Whoever thought chamber pop would go so well with hip hop had something special in mind.  Then again, when your concept of hip hop is as simple as Raj Haldar’s (aka Lushlife), the marriage couldn’t be any more obvious.  “Hip hop at its core can be anything” is the underlying principle behind Cassette City, Lushlife’s latest “experimental” album.  When you’re a classically trained musician with musical influences that span far and wide, everything you produce can qualify as an experiment.

Evil Monito (EM):  How’d you come up with the name LushLife?

Lushlife (LL):  Lush Life is a jazz soundtrack written by Billy Strayhorn for Duke Ellington.  I grew up playing with jazz roots.  I studied jazz drums and played in different groups throughout high school and college.  It’s just a reference for that jazz world that I come from in a way.  I also thought it just had a nice ring to it and was somewhat expressive of who I am, especially with my rhyme content.  I’m always talking about the sun, the moon, and the stars, and just really, sort of, lush lyrical content.

EM:  You’re a classically trained musician.  How much of an impact did growing up in Philadelphia have on your music?

LL:  I think I’m just now at a point where I’m able to synthesize all of the things that have influenced me musically over my lifetime, and I’m able to filter all that through me and come up with new stuff.  Everything, from being 7 years old and studying classical piano, to being 15 and being head over heels in love with The Roots, to being 19 and discovering 80’s funk rock – just being in an environment where I had constant influences, whether actively through playing music or passively through being a fan of different shit, it all just comes into play when I’m writing.  When I’m conceptualizing a song, I’m reaching back to things I haven’t thought of in years.  You wonder what recesses of your brain come through through music.  It’s all there.

EM:  You’ve said that “hip hop is the perfect platform for me because at its core it can be anything.”  Cassette City, at its core, is a hip-hop album.  How was your approach to producing an album that, like so many other artists out there, attempted to challenge the definitions of hip-hop?

LL:  One thing that was really important to me in trying to make a challenging hip hop record was to not make a record that was too alienated.  I wanted you to feel an immediate visual response that you were listening to a very classic sounding hip hop record, but at the same time I wanted the listener to be like “Oh shit, well there’s a little more going on here”.  So, there are elements on the record that are just straight ahead – very classic, 90s sounding hip hop songs, but in those songs I might be playing slide guitar or something that would throw things off tilt there.  With the tracks Meridian Sound part one, two, and three, those were the true explorations where, since I don’t have any skits on my record, on these three short two-minute tracks I explored different ideas.  On one of them, I recorded myself on a grand piano in a church sanctuary with a cellist, along with some samples.  I rapped over that, no drums, just to see how hip hop works in other contexts.  On the first one, I was listening to a lot of M83 at the time, wondering how this lush bed of synthesizers with no drums could work with a hip hop vocal on top.  Those are just real expressions of how I see hip hop being an open playing field for anything to be rapped over.

EM:  Your first album was titled West Sounds – a “mashup” of Kanye West’s Late Registration and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. How does Cassette City reflect the maturation your music has gone through since then.

LL:  I definitely have this huge influence with a lot of chamber pop: the Beach Boys, the production quality, strings, horns – just a very lush, pop orchestral backdrop.  I was using the Beach Boys’ samples and putting Kanye’s vocals over them, and the thing that really carried over was that there was something to be said for the marriage of these two sounds.  In 2007 when I started recording Cassette City, I delved into recording all sorts of other music like indie rock, pop, and experimental electronic.  I matured a lot just from a production standpoint – what I have to offer from a producer and a rapper is that I’m going to put together these tracks that aren’t just samples and beats, but a true expression of an artist, almost in a way that Cat Stevens or a singer-songwriter might write a song.  I try to have this really focused and fluid expression of these songs as who I am as an artist, and I think that was only possible because I started out making beats, played live instrumentation over those, did scoring with live string and horn players, and then I sat down and wrote the rhymes and recorded the rhymes.  None of those elements would’ve been possible without the early experimentation of putting together West Sounds and other hip hop records here and there.  This is a real, sort of, grand culmination of all the things I’ve been doing over the last 5-6 years.

EM:  Let’s talk about your project Leisure Class/Stick-Up Kids, where you invite other artists, as well as your fans, to remix the songs on Cassette City and put their fingerprints on your music.  What do you hope to achieve from this?

