Mr. Lif (original) (raw)

Since the Internet is a time capsule, I should explain this for readers in the year 3050: on the day I interviewed Definitive Jux recording artist Mr. Lif, aka Jeffrey Haynes, who has been pigeonholed-- and who has pigeonholed himself-- as a protest rapper, the world seemed fraught with political tension and pop reactions to it:

Throngs were rallying outside my town's city hall, where a meeting was being held to decide if the town would join the 90 cities that had passed anti-war resolutions. On his website, David Rees had published the latest edition of his scathing meta-comic Get Your War On. The country was under "Orange Alert." Based on Today show enactments of Homeland Security provisos, people were duct-taping their kids' faces and caulk-gunning their wives' crotches. AOL's "news" page offered a poll entitled "Rate Your Worries." National Public Radio ran a segment on anti-war songs analyzing Mr. Lif as a what-goes-around-comes-around perspective. The segment also featured rapper Sage Francis and the great guitarist but annoying vocalist Ani Difranco, and was bold enough to play a lot of Yo La Tengo's cover of Sun Ra's "Nuclear War".

President Bush had his mind on the airwaves as well; he spent the day in Nashville at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, where he heard his friend Michael W. Smith sing a song about the flag that Bush recommended Smith write ("There She Stands"), and where Bush said, "Liberty is God's gift to every human being in the world."

Lif rapped of Bush, on his Emergency Rations EP, "I could smell the dawn of Armageddon when this dick was elected." Lif's CDs make your head hurt. You can hear him trying to sort out a path between video-game addicted complacency and activism. He's got lots to say about the threat of monoculture, but he also wants to transcend that mundane stuff and concentrate on honing his art. He's the best blend of angry, violent rap (even pacifists laugh at his employee fantasy on I, Phantom that begins, "Dead boss/ Somebody call Red Cross") and knowledge-dropping, preachy rap since the early days of Boogie Down Productions. Every highway exit in America might be the same, but Lif, getting tired of being an outrage poster boy, is seeking variety.

Pitchfork: On your albums and EPs, there's always at least one song during which you express reverence for hip-hop's past. What are, to your mind, some peaks and some low moments of the artform?

Lif: Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is the straight-up peak of hip-hop. Straight-up one of the most powerful records ever made, period, in music. Follow the Leader by Eric B. & Rakim, and Illmatic by Nas just hit me really hard. It's actually impossible for me to leave out any Gang Starr record. Low points: I hate to say it, man, but I got to reference when Puffy came out and just started changing everything to this super-fucking-money-culture, just, like, the capitalism rap. I know we're supposed to be past holding grudges to an extent, and I can get with a lot of that shit a lot more than I used to. I used to be on some straight-up hater shit. I recognize the decay that it causes on a wide scale still. That was a turning point; that was when hip-hop became corporate, and that's, to me, the ugliest period. Other than that, well, I didn't see much in Tone-Loc or Vanilla Ice.

Pitchfork: Does their stuff even qualify as hip-hop?

Lif: Yeah it does, because it's so strongly derived from hip-hop culture. They're not necessarily the best at it, but you're always going to have corporations that will put out watered-down versions that will appeal to the masses because, unfortunately, the masses like watered-down versions of shit. As has been reflected in record sales and in mass consumption of certain products.

Pitchfork: Let's talk about those masses. One of your biggest concerns, or one of the ideas that you're most fascinated with, seems to be that while Americans think that their lifestyle is freely chosen, and that they are celebrating freedom of choice, their habits and desires have actually been socialized into them. You rap, "Ads are dads, sitcoms are moms."

Lif: Yeah, definitely, absolutely. I fully recognize the money mechanism that we live in... Wow, I'm already trying to not go off on a tangent. I feel like it's also an entertainment mechanism. What the cover of I, Phantom was trying to do is depict all of these aspects of our lives in this modern society. You see a briefcase for business, a bookbag for education, a knife and gun for violence. Then there's government, law, media overall, and so on and so forth, just things that we are kept busy by. We're either entertained by them or we're just trying to keep our heads above water by trying to earn enough money at a job so we can afford just any standard of living, let alone the standard that we desire. All of this goes on while things progress in a way that is not necessarily in our favor. We're kept so busy focusing on things that are extremely mundane while the people that possess the real power are deciding what our reality's going to be.

