In an attempt to bridge the gap between mainstream, uninspired rap and dirty but heartfelt underground hip-hop, Lifesavas have released their first album, Spirit in Stone, with one of the most successful independent hip-hop labels in the world.  Their music moves from one style to another, sometimes aggressive, sometimes jazzy, sometimes compassionate, sometimes sarcastic.  The production is clean.  The beats and samples are top of the line.  The lyrics are positive, and the style is street.  With the kind of distribution and management they're currently using, they might actually build that bridge.  
   Quannum is the brainchild of a crew named Solesides.  Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel (Blackalicious), Lateef and Lyrics Born (Latyrx), and DJ Shadow are the core members on Quannum's list.  Before Jumbo, Vursatyl and Rev Shines (Lifesavas) were invited to the party, Quannum was only dealing with Bay Area artists.  But now that's changing.
   I met with them at Reflections, a black-owned café just off of MLK on Killingsworth.  In conversation, they have a lot to say about commerce in the Northeast.  In the music, they express opinions about black culture throughout the country.  One segue on the album, called Thuggity, is a spoof on gangsta rap.  Imagine a vicious promoter yelling, "You ain't heard of Thug Dog!?"  On the other end of the spectrum, the song called Living Time is less about dividing culture along racial or political lines, and more about embracing life, whatever level you happen to be on.
   Much like the NE neighborhood these men grew up in, their group is going through an infusion of new interest, and they have yet to reach a ceiling.  But no one could seem better equiped to deal with that responsibility.  Says Vursatyl, "The way we look at everything is: that's the outside and this is the nucleus.  And so when anything new comes in, between the 3 of us, we're the team, and we see ya'll.  And any time you're approaching us as a unit, that makes us tighter."  Before anything else is their friendship.  It reaches back to middle school playgrounds and community dances.  Now, they're grown men with the respect and love of each other's children.
   Given their history in Northeast Portland, and their love for the community, I asked them to describe what changes they’ve seen the community go through:
Talk about some of the changes you’ve seen the city go through.

V	First of all, we were here before gang activity hit the city.  We seen urban music go through the funk scene up through hip-hop, on the east coast and simultaneously out here.  We’ve been around watching those things come and go in regards to their relevance and importance around here.  From an urban standpoint, Portland had a lot of black musicians doing shows to the point where when hip-hop came through, a lot of cat’s that didn’t have that voice found a voice.

MLP	Was there a resistance to that change?

V	Not at that time.  Especially in the beginning because it was so fresh and new.  I think people were just interested in something new happening around here.  But simultaneously we saw the black musician—playing keys and singing and playing guitar and bass—that kind of era fled through the whole birth of MTV.  The Ohio Player, that whole Earth, Wind and Fire style, we seen that kind of die even here.  The community has changed faces completely.  During the late ‘80s, this was an unpopular part of town.  Now it’s slowly becoming an economic hotbed.  People are moving businesses in.  In the late ‘80s and early 90’s, they were moving them out.  People are buying houses and property over here.  Houses that have been abandoned.  Houses where the property has been devalued, now you can come in pay $300,000 for a house now when cats was selling them 6 years ago for 80/90,000.  So there’s a lot of changes, man, from an economic standpoint, an artist standpoint.  We’ve been here through all of it.

MLP	What do you see as some of the negatives and some of the positives of that economic change?

V	Here it’s funny, ‘cause in this community we used to have black-owned hair products businesses down on MLK and Ainsworth.  One up on MLK and Skidmore called Friday’s, the one on Ainsworth was called Jabell’s.

MLP	And they were making hair products?

V	They were selling hair products, like black hair care products.  That was the booming black business back then, in the mid-80s.  Miss C’s T-Shirt Shop, they sold everything from t-shirts to wigs to jewelry to weed paraphernalia.  But mostly it was barbershops and hair salons.  It’s just unfortunate that we haven’t seen black businesses survive over the past decade, 15, 20 years.  I just wish that with all the prosperity happening in our community that people were more involved in it.  I think that’s one of the downfalls with gentrification.  Houses have been devalued.  People sell houses for cheap and lose a home that you grew up in, that your grandma live in.  You sell it ‘cause you need that $70,000 and then some guy comes in and buys it and sells it for 3 times what he bought it for and you’re living in an apartment with no equity.  It tampers with the economic system from the standpoint of people.  But I think on the positive side of it, people are able to see success in their community now.  They’re able to see that it’s possible to have a business and do well.  They’re able to see that there’s money to be made in our own community.  It presses our creativity to be able to think about ways to join that market.  Everything going on with Alberta from MLK to 33rd, I think there’s a little ice cream shop that just opened there, all those things are really positive for the community to see.  It enables you to see those abandoned buildings as a possibility rather than just an eyesore.

