Tell us about The Ruby Kid, you’ve got roots all over the country, how has this defined you are a person?
Okay, so the basic low-down on me is: I write poetry, most of which I perform as hip-hop. I’m based in London but I’m not from here. My favourite rappers are Aesop Rock, Slug and Nas and the other big thing in my life apart from poetry and music is political activism. I’m a member of a revolutionary-socialist group called Workers’ Liberty and, happily, activism is taking up more and more of time as the tide of struggle rises a little bit. In terms of my roots and how they’ve defined me, it’s difficult to pin down exactly but I do think having quite a diverse background has given me a very rich seam of artistic inspiration to mine. My family on my mom’s side are Polish-American New York Jews; my grandparents fled Poland in the late 1930s. On my dad’s, it’s traditional East London Jewry. His family came to Britain in an earlier wave of immigration, fleeing Tsarist pogroms. I feel a lot of affinity with both heritages and that reflects itself in my music. I’ve lived in three different cities in the UK (Nottingham, Sheffield and London) for periods of at least a few years; I love them all in different ways and for different reasons. I couldn’t say exactly what aspects of my character, or of my music, are “defined” by, say, Nottingham or London and which are “defined” by, say, my New York connections. Although some of my tracks are quite specific and particular in their subject matter (“The Imagined Village” is very explicitly about Radcliffe-on-Trent in Nottingham, “The Unreal City” is very specifically about London, etcetera), I hope both myself as an individual and my music are more than the sum of individual parts.
Tell us about the Maps EP, how long as it been in the works?
All art is obviously personal to the artist on some level, but Maps is a particularly personal project for me because the overwhelming majority of the material is quite specifically about a particular period in my life and what was going on in my head during that period. If it tells a story in the traditional sense, it’s the story of my experience of moving to London and doing some thinking about what it means to live in a city and the nature of the relationship between self and place. That sounds really wanky, but London is a bit unique in a lot of ways and the experience of moving there and trying to find your way around (literally and figuratively) takes a bit of doing. Some of the tracks use lyrics that I’ve had lying around for a while and one is a track I’ve been performing live with Black Jacobins, the band who played with me when I was living in Sheffield, for some time. The EP we did together, Winter In The City, came out in March 2009 so there was a bit of a gap between that and releasing Maps. The other key difference as far as the production goes was that I worked very closely with one producer, Dan Angell. I’ve done extensive work with particular beatmakers before (Keybored from Manchester especially) where we’d collaborate quite closely, but I took that to a bit of a new level on this record with Dan. He recorded, mixed and mastered the whole thing as well as composing most of the beats, so getting into that quite close emcee-beatmaker relationship was unchartered territory for me. In many ways the record is as much his as it is mine, which is why I wanted to put his name on it. We put it out as ‘The Ruby Kid & Dan Angell Present...’ which I think is a fair reflection of how closely we worked and how much graft Dan put into the record.
How do you sit down and write, do you have a particular method? For example, are songs written over time bit by bit or constructed in one go?
It varies wildly. Sometime a poem or lyric will just come out all in one go, nearly fully-formed. Sometimes they’ll build up from tiny fragments of literally one or two lines over months and months. There is no method. I know poets and rappers who do write in that very mechanical way and can just sit down and say “okay, I’m going to write 16 bars now”. That’s a skill in itself but that’s not how I approach my writing.
Is this a new Daniel Randall to the one we met on Winter In The City?
Of course. It’s two years since we put that record out and even longer since I wrote the tracks that are on it. A lot has happened to me since then. As I mentioned, Maps is in large part about the experience of moving to London and trying to get my bearings down here so that’s the experience I’m sharing on Maps. Some things haven’t changed, though; my politics are still pretty much the same as they were when Winter In The City came out and you can hear them on the record too.
You studied English Literature, could you have written Maps without looking at ‘academic’ poetry at Uni?
