Preview to The Long Good Bye

PART II

“I’m an A-U-D-I-O”

There was a friendly competition we all adhered to when we
started. Ultimately it was about the four of us: me, Koncepts, Kirby and
Hypnotic being able to freestyle against each other for hours. I mean HOURS. At
that time we thought we were okay, retrospect made me realize we were pretty
high level. Much of the energy of that competition played out in the dynamics
we had with one another outside of the music. Kirby was the master of
partnership, I understood project management, Koncepts was our in house
technical and Hypnotic did our sales. We were a much larger collective once, at
one time being 15 people deep if you counted the affiliates in New York and
Texas as well as the younger cats we were mentoring. There is also an argument
in there about how influential and selfless cats like Bas1, Eclipse427 (Walt
Liquor), Peekaboo and Infamous were so they could be Kemetic Suns. Plus there
is a whole other tangent on how strong our ties were to MURS.

Quite accidently, Kirby and Koncepts together were very good as
ambassadors. They travelled a lot, they showed up to events and they were able
to get our sound into the heads of real decision makers who made sure our
records ended up on mix shows, college radio and features. This is part of the
reason Konceptual Dominance made so much sense. On the opposite tip, Hypnotic
and I were doing shows and selling merchandise direct to customers (fans). I
had a pretty high ethical standard which I realize now was a serious handicap
for our business in terms of being in the music industry. Other groups could
trash the stage, steal from the bar, go over their time or intimidate the
promoter into moving them up on the lineup. I never wanted to get too involved
in that type of grimy dealings because it was dumb logic to me – if we were
going to go that route, forget the music and let’s go back to the streets.

That was another issue we were confronting. Many of the people
rapping at the time all came from middle class backgrounds and had a parachute
lined up for them afterwards. Koncepts and I tried to address that on Stop The
World (the song itself). Where as many crews were diverse economically and
ethnically, we were diverse economically but most of our members were two steps
from the streets. Meaning we had convinced them to let go of their old hustles
in lieu of legitimate enterprises that would be promoted by House Kemetic Suns.
It was always a struggle. We didn’t always win. As the founder of the
collective, I had the tendency to be the loudest voice in the room even if I
actually wanted a democracy. In fact I remember always talking about being the
bigger person and breaking up some many beefs. Then one night in winter of
1996, I confronted a mask bound rapper about some personal violations he made in
my life. In his drunken indignation, he replied he was not responsible for his
actions and he might kill me. I lost it and told him to put up his hands. He
had 12 tiny people holding him back, the Suns just watched to make sure nobody
jumped me from behind. We never got into it but he knew that night like I know
this day that if it went down he was going to end up in the ER. The problem was
we had crossed a bridge; our music was never going to be bohemian again and I
had lost the credibility to tell my crew to “walk away”. In fact, we turned the
ship and headed directly into the storm.

There are some background elements to understand before going
in. If Konceptual Dominance was the equivalent of two tenured professors doing
panel discussion on human behavior through hip hop, Ka Auditron Ba was the
essence of two battle rappers getting their own satellite and broadcasting a 24
hour signal based on the lifestyle trying to prevent a cataclysm. We pulled
from everything important to us at the time. Both Hypnotic and I were avid
Marvel fans. We owned tons of comics. I read a lot of science fiction and
watched a lot of movies. Hypnotic was really into documentaries. At the time I
was able to study under Mr. Obenga which deeply changed my life and I was able
to see firsthand the aspirations of the progenitors of the Nile Valley culture.
Meanwhile Hypnotic’s mother was a reggae journalist and therefore gave him
access to elders. One in particular who really influenced us was Scientist.
Aside from demystifying much of the Rastafarian thought process beyond the
generics and tropes, Scientist gave us the template.

Thus began the goal of creating an identity: we would
outperform. The analogy of individuals who take and never gave back became
“vampires”. We knew because we didn’t play the politics game we were hard
pressed to get headline bookings in the Bay Area because of the co-opting of
the scene happening. Simply put, I was going to kiss anyone’s ass, the big names
were haters and Hypnotic was doing things behind the scene that made these
dudes shook. If we couldn’t get the midnight spot or the top name of the flyer,
we wanted the 1130pm slot and we wanted to be second on the flyer. It was
Scientist who told us to open with The Voodoo Curse that we transformed into
the chant to take over the crowd: “We are……the Kemetic Suns….” It didn’t matter
WHO was the headliner. Our goal was to create and perform music that stole the
show. It happened time after time after time. We would watch crews argue with
the promoter: “don’t put Kemetic Suns on before us….they tire out the crowd”.
The promoter would come to us and Hypnotic would say “don’t worry we’re just
the Auditrons”.

