“Every time, I get nervous,” smiles rapper the Gift of Gab at soundcheck for a February performance at LA’s Wiltern Theatre. “Like, two minutes before I go on. Every time.” Across the stage, DJ/producer Chief Xcel fiddles with the knobs and needles on his turntables. Gab’s butterflies aside, the duo — known as Blackalicious — are quite at home on a stage. Their new album, Blazing Arrow, may be many listeners’ first introduction to the group, but Gab, X, and their hypercreative antidote to commercial crap-rap have been rocking crowds for a decade.
Earlier that day, Blackalicious sit in an office at their new home, MCA, replete with plush couches, platinum plaques lining the walls, and a pretty assistant delivering lunch. The trappings of a mega-label are fairly new to the Bay Area duo, who have spent the past ten years pressing up wax out of their own pocket, distributing their music by hand, and paving the path of their career brick by brick.
Today, with Blazing Arrow backed by the might of the world’s largest music distributor (Universal), they’re still modest. X sports a T-shirt and ball cap; Gab’s in a short-sleeve button-down with wire-rimmed glasses and his trademark newsboy cap. Both wear goatees and baggy pants, their necks and wrists free of any diamonds or platinum or other miscellaneous bling-bling, their attitudes free of even the slightest hint of pretense. More than low-key, they almost seem … shy. Gab’s head is sunk down into his large frame like a tortoise retreating into his shell, craning up only to speak.
“It’s all a blessing, it’s humbling,” he says, speaking about being on posh MCA. “At the same time, it’s something we’ve been working at for years.” Then his head sinks back in its hole. Between the posture and the specs, it’s hard to imagine a relentless stream of unlikely metaphors gushing out of his mouth like ink from an exploding fountain pen, with bar after bar and staccato punch lines layered one upon the next, rhythmically spiraling upward and reaching a thunderous climax. Anyone who’s heard Gab’s gift live or on record knows that the man shreds microphones like Arthur Andersen shreds documents.
But today it’s X who does most of the gabbing. He grins as he recounts the long, patient journey that brought them to this point: “Almost ten years ago this month, we’d be all piled into our van, going from record store to record store asking people to take our records on consignment. And our careers have just built from there, stepping-stone after stepping-stone after stepping-stone.”
The first stones were laid in high school. Gab (Tim Parker) lived in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley until age fifteen, when his mom passed away and he moved to Sacramento to live with his older brother. Xcel (Xavier Mosley) was born in Sacramento but lived in Oakland until he was fourteen, when he and his family moved back to “Sac,” as he calls it. The two met in tenth grade home economics class and bonded over their mutual appreciation for Audio 2’s “Top Billin’,” which, with its raw, basement style, “just blew my wig back,” says X.
After high school, X enrolled at UC Davis and Gab moved back down to LA, doing odd jobs like telemarketing and working at KFC. The two continued to write and create, exchanging tracks and rhymes over the phone. Realizing that running the deep fryer just wasn’t where his passion lay, Gab ultimately moved up to Davis to work “hard-core” on music with X.
In the hip-hop wasteland that was Davis, they found like-minded souls in future instrumental hip-hop collagist DJ Shadow; DJ Zen, who hosted a rap show on campus station KDVS; and classmates Lyrics Born and Lateef, who later morphed into the duo Latyrx. Blunted freestyle sessions and casual tinkerings in the studio ultimately gave way to the indie label SoleSides. The crew began releasing vinyl 12-inches, including Blackalicious’ 1994 underground anthem, “Swan Lake.”
“It was really informal,” X explains. “It was, ‘I got a student loan check, you got a student loan check — let’s do it.'”
Once records were pressed up, the guys serviced them to college radio jocks across the nation via the KDVS database and peddled them to retailers out of the trunks of their cars. Between its lyrics about patience and peace of mind and its unconventional rhyme schemes, “Swan Lake” set the tenor for Blackalicious and quickly branded the group as NoCal’s answer to LA’s Freestyle Fellowship.
UK-based label Mo’ Wax — who had signed a deal with Shadow — agreed to distribute Blackalicious’ first EP, Melodica, throughout Europe, but in the States they continued to do it all themselves, region by region, through indie distributors and one-stops. After X and crew graduated from Davis, they moved to Berkeley and opened an office, putting out an album by Latyrx and a host of 12-inches. Somewhere along the way, the artist-run collective changed its name to Quannum Projects and nabbed solid national distribution through Caroline and TRC. With a stable of songs already in the can, Blackalicious was poised to drop its debut LP upon hungry hip-hop heads nationwide.
Three years later, heads were still waiting, their appetites temporarily sated by another EP. The full-length’s delay was due to what Blackalicious’ official label bio describes as Gab’s period of “personal turmoil,” and what Gab himself calls “growing pains.” He avoids discussion of his bout with alcoholism, saying only: “The biggest struggles give birth to the greatest creativity.”
