ODDISEE INTERVIEW

Washington born and raised rapper Amir Mohamed el Khalifa aka Oddisee is clearly an articulate, intelligent and thought-provoking human being whose life mission is to be a witness and messenger. If you listen closely to his lyrical content, he speaks with fervent statements, questions truth(s) and accepts your own without judgement. An observer of art, life and consequence, Oddisee is a rapper that oscillates between the golden era of hip hop, edging on experimental funk and dipping in the golden glaze of jazz and soul music. With his critically acclaimed album ‘The Good Fight’ released back in May, Oddisee returns to Australia in November for his highly anticipated ‘The Good Fight’ national tour.

Krystel from Behind The Front talks with Oddisee about his truths, delving deep into the topics of growing up in Prince George’s County (Washington DC), how his environment impacted on his perception of life and music, the escalating violent racial intolerance in America, the current state of hip hop and more.

There’s so much to cover – first off, let’s talk about your childhood growing up in Prince George’s County. What was that like growing up and how did that influence your view on music?
Growing up in PG County was a heavy influence on my music. It’s an interesting place because it’s home to so much wealth and prosperity, but it’s also home to a lot of adversity, trials and tribulations.

It’s the wealthiest concentration of blacks in the United States of America but it is also home to the largest economic gap between the rich and the poor. So imagine those two statistics coming head to head in our neighbourhood.

In PG County? So the disparity is hugely acute.
Yes, the wealthiest concentration of African Americans in the United States and the poor. It’s pretty segregated. The northern Prince George’s County is a bit more wealthier – middle class and upper class, and southern Prince George’s Country is bit more working class, lower class and below the poverty line.

And sprinkled throughout all of them, we have a system in The United States called Section 8 Housing which gives people who can’t afford a home – a subsidized home in a random neighbourhood anywhere, where the rest of the people living in your neighbourhood are paying full price for their home, but your rent is subsidized.

You get to basically give your children an advantage of living in a nice neighbourhood and going to a better school. All of those things combined. You had situations where I went to high school in Largo High school, where some of the children came from two parent homes with two parent incomes.

Where as Forestville High School, which was a bit of a rougher neighbourhood, their school was over populated. And Prince George’s County had some of the worst public school systems in the state of Marylands even though it has the wealthiest people. So people in Forestville [High School] were bused to my school because their school was overpopulated.

So imagine people from the poorest parts of the county going to school with some of the children from the wealthiest parts of the county. What do you think would happen if those two kids went to school together?

How did that particular environment influence your view on life?
It made me understand the differences between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. It made me understand that the ghetto is a mentality more-so than fate. It made me understand that you can be ghetto and have the world. It can be in your mind.

Yes.
Because there are plenty of people where I grew up, where people had everything, but they were still hood as they wanted to be. For whatever reason, because of the proximity, the origins of their family and where they came from…

Those were really the valuable lessons in the creation of my music. I had a wonderful example of black people where I don’t think a lot of the other parts of the country reap the benefits of what I had where I saw the full spectrum.

My doctor was black, my bus driver was black, my family mechanic was black, my teachers were black, the woman or the man working at McDonald’s was black, the drug dealer was black, the taxi cab driver was black – everyone!

I didn’t associate negativity with being black and positivity being white. I saw the whole spectrum.

You could find yourself down any road, going down any path.

I am thankful for that because I think a lot of us growing up as Black Americans in the States often times see negative images of ourselves perpetuated by television, media and music.

Whereas Prince George’s County gave me the full spectrum. It didn’t hide the reality that this is the state of a lot of African American lives, but it also didn’t tell me that there was only one side to it.

I didn’t want to touch on this so soon, but I’m going to go there now that we are talking about African American culture. There’s a mini documentary out on Nowness publication featuring Adrian Younge where he and a few notable musicians – Rza, Raphael Saadiq and few others dissect music and talk about the current state of Urban and Hip Hop music in America. Raphael Saadiq talks about how sad the current state of black music as it pertains to Urban radio. He posits “Who will they make a movie of in 50 years time?” about our current artists in this generation? Adrian Younge claims that he is a Hip Hop head till he dies but also says that ‘black music is being run to the ground synonymous with the popularization of Rap music’. We know Urban music and Hip Hop are two separate things, but what do you think about the current state of Hip Hop?
That’s a loaded question! I haven’t seen that documentary, but I don’t agree with it. I think music is in a great place and Hip Hop is in a wonderful place at the moment. I think fans are starting to appreciate lyricism again and the importance of lyricism.