There is most of the recordings on Soundcloud. I am not sure if everything is awesome. I know I was rapping in the top 10 list at the time but I am not sure if everything we did was incredible. There are some tracks that really move me and Koncepts. I pinged him to get his take on our favorites from the project:

Resonance

Karma: Resonance was a tribute to Scientist but all scientists in general. We knew there was some connection between innovation and audio engineering happening from the Jamaican sound clashes to NYC hip hop to what we were actually doing with the drum machine and ASR vocal effects when we performed. This is a perfect example of the routines we would do. Back and forths that would whip the crowd into a frenzy as an opener. Also the djs loved it because it was heavy with break beats and juggling. FYI, this is Neal Degrasse Tyson narrating before you all knew how great he was. I pulled it from a vhs compilation my father got me because of our shared loved of astronomy.

Koncepts: this beat don’t make no fucking sense. I didn’t make it. but it always killed at shows. watching people try to catch the beat count was comedy. this shit is in like 11/8 or something. Ka and Ba had that rapid-fire flow where they could make it work and trade off like they were freestyling. It’s pretty incredible, actually.

Black Elevation Station

Karma: Black Elevation Station was supposed to be the crunk remix to All Terrain for Internal Symmetry. My father was from the south and I loved southern hip hop. Not just the obvious stuff like Dungeon Family, Geto Boys and UGK. I listened to obscure material most didn’t know about. When I heard this beat I said its smobb music but it’s not southern. At that time, the stuff I was doing with the internet was getting some nods. I was brought to speak at Stanford to a couple of student groups. The idea of creating one’s own content distribution was intoxicating but we were talking to a couple investors who were interested in buying a satellite and setting up a station in San Francisco. When the deal went through, like so many to come after, Hypnotic suggest we just act like it was still going and we had our station on a satellite we owned.

Koncepts: I had this track early on in the process but added to it along the way. a lot of the keys and stuff came in later. I used a few different samples but kept them all in key, I was known for melodic beats but one thing about the west coast style and the Bay underground in particular was this kind of mystical ass sound but with slapping drums. so this was like that, some psychedelic guitar and synths, but at a higher tempo and some 808 sounds. What Ka and Ba did with it was sick, exactly what I had envisioned it for, they flowed perfectly on the beat. A mix of paranoia and toughness in the lyrics. I think I added the later stuff when they were in the studio with the session players - I wasn’t really involved in that and I wanted to tune up my own stuff to keep pace.

Auditron

Karma: Tapes. Koncepts and I would send each other tapes a couple times a year. He was attending NYU while I was at SFSU. Most of the beats on the tapes he would send would end up on some project: Ambershine, Internal Symmetry, Konceptual Dominance or the Auditrons. Most of the beats I would send back were rough but he would tweak some of them and they would end up on his solo stuff, my ill fated solo album, Prayze The Sun or Internal Symmetry. This beat was clearly for Hypnotic and I. He even put it on the tape. It was Koncepts at his most genius Smokey Robinson. He could hear something we couldn’t in ourselves. He made sure he was with us when we wrote to it. When he started playing it on the speakers, he prompted us with “show them how the flow never ends”. He wanted to play with some of the Nommo concepts of embracing the silence in the groove as well as the volatility in the drums. We were always sure to write what the beat wanted not what we wanted. Soon as Hypnotic mumbled “its vital that you follow our path that is spiral” a voice spoke to me with the chorus. I looked up from the pad and said “I’m an A-U-D-I-O”. At first they didn’t get it, but I wouldn’t stop. When I saw their eyes light up after the third repetition, we knew did something. This might be my favorite memory of music.

Koncepts: this is definitely the big one. coulda maybe done some numbers. had all the elements. smoothed out but conscious, a hook you can understand and repeat… the label Ka & Ba were messing with brought this into a bigger studio and I was able to add the live guitar and percussion. But they had a boy band and brought them in to do background vocals… kind of not what I had envisioned, image-wise. it worked for the sound, as far as that was concerned. The label was just trying to get on a vehicle for their boy band though. They kept trying to push them into the mix of what we were doing and I had to step away from that situation. that’s one of the things that messed with the delicate equilibrium of the project and the crew.

Cryosleep

Karma: There was a lot of money to be made being an independent rap group if you were willing to compromise. We weren’t. Managers would tell us we were unmanageable; too head strong and not needy enough. We made far less money than we should have based on our morals and pride. The way to keep the boat afloat was to subsidize the business model with pieces of my check. At first I worked at a smoothie shop that got bought, stole all my recipes and became Jamba Juice; different story for a different time. That wasn’t going to work for me. Doing minimum wage at a mall. Also in my young fiery mind, “how does this help my people?” I got into working for a few non-profits and did harm reduction outreach – needle exchange, violence prevention and street worker advocacy. I was seeing young people being mistreated as wards of the state.

Hypnotic was doing group home work given he had been in one himself. We would trade stories about the issues we were seeing with young people and the bureaucracy. More and more it felt like young people were being experimented on rather than treated or helped. Both of us had some experience at young age in terms of “recruitment” that made us a bit more suspicious. Now with the popularity of Stranger Things, Hunger Games and Ender’s Game, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. I know.

Maybe there was also a piece of falling into the formula. Doing it every time because it worked last time. I remember be asked “whats the sci fi movie song on this album?” well before we even wrote Cryosleep. It’s possible we had become trope.

Koncepts plays the bass on this. That’s why its so rich.

PART IV