We're kept scrambling so much that we don't have time to really study and analyze and understand the way that power really works in this country. The power of language, for instance, the way that things are presented to us. These politicians step up and say, "This is what were going to do: we're going to set aside 450 million dollars for a mentorship program for orphaned youth," and so on and so forth, and it sounds great in this romanticized vision of what these alleged leaders are going to do for the alleged meek. But it doesn't examine: why are these kids orphans? Well, actually because the U.S. government brought drugs into the community, because this person is a person of color, perhaps even an immigrant, or perhaps they were constantly taken advantage of by corporate labor or were just completely exploited and not paid well for their work and their time, and were never offered any real skills as far as job training, and resorted to a desperate route that ended in their own death. There's lot of angles through which we should be able to access a lot of information, and deal with it readily, but they are completely cut from our vision on a regular basis.

Pitchfork: What would be one of those obscured angles?

Lif: Just to draw something from the state of the union address, you have Bush saying, "I'm so proud of Americans because you're so resourceful when people are in need; when other Americans are in need you step up and you do this and this and that, and when you fit these situations you'll receive assistance from the federal government as well." And everyone claps for that. I didn't quote him verbatim by any means but it's just like, okay, what are the fucking stipulations that make a situation fit for federal aid-- what's the criteria that makes a situation fit for the federal government to step in? And let me read the fucking 80-page novel of red tape that defines the criteria for when the government would step in to help people in need.

That's pretty simple, but it's a way in which people are lulled to sleep. People think that the government honors and respects us, and that they're actually going to come in and help people in need, but in reality it's really just a bunch of red tape, and through the power of language they can really make it seem like they're going to do a lot when they aren't going to do anything but filter money back into their own pockets.

Pitchfork: Do you see mass media as being just as culpable as the government? A lot of your ire is toward the government, but do you resent the ways that our news agencies also deny people information?

Lif: I definitely feel that they're at fault. I feel that the whole code of professionalism in this country is at fault, this code of business, with professionalism being the code of conduct that comes along with that. Business is cold and harsh. Business doesn't consider your personal needs or the ends of your family. Business doesn't allow you to keep to your job after you slaved at a place for 20+ years. Rather than increase your benefits, business cuts you out of the job situation so that you're job-hunting, off to find a far less prestigious position.

People are sitting up there, trying to be professionals, just delivering the news as it comes in, trying to get those ratings but not adding any actual human opinion. It's a desensitized view of the world being delivered. It definitely translates into the way people see situations. Why create the illusion that they're dropping it on us black and white? They're not doing that; they're fucking... it's already skewed to enhance the ratings. It's already sensationalized. There's a reason homicides start off the program every day.

Pitchfork: When you have a character rap about "the ghetto eyesore," are you talking about landscape psychology, about how people's environments can destimulate them to some degree?

Lif: Yeah, but ultimately in that sentence, in that phrase, I was really talking about just the absolute litter. Or mostly just in using the word "litter," giving a hint of the degree of negativity connected with the image of African-Americans. Just the imagery of this young man who was a good person. In the song I hope it's clear that he just snaps because he just hasn't eaten for several days and has no idea how to do any better for himself. Ultimately, he just wants to get a little bit of money and enough food to last him to the end of the week by robbing this place. I feel like that's one of the strongest connotations connected with the ghetto: homicide. You know, you go there, you get killed. Someone will rob you. Someone will fucking stab you. Something bad will happen to you. I felt like another dead body was just another part of the decaying scenery provided by a sick environment.

Pitchfork: But are you saying that that environment doesn't seem to offer its inhabitants something to hope for beyond it?

Lif: Honestly, I feel like it's a little bit beyond my jurisdiction to say, because so many incredible things rise from adversity. But if you look at it on just a very cold scale, corporations and the government do not care about the poor. So in what's considered a poor area, you got to look at things. What's going on there? The actual environment is sick, and sickly, and causes illness. I can't remember what the stats are on the number of toxic waste sites that are located in ghettos across the country. I know that in Houston, I believe, a hundred percent of the toxic waste sites in that city are in the ghetto. And I'm sure that in communities of color across the country... I wouldn't say the numbers are a hundred percent, but I wonder if they dip below sixty.

Pitchfork: So while touring, you've seen things that enforce some of your assumptions about our culture?

Lif: When I'm overseas, in Europe, just hitting up a bunch of different countries, I always try to take a little time to talk with people about what I seem to zero in on: What are your healthcare reforms like? What do you have to do to obtain a solid education in this country? Those are just two of the most important things and they're also the things that can be the most harsh thing in America. Yo, here, you get to fucking basically break your neck to get healthcare, because you got to pay so fucking much for it.