MLP	I was just in talking to the people at the Black United Fund and they’re going to be buying the lot next door to build a 3 story building with a community center on the ground floor, an expanded resource center and they’re expanding their offices.

V	And even here where you’re sitting right now.  This wasn’t here.  And I think it’s important for people to see success in Portland as a whole.  In other cities they see success all the time.  It’s not uncommon for you to go to Los Angeles and see Jack Nicholson at the Lakers game.  But you come to Portland, the only celebrities you see are the ones who actually play for the team.  So that’s the success we associate ourselves with.  If we can accomplish that high goal of being basketball players, but other than that, you’re not going to be able to sit nest to or live in the same community as someone who’s doing big things on a business level.  With these business you’re able to come in and see this has been here for 5 years and they’re doing well.  Right next door there’s a bakery shop.  You know, we never had that.  You can come up here and buy some sweet potato pie.  And it just makes you want to do your thing.  It makes you want to do something for yourself.  So that’s positive.

J	Even that store, New Seasons, over there on 33rd and Killingsworth.  Forever that store used to be a chain called IGA.  When that store couldn’t compete with some of the bigger stores, like Fred Meyer or even Walgreens, that building sat there for at least 2 and a half years and nobody wanted anything to do with it.  And here comes New Seasons, who revamped it, and they’re pulling, like, 300,000 a month.  So that says something about the community is not as poor as you think.

MLP	And they’re paying well, too.

J	What they’re doing, which is something we can learn from, is they’re setting up a store like that and selling that store, changing their name, setting up another store to compete with it.  And it’s positive competition.  Because initially they started out as Nature’s, and once that store’s doing well they sold that.  And they keep moving.  And there’s jobs in the hood again, know what I mean?

V	For most of my life I worked out in Hillsboro.  There was just no way to work around here, unless I worked at Safeway.  So I started working at a mall.  Now you can work in a little, local business right here in the neighborhood.  That’s really good.

MLP	How do you imagine a community keeps it that way?

J	Don’t just fill a quota.  You feel like you have to hire this one this one and this one, I got the whole spectrum color.  I think that’s an unfair thing  Particularly when you have a store on the other side of Portland, like Renasance Market, that’s not doing well, bring them into a place like New Seasons.  Bring them into a place like Alberta Market or Alberta Art Gallery or Philly Café.  It’s an unfortunate stereotype, but you can pretty much walk into a little market and know what race the owner is.  When you have kids looking for summer jobs, rather than them sitting at a kiosk in the mall, let them work behind a food café in their own community.  Feel good.  Take some pride in it.  Alongside other ethnicities, that way there’s a balance of diversity in that regard and then there’s also a balance of economy.  There’s still an unbalance.  It’s not just minority hiring, but it’s hiring from the community.  Don’t hire somebody who lives in Hillsboro to come work here.  That’s not helping our economy.

MLP	It seems like the community’s struggle has less to do with race anymore and more to do with who has money and who doesn’t.  Poor people are poor people.

J	Exactly.  And that’s why we need that money to stay in the community in order to build it up.  Places like this are popping up in all types of suburban communities.  You see it all the time.  It’s like the same thing is reproduced over and over.  Hollywood Video right next to a Papa Murphy’s and a Starbucks.  We could have plazas like this where you’ve got independent businesses that keep that money in the community.

MLP	A lot of times you’re competing with the mainstream American mindset.  People want the same thing.  They want to go somewhere and have it feel just like home.

J	You know we used to have a movie theater over on 30th and Alberta called Alameda.  We used to go watch Bruce Lee flicks.  Right across the street was B & L Tennis Shoes, where we got all our sneakers.  We definitely need another movie theater.   That’d be tight to have again.  We’ve been kicking around the idea of doing something later on down the line.  Those things are good to have a sense of community.  That’s a bit that’s been lost over these years.  You used to be able to ride your bike down the street and see kids on the corner playing wiffle ball, in the middle of the street playing tag football, and in somebody’s driveway playing basketball.  That’s basically how people learn to play sports.  Now you have to go to a community center or a park to play sports.

