I won’t be surprised if El-P’s I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead ends up in my top 3 albums of 2007. This is a bold statement, considering my musical diet these days is exclusively Jenny Lewis, Blaq Starr, the Jones Girls and Morse Code’s Shit I’m Feeling mix. Not a lot of room for “the next shit” in there. Not that I’m looking that hard anymore, but after Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein changed the game six years ago, I’ve found myself unimpressed with every creatively ambitious hip-hop album since. I know I’m not the only person that feels this way.

Buried within the mix of “EMG” (check it at El-P’s myspace) Big Wiz cuts up the three-hit drum fill that opens Bob James’s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras”. I think what I like about El-P is that under several layers of analog noise, intricate drum programming, fx loops and future rap, one still finds a fundamental building block of hip-hop. And I’m working on the assumption that there was a conscious choice to use a worn out copy of Two, not because El loathes treble, but because in the context of hip-hop, that drum fill should be burnt out from “Peter Piper” practice.

My discussion with El-P is mostly a discussion about the relationship between him, his music, his fans and hip-hop. And the annoying revelation that there probably won’t be a second Can Ox joint. But there are a lot of obvious questions left unasked, so in case you want more…
El-P in The AV Club
El-P in Remix via ReadMezzanine

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead drops 3/20.
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How did you approach I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead differently than Fantastic Damage?

I’m not really sure man. Every time I do a record it’s like I have to relearn how to make music again in some weird way; I don’t really have a formula, I can’t really pinpoint it. Probably the reason why I take so long in between records. If I had a little bit more of a system, I might be a little more prolific.

When did you actually start working on the album because I guess it’s been almost 4 years between the two albums?

I kind of started off and on. I had a few false starts. I started probably around 2004.

Fantastic Damage was good, but it was very epic; there were a lot of tracks that were very long and seemed to go through a lot of changes. This album is a little tighter, maybe a little less sprawling. Was that intentional?

Yes it was. I think Fantastic Damage was me throwing literally everything I had as rambling and ranting as long as I possibly could on every song.

It was your first chance to do a solo album so I could see that.

It was and I guess I kind of had a mixture of excitement and inexperience kind of dictated the way that came out and I loved that record, but when I did this record I was very intent on making a more distinct, more tight record, something were every word counted. I knew I wanted to make a record just under an hour long. It was a challenge for me; how can I make a record that is short and epic simultaneously? That was my approach to it. it was very intentional.

When you start working, do you start with your beats or your rhymes?

Yeah it’s really whatever happens. Like I said, I don’t have a particular formula. But I would say probably though a majority of the time the music will come first.

Your sound is diverged so far from as rap from a whole? I’m wondering, is there any rap that is influential to the music you are making these days?

Yeah man, I mean I love rap music. What I make is rap music. I don’t know, I guess I just stand on my own two feet here, ya know? The beautiful thing to me is striking a balance between creating something that is reaching and that is expansive and is contributing and in a way that is not always thought of as being rap music, and at the same time be grounded in rap music, have it have the b-boy essence of soul that I grew up with that made me love this music and made me a musician. And I think that swinging too far in either direction isn’t the right way for me. I’m looking for the perfect convergence of these two things. Certainly I wouldn’t say that i’ve found it. I look at everything I do I feel proudly about. I feel I’m so rooted in this, so clearly what I do that any moment, any song, any idea I have I am attributing it directly, I am giving the credit directly to hip-hop. I want to, it’s my honor to hand it over and hopefully what I’m doing is contributing positively to it and I love to do it. I certainly don’t think in those terms.

That’s definitely something that you do that a lot of other artists that try to expand on hip-hop don’t quite achieve; they sort of either go too far from hip-hop or don’t go far enough.

I don’t have any choice ya know? It’s engraved in my personality. I was born and raised in the era of hip-hop that most people only read about in books or watch in documentaries, and in the place that they read about. I was there! I was there walking down the street with people breakdancing and listening to their boxes, writing graffiti. I was taking the fabled bombed graffiti subway trains to school everyday. This is engrained in my life. I’ll always have that b-boy swagger to my shit no matter what I do, so therefore I don’t feel like I have to go out of my way to keep mentioning it to people. I don’t feel like I have to go out of my way to remind people. I feel like my job is just to go wherever I need to go and as a legitimate citizen of this culture, I will carry the culture to a degree with me as I walk. that’s all I really want ya know?

That is a really interesting idea, that it is so engrained in you and there a lot of artists who got into hip-hop but are sort of straying away from it because it’s not ingrained in them.

Well ya know, hip-hop is not some transient fad or interest for me. It’s not something I got into in college when I heard whatever record. This is not something that is fading for me, I’m not going to lose interest, it’s not like that. You know there are a lot of people who do kind of approach it like that, who kind of go into a phase where they get really into hip-hop music because they think it’s interesting for a moment and then all of a sudden they spend the rest of their lives being disappointed by hip-hop music because it doesn’t match up to that one year that they were really impressed.

Your fan base has more in common with indie rock; the kind of people that don’t listen extensively to hip-hop. For a lot of people I feel like you are sort of the only rap they actually hear.

I think that you could say the same thing about pop music, couldn’t you? Like pop-hip-hop, top 40 hip hop. People who have no connection to hip-hop other than the fact that they are listening to top 40? People who listen to whatever pop music is, and therefore hip-hop is pop music, but they are not in love with hip-hop. I think that there are people that are attracted to the music that myself and some of my peers do that may not know a lot about hip-hop, but we’ve become a gateway drug ya know? And I’m proud to be that. I would love to be that drug, that introductory drug into the world that I love so much and know so much about. you gotta get there somehow I suppose, right?

Right and it might as well be with you.

Well sure, my thing is it shouldn’t end with me. If it begins with me, that’s fine, but it just shouldn’t end with me because it’s much bigger than me and what we do or what my friends do, but I’m proud to be part of anyone’s experience. And I do think that I get a lot of people who are interested in what I do because of some of the sounds that I use and some of the structure and some of the way I approach it because it reminds them of things that they know, like rock music. I get a bit of a crossover audience. People who love listening to rock music hear rock music in my records. People who grew up listening to Mantronix and BDP hear that in my records. I grew up pretty much listening to all of this.

I don’t care. Personally I have no stake in nor am I taking any responsibility for the reaction to my music. I’m not a politician, I’m not a statistician, I’m not taking a fucking census, I don’t know who the hell listens to my music or who doesn’t. And there are people who find it interesting when you analyze who’s listening to what, but I have never change what I’ve been doing and I’ve never changed my perspective on what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter who the fuck listens to what I’m doing. I was born and raised and lived my entire life in Brooklyn, so it doesn’t change my experience it doesn’t change what I’m doing and the reason why I’m doing what I’m doing. So I can’t resent it neither and I damn sure can’t over-analyze whatever’s happening in terms of the listenership of independent hip-hop music.

Is there a new Can Ox album coming out any time soon?

I really doubt it.

Really?

The fact of the matter is that everyone has been crossing their fingers, including Def Jux, hoping that Cannibal Ox would get their shit together as a group, even to the point where I resigned them. I really hoped and prayed that they would get their shit together, thought they were at a certain juncture in time. At this point I can’t pretend anymore or cover for those guys. They haven’t been together for a long time, but they tried to get it back together again, but it’s proving to be an impossible task.

That breaks my heart.

You’re not the only one buddy.