LL:  For me, it’s more than just “Here, I have this content with Cassette City.  Let’s get it remixed”.  It’s almost an extension of what I wanted to achieve with my album.  I worked with indie rock artists because I love that experimental quality and vast scope of what is indie music – it can basically be anything.  I think one thing that hip hop lacks is an openness – everything is so narrow.  What I wanted to inject was an exploration of what was possible amongst these diverse artists and display how expansive hip hop could be through the work of all these artists.

EM:  The Leisure Class/Stick-Up Kids project seems like a great way to bring members from all realms of the music community together.  This all ties back to your vision of, sort of, hip hop without boundaries.  What’s your take on the state of hip hop today and where do you see it going?

LL:  Hmm…I don’t really harbor this thing that I feel like a lot of people do – “The state of hip hop is dead”.  It’s still a relatively young art form that I think is going through some growing pains and that’s sort of bolstered by issues of digital media and how quickly information travels.  But hip hop in and of itself, that stuff on the radio – I mean, it’s cool.  I’m not 15 anymore, so I don’t know if I can relate to…someone like…like uhh…Trey Songz…or someone like Lil Wayne, but I think it’s still vibrant and expressive.  I do think there are some strange limitations that have grown around it because of new media and the stronghold grip that radio has.  When I was 14, for example, that same stuff that kids listening to underground hip hop were listening to, you could hear it on Hot 97 or pop-hip hop radio.  There wasn’t a huge distance of nature to the music.  I think a lot of it nowadays is that there’s just so much out there.  In short, I’m down – if it’s a good song, it’s a good song.

EM:  Any other projects coming up?

LL:  Leisure Class/Stick-Up Kids is really my main focus at the moment.  That’s been a huge thing I’ve been working on for months now.  Getting the caliber of artists involved is no easy task.  We’ve got Jimmy Tamborello (Postal Service/Dntel), Brendan Canning and the other rotating cast of characters from Broken Social Scene, a group called MADRID from Toronto – getting all these guys together despite their schedules became a real logistical game.  Beyond this EP of artists who I admire and wanted to get on the album, we wanted to launch a remix competition.  Essentially we have five official remixes, and we have one track available at http://lushlife.cashmusic.org/ that we’re soliciting fans to come and remix.  In the same way, whether they’re hip hop producers or folk singers, take what they’re doing and inject it into doing a hip hop remix and submitting that, and that would be, ostensibly, the last track off the album.  I really want to see how broad and vast people’s output are – what kind of weird shit people can put together, what kind of beautiful things people can put together.  In my heart of hearts, I imagine people uploading my vocals with just static underneath it – or anything really.

I’m also focused on playing live.  Cassette City was a huge project, and it’ll be an equally huge project as a solo artist to bring that to a live stage.  It’s got to be so well orchestrated since I’m playing a lot of the instruments myself, going from here to there and doing all this other stuff.  We’re planning on doing Europe first, and then early next year we’ll do the full U.S., and then back to Europe, with hopefully South Africa somewhere along the way.  We just did a spot for the University of Kentucky’s Boomslang! Festival.  The live show is resonating equally as well, if not better, than the record is.  I think I made a lot more converts out of performing this stuff live than I expected.  So, we’ll try and amp up the live touring schedule.

EM:  Anything else you’d like our readers to know?

LL:  I’ve been pretty quiet on all my online collateral – I wasn’t blogging, on Facebook, and I wasn’t even really recording that much for much of August and September.  I was busily getting Leisure Class/Stick-Up Kids up and running, and I really want your readers to know that this project is out there.  Whether you’re into recording in any capacity or not, definitely please check out http://lushlife.cashmusic.org.  Download the stems and do your own remix, and hopefully you’ll be on a release with Broken Social Scene and the Postal Service.  Also, definitely checkout my blog – http://www.theyoungandinlove.com, and keep tabs because the live show is coming soon!  Not to be totally pushing all my collateral at once, but that’s what I’m working on and that’s what I’m passionate about.

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http://www.myspace.com/lushlifemedia

http://lushlife.cashmusic.org

http://www.theyoungandinlove.com

Published on 27 October 2009 | 1 |