MLP	Or else you’ll get run over.

J	Exactly.  The sense of community gets served when people are able to be in an environment where they see each other, get to know one another.  We was going up there to the movie theater.  We’d be up there buying Nikes and Converse across the street.  And that’s happening all again over on Alberta now with so many businesses over there.  We used to eat at Fish and Poultry with good fish sandwiches over there.  Word of mouth would get around town, and after a basketball game we’d go over to Fatburger.

MLP	So how long have you guys known each other?

J	I don’t know man.  We knew each other before high school.  We weren’t legends, but we were both stellar park rats.  We’d be at the park heavy…  The park we’d always run into each other at was Alberta Park.  Just being in the community and having similar taste and style, a lot of people would run up on us and say, “Man, you gotta meet this cat.  He’s just like you.  He’s into music like you.  His game is kind of like you.  You’ve gotta meet.”  He’d hear the same thing about me and eventually we’d be in the park and not know that’s the guy people were telling us about.   So we’d go to the same jams and functions that DJs were at, and I used to DJ a lot of after-hours spots.  He had his own group and I had my own group.  Whenever there’d be some kind of community affair going on,  if there’s music involved and there’s competition going on, either they’d be performing or I’d be performing.  So we’d see each other, and we started developing admiration and respect for one another’s skill level.  Lo and behold, in high school, come to find out that we were rivals and the basketball court, too.   So that just made it a friendly competition.  Then we were like, “Man, we just gotta go ahead and hook up.”  We respected each other’s style and kept saying we should get together and do a song.

MLP	How old were you at that point?

J	I don’t want to reveal the age, but we were in high school.  We had a mutual friend who we lost to gang violence in the city.  As it turns out, it was kind of a blessing in that the songs we wanted to do was called Stop the Madness.  It was going to be myself, Irv and our mutual friend.  So it was ironic that his life was lost and then we ended up hooking up and doing that.  From there we just kind of built a relationship.  We started feeling each other out in terms of music, but also in terms of people.  We entertained anything from a relative’s baby shower to church concerts to community outreach.  There used to be a thing back in the day called the Can Jam where we’d bring a can a food and it’d go toward a good cause and we’d go in there and have a blast.  Dance all night, have a party, do whatever step.  Those were the kinds of things we built our relationship on.  But on top of that, in terms of people—there’s not many people you can say, “I outright trust this person.”  Outside of music, and outside of our group, that’s my friend.  There’s nothing along the way that’s broken us thus far.  So whenever we get to tell how we met, it lets us reflect on how much we’ve gone through and how far we’ve come.  So that inspires us.

MLP	With the amount of work that you’ve been doing, especially in the last couple of years, has that put any kind of stress on the friendship?  Has it brought you any closer?

J	It makes us come closer

MLP	Even with all the business?

V	Definitely.  The way we look at everything is that’s the outside and this is the nucleus.  And so when anything new comes in, between the 3 of us, we’re the team, and we see ya’ll.  And any time you’re approaching us as a unit, that makes us tighter.  We have to pull together in order to know how to handle that situation.  From business to touring to doing shows, all of that, we face everything as a group.  You gotta be like-minded to do that.  And we fight like brothers, but at the same time, it makes us closer.  We know what the goal is, and that’s to stay together and to keep what brought us together intact.  We’re friends first.  We were together as children, you know.  That’s uncle.  I’m uncle.  He’s uncle.  That’s gotta last.  After Lifesavas is done, we’re still family.

MLP	You all have kids?

V	Yeah.  He don’t.  (Points at Rev.)  He has a million records and he considers those his children.

MLP	Well let’s talk about the music.  How do you guys feel about the album?

Rev	(Sarcastically) It sucks.

J	Very, very, very pleased.  We’re excited about the record.  You like it?

MLP	Yeah.  I’ll just tell you right now, I’m really excited about this album.  This is the best hip-hop I’ve heard in years.  I’m proud that it’s coming from Portland, and I’m really impressed with the work, start to finish.

J	Thank you.

V	Right on.  Appreciate it.  We’re excited about the record.  It’s our first album.  We said long awaited, man, we was waiting for it.

MLP	Well basically you started recording with Head Exercise, right?  And that was your first demo?

J	Yeah.  That was the record that got us situated.

MLP	And that was what, 3, 4 years ago?

