“This shit special!!!!!!!!” DJ Khaled bellows in his reverb-twisted voice on the intro to “Hip Hop”, a track off his sixth album. After several verses, when the track is winding down, Khaled says it again. If, somehow, the listener had forgotten that the shit was special, Khaled is there to remind us that this shit, indeed, special. Between contributing this grammatically incorrect but still somehow appropriate line, Khaled’s contributions to the track are hard to pin down. He doesn’t rap on the track; that’s handled by hall-of-famers Nas and Scarface, each doing a somber take on Common’s hip-hop-as-a-woman motif. Nor does Khaled produce the beat for the song; the beat was produced by young fruity-loops virtuoso Lex Lugar. There’s even some token old-school scratching. Was that Khaled on the Serato? Nope. That’s DJ Premier, also a hall of famer. Khaled’s only clearly manifest contribution to the song is saying “This shit special,” twice. And that’s what makes him kind of awesome (emphasis on the “kind of”).
Tag Archives: hip hop
People with jobs I want: DJ Khaled, curator of rap radio bangers
How to balance a ton of shit at once: A Q&A with Jensen Karp, gallery-owner/podcaster/marketer/rap manager/adult
Jensen Karp has had a multi-hyphenate career. Jensen began his professional life as a major label hip-hop artist known as Hot Karl, during the white-rapper boom of the early aughts. He went on to ghostwrite songs for other artists, write for the WWE, open Gallery1988, a pop-culture-focused art gallery in Los Angeles, among other things. Lately, Jensen has been hosting Get Up On This on Smodcast, doing marketing projects for TV networks and just got back into the music world, signing up to manage Jamaican-Canadian, cute-but-fierce, female MC Nova Rockafeller. I’ve been following Jensen since he hosted Hype Men, the defunct hip-hop podcast he produced with sketch comedy bros, It’s the Real (If you’re into hip-hop at all, you should check out the back episodes, as it’s probably my favorite podcast of all time – it was like a hip-hop-Nerdist, for people born between 1980 and 1987). I wanted to ask Jensen about how he got go where he is, doing all sorts of awesome things at once, without completely losing his shit. So, you know, I did.
yr an adult: First off, you’ve done a lot of things in your adult career, segueing from artist to writer to ghostwriter to gallery owner to podcaster to rap manager. When you were younger, did you ever imagine you’d have such a multi-hyphenate career?
Jensen Karp: I was thinking about that today. My father was a car salesman and my mother was an advertising executive for coupon magazines. So, even though my mom would take painting lessons and had fun outside things, my parents never did a million things. I think I took that on myself based on other weird aspects of my personality that I’m in therapy for.
But I was thinking about it today and there was this guy who worked at my dad’s car dealership who was really funny. And he had a normal day job, obviously, he was a car salesman, but he would also do standup and he would do videos for the dealership and all these other things. I remember as a kid, I would think, “That guy is so funny and it seems like he has something that pays the bills normally, I feel like he should be doing 7 million other things.” And I think that was the first time I sort thought of the idea that I could be doing 7 million things.
Hot Karl came up while I was in college for film. I never wanted to ditch the film concept or stop writing. That sort of made it a necessity [to multi-task]. I felt like I had to do the Hot Karl thing, because it was offering me a lot of money and it’s an opportunity I can’t really pass up. But I don’t want to give up anything creatively, so I became a hyphen because I had to. Since then, I’ve sort of made that into a career.
Rapping adulthood: a Q&A with rapper/producer K.Flay
Rapper/singer/producer/adult K.Flay has been garnering a modicum of buzz in Bay Area since graduating from Stanford, but she first really caught our ear with the release of last year’s I Stopped Caring in ’96. The project was an eclectic mix of electro-rap bangers about growing up and individuality, with a small dose of existential despair mixed in. If yr an adult were an FM-radio station in an alternate universe, this banger would have been on HEAVY rotation all last summer (also, our yearly summer jam concert festival would be called “The Big Chill”). Flay has stayed busy, releasing a new EP a few months ago, dropping remix after remix and touring religiously. Luckily, she was able to find a hot minute to answer some of our questions about growing up and making music.
yr an adult: A lot of the subject matter of a lot of your songs seems to be about growing up, (which is obviously what made you of interest to a site about facing adulthood) – why do you think your own emerging adulthood is a theme your interested in?
K.Flay: Mainly because I feel like we’re living in a time in which it’s easy not to grow up. People are incredibly preoccupied with preserving youth, both in a physical sense & a conceptual one. iI’s kind of insane when you think about it.
Why it might be time to start listening to political rap again
I was drinking at a friends house last weekend, and, being millenials, instead of just putting on an album, someone pulled out the laptop-projector combo and we played my very well curated vhx.tv rap video playlist. We stood around drinking, sometimes paying attention to the screen and enjoying the antics of Azealia Banks and Odd Future and Fat Joe, et al. Then, Yasiin Bey’s (née Mos Def) remake of “N**gas in Paris”, “N**gas in Poorest” came on and everyone stopped in their tracks to watch it.
The video, embedded above, sent a message to us that, Oh yeah. All the songs we like now are about how great it would to be rich, and none of them are about how fucked up we are for thinking that. Once the next Rick Ross video came on, we went back to our prior positions, but the situation got me thinking that, even though I like fun, dumb music, I (and I think many of the people I know) wold also appreciate some music that reflects and affects reality.
Q&A with J-Zone, writer/former hip hop artist/adult
In college, J-Zone was one of my favorite hip-hop artists. He made a series of loopy, funny and inventive albums, like Pimps Don’t Pay Taxes, $ick of Bein’ Rich and To Love a Hooker, among others. The beats were weird, the songs hilariously ignorant and the personality was a strict departure from any other notable artists from the height of the backpack rap era. And it didn’t go anywhere.
A few years ago, J-Zone gave music up as his primary career, to pursue other interests, including writing and teaching. He has a new book out, Root for the Villain: Rap, Bullshit and A Celebration of Failure, where he hilariously chronicles his exploits in the world of hip-hop in the early ‘00s, why he got out of the business and his lifelong aversion to bullshit. It’s a great, funny read and can be purchased from his website, http://govillaingo.com.
After nearly a decade in the music industry, you left it behind to make a living in other ways. Did you seek out advice from other former musicians about how to make transition out of music?
I did, but I didn’t get much help [laughs]. Most musicians do this forever. Look at it this way: If 25- year-olds with Master’s degrees and PHDs can’t find 9 to 5 jobs, imagine being in your 30s or 40s with a giant gap in your job resume. Most professional musicians either never had jobs or they did like telemarketing, customer service, bar tending, or retail in short spurts to pay bills while they pursued their dream. We never saw 9 to 5 jobs as careers and places to grow – they were temporary cash. So most musicians I asked thought I was crazy for even trying to get work outside of the music biz. And the ones who made the jump didn’t want to talk about it because there’s a stigma attached to being a professional musician who gets a job. It’s like an indicator of “I wasn’t good enough to make it.” So it becomes a pride issue. I know that reality is reality and it rarely has anything to do with one’s talent or personal worth, but artists have fragile egos. So I’m still trying to find new avenues that are away from the music biz, but not traditional 9 to 5s. I didn’t last very long in the 9 to 5 jobs I took.