Brian Coleman – The Unkut Interview

At one point liner notes were nearing extinction on rap albums, but thanks to the fine work of people like Brian Coleman and the crew at Get On Down, they’re currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts, giving aging, bitter rap fanatics such as myself the perfect excuse to bang on about the first Ultramagnetic album in day-to-day conversation. Most of you would have read Rakim Told Me/Check The Technique by now, so you know that copping the Mr. Coleman’s third tome is mandatory at this point. He took some time out last weekend to trade war stories from the trenches of the hip-hop interview battlefield and discuss the trials and tribulations that go along with such in-depth work.

Robbie: Was the ‘Classic Material’ column in XXL your first published work?

Brian Coleman: I started that column in 1999, that was Elliott Wilson’s idea. I had been writing for XXL before that. I started, I think, in the second issue. I wrote for them until 2004. That Ultramagnetic chapter in Rakim Told Me started as a piece I did for XXL and then I expanded it greatly over the years. In ‘98 Ultramagnetic was supposedly reforming so everyone was like, ‘Oh, we should talk to them about that!’ I had been writing a little bit before that, I’d been writing for URB, The Boston Phoenix, I wrote for this magazine called CMJ, it’s basically the trade publication for college radio. I was a hip-hop columnist there, it was cool because you could write about a lot of indy stuff.

What inspired you to write about music?

I always had a day job, I’ve been a publicist for the last 23 years, pretty much right out of college. I was promoting a lot of jazz stuff back then for a small company in Boston. I never really wanted to be a writer. That was never something that I yearned to do. I’m not an English major, I was a Communications major in college. I didn’t like the way that hip-hop was being covered locally, in Boston. There was only one guy that was writing about hip-hop with any kind of consistency and doing it well – Ken Capobianco at the Tab Newspapers. I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous, this is Boston and this is a major city. Fuck it, I’ll do it if no one else is gonna do it.’ I started writing for this monthly publication called Boston Rock in ‘94 and I just called up the editor and said, ‘If I do a column, will you print it?’ I would review stuff like The Roots‘ From The Ground Up [on Talkin’ Loud] and jazz/soul stuff like Omar out of the UK and Steve Williamson. Some of the re-issues that were coming out, the James Brown stuff. It was whatever the hell I wanted to review, because the guy wasn’t paying me. I was a DJ, I was doing a college radio show at WZBC. I was doing a funk show and an old school hip-hop show at the same time so I was getting some promos that way. I was the only person in Boston writing about The Roots at that time, which shouldn’t have happened, but it did. Eventually I started writing for the Boston Phoenix, which was the local arts weekly paper, and the Boston Herald, which is one of the two bigger dailies. It was all very happenstance, I’m not a very ambitious person in that regard. I’ve always just found certain niches and fallen into stuff. After a while I found out that I was half decent at it and I enjoyed it so I just kept going.

How did the idea for the first book come together?

Rakim Told Me was basically two books smooshed together – Yes, Yes Y’All and Our Band Could Be Your Life. My problem with Yes, Yes Y’All was there was no flow, they were just chunks of text. The text was dope, but it was difficult for me to read. I thought, ‘What if it had more of a linear narrative and there was someone to guide this along?’ That’s what liner notes do, and I was very familiar with classic jazz liner notes, so it was like, ‘Shit, why don’t I just do liner notes for hip-hop albums!’

I did a book proposal and I had an agent shopping it. It was all about the year 1988 in hip-hop. The sample chapter in that proposal was the Ultramagnetic chapter. I had some people who were mildly interested in the book, but this was 2004 and hip-hop books were not a very sexy or interesting thing to most publishers. I was like, ‘Schoolly-D? No one would put his shit out, so he just said, ‘Fuck it’ and did it. Uncle Luke was like, ‘I don’t need a major label.’ I came up in the punk scene in the mid 80’s, and Black Flag didn’t even try to shop it, they were just like, ‘Let’s start SST and do it.’ A lot of the inspirations in my life, musically, have been independant artists. A lot of the times I liked them even more because they were independent.

It was also out of the fact of doing a long interview and having this incredible conversation with someone like KRS-One or Slick Rick and then they [XXL] were like, ‘Oh yeah, give me 500 words!’ So I had all this extra stuff that was just as good as the stuff I included in the piece but they kept shrinking and shrinking the ‘Classic Material’ column to the point where I said, ‘This is not worth it anymore, I’m not even going to bother.’ I just took those interviews and blew them out like they should have been in the first place. If the blog world had existed back then, maybe I would have just put it up online, but that wasn’t a realistic option in 2004/2005. I called up Andre from Wax Poetics and said, ‘Who prints the magazine?’ He gave me the number and I called them up and just did the book. It doesn’t look that great, it’s pretty basic – especially when compared to the new one – but it got the job done. It’s about the content. People took to it – not tens of thousands, but more than I thought would be into it – and I figured I’d just go from there.

How many copies did you print?

The first run was two thousand, and then I did another run of two thousand after that. I haven’t sold all of those yet because I took it off the market for quite a few years when Check The Technique came out. I didn’t want them to be competing with each other.

Having only recently read the Critical Beatdown chapter was amazing. I found out a lot of stuff about the making of that album that I would never have imagined.

That’s the whole thing. You know – because of all the important work you’re doing – it helps so much to understand the process that these artists go through, what they’re thinking at the time and what situations they’re in. I thought that was important as well – they really had to work their asses off for that album, and even after they did it didn’t sell shit. You and I know how influential that album was but a lot of times influence doesn’t mean sales. That album is still underrated to this day, except for people like Prince Paul and Premier – the people that were influenced by it.

