Back to School

If various members of the hip-hop community decided to get together for a potluck, Prince Paul and Automator would bring the casserole. Joining forces on White People, the follow up to their acclaimed 1999 album, So...How's Your Girl, the two Midas-touch producers have upped the ante this time around, spreading over 25 guest appearances from all ends of the musical spectrum throughout the record. Prince Paul, famous for his production work for De La Soul, and Automator, best known for devoting his knob-tweaking skills to Deltron 3030, Dr. Octagon, Lovage and the Gorillaz, just to name a few, have truly created a musical smorgasbord with White People, an album custom made in attempts to destroy the imaginary "Benz vs. backpack" gap in the hip-hop world. Calling from New York, we got a chance to catch up with Automator, aka Dan Nakamura, to discuss some of the new material.
With a name taken from an episode of the obscure and ill-fated early '90s sitcom Get a Life, it's obvious that Prince Paul and Nakamura aren't afraid to project a jovial attitude. They even went so far as to summon Saturday Night Live veteran Tim Meadows for vocal assistance on a few Dating Game spoofs on the new album. In fact, both So...How's Your Girl and White People are loaded with enough skits and wacky instrumentals to often make you feel like you're listening to a comedy album. The strength of the actual songs and collaborations, however, put this notion down and proves that, despite their clownish stance, Paul and Dan are all business.
Originally from the Bay Area, Nakamura maintains that his idea never was to simply be a rock star. "I never wanted to be in a band," he claims. "I don't mind touring and all the stuff that goes along with it, but that's not really what I wanted to do." Instead, from an early age Nakamura began to develop an interest in the more technical aspect of how music was created.
"I'd read all the liner notes and not really understand them, but I'd be fascinated by the sounds and how they were made," he says. "I guess later on, I realized that was the production aspect, so that's what I got into. But the idea was never to learn guitar and join a band."
When he was just out of high school, Nakamura began developing his skills and producing some of his own tracks, and while one listen to his records will tell you that the man has some diverse listening tastes it was obvious early on where his true passion was. "It was mainly hip-hop," he says. "I was fooling around with drum machines and doing the DJ thing a little bit at the time, so I started to get into some dance music, but it's pretty much always been hip-hop."
If So...How's Your Girl was meant to be appreciated by true hip-hop heads, then ironically titled White People is the album for the rest of us. Genres check in and stay only for as long as the packed revolving door of guest appearances will allow. You can find everything from retro-sounding hip-hop with De La Soul ("If It Wasn't For You"), to radio-friendly folk rock starring Jack Johnson ("Breakdown") and breezy Cat Power led trip-hop ("I've Been Thinking"), on this album, and yet, all of it manages to make sense. So, when you're putting together a record that has these stars, along with Mike Patton, Del the Funky Homosapien, Casual, Franz Ferdinand, Linkin Park, Rahzel, Mars Volta, RZA, John Oates and several others, how do you go about narrowing down who to work with?
"Honestly, the thing about all these records is that we pretty much just work with friends," Nakamura says. "I admire a lot of bands that I don't necessarily want to work with. What makes me decide who I want to work with has much more to do with personality and whether or not we'd get along than anything else."
With so many different personalities, talents, egos and availabilities to juggle, however, it's amazing that the Handsome Boy Modeling School albums manage to maintain their sense of cohesion. Nakamura reveals that this is a result of how the tracks are written from the ground up.
"We start out making tracks with people in mind, and once we find out who's going to be on the record, everything evolves," Nakamura says. "It's not like the records are done by mail, we're always working with people." Nakamura also claims that there is something to be said about the delicate balance of each artist's unique input and the overall vision that he and Prince Paul have for the projects.
"We don't lose control of the ship," he says, "but at the same time we don't constrict what people can do. We definitely have an idea of the direction we wanna go, and usually it just ends up that people go in that direction anyways."
Handsome Boy Modeling School will be touring across the US in March, so be sure to look for them if they come to a town near you. Also, be on the look out for the Handsome Boy Modeling School Self-Help DVD, which Nakamura was working on when we spoke. As for what projects he has lined up after the work for White People settles down, Automator is remaining understandably tight-lipped. "We've been working on some interesting stuff," he says. "You'll have to wait and see it when it comes out."

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