In 2000, six years after fans first clamored about “Swan Lake,” Blackalicious finally released Nia, meaning “purpose” in Swahili. Specifically, it seemed the duo’s purpose was, as Gab stated in rhyme, to “clean out the digestive tract of hip-hop like cranberries” when so many others persisted in clogging it with hollow, violent, and materialistic clichés. Conscious, but free of fierce sociopolitical rants, Nia challenged gangsta rap not so much with contempt or bravado but with wistfulness and resolution. The disc also included plenty of tracks whose aim was simply to showcase Gab’s gift: an uncanny, often Seuss-like verbal dexterity, served up in a range of rap styles from gruff dancehall cadence to precise rat-tat-tat. Nia sold 100,000 copies. Critics heralded it as an indie hip-hop classic; ears at the major labels perked up; offers were made.
“In the end it came down to, creatively, which situation is going to allow us to be us, and not interfere with our process?” explains X.
They chose MCA, home to several hip-hop acts falling within Blackalicious’ left-of-center milieu, including DJ Shadow, the Roots, and Common. A listen to Blazing Arrow suggests that the guys made the right choice.
Other than the disc’s array of cameos (Zach de la Rocha, Ben Harper, KeKe Wyatt, Saul Williams, Gil Scott-Heron, members of Dilated Peoples, Cibo Matto, the Roots, Sean Lennon, and Jurassic 5), the disc makes no commercial concessions. Once again, Gab is “prone to leave your dome blown with the poem, homes” on sweaty verbal workouts like “Chemical Calisthenics” and “Paragraph President,” his lyrics free of the gratuitous violence, misogyny, expletives, and overall “thugged-out/pimpin’/flossin’ my ice/packing a gat” mentality that litters the bulk of commercial hip-hop.
But Arrow also distinguishes Blackalicious from the current underground contingent of hip-hop, where all you need is to insert a few “conscious” (but ultimately trite or clichéd) nuggets into a stream-of-consciousness rap and an underground MC is said to be “droppin’ knowledge.” But one of Blazing Arrow‘s strengths is that Gab actually writes cohesive raps that stick to a particular theme, in contrast to so many hip-hop tunes that change course whenever the MC runs out of thematic punch lines. More importantly, while many indie, underground, or conscious rappers devote a lot of time pontificating on the degenerate state of hip-hop, pointing out the foibles of their gangsta/playa peers, songs on Arrow focus less on diagnosing hip-hop’s diseased colon and more on Zenlike notions of faith, peace of mind, and the simple pleasures along the road of life. Blackalicious, it seems, is leading by example.
“A lot of times within rap, we spend too much time talking about what rap should be, instead of making it what it should be,” says X. “With this record we didn’t really focus on the state of rap as we did the state of the world.”
Gab, who calls himself spiritual but not religious, takes it one step further: “The whole concept behind Blazing Arrow is faith. Nia was about finding a purpose, and Blazing Arrow is about ‘Now you found it, now you have to have the faith to walk it, to live it.’ You found your purpose, but ten minutes later something might come along and distract you. So it’s about staying [true] to that purpose.”
As on Nia, X’s tracks are anchored in vintage soul and jazz, but with plenty of unexpected twists — odd sound flourishes (gurgling noises, ticking clocks), breakdowns played in reverse, and crazy tempo change-ups that make you wonder if you’re still on the same song.
It’s this creative freedom that the group says MCA is supporting 100 percent, and sales of the record have surpassed 800,000. Like Blackalicious, unconventional rap acts Jurassic 5, Black Eyed Peas, and Dilated Peoples each cultivated loyal underground fan bases before signing with a major. But despite big-league promotional pushes, none of them have hit gold status yet, possibly because their music is too heady for the kids and teens who constitute the bulk of rap consumers, and not hard-core enough for the suburban buyers who demand the vicarious thrill of the gangsta lifestyle in their music. Then again, the Roots and Common both blew up once they came to MCA. But Gab and X don’t seem overly concerned with sales, or about jumping from underground to overground. Rather, Blazing Arrow simply marks a new chapter in what X calls a “natural progression.”
The best part of their new situation, they say, is that they can devote 100 percent of their time to their music, without worrying about side jobs and other distractions. In lieu of a fancy new car or a house or diamond bezels, their big indulgence was building their own personal production “compound” at X’s home in Sac, where they’re free from time constraints or outside pressures.
“For us, the focus has always been on the music,” says X. “Our whole mentality was, the deal is done, stuff is finally in place, but we’ve got all of these songs we’ve been working on and we want to get them done.”
Gab sums it up: “Just because we got a deal with a major, it wasn’t like we crossed some kind of finish line.” Will major label success spoil the East Baysup1s Blackalicious?
