending new styles and contemporary ideas. It’s a tight blend of familiar vibes, honest aesthetics and fresh sounds that’s spreading like wildfire.

Jurassic 5’s first widely-distributed release, a self-titled EP, was the strength upon which the group gained so much exposure, and with the release of the crew’s full-length, Quality Control (Interscope), things have really started to take off.

Both mainstream and staunchly independent factions have embraced J5. They have the street and underground credibility that can only come from making things happen independently and putting in time and work for the cause, and they’ve managed to catch the ear of the mainstream marketplace by producing beats and rhymes that are intelligent and fun while still maintaining an edge that reminds folks of that ever-important street cred — the two creating a crucial combination that separates the flash-in-the-pan fools from the in-it-to-win-it players.

Jurassic 5 are definitely in it to win it.

Catching up with J5’s DJ Nu-Mark at his home in Los Angeles to talk about the crew’s sound and vibe, as well as the rapidity with the group has blown up over the last six months, it becomes apparent that he and the rest of J5 have a comfortable sense of where they’re at and what it’s taken to get to this point.

Everybody met at a place called the Good Life Café, and I later met everyone else at another club called the Rat Race. We were all in the underground scene together, and liked each others’ styles. Originally, it was two groups, Unity Committee and Rebels of Rhythm, and both the groups liked each others’ styles and we both had a lot in common as far as what records influenced us growing up. So we all got together and put out a song, and liked it so much we decided to be a group. The song was called "Unified Revolution." It was the first 12-inch that the group put out. We made 500 hundred copies and then got it re-distributed by Blunt Records in New York. Then after that, which was just a single deal, we decided to do some single stuff again, and then we did the EP. That came out here, and we didn’t really have a label to work it except ourselves, so a label in Europe decided to license it from us, and with that came a lot of exposure because they had actual people working it. We went out there and they had press and promotional people behind us — they had the fuel to work the record. We went out there, toured forever, came back out here and toured a little bit, then recorded the new album.

They were just lookin’ at us — we had a lot of labels looking at us, which is why it took so long to make Quality, because we were trying to find the right deal. They were the only label that wanted to give us 100 percent creative control. We signed to the president and they let me and Cut [Chemist] sign to whoever else we wanted. We’re non-exclusive artists, so that worked out good — we got a great deal, basically. We get to do our own shit if we want. I don’t have to say ‘Nu-Mark appears courtesy of Interscope’ on anything else I do. Nu-Mark appears courtesy of himself.

Yeah, and it was a requirement for me, because I want to do other projects. J5’s my main focus, though, and I haven’t had time for anything else, to tell you the truth.

We really just touch on areas that feel good to us, and we mesh our own new styles and original ideas. We’re kind of teetering and walking that tight rope of being reminiscent yet original, and that’s an oxymoron, but it’s like, we’re trying to walk that line and it seems to be a good and healthy and challenging line for us to walk because, on the one hand, you might think, ‘Oh, Quality, I feel like I’ve heard that before,’ but then you think, ‘Oh, but nobody’s sampled that before.’ It’s a good line for us to walk, and we’re not trying to be just old-school. That’s one one-hundredth of what we do, and if anybody listens to the record, they’ll hear that. Songs like "Swing Set" or "Contact," or really anything on the album — there’s more to it than just old-school. There’s a message being sent across, there’re concepts, sometimes deeper concepts than you think, and there’s definitely a lot of work put into it.

Not really, not one that everybody says, ‘Yeah, this is the reason we’re doing it.’ Everybody has really different reasons why they do music, so I can’t say there’s just one theme. I can say, though, that we were influenced by a lot of the same people and that’s what gelled us together. We’ve also seen a lot of mistakes made by people in the LA underground and in music in general that have gotten them fucked out of deals, or put out a song that cuts off their career, or acted crazy at a party and shot somebody, or whatever — we’ve grown up around a lot of violence and a lot of chaos, and that’s not us and we’re not gangsters so we’re not gonna claim that. We just do what we like. When we first heard Run DMC, they were being played on mainstream radio 20 times a day, but it was still old-school and underground, and had all the credibility that people still attach to it. We feel like that can still happen, and the reason people still like it is because of its simplicity. It was different back then, you know? It’s hard to decipher what is good music nowadays. I think people get caught up more in what label it’s on, or ‘why they got a video, they should just be underground.’