That and Criminal Minded still remain as the pinnacles of rap to me.

BDP even more so, in a way. It was recorded for an even lower budget than Critical Beatdown. Some of that stuff was recorded in $25 an hour studios. Will Sokolov [Sleeping Bag Records] told me a funny story when I was interviewing him about Mantronix. After the first EPMD record they got signed to Rush and Lyor and Russell were like, ‘You’ve gotta go to this studio, they have all the best equipment. You’ll love it! We insist!’ They called Will and were like, ‘We don’t like this shit! We wanna go back with Charlie Marotta!’ When you know about the struggle to get those records made, it makes you appreciate them that much more.

How do you decide which albums to cover?

Rakim Told Me was easy, because those were interviews which I’d pretty much already done. There were 90’s albums that didn’t make it because I decided to put all of the 80’s records in. Check The Technique was a little bit different. Sometimes you can’t get the people on the phone, so decisions are made for you, against your will. It still happens to me to this day, which is why I don’t think I’ll do another one of these books. People come up to me all the time, ‘Do you know what album you should do?’ ‘I’m not the one who has the rights to this formula. You should do it, I’ll buy your book!’ Everyone has the right as a fan to be able to do this sort of shit. It’s not as hard to get in touch with these guys as people might think, especially these days with Facebook.

Some people have asked me, ‘Are you trying to make the hip-hop canon?’ What right do I have to tell you what the hip-hop canon is? My goal is to cover albums that I find important, and they’re not necessarily the most important records ever made in hip-hop but I find them important for different reasons. Too $hort’s Life Is… album was important for me to cover. His path to making records, how important he is to the west coast and the Bay, the fact that he’s an indy artist – and I’ve always liked his flow. These are albums that I find to be interesting to listen to, and I find them even more interesting the more I find out about them. Range is good. It’s good to have Ultramagnetic, who sold less than 100,000 copies, and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, who sold multi-millions. Both of them are equally important in a lot of ways, and they both came out in 1988. No artist produces music the same way. Some MC’s only write once they hear music, others have their rhyme books. That’s a huge difference, that changes a lot. That doesn’t make you better or worse but I find it kind of interesting.

What was your experience like when your second book was released through Random House?

They gave me a really good opportunity to put my book out and put it in front of a lot of people, but I really hated giving away 93% of my royalty. There are tonnes of parallels to putting out books and putting out records. There are always trade-offs, but I knew what they were when I went into it. They didn’t promote the book that much, but I didn’t expect them to, they had a lot of other books on their plate so I didn’t get upset about it. I was promoting it the whole time. At the same time, how many chances am I going to get where Random House calls me up and wants to put my book out? I didn’t find it a bad experience, but after doing it I wouldn’t put out another book with a major house unless they were gonna give me a shitload of money, and that’s not something that was ever going to happen. Nothing against Random House, but my new one looks better than theirs, and I did it myself with my designer James Blackwell. I kicked their ass, and that makes me feel good. I don’t think anyone would even notice that it’s self-published.

Who has been your most elusive subject?

Kurtis Mantronik, because I still couldn’t get him for this time around. People don’t even know where he lives! I heard that he was either in South Africa or Israel. He’s continued to elude me, but I’ve done a massively updated version of that chapter anyways, because I felt it was important enough that I needed to do that. I had talked to him in an email interview but he didn’t answer half the shit. Maybe he just doesn’t like journalists. That’s every artist’s right, they don’t have to talk to me, but it’s a shame because Mantronix as a whole is generally forgotten and they were so important in so many ways. You know who else is elusive? Herby Luv Bug. Last I heard, he’s in Brazil. I got in contact with the woman who does his publishing and she was like, ‘No, he’s not going to be able to do the interview.’ The only chapter that was tough for me to decide if I wanted to do it early on, because of not having access, was the Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince one, because he’s Will Smith. I kept having the hope that maybe he would come through and I kept trying to reach him as I went along but I realised that wasn’t going to happen. As with the Mantronix [chapter] I over-compensated by talking to all these other people.

It must help that you have a couple of books under your belt when you’re trying to convince people to do an interview with you.

That certainly helped. It at least lets them know what they’re in for and what kind of approach I’m going to take. There are artists that I wish were in here but I couldn’t get enough time. If I was only going to be given a twenty minute interview then it wasn’t worth it. The chapters that are meant to be in there are in there, I take a very zen approach to it. When I finished the last book for Random House, they were like, ‘This is too long, you need to cut a lot of these chapters in half.’ I was like, ‘Fuck that, I’ll chop chapters out but I won’t cut any of them them in half.’ But this time I’m the boss, so I’ll do whatever the hell I want. Some of these chapters are fuckin’ long, but I always say, ‘The more, the merrier!’

Do you prefer to interview people over the phone or in person?

There’s one thing that distracts people more than anything else while you’re talking to them face-to-face is their fuckin’ phone, so if you’ve got them on their phone they’re not going to be distracted by it as much. I interviewed Biz Markie in New York, and he was very entertaining, but he had two cell phones in front of him and he was checking them both constantly.

What were some of your inspirations as far as music writing?

There are people that self-published before me that I took inspiration from, like Freddy Fresh. That book does not look good at all, but it is fuckin’ incredible. If your content is unique enough and compelling enough then it doesn’t matter what it looks like. I’m very thankful that people before me did books. I’m very thankful that David Toop didn’t just write a bunch of articles and then stop. I’m glad he did Rap Attack, because that book changed my life.

Check The Technique 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies is out this week. Buy it.