I think we are living in a black America where this generation is allowed to listen to whatever they want to. Where I come from and where I was raised, we weren’t allowed to listen to ‘white’ music, and anything that wasn’t rap or played on urban radio was white music, and if you were caught listening you were made fun of.

This generation gets to be free! Free within their clothing, within their attitudes, within their music… they get to turn up and listen to trap, they get to be retrospective and reflective and listen to Kendrick Lamar…they get to party to house music, to trance music – electronic music. They get to do all of that whilst being straight examples of themselves, whether that be Straight Outta Compton or President Obama, or Empire – which I don’t agree with a lot of displays of African American culture.

However, that environment that I was raised in is starting to be more prevalent – the full spectrum of the good and the bad is more available for everyone to see.

There are great artists right now that in 50 years time we can do documentaries about them. Are we talking about mega artists? Like there were in the past, where the documentary will be about the artist that everybody knew? Maybe not. What’s a mega artist anymore when we’re living in an industry where less and less people are selling records, but more and more people are making a living from the music industry.

And more and more people are hearing it.
Yeah, why do we even have the same scale of success to garner who deserves a documentary about them? There are plenty of artists that deserve a documentary about them in 50 years time. They may not be mega artists, but will they even be around in 50 years time?

What are your current influences and who are you listening to at the moment?
Who I’m listening to and who I’m influenced by are two different things.

Let’s go with influences first.
I listen to an insane amount of Drake. I love Drake. What else I bought the new Future record I know it’s not that new but I just bought the last Metronomy record. I love them.

Metronomy is a big influence on me right now.

UK group? How did you come across Metronomy?
Yeah, the UK group. Their album ‘English Riviera’ was really big. I think I heard one of their singles on radio somewhere. I checked it out and I bought the record and fell in love with that, and I checked their back catalogue and bought the rest of it. I don’t know where I was in 2014, but I must have been busy, but I didn’t know ‘Love Letters’ came out in 2014. I’ve been playing the hell outta that album.

Are you a big record collector?
No I’m not – not at all actually. I’m not a vinyl head, I’m not a sneaker head, I’m not a hip hop head to be honest with you. I love making hip hop music but I don’t go out to a lot of events, I don’t dig in the crates… I don’t really do a lot of that. You’ll probably see me at the Farmers Markets than a record store.

You strike me as a person just based on this conversation, who walks side by side the hip hop culture – an everyday human being – not really in it, but in it if that makes sense. You aren’t your “typical” hip hop head.
Oh, you nailed it! So many times with black culture – as with anything – when you’re from a city, you may take things for granted cos you’re from it and someone will ask you to do touristy things, and you’ll take them to do it. You’ll say ‘ Wow! I’ve actually never done that before and I’ve lived here my whole life.’

I think anyone can say that where they are from, because it’s you, you’re from it. And I think with a lot of people…I don’t mean to say it in a bad away, I’m just being honest… Hip hop didn’t give me my identity. It didn’t give me my purpose, my culture. I already had a culture and an identity before rap. Rap didn’t tell me how to roll a blunt or twist my dreads, or wear Timbalands or camouflage, or fast forward to now wearing black and white.I’ve never been one of those people.

I think the environment shapes an individual’s identity at an early age, and we all reach points where we either accept who we are and develop that, or follow someone else’s dictation of who society thinks you should be. I get that!
Absolutely true! Whether you choose to subscribe to another person’s dictation or your own, doesn’t make you less real. It’s just a choice.

Speaking of choice – we’ll talk about your music in a second, with the current climate of America’s escalating racial tension, if you had the power to change that, what would you do?
I would encourage people to dig beneath the surface. I would encourage people to attack the root of the problem and not the end result. I think that, time and time again, we continue to march for things as the end result versus what causes them in the first place.

It is much easier to blame someone and hate them and be angry, rather than to find an understanding for them or why they are the human being they are. Whether that be a black on black crime – why is there black on black crime? Whether that be a white armed police officer shooting a black person. What happened to that white person that made him so trigger happy?

What happened in his life? Was he ex-military suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? What he bullied in high school? Did he have a complex about himself? There needs to be more sensitivity training in the police force to understanding the psychology and the mental stability of officers when they go out.

