Underground hip hop and history: Miguel Cullen talks shop with Slum Village's T3.
In all, 21 well known hip hop artists have been shot dead since the genre's inception. Such is the potent braggadocio of rap's exterior that, quite apart from the relationship between violence and hip hop, it seems strangely alien when a rapper dies from something as human as natural causes. That fate has befallen two Slum Village members in four years.
Slum were in their underground pomp in 2000, when T3, Baatin and über-producer J Dilla created undie classic 'Fantastic Vol. 2' featuring huge stars like Busta Rhymes and Q Tip. Only T3 would remain alive from that trio, and a later, incongruous lyric from the group seems prescient: "Makes me wanna throw stones at a deacon in his home when he preachin' / See that's Satan makin' my heart cold as a breeze till it's frozen from freezin'"
Speaking to me on a zinc-grey December afternoon in Detroit, T3 seems to be keeping the demons at bay: "I deal with it" he says matter-of-factly. "So long as Elzhi (remaining band member) was still willing to carry on, so was I."
Baatin's departure is the most recent – he died in July 2009 and is present on their coming album, 2010's Villa Manifesto. The turbaned MC was a mad rapper in the mould of Ol' Dirty Bastard (he was diagnosed a schizophrenic): "He was the wild card" continues T3, "Just like Ol' Dirty Bastard was the wild card for Wu Tang, you've just got a wild card dude sometimes. He was our wild card…" he trails off, choking up ever so slightly, trauma tangible for the first time.
Their 'Villa Manifesto' LP is a hip hop producer's dream: beats from old school legend Pete Rock, MF Doom collaborator Madlib, Talib Kweli stalwart Hi-Tek and Jay Dilla form the trellis for vignettes from T3, Baatin and the excellent Elzhi. The lead single, the Lindsay Lohan-referencing 'Dope Man', meshes ideas of drug dealing in their native Detroit and the hustle that is required to stay ahead in the rap game.
As a hustle, I ask, is the rap industry lucrative? He laughs out loud: T3 is that kind of guy – cheery, eloquent, with a showman's assurance: "Hell: to make money in this game, you either gotta write 100 records a day. That or you’ve gotta be associated with someone who's popular already. It's super hard, and super-gimmicky, the rap game. If I was starting today, I probably wouldn't do it. It would be a hobby of mine, but I wouldn't stake my livelihood on it."
Tragedy and the struggle to survive have made this latest album a more thoughtful package: "This is the most serious record we've done in a while. You realise that when you hear Dope Man. We've got another song on the EP which is called Money Right, which is produced by Madlib, which is talking about the struggle of a person trying to get their pieces together and figure out what to do, how you still provide in these times.
J Dilla had become perhaps the biggest producer in hip hop, working with Busta Rhymes, Kanye West and Janet Jackson and eclipsing his old Slum partners, before dying at the height of his fame of blood disease. Such is the precarious state of even big name rapper's finances that he left his family destitute; his mother lives on in the same Detroit ghetto whilst struggling from the same disease that killed Dilla.
T3, who grew up with Jay Dilla, recalls a shy, stuttering kid, and remembers, with humbled affection, how he "Could just create songs on the spot. He could make anything - a soul song, a jazz song, anything. I used to throw stuff at him and he would just make it happen, with no keyboard. I would say 'I want a bass line like this, a mid-section like this', and he would be like – 'OK give me two minutes' – he'd whip up something and we'd just write the song on the spot. You can't get that with producers these days…You can't - c'mon, that's incredible!" he says laughing.
Ok, fair enough, but isn't Jay Dilla redolent of an undie, backpack style of hip hop that is stuck in the past? In a recent Guardian blog, Simon Reynolds accuses the underground scene of "crate-digging antiquarianism." I put this to T3, but he demurs: "Man, I was in the 90s – I don't feel like we're still back there – the only thing that's important is that it's good music. You say we just use turntables – but Dilla uses electronic sounds like Lil' Wayne on some of his beats – it's whatever's good. Bad is bad – good is good - you know what I'm saying?" Given the ease with which Slum have turned bad into good in recent months, the two seem remarkably interchangeable. 'Villa Manifesto' is a uniquely posthumous album - yet the two dead voices that speak on it help turn that pain into something good.
Their album Villa Manifesto will be available in early 2010. The EP is available now to download.
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