J	Yeah.  We recorded that in early ’99, right?

MLP	Did you re-record it for the album?

J	Yeah.

MLP	How much different does it sound?

J	Not much different.  We tried to keep it the same, ‘cause when you come up on an idea like that, with what to us feels like classical energy, you can’t recreate that vibe.  Once you capture it in a recording, it’s better to leave it alone.

MLP	So much of songwriting for me is coming up with something on the fly and then spending the next 3 months trying to get it back again.

J	Indeed.

V	What’s so dope about it, too, going back to the album, is that we finally got an answer to the, “What took ya’ll so long?”

J	We were asking ourselves.

Rev	There’s been plenty of material through the years, we could have put this album out, put that album out, but it wouldn’t have been the true representation.  So now it’s like, this is what took so long.  And it’s from, what I can see, it’s been the most successful Portland hip-hop release that I can remember.  It’s been a long time since something even made this much noise around the city.  You know, you got to put some time and some thought into it if you want something to leave.  A lot of times, you expect it from your own town.  You’ve got friends, you’ve got family, you’ve got people that are going to spread the word.  And eventually it’s like, “Oh, he mentioned The Rose Garden.”  And we cover all that, but I think that we cover music that everybody wants to listen to.

MLP	There are a lot of styles on the album.  It seems to me that a lot of artists work really hard to put out solid albums, but then their shows are a disappointment.  But when you all play, it’s still just 2 turntables and 2 microphone, but there’s something about it that’s really full.  How do you do that?

J	Practice.  We take pride in work.  We respect our craft, and we really respect our pioneers.  A lot of artists today kind of have a microwave mentality, as I dub it, which means their attention span is about 2 minutes and then it’s hot.  If it ain’t hot then they’ll move to the next thing that’s hot.  And from that comes a lack of perspective and knowledge of what laid the foundation of what’s hot or what you’re itching to have access to now.  We take a different approach.  We really respect our pioneers.  We draw inspiration.  We’re not trying to be their career or anything like that, but just take that inspiration and build on that.  With that, it takes a certain amount of respect for what music comes out.  We pride ourselves on being style-junkies.  We pride ourselves on being musicians.  With all of that, in terms of the live show, we pride ourselves on being entertainers.  We go to shows all the time.  We’re still fans of the music.  We go to shows all the time, and watching someone walk around and grab their genitals and bark and throw the mic at the crowd because the soundman don’t got the sound right or whatever.  The people who come to see you don’t understand that, they just want you to entertain them.  They think that you are it.  If you get up there and you don’t show that, they might not get your record and they might now come see you next time.  So we know that and we want to come every time we come out.  We want to bring passion, and energy, and show that this is just straight-up hip-hop and there’s a reason why we fell in love with this thing and a reason why we have a love for this thing.  We see it as our vehicle of communication.  Right now, it seems to me that this music is the most powerful thing, as far as communication, across the globe.  We’ve learned that from touring.  So, in order for us to not only entertain around the city of Portland, but be able to go across the country and then take it further and push it into other countries—to be able to do that I think you have to have an entertaining show.  If he’s up on the mic and we’re in Barcelona, Spain or Pocatello, Idaho and he says, “Ok, let’s try something new, I’m just gonna fart on the mic and ya’ll will clap.”  Mmm-mm.  The promoters aren’t gonna book you.  The people aren’t gonna come out and they’re not gonna want to hear that on the cd.  Now if he comes out and says, “Alright, I know we usually do this, but I want to be creative.  Can I do something new for ya’ll?”  It invites people in, and makes it so they’re a part of the music.  We try to do that.  We don’t just stand out front and try to run through the songs and go through the motions.  We try to go ahead and put on a production.   So you can say, “I went.  I saw.  I went home.  I’m on fire.  I’m inspired.”

Rev	And I want to see the show again tomorrow night.

J	And I want to see it tomorrow night, like that good movie or that good book.  That good sermon, whatever it is.  I want to get that again.  Then when you see us on the street, we’re more than just artists.  It’s kind of like I know you now.  That’s how Lifesavas base their show.  As well, he shines on the decks, demonstrating the art of blending and DJing.  And then on the mics, we try to display the art of style junkies and lyricists.  Then you combine that with beats and it’s straight-up hip-hop.