I was working a job before, which I wrote "Live from the Plantation" about-- I couldn't pay healthcare. It was just like, either I can have a little bit of disposable income, and I mean a little bit, like the amount of hours I'd have to work to make $200 was just like insane. But then to give away whatever portion of that money, on top of my taxes, just to have some healthcare? Yo, man, I had to fucking kick my shit to the curb just so I could fucking live.

That's one of the most bold smacks in the face in this country. It's a way to say, "Look, we just don't even care about you," the price of healthcare in this country. And the fact is, if you have a solid healthcare plan, you still don't have dental. If you have dental, you might not have vision. And if your back hurts, well, a chiropractor's not covered in that. It's a hassle. You have to go seek out on your own and look for the best plan you can afford, and a lot of times what people can afford is not what they need, and it creates lot of leeway for people to slip through the cracks.

Pitchfork: In that song you mentioned, "Live from the Plantation", you make a bold analogy between the thankless labor of some modern jobs and slave labor. You don't take it very far, but it's there.

Lif: Honestly, I can say from my experience: I think you're just branded at a young age. You fucking got to go work. A lot of the time, due to the exhaustion that can ensue from job-hunting and not finding an ideal situation, a lot of people do end up settling, man, for shit they're not passionate about in any way. The pace of life and the cost of living doesn't really allow people to get situated and find something that they love to do and allow time to figure out how to really earn a decent income from that.

For instance, I think college is a great forum for watching people flail within the stresses presented by the urgency to be a fucking hard-working taxpayer. In my sophomore year, I was in whatever fucking office it was where I was supposed to pick my major, literally watching kids just slip through the curriculum guidelines, just pointing at something on a list and saying, "I guess this is what I'll do for the rest of my life." It's just fucking sad. And people in college are the fucking alleged privileged people anyway. There's other people out there, their fucking family fell apart or whatever; they're working at a place at fucking 14, 16. You just get locked in. We've been beaten into submission by the dogma, by a program of, "Yeah, we have to brand ourselves."

Pitchfork: But even the disposable income that people get from branding themselves at jobs, many of them spend it on logo brands anyway, "branding" their free time with whatever label they pay-- exorbitantly-- to throw all over themselves.

Lif: There's so many levels of that. Some people's logo is having no logo. There are levels of dedication that are perhaps more ill. There's wearing certain kind of sneakers or a certain garment just because it's comfortable, and because that company just happens to make some shit that works with the level of comfort you're looking for. That's all good. But then there's other cats that are like, "I won't wear anything but Nike..." Logo recognition is the main focus of these companies. They research to find out at what age we first start to have logo recognition.

Pitchfork: A friend sends me Nickelodeon's "What We Know About Kids" documents. It's data for the Kids Marketing Conference. They aim to indoctrinate brand loyalty. Fast Food Nation spotlights someone who calls it "lasting attitudinal change."

Lif: If you're just buying to have that brand, or will only buy brand name shit, then it's more ill. It's a different syndrome, but one that's easily acquired.

Pitchfork: How did you arrive at your perspective of being media literate, or of being critical of American material culture or the government?

Lif: I think it was by watching my parents struggle as immigrants from Barbados living here in America. And by listening to Public Enemy. I mean, I can't put it all on PE, but just being around for that era of rap when rap actually stood for something. That was just priceless in my development as a human being. Having my foundation be from two positive black role models in my life, my mom and my dad, two strong-minded intelligent individuals who clearly have made a great deal of great decisions in their lives and put me in a position, via educational institutions, to be around other intelligent people and to have a strong moral foundation, from which I try to never stray far. It all spurred me to carve out my own little niche as a human being.

Pitchfork: That's interesting from growing up in Boston. I know people who moved there and almost got turned off to liberalism by that lazy, Boston, rich-Democrat vibe.

Lif: Yeah, but all the everyday struggles factor into the overall perspective that I'm coming with right now... the experience in my home life, and just growing up, and the awkwardness of the whole process of growing up. Facing your own struggles, the identity wars, the pressures of school, and that pressure in school of "What you learn in school has to translate into big dough for you when you grow up."

Pitchfork: Public Enemy framed a worldview of being all black-versus-white tension. I hear that tension in your records, but I hear a wider everyman view coming from it, too. It's not all a black-perspective-in-a-white-world, it's someone on the receiving end, on the bottom, of a top-down culture. They were awesome, but only a little of the latter-day material is strong.

