Hip-Hop For Thought

Alongside the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, on your left as you are heading north into the valley, there’s a row of palm trees — nothing out of the ordinary in the Southland, but upon closer attention you will notice that one of them isn’t a palm tree at all. It’s a cell phone relay tower built to look like a palm tree, complete with plastic-metal fronds and trunk. Sure, you might say there’s nothing sinister about that, but the fact that you may have passed it a few hundred times and never noticed it seems something akin to sinister, perhaps. It’s this tree that’s the symbol for Los Angeles hip-hop outfit Blood of Abraham, and its subtlety is one of the reasons they chose it.

As the core make-up of Blood of Abraham, one cat named Mazik and another equally enigmatic character named Benyad, convene with the rest of their crew around a table for dinner in a fashionable downtown eatery in Chico, California, I sit down to find out the story behind their upcoming release on Atomic Pop Records, Eyedollartree, its message and what it takes to go from straight album tracks to live band performance. Rounded out by DJ Rick 1 on turntables, Joe Carns on bass, Jeff Mince on drums, and Breakestra guitarist Dan Ubick on guitar, the B.O.A. mixmasters have taken their show to the people as they itch for the release of the new record, slated for August 22. Benyad and Mazik have spent some of the time very wisely, crafting a 10-minute, 16mm short film, a sort of a visual accompaniment to the album that has been shown in various film festivals, highlighting both the textured richness of the album and the vision of the message they wish to bring with it.

The posters for the Blood of Abraham show, plastered up all over the inside of the tiny club they are playing tonight, say "Be Aware", but the "A" in "Aware" is obscured, leaving the message to just say "Beware." In getting to know Benyad and Mazik, the two wizards behind the curtain for B.O.A., I learn that this is one of the subtle ways they seek to build a perception into the obscured that is all around us.

Benyad: Once you have the band everything else is a step backwards, you always want to have that, it’s such a full sound and we want to perform in front of as many people as possible, and just having the band opens up so many doors. You have a lot more freedom as opposed to a DAT or just vinyl. Like, we have a set list and we can go through the songs in a certain way or we can switch it up, with the band you have that freedom.

Mazik: The difference between the DAT show and the band show… there’s a big difference, but a lot of it has to do with the skill level of the sound engineers in the club. With the DAT, they’d just set us up a couple mics and that would be it. Now, with all the instruments, they have to work harder to make it sound really good. That’s the wildcard.

Mazik: Yeah, definitely. To me, just having all the different instruments on stage is a lot more powerful of a feeling. I love the tracks that we’ve produced, and we’ve done shows with just our drum machine or just our sampler and DJ, but to have all these different personalities on stage, I can just kick back and do my lyrics. I enjoy it. Sometimes I just sit back and get caught in the moment. Having that live bass up front kicking you in the ass with the drums and this guy’s guitars [motions to Dan across the table] — it’s great. And he’s a bad-ass, he can make his guitar sound like a tuba if he wants to.

Benyad: Oh yeah, here’s a little plug, too — we got pyrotechnics. We got this U.F.O. that comes down. [laughs]

Mazik: And lasers.

Benyad: Unfortunately, a lot of the tracks were done before, while we were forming the band, so only the early members, like Dan, are on it. Most of the drums were programmed and looped up. And as far as what we’re doing now, we’re just trying to work out how to collaborate with live musicians more.

Benyad: It was at first. For us it was more like we didn’t want it to come off like "unplugged" — like covers of stuff on the album — because the album has such a unique sound to it. That’s why we took the hard road to have a tape machine and click tracks for everyone to be able to sync up to. But still, I’d say it’s not too different, the live stuff compared to the album, but it’s definitely not identical. It’s still got that edge — the obscure sampling, the layering, the soundscapes. They’ve got textures.