Rev	The three of us have really high standards.  That’s another thing that took the album so long.  Everybody in the group is a perfectionist.  We have certain sounds that we all like and play those sounds back to back and say this one’s not good enough.  And the same thing comes across in the show, too.  We all came up going to see Public Enemy and De La Soul.  Actually, I remember when I first started going to shows, almost every show was that big.  That was a thing that was put in our mind as far as doing a live show.  Nowadays, people have videos and don’t really bother having a dope show.  I don’t really know what it is, but up until now we’ve been performing to a crowd that didn’t really know our material so we kind of have to base it off of all these different things that we like.  We like the way Blackalicious performs, but the difference between us and them is in they go into the first bar of a song and the crowd goes nuts, like, oh that’s my song.  We don’t have that so we gotta give them more introduction to each song, trying to encourage them.  And the crazy thing about it is we went on this last tour and it was funny because people were starting to know the stuff.  Like we’ll go into our routine and be like, “Oh, they’re doing our part.”  It’s proving to be effective.  Obviously we’re putting enough work into it.

MLP	The first time I put in the album I was surprised how the performance of LIFE was so different from the album.  That was a nice treat.  On Hellohihey you’ve made a statement about facing and overcoming your own ego, but then on It’s Over you ridicule pretentious rappers.  How do you pick apart another artist or speak highly of yourself without becoming arrogant?

J	What’s wrong with being arrogant?  (laughs)  On the mic that is.

V	Hip-hop is multi-faceted.  Basically, we is just people.  We’re just trying to take the standpoint of, you might make a statement, but at some point you gotta point the finger back at you.  At the end of the day, if you’re always giving your opinion and never check yourself, that’s when things are unbalanced and that’s when you start to lose focus on what’s important.  So, ultimately, through the course of the whole record, any statement that we say, we try to balance it out, whether it’s through another song or another verse.  So at the same time we’re putting ourselves under that microscope as well.  Balance.  For everything you’ve got to have balance.  I think that if we can accomplish that then as people we can feel confident about our art.  And as a person you can say you’re always changing and you’re always evolving as a person.  Even though I have strong opinions, I’m checking myself along the way.  So we try to do that.

J	Also, emceeing was built on the art of the battle.  Who could demonstrate their description of their bravado the best, on the mic?  So when you’re listening to the music you’ve got to know that’s going to be a part of it.  The early origins of hip-hop and emceeing comes from the MC that could toast the party the best.  I’m the host with the most.  I’m the man with the plan.  Those are things that this thing is based upon.  So if everybody stopped doing it, it kind of be like, “Hey what happened?”

MLP	You guys are talking about sensitive issues, you’re talking about things that get people hot.  You’ve got to get out your aggressions in a positive way.  I noticed that the first half of the album is proportionately much lighter than the second half.  Were you writing songs for the album thinking, “We want it to look a certain way so let’s write a song that goes here.”

V	We definitely had certain ground that we wanted to cover, from a topic standpoint.  There were certain things that we wanted to accomplish.  There were things that we wanted to make sure were being said about us as MCs and producers.  But ultimately we tried to put the album together so that it felt good as a listening experience, so that when you put the record on, from song to song, it just felt right.  Back in the day you didn’t want to keep going to the record player to move the needle from song to song.  When you listen to Innervisions by Stevie Wonder, you can just put it on and let it play.  The only time you go to the record player is to turn it over.  So we wanted to put together a record that felt that way,  You could put it on and play.  Nowadays, with cds, you can just program your favorite songs, skip, people don’t even know the names of songs anymore.  They’re like, “I like track 10.”  

MLP	So did you take a big basket of songs and arrange them that way?

V	Basically, yes.  We cut several different versions of the record

J	A lot of material did not make this record.

V	And we just honed it down and juggled songs until it felt good.

J	We were in the mastering session going back and forth like, “Nah, I don’t think that song should make it.”  “Yeah.  You got to have it.”  And, “No.”  Until, “This is it.  Let it happen.”

MLP	And were the segues written beforehand, or did you come up with them in the studio?

J&V	A little a both.

J	There’s no set way of doing it.  It was more or less by ear.  But you could also say that we aligned a little bit by doing our shows.  There’s a time to just hit you over the head and there’s a time to let you breath.  There’s that ride.  And even from DJing, you have to know when to let up and when to turn it on.  That’s just how we wanted to record to be like.  A lot of people in the studio sessions would listen to songs, unsure that they should go on the record, and we were like, “Trust me.”  Because we’ve got this other piece that’s just going to bring it together so well.  And once you hear it your realize that it flows so perfectly that it just feels good.