Lif: No one can keep it up forever. I honestly feel like it's largely a production situation with Public Enemy. I think when the Bomb Squad stopped being razor sharp, that was what was going to take PE down the tubes. As far as Chuck and Flav still sounding good, there's a couple cuts on that latest record... I mean, Jesus, "Give the Peeps What They Need"! That shit is sick, man! And then "Son of a Bush" is sick. They got some jams on there, you know what I mean? But again, the jams that are fresh are the ones with the tight production. If they had an album with ten sick beats, they'd have ten sick songs.

Pitchfork: Speaking of beats, that was a brave decision to include, for the concept album's sake, the really bad beats of "Status", about when your character was poor. You were really pulling out all the stops, if you were willing to take the risk having a wack song. Was there a debate at the label? Did someone say, "That sounds terrible" and you had to argue, "But that's my point!"

Lif: No, I didn't catch any flak from the label at all. It's actually never been mentioned before this! I just set out to make a song with the jankiest possible beat, and to EQ it in the worst way. I think the snare is panned all the way to the right. If you listen to that shit in your car, man, it's a fucking nightmare. The bassline's mad high, and there's fucking patches in it and holes and shit. I think it achieved its goal, especially when you hear "Success" come in after it, and you realize how well-EQ'd "Success" is.

Pitchfork: How, in concert, do you pull off the long, fast raps at the end of "Return of the B-Boy"?

Lif: Honestly, I've never performed that song in its entirety. "Arise" from my old EP, Enter the Colossus, is a 4½-minute verse, and I've actually done that one live. "Return of the B-Boy" I would do live, but I'm having a little trouble right now with my show. I need to recruit certain people for my show that can really hold shit down, because I, Phantom is a narrative what I'm trying to do with my show is put on a production that expresses the storyline, and "Return of the B-Boy"-- I can't go that song alone. I need to have cats doing backups for me so I can breathe.

I do a lot of performing just straight-up by myself with a DJ. But actually the first part of "Return of the B-Boy" can't be done effectively, because I used a very multi-layered approach when recording the album, where I was able to create a dialogue with myself by recording on a couple different tracks. For shit to be done in the best possible form, it requires people to fill in certain lines to create that effect of a dialogue.

Pitchfork: So are you bringing out a Lif doppelganger for the part about battling a "genetic replica" of yourself? You're not like Digital Underground, are you, bringing out a fake Shock G for when Shock G comes out as Humpty Hump?

Lif: No, no, no! See, I haven't figured that out yet. I'm actually writing the script for the show now and I'm trying to figure out what each scene is really supposed to be. Doing "B-Boy" would be great to do on stage, I just haven't figured it out yet.

Pitchfork: People get exhausted even lip-synching to that song, it's so fast.

Lif: Right. But it would be a cool effect to see different MCs coming up to test, and then getting done up one by one, and then the overall struggle with myself at the end, which... I have no idea how to stage.

Pitchfork: You mentioned Magnolia in the liner notes to I, Phantom. Is the scope and structure of that film an influence on your albums, which have always had concepts?

Lif: Using Magnolia was the only way I could make sense of that song. It wasn't really inspired by Magnolia. I was just working on the jam and I realized that, after I turned in the album, no one really understood it.

Pitchfork: This is the song "Friends and Neighbors", which is very close to the title of a Neil LaBute film. This is the really panoramic one with all the people's interweaved histories?

Lif: Yeah. I submitted the album to my management and my publicist and there was just this silence that ensued. I was just like, "Okay, people just don't even get the record." So I was like, "I have to write the fucking storyline." And referencing Magnolia was one of the easiest ways to nutshell and make it clear the approach that the song took.

Pitchfork: And the point of "Iron Helix", your duet with Insight, in which you play the modern materialist to make a statement about how the current idea of civilization began with colonization of primitive man? His peaceful existence is reduced to competition and combat.

Lif: I wanted to show, in 2½ minutes, a nutshell, the corrosive and corruptive nature of colonization, and I think I probably went to some extremes. I wasn't necessarily saying that was the conflict, but it's a conflict that does take place. We literally have some of us in the modern culture trying their best to stomp out every other way of life, really. People in tribes are depicted as completely primitive and crazy. The way that we live is very pigheaded and very unaccepting of other ways of life, especially in America.