That is a deeper issue. Noone gives a shit about what happened to the white police officer that pulled the trigger. But we need to get to the bottom of why it keeps happening. But no one cares about that. I’ve lived in black neighbourhoods my entire life – Bed Stuy now, I’m from PG, I’m lived in DC before moving to New York. What I see on the daily basis is the blind eye to the atrocities committed in our own communities, but whenever a white person does it someone tries to throw shit.

I don’t really agree with that! I don’t agree with that at all! Every time I’m on the A-Train, I see a mother yanking her two or three year old child being yanked by the arm, screaming at him to ‘hurry the fuck on, and stop walking too slow’.

What do you think that two or three year old child is going to grow up to be when his mother speaks to him in such a way? He’s going to grow up to be a desensitized individual. What happens to the white police officer whose dad comes home and starts beating on his mum, and whipping on his son telling him to be more of a man? And that kid doesn’t have any resources so he fights in the Middle East to join our military, he comes out, doesn’t have a job and his buddy tells him to join the police force.

We’re not getting to the root of things. I’m not interested in dealing with this shit on the surface anymore. I never have been and I’m not going to pick up a picket sign right now and march for anyone until we start marching for everyone.

Institutionalised racism is a hard task to eradicate.
It is and no one wants to deal with it. It’s way too easier to let one person die and to march in their name. In BedStuy – in my neighbourhood alone – the number of murders in Bedstuy in the last five years… none of them get marches.

I am genuinely interested in what’s going on in the minds of these police officers. How they ended up getting their positions, to pull a trigger and end a life. What happened in their lives? And I wish a lot more people would be interested in that.

We had to go deep! Let’s talk about your music now – you ‘ve got a lot of albums under your belt and a few mixtapes. How old were you when you first made your beat, and what program you were using?
Wow! I have no idea… (laughs) To be honest… I can’t remember! I’m not really a nostalgic person so it’s all a blur. I guess I was in high school?

Do you remember the program? For me it was Fruity Loops in high school, then Sound Forge & Acid.
Oh yeah! My homie Shaun in high school introduced me to hip hop production. I made my first beat when I was 18 on an ASR x Beat machine cos that’s what he had.

Which albums has been your favourite so far to produce?
Although you probably won’t believe me, but my favourite album is whatever my newest record is because it’s where I’m at in the moment. I’m not really a nostalgic person. I don’t like to look back, I like to look forward.

How did “The Good Fight” come about? It’s sonically different and eclectic playing.
It’s a sum of a lot of previous records. I thoroughly paid attention to what people wanted to hear from me when I would go out to do shows. The songs that resonated were the ones that the crowd new the lyrics to, or I’d get a bigger reaction when the beat comes. I started to see a bigger picture of what songs are the people’s favourites of mine.

I started noticing that fans were very active in telling me their favourite tracks were from Rock Creek Park, an instrumental album. So I started to think, maybe I should rap lyrics over Rock Creek Park production. And by Rock Creek Park I mean a little bit more experimental, a bit more musical and melodic. Anything you hear on The Good Fight you can hear on any one of my records. It was always surprising to me to hear people say it sounds different – the funk, the slight electronica influences, the jazz, the ode to earlier hip hop, they are all here on any record that I’ve done.

What are we going to expect from your shows when you return back to Australia in November?
Honestly, a good show! When was the last time you saw a good show? (Laughs)

What’s your definition of Grindin’?
Hmmm…. (silence) I’m not one of those people that are like ‘Yo! No days off’. I don’t stop

You’re like ‘more sleep’ that’s my definition of Grindin’.
I just came back from a 5 day vacation in Miami, so I’m chillin’ (laughs)! I’m good! My definition of Grindin’ is to work with purpose and working smart so you don’t have to work hard.

I work crazy hard 3 or 4 months of the year on several projects and let them come out for the rest of the year. The rest of the year I’m chillin’ (Laughs).

Interview by Krystel Diola

TOUR DATES:
Thursday 19th November – Section 8, Melbourne
Friday 20th November – Mojos, Perth
Saturday 21st November – Transit Bar, Canberra
Sunday 22nd November – Strawberry Hills Festival, Melbourne
Thursday 26th November – Woolly Mammoth, Brisbane
Friday 27th November – Goodgod Small Club, Sydney
Saturday 28th November – Rocket Bar, Adelaide