It’s impossible to say. I’m not sure I know what “academic poetry” is, anyway – unless you mean stuff that’s accepted into the “canon” of “proper” literature. I like to think, or at least I hope, that I would’ve read a lot of the stuff I ended up studying even if I hadn’t been doing a degree so maybe it would have found its way in somehow. Certainly a lot of the stuff I’ve studied does cast a shadow over my own writing; when I started writing what would eventually become “The Unreal City”, I was just trying to write a poem about living in London. As I went on with it I realised I was basically writing a karaoke-pastiche of “The Wasteland” by Eliot. So I embraced it and just went with it – hence the title. I might be the only rapper who can claim that their EP includes a karaoke-pastiche of “The Wasteland”, which I genuinely believe makes me simultaneously quite cool and a complete dick.
How did you first discover rap and hip-hop?
The same way that a lot of white kids from suburban backgrounds did: through Eminem. I’d never really encountered hip-hop until he started breaking through around 1998/99. I was just entering adolescence at the time so I was attracted to the irreverence of what he was doing. But the whole cadence and rhythm of rapping also really appealed to me and it seemed to sit nicely with an interest in poetry I’d always had. So I delved a bit deeper; I went through an “old-skool” period where I just listened to Public Enemy, Run DMC, ATCQ, De La Soul and those cats for a couple of years. Then I started buying Hip-Hop Connection (when it still came out as a physical magazine!), which has always been pretty good at championing both homegrown stuff and the US indie-underground, so I simultaneously discovered UK hip-hop and American indie-rap. I bought a load of Def Jux records and basically haven’t looked back since.
It’s easy to for punk bands to say they’re part of a punk music scene, or ska bands to say they’re part of a ska scene, but do you feel part of a UK Hip-Hop scene?
Yes and no. The UK hip-hop “scene” as such is quite a small place; you could point to, say, the Suspect Packages nights at Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, the Doctor’s Orders events and the work people like DJ Snuff are doing around End of the Weak and say “yeah, that’s the scene. The people who’re involved in that – on stage, in the audience, doing the promo, whatever – they’re the UK hip-hop scene”, and in a sense you’d be right about that. But personally speaking, and while I really respect all the people behind that stuff, I’ve always felt more comfortable doing a show in the basement of Ryan’s Bar with, say, Al Baker or Jackal than I would in most of those places. My relationship to various scenes is pretty contradictory; I often feel like I’m part of lots and none at all. I’d like to keep it that way – “scenes” have an inbuilt tendency towards insularity anyway and I don’t want to get trapped in one.
Big question: Can music change the world?
Short answer: no.
What were your thoughts when Sandman magazine compared you to Allen Ginsburg or Bob Dylan? Are you a “revolutionary prophet”?
Obviously it was ridiculously flattering, especially at such an early stage in my “career”. I was coming up in Sheffield at the time with a group of artists who were basically on that electro-pop-rap flex (which is huge now) and in amongst all that I think a lot of people just found what I was doing a bit baffling. So it was deeply gratifying to read that review because it showed at least someone was really listening and on a certain level “got” what I was doing. Having said all that, and despite having dined out on that review for about three years, I should say that I obviously don’t consider myself in a bracket with Ginsberg and Dylan and never will. And I’m definitely not a “revolutionary prophet”.
You’re part of various political causes, but have said on your blog you don’t quite like the term ‘protest’ or ‘political’ rapper. When talking about artists like Frank Turner or The King Blues, old school fans often talk about the ‘responsibility’ of these bands when they get larger audiences to raise awareness of political causes. Do you think there is an element of ‘responsibility’ to get a message across?
There is an element of responsibility; you’re privileged as an artist to have a platform that at least some people are going to pay attention to. “I’m the one who’s got the microphone here”, as Frank Turner himself puts it. So I do think artists should at least take this into consideration. But when consideration of that responsibility shades over into compulsion or obligation it becomes very problematic. No-one should be obliged to make a particular kind of art or to have specific content in their art. At the end of the day I’m for full freedom of artistic expression; people should make the art they want to make. If you’re a political activist but you want to make art that isn’t “about” your politics in that very direct, upfront sense then why should you have to?