Benyad: That’s the beauty of it, we’re all fans of different types of music and we always push ourselves to the limit to be as experimental as possible. Its like gumbo soup, you throw it in and if it doesn’t taste right you take it out, but you definitely want to try it out. That’s the luxury of having our own studio, our own equipment as well. We have a bunch of talented musicians who have access to more musicians, like, if we need horns or other percussive sounds, its only a phone call away. Its like in rehearsal, someone comes in and starts playing the funkiest bass line I ever heard and I’m like, when he was done, "Okay, where’s that from? Why you teasing me?" and he just says, "Oh, I just made it up." And it blew my mind. We get to do a song from that shit. With the band now, it will be easier to do the songs from scratch like that.

Dan: One of the best things about working live with Benyad and Mazik is that it isn’t the live stuff or the samples, its whatever works in the vibe. It’s not an ego thing. It’s not me going, "I’ve got to play guitar on every track." It’s like, if we need some slide guitar or if we’re going to use a recorder, or a looped bass, or we need to chop up the drummer and loop him, or just straight live, it’s whatever works in the vibe of the song.

Benyad: We look at musicians like we’re flipping through records, we’ll sample them and chop them up when we need to.

Mazik: That’s the thing about having your own studio: We got the chance to be able to learn how to mic different things, especially around some of these cats who study, like, all of the classic rock and a lot of the psychedelic stuff. We’ll have one mic for the drums that’s all the way down the hall because we have, like, this big artist colony with the Black Eyed Peas, we have a whole studio all set up, and we can do crazy stuff with it. We’ll have all the different bands stay in their rooms and have the drums set up in the lobby as were micing them in different ways, and then we take out the tightest parts, put those on tape and figure out what tracks we want to use. We’ll have five different mics on there and then pick out the best one. But having our own studio, we can run the gamut, like people hear his guitar and they don’t know what’s sampled and what isn’t.

Benyad: It’s the whole package. Anything goes. We’re as experimental as we can be. We have nowhere to go but up, in a sense. There’s no preconceived anything as far as a mold we’re trying to fit, a format or such. We’re just trying to do the best that we know we can do and hope that somebody gets it. And we’re very proud of the album from beginning to end. We’re just trying to raise the ante a bit, challenge ourselves.

Benyad: It’s everything. Its like people worshipping materialism. That’s what the album title refers to: Eyedollartree. It’s completely false, the shallowness of materialism. It’s so what hip-hop has become.

Benyad: We don’t care. Nobody said to Bob Marley, "Hey your political messages are not in fashion. Don’t say that stuff."You know what I mean? They’re timeless. Timeless messages. We try to strive for longevity, both in subject matter and in production, so when you put our album in 10 years from now you don’t g,o "Oh, that was the summer of 2000." And the things we deal with — whether they’re philosophical, political, spiritual, or whatever — they’re speaking to humanity as a whole and they’re timeless.

Benyad: Yeah, but again, when you look at something that is a truth, the danger begins when it becomes a fashion or a trend. That’s when problems arise. Definitely there’s a hunger for substance and spirituality in everything these days, from movies to music. Look at music, it has been bankrupt of any substance for the last 10 years, especially hip-hop, which used to be a pioneering type of music. The attitude of hip-hop used to be the more experimental the better. Now its gone to almost formulaic, two genres basically –party rap and gangster rap- but like all things they’re going to run their course. Its almost as if right now the point is to find out who’s the hardest, like someone’s going to say "O.k. Now I’m going to kill somebody LIVE on record." Like what are you going to do next? So naturally in society people are going to come around seeking the substance and really noticing the difference in groups like Blackalicious, or KRS-ONE, or even Del [the Funky Homosapien]. Those cats, they’re not worried about following trends, what’s in or what’s out, they’re marching to their own drum. And speaking about us, I would say the importance is how its sounds first, and what you say second. Truth is, you’re in a club and the beat is bumpin’ and the MC is flowing and you like his voice, his cadence, the whole package, you’re going to start nodding your head and then only later are you going to dig deeper into the layers, and peel the layers into the content. And only then, hopefully, will you get it.

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