Change Of Pace

Producer, rapper and budding record label head, Blueprint is one of those guys who doesn’t seem to slow down. A leading force in Cincinnati’s Weightless Records crew, this Ohio native and his partners in rhyme — Manifest, Inkwel, Illogic and Plead the 5th — have been cranking out a steady flow of quality independent rap for the better part of five years. Their music is starting to break out of the Midwestern regional confines and into the headphones of hip-hop hipsters in cities and college towns all over America. This small explosion of national underground notoriety has only made Blueprint and the Weightless crew pick up their pace, and even on a random Wednesday evening, Blueprint can be found working, in this case, at the home of a friend who also happens to be a DJ, going through a bunch of records looking for breaks, and listening to some beats. He’s looking for something specific.
“This is for a solo record I’ve been working on that’s gonna be called 1988,” drawls the Midwestern MC, referring to a year that many hip-hoppers feel was the highest point in the genre’s fabled Golden Era. “So I’m trying to bring back all the classic breaks, man, all the standards like the jazz music. And my man here, he’s like the break champion of Cincinnati. You can just say something like, ‘Yo man, I need that break that Eric B dropped on “Follow The Leader”’ or just beatbox something for him, and he’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, I got that.’”
This distantly forthcoming record’s theme, says Blueprint, will only apply in terms of production and sound. Lyrically, he tends to avoid rapping on any single subject, and from his own solo work to the rhymes he writes for the Rjd2-backed Soul Position project to guest spots on other people’s albums — like the stellar “Alchemy” on Aesop’s Rock’s Daylight EP — Blueprint can be heard rapping about anything from women and life’s everyday struggles to politics in the nation and politics in the rap scene. Nothing he writes seems to fit easily into a specific category.
“I don’t like to write that way because I don’t want to limit myself,” he states flatly, “I don’t want to make a call like that because if I say that I’m only going to write about one thing and it doesn’t work out, then I’m stuck. And I already have writer’s block a lot. I go through spells where I might write once every six months, man. I mean, in terms of the work ethic it takes to be a solo artist, I’m just not in that mode, and a big part of it is that I do beats too, so I literally have a hard time doing both at the same level of output. I’m either doing beats really heavily or I’m writing rhymes really heavily.”
In that regard, the Soul Position project is a change of pace for Blueprint, who first heard about fellow Ohio native DJ Rjd2 a while before the pair managed to connect. Some of Blueprint’s fellow Weightless guys were friendly with some of the MCs in Rj’s Columbus-based MHz crew, and after several near-misses, the duo were finally introduced to one another.
“I just met him about six months before we started working on the Soul Position stuff together, but all my guys were telling me about him, and when I went to Columbus, I heard about him and knew he was one of the MHz guys,” says Blueprint. “The first time I went to his house, though, he didn’t even play me any of his hip-hop beats, he just played me his instrumental stuff. At that time, I was doing instrumental stuff too, so I knew he was going to be good on the beats.”
Some months later, recalls Blueprint, the Weightless and MHz crews finally played their first show together, and the two artists saw each other perform live for the first time. After discussing collaboration, they decided to form a duo, and Rj began working on beats. Despite the fact that Blueprint is, himself, an accomplished beatsmith, the production aspect of Soul Position is something he has no involvement in, and he’s not even interested in it on this project.
“That’s strictly Rj,” concedes Blueprint, explaining that project is, in a way, their humble homage to hip-hop’s classic, time-tested combination of a DJ and an MC working together as one. “Looking back at the groups that I idolized, I felt like I wanted to keep that formula. I mean, I make beats too, but I want this to be a Gang Starr kind of thing, or like an Eric B and Rakim or Pete Rock and CL kind of a thing. So for the Soul Position stuff, I’m never going to do a beat. But you know, it’s a lot easier to write when you don’t gotta do beats. All the Weightless stuff I did, I had to do the beats, sequence it all, organize the sessions and mix it all down…by the time came to kick my verse, I was exhausted. Then I got with Rj, it was like heaven. I was like, ‘What? All I have to do is show up and rap?’”

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