It’s exciting, man. It’s good to see a lot of people from the West Coast doing music that I respect. Like, I really like the Cali Agents album. I just heard that and I was like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ There’s a lot of shit bubbling up that’s easy to overlook, like the Cali Agents, but I finally heard it, I loved it, and it deserves a little more respect than it’s getting, and a little more notoriety, of course — same old story there. But yeah, it’s exciting, man, and to tell you the truth, I’m just proud of everybody. It feels really good to see people coming up together, and it’s not just us and Dilated, there’re a lot of groups who feel like the baton has been passed from their old school heroes, just like we feel that way. We’re influenced by so many old school groups, and I feel that in other people, like they gotta push that envelope and do something new. It’s cool. I don’t see tons of underground hip-hop that I like, but what I do see that I like, I like a lot.

Most of the time I see ‘em write, all the MCs write all together. But Akil, he can write like 40 rhymes a day. He and Chali write a lot. Sometimes the guys come to the table with their own ideas; sometimes I have a beat and they write to it all together; sometimes they have a rhyme and me and Cut make a beat around it. But it’s different every time. We try to keep the vibe as open as possible. It’s weird too, man, because as you get older it seems like the mind closes more and more, so we’re trying to pry open the minds. It’s easy to shoot down ideas, but we keep in mind that there’re six of us and so we try to utilize six people and roll with that.

Personally, I think a DJ’s opinion should be highly valued — and it’s easy for me to say that because I’m a DJ — but DJs have really good ears and they know what moves people. Having two DJs kind of strengthens that fact. But you know, a lot of times me and Cut will get outnumbered. It does balance everything out.

Where’s the name Jurassic 5 come from?
Chali’s ex-girlfriend was like, ‘You guys think you’re the Fantastic 5. You’re more like the Jurassic 5.’ She was just joking around, and we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s sick!’

Yeah, exactly, that’s what makes it even funnier. We never did have good math teachers growing up.

Man, you’re like the third person who interviewed me who said that. I don’t really look at it like that, but I can see it ‘cause, well, it’s true. There’re a lot more people talking about it, but I don’t think it’s really affected us because it’s been such a slow build. I don’t see it like you guys see it, you know, I’m just in it, right in the middle. But yeah, people are definitely playing the record and I can definitely see that people are buying it — the sales are really good — but it’s juts been a one-brick-at-a-time process with us, and we’re trying to do this for longevity. We came from a background of selling 12-inch records hand-to-hand, using our fax machine as distribution, and now here we are…wow, whoop-dee-do. No disrespect, I mean I’m happy to be here alive, making music and making money doing it, I just think that people catch success in different ways and it trips me out how people can have that one hit and automatically they’re stars. I don’t even know what that would be like. We’re not clocking millions and we’re kinda’ doing things the old-fashioned way, trying to gain respect.

Yeah, the audience has definitely expanded, and I think that the crazy tours we’ve been doing have helped as well. We’ve never done what people have wanted us to do, and that’s been kind of the formula, dude. Like, when we put out the EP, we had more people saying, ‘Why you guys doing the independent? Don’t you guys want to blow up, get some notoriety?’ We wanted to control it because we were at the infant stages, and that did us good. Then it was ‘Why you guys going to a major, why you on Interscope?’ And now that’s doing us good, and there’re are lot of reasons why we did it — we needed a video, man, and that video has helped us out tremendously and we wanted to express our art visually as well. We’ve never had a chance to express our art visually besides our stage show. Our stage show used to be our ‘video,’ though I think no video can replace a good stage show, at all.

Well, when you asked before about the themes of the group, one of them is to have a really good stage show, and to be really well-rounded. We want to be a group like the Temptations — who have a slammin’ album, when you hear it, you’re like, ‘wow.’ Then you go see them live and you’re like, ‘WOW!’ — just well rounded cats who are down to earth and can still rock their shit. And for some reason, with this group in particular, it’s been really important to have a really live stage show. A lot of times in hip-hop, you don’t see good stage shows and for the most part, we’d been experiencing a lot of hip-hop shows that were kind of boring, so it was important to us to have a good one, you know? We want to be professional, man… We are professional.

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