MLP	Shakespeare did that.  You do it to, with the comic relief by putting Thuggity in the middle of the second half, as heavy as it is.  Then you come in with Skeleton, which says a lot in two pretty short verses.  I want to ask you about one specific line which is, “Who stole the shoul became the phrase when there’s only 8 niggas at the show and 6 of ‘em is on stage.”  That says something I’ve never heard in a song before, but it’s something that we’re all thinking about.  So, I know how it is here at shows.   What’s it like in other cities?

J	Oh it’s like that everywhere.  That idea came from a song that’s going to be out later called 86.  As artists we try to wrap our heads around how to get people of different ethnicities out to the show, and specifically, how do we get our people, our community to come to the show?  Well, we’re 86’n each other.  They don’t want the music.  When they do come to a show then there’s violence., or the promoters don’t want it.   The whole community is just like, “86 it.  Hip-hop should not even exist in the city.”  So there was that concept for a song, and Verse pretty much just played with the number and based it on some of the shows that we go to and some of the shows we perform at.  We’ll walk in and the only ethnicity that you see in terms of what we relate to are the musicians on stage.  And sometimes that can be discouraging.  And he’ll build on that.

V	Hip-hop is the new jazz music, you know.

MLP	I agree.

V	Wherever we go now, there’s just no black people at the show.  If there is you can count them on one hand.  And it’s just crazy for hip-hop to be born out of the inner city and now, unless you’re performing it there’s no support for it.  People are not buying records.  We’ve taken it for granted.  DJ Chill, who you mentioned in the Mic Crenshaw story, he’s like the last of the black DJs out of this community.  Period.  If you go to the Mt. Hood Jazz Festival or the Montreal Jazz Festival, there’s no black people there to see jazz.  They only perform it.  It’s just like, why?  Ask yourself why.  Again, with hip-hop, we’re not putting our money on it.  We’re not supporting it.  We don’t consider it urban music anymore.

MLP	Is it because white kids got into it, or is it just that it’s not new anymore?

V	There’s this soul-food place on MLK and close to Dekum called Yam Yam’s.  I’ve never eaten at Yam Yam’s.  You know why?  ‘Cause my mom makes ribs.  My mom makes yams.  She makes greens.  She makes it better, I’m sure, than anything I can get at Yam Yam’s.  Why am I gonna go buy some food at Yam Yam’s when mama makes it?  And mama lays that door down.  My wife makes it.  She makes it good.  She makes good catfish.  You feel what I’m saying?  She makes good cornbread.  She might even be insulted if I went to Yam Yam’s when she can make it.  And a lot of cats around here are like, “Why should I buy a Lifesavas record?  I rap, too.  My cousin Pookie raps.  My cousin Tay Tay putting out a cd.”  It’s becoming old hat to us.  Why buy it if you can make it?  I’m just as good as this guy doing it, so we’re just going to disassociate ourselves from it.

Rev	I remember, years ago, when black friends and white friends of mine, we were all listening to the same music.  And there was a time when I first started going to shows where there would be a lot of black people there.  There was really no division, it was just hip-hop music.  Then there was the whole east coast/west coast thing, mainstream thing, and now every kid you meet raps.  You either have a cd out, or even if you’re totally clueless, don’t have a cd out, have never even written down a verse, there going to come up and say, “Yeah, man, I rap.  So you going to sign me?  What’s up?”  People just have this perception that this is something that anyone can do.  Pick up a pen and a microphone and a throw-back jersey and they’re an automatic rap star.  That’s where the thing comes in about, “My cousin raps.”  It’s a lot easier to listen to and think about getting high and rolling the car that you’re never going to drive.

J	That’s a lopsided division.  That the beauty of a Thuggity as opposed to a Livin’ Time.  Any question that anyone asks us you’re going to hear the word balance, again.  The division, or the separation, or the “I don’t want to hear anything new” is basically because this Thuggity thing is so far away from this Livin’ Time.  Because this is death, this is life.  And that’s what they relate to.  They don’t care if they can relate to this Livin’ Time.  They dub it white, college kid, backpack music.  And this is their I’m a gangsta, I’m a thug, I shoot em up, I’m sexier than the car, I live at home with my mother and I got $100,000 rims on my car.  That’s like, there’s nothing in the middle.  So it’s off balance.