A 16-year old X-Factor winner releases a song that has no political content whatsoever (let’s call the single ‘I Love You Lots’), but they’ve been involved in anti-cuts protests and decides the song will raise money for NCAFC (National Campaign Against Fees & Cuts). Does this suddenly make ‘I Love You Lots’ a political song or the singer a political singer?
That’s a great question. I think all art is “political” so the idea of a dichotomy between “political music” and “non-political music” has always needled me. The scenario you describe is fantastic; I mused about something similar in an article I wrote about this subject. I’m a big follower of mass cultural phenomena like X-Factor so discussing the political potential of something like that fascinates me. Basically I think if what you were to describe were to actually happen, it’d be brilliant. The X-Factor winners are basically cultural commodities who don’t have a lot of control over their artistic output (you can read some interesting stuff about Matt Cardle having to have a bit of a battle to get them to let him release a Biffy Clyro cover as his winner’s single), so for our hypothetical X-Factor winning leftie to say “okay, I can’t fight you on content but I will donate the money I’m going to make from this to a radical anti-capitalist campaign” would be extraordinarily powerful and pretty fucking subversive. The political debate that would catalyse amongst the millions of people who watch X-Factor would open up some pretty incredible possibilities. Rage Against The Machine – a “political” band - donated the funds from their Christmas number 1 single (“Killing In The Name” – a “political” song) to Shelter – a very mainstream, soft-liberal charity that is run along basically corporate lines and which fucks over its own employees pretty badly (there was a big series of strikes by Shelter workers in 2008). I’d take our imaginary leftie X-Factor winner giving money to NCAFC over that any day, even if the song was superficially insipid and contentless. Sometimes art can be given extra meaning by the people who receive it based on the wider role it’s played; the actual content of Tempa T’s “Next Hype”, for example, is a fairly reactionary glorification of violent crime. But for a lot of people that’s been transcended by the role that song played in the November-December 2010 student protests. When people hear that song, they’ll be thinking about the demos and the politics of the demos – not just the superficial content of the song.
Have you come across snobbishness in musicians or music fans who think only political people can listen to political music?
There are all kinds of snobbishness; there are people who think only activists can listen to “political” music. There are people who think that by listening to “political” music they’re discharging their political duty. There are people who think that people who don’t listen to “political” music are less worthy. There are people who think that only people who listen to “political” music should be involved in activist politics. All those forms of snobbishness are bullshit. The fate of humanity will be decided by struggles in our workplaces and communities, not in our CD collections or on our iPods.
Have you ever experienced verbal or even physical abuse because of your politics or political lyrics during a gig, has any review negatively flagged you up on your politics?
I got a lot of flack on some EDL message boards once; they threatened to come to a gig to beat me up (they never did). The whole episode was pretty amusing, frankly. Some reviewers have said that my politics were presented in a slightly crude way in some places and frankly I'd be inclined to agree with them. I’ve tried to alter that and make the political aspects of my lyrics less preachy and bit subtler. Beyond that it’s never really been an issue; I get people after shows saying “I’m really on board with what you’re saying”, which is great, and I get people saying “I don’t agree with your politics but I really enjoy listening to your music”, which is great too.
And, finally, what advice would you give to anyone wanting to forge out a career as a UK rap artist?
Have a fall-back option. Unless you want to take the Dizzee/Tinchy/Tinie Tempah route and make what is basically commercially-marketable electro-pop with a grime or rap influence (horses for courses but that ain’t my bag), you’re gonna have a very hard time making a living as a UK rapper. Even Jehst, who can stake a pretty strong claim to being the best UK rapper of the past 10 years, works as a postman to make ends meet. Rap doesn’t pay the bills for me and it probably never will. But that’s cool; I didn’t get into hip-hop thinking “this will be a good way to put food on the table”. I got into it thinking “I love doing this stuff, I think I’m okay at it and I want to share that with other people”. If you get into it on that basis then you’ve got a future, even if you never manage to make it cover the rent.