V	It’s got a lot to do with marketing, too.  A lot of the reason the make up at our shows, and artist like Common and The Roots, and increasingly Outkast, those shows are marketed toward a certain part of every city.  Every show we play is like the equivalent of Northwest 23rd.  I don’t care where we’re at, when we get off the bus and look around, it’s almost like we’re up on NW 23rd.  And that’s where to posters are.  We ride to the hood and there’s no posters.  There not putting posters up at the barbershops and soul food restaurants that are common in this part of town.  When we’re coming to town they’re just marketing it to a certain demographic.  But the gangsta rap is at liquor stores, cigarette and cigar shops.  They’re on every corner.  They’re pumping that major like, “Come check this out.  This is the hot new guy.”  And the barometer for success begins to equate that he’s tight because of everything else besides his music.  Everything else besides his music is why I should want to be like that.

Rev	And you just answered a question I was about to ask, too.  Why, with the light-skinned kids it incorporates all these guys getting high, kind of hippieish, and they’re coming to the shows all smoked out and there’s a lot of music that can relate to that.  Not the Lifesavas, though.  But you know what?  I guarantee you that everybody in the crowd smokes weed and is into all that, but they still listen to us.

J	It’s good music.

Rev	And then as far as relating to, like, Camron.  And who relates to that in Portland?  Maybe 3 drug dealers who make enough money to afford that stuff.

MLP	What’d you say?  Camron?

Rev	That’s just a rapper that I could think of that’s into showing off his jewelry and his pink cars.

J	His demographic is not the rest of the world.  He knows that.  He’s totally New York.  Even though some of them say that the streets the street, they’re talking about their block.  And there’s people out here that claim their block Gantenbein or Dekum or Killingsworth.  That’s cool, but we’re claiming that, too.

Rev	Some of the music, and there’s way better examples than Camron, and I see them on MTV, and a lot of people see this and a lot of people like this.  Why?  Because I’m really open-minded.  I definitely have certain things I like, but I’ve been a DJ in mainstream clubs and I can appreciate why people like this.  But some of the shit that I hear, I’m just blown away.  They spent $500,000 on a video for this guy because he looks good in a baseball hat.

J	To wrap that up, unless you’ve got something to ad, that is a bone that our people don’t want to hear about.  “I don’t want to hear it.  I like it.  It’s what’s happening.  I don’t want to hear that.”  Ok.  So we got a bone to pick with you now.

V	It’s easy to set people against each other.  It’s balance.  We love that hip-hop has grown.  You can see the growth.  That’s dope.  But now there’s no balance there.  A lot of what was there is missing.  You asked about our live show, or putting together the record, we’re just students who love hip-hop music.  So we watched like wide-eyed kids when A Tribe Called Quest would come to town or put out a new record.  You would just listen for hours, over and over and over again.  They way he was saying stuff.  You just loved Q-Tips voice.  The beats.  The way they put the samples together.  It was art.  But now, the way that they market the music, there’s a certain tier of fan and artist that sits apart from this movement of music, and vice versa.  So the underground/independent artist begins to look at that artist or that type of music like, “Man, ya’ll don’t know nothing about music.  We are the true purist.”  And when you set apart, like the supposed east coast/west coast thing, it starts setting you almost at war with each other.  It’s this psychological game where I’m going to try as hard as I can not to be commercial.  I want to be as dirty as I possibly can.  I want my record to sound like it was recorded in my Grandmother’s toilet with combat boots stepping on it.  Then on the other hand, the cats who are making the “commercial” music have got to be as pristine, generic and overproduced as it can possibly can be.  They just regurgitate the same subject matter.  It never takes a gamble, never takes a risk.  And I think that if we could break that down and say, “Make good music.”  No matter what you’re trying, just make good music.

Rev	Hip-hop is not that young anymore.  There are some kids that I see that don’t even know about A Tribe Called Quest.  Some album will come out and you’ll just be blown away by it.  But you didn’t even realize those were samples of the instruments and elements that were being used.  I see how fans are really detached from it.  But the really scary thing is how many artists that are making music, making money selling records, that have their own fans, don’t know about this stuff either.  

MLP	In regards to what you were talking about the independent versus the mainstream.  There’s the fact that independent music is making money.  The independent records are selling because we decided to defeat mainstream music was to go out and give a bunch of money to some obscure artist.  So now that market is coming up.  It’s getting bigger and selling records but I think that the musicians and the music fans are still kind of feeling less than the mainstream.  

J	That’s an excellent point.  That’s why MCA, which is now defunct, went after Shadow and Blackalicious.  They didn’t come and say, “You guys have to do this and this and this.”  They realized these guys are moving 100,000 units plus on their own.  No video.  Solesides didn’t have any videos.  They were our of a dorm room.  MCA is saying, “What if we distribute that?  We could triple it.”  And now look at them.

MLP	And they don’t even know what the music sounds like.

J	No.  They don’t.  But the fans see that move and they get worried like they’re leaving us.  But that’s not the case.  We’re just getting the message across so that gap gets filled.  And that’s something that will get those people on the outside of the bubble back in.  That starts the process, but it doesn’t finish it.

MLP  About the religious references in the music.  Are you religious, or do you use the references to make a point?

V	We’re not religious at all.  The references are definitely there to make a point.  Religion, I’m not cool with that term.  Because it puts you in this box.  But we just live life.  We have an appreciation for life and everything we have on the album is just food for thought.  This is our experience.  This is the way we see things, and these are the resources that have given us that information.  But, religious?  Nah.

J	Out of millions of people across the world, everyone has their own definition.  There have been groups before us, teachers that had their spiritual gifts in terms of finding peace within themselves and appreciation for their creator.  Now, in terms of that, we have a foundation on which we were raised and we have morals.  So you’re going to hear that because the album is an honest album.  It’s an honest depiction of us, it’s not a definition.  That’s why we don’t use that word.  But it is a description.  In a description of us, we are at peace with what our foundation is.  As he said, that’s food for thought.  That’s an option or whatever.

MLP	You guys do make it clear that you’re against abortion.  That seems pretty brave in today’s political climate, especially since the underground generally has a box that everyone is supposed to be in as far as being vegetarian, active, pro-choice and so on.  You’ve also got a song like Resist, sort of an anthem to standing up to authority.  Can you speak a little bit about your political beliefs, and in addition to that, your opinions on current policy?

V	First and foremost, we are definitely pro-life on every tier.  Just because we come from a situation where seeing death is scary in how much we’ve had to witness it.  So that spurs us to say let’s live. As far as the government, we see that in politics, it just seems to be behind so much death, especially here in America.  Our hands are so bloody.  We’ve played the secret bearer of bad news for years, but when it comes back around to bite us, we’re innocent.  Where is this coming from?   I’m not really into what America needs to do globally.  But I know if we start with what’s going on here in our own community, when cats is literally getting shot every day.  Just the other day this cat was shot in his arm like 500 feet from where I live.  I got home like 20 minutes after it happened.  When gunplay is that rampant, and it’s right by where my babies are growing up.  And there’s a police station right here and it takes the police like 45 minutes to get there.  I live like 8 or 9 blocks from here.  There’s a problem with what we see going on here in our own community.  And until we can effect that we can’t really effect what people believe can happen on a larger scale.  That’s why people don’t vote.  And I do believe that we should vote.  I believe that we should get out there and have an opinion about what’s going on.  Ultimately we’re discouraged when it doesn’t seem attention is being given to problems here at hand.  From where I live, people think really basically, man.  Why are we going over there, involving ourselves in affairs that have nothing to do with us?  There’s no threat to us.  And you can’t even deal with what’s happening with me here in my one block radius?  It’s difficult to be encouraged about what the president’s doing in Iraq.  If anything we’re just skeptical.  You may not even be able to read, but if you can, your point of interest may not be to go pick up a book and educate yourself on foreign affairs.  But you can still be an activist.  You can still be active in your own, immediate circle.  You can get involved and make a difference.  You can complain until the police do something about what’s going on right next door to me.  I’ve got babies I’m trying to raise.  I’m going to complain, write letters.  I’m going to participate in the rallies.  When we were downtown at the antiwar rally, people were there with every other agenda besides what’s really going on.  That’s scary because what it’s really saying is that we’re avoiding those pertinent issues that the government is ignoring in our own neighborhoods.

MLP	It’s easier to do that.  You have to start being responsible if you’re going to start talking about what’s going on in your neighborhood.

V	It gets discouraging.  We just try to say, “You can be active.”  A lot of people don’t even know who Mumia is, but they can be active and effect the Mumias of our community.