All our fucking media does is focus on making other civilized cultures look uncivilized. That was one of the things I wanted to convey. The overall "look, this is the one way to live" approach to this individual who is clearly living a happy life, who is clearly completely satisfied with and fulfilled by the tasks that he was able to complete every day, like eating, healing his own wounds, doctoring himself and whatever. And then this voice says, "Look, your life is inadequate. This is the way you need to live."

Giving that depiction of the subversive methods by which our way of life creeps into our own psyche and eliminates alternatives. That's what happens. By Insight even having a conversation with me, me putting these things in his head, it completely warped his whole point of view on how he wanted to live his life and what he wanted to be involved in, and he essentially, in the song, lost his identity, and we were just one and the same.

Pitchfork: On "Post Mortem", the post-nuclear apocalypse rapped from four perspectives, all the guests wrote their own parts?

Lif: Yep.

Pitchfork: The Jean Grae part, that is dark! Where the girl wished she raised more hell-- that's one of the most powerful moments on the record. You know how to end an album. The speaker that is you almost sounds like the end of Schindler's List where he's regretfully wishing and saying how he could have saved one more person. That's what I hear in your character, talking about the time he spent trying to look cool in a club or the time he spent working a dumb job, when he could have been doing bigger things, changing the world. What are the bigger things you're doing now?

Lif: Devolution. It's a trivia-based Internet game I'm designing with my boy Jay Hakkenin, who is actually head designer of the game via his own company called Receiver Studio.

Pitchfork: So you're doing the content of the game?

Lif: Yeah. It covers everything you see in the artwork of I, Phantom. The Capitol building icon would stand for the politics category. Briefcase: business. Knife and gun: violence. The two people embracing is the sex category, of course, which a lot of kids are going to have fun with. The CD is music. There's media, and the food industry gets discussed at great length. Basically, you have to answer a number of questions to pass any stage. It's myself and some of my friends-- mainly myself and my girlfriend-- generating all the questions. People should check it out. There's neat grand prizes and shit you can download. Basically, the point of the game is to disperse information that otherwise is a little difficult to find or gets swept under the rug. Stuff that should be common knowledge that people have a right to know, and should know. The game will be on mrlif.com.

Pitchfork: What about an album?

Lif: I'm working on an album with my boy Akrobatik; it'll be a group called The Perceptionists, with an album coming out in 2004.

Pitchfork: Full-length?

Lif: I'm only doing full-lengths now. I had my single run, and I did my EP run. Now it's all albums. Also, to come out in a few years, I'm working on a book as well.

Pitchfork: Any scoop what that's about?

Lif: It's a sci-fi joint. I can't really unleash it yet.

Pitchfork: So the book ends with a nuclear apocalypse?

Lif: No! I cant... we'll talk more about that in a couple years!

Pitchfork: And you've been speaking out against war. You just did a huge D.C. rally.

Lif: Yeah, definitely. But-- I can only watch the news in short bursts. I don't even feel like I'm as in the loop as I should be right now. I should tune in and find out what's going on, because I've actually turned down a couple of opportunities to speak because, I don't know man, I'm feeling a little exhausted lately.

Pitchfork: It seems like you really got nailed to the 9/11 song on Emergency Rations, "The Home of the Brave". Are you wanting to move past being viewed as such a spokesperson?

Lif: To an extent, yeah. Clearly, I have things to say. I definitely have my opinion, and I definitely have a voracious appetite for analyzing social and political situations, but I don't necessarily want people to expect me to be the next PE or Dead Pres. I'm not saying that I'm not going to keep the music aware; that's always been the driving force behind what I've done. But one of the most important things about any artist is to fucking redefine yourself every time you put out a record. To me, that's the thing I cherish most about any artist I love, the way that they grow from record to record.

You see Gang Starr: on every record Premier's style just elevated completely, especially if you look at Step in the Arena and Hard to Earn. Amazing development in style, and Guru stepping up his game. You look at Outkast, just completely fucking shit up every time they drop something. That's what I strive for. I'm not saying I'm going to be deviating from what I've been establishing as far as being aware, but I feel odd about consistently being... I mean, I don't know if I'm... I'm just leery about a lot of things.

As far as sometimes being involved with different demonstrations, I did an anti-war protest in San Fran in January, and I'm standing there, amongst all these people, and it's this great thing to see people being active and actually standing up for what they believe in and still letting the government know that there are people who will still sacrifice a portion of their day to stand up for what they care about, but I'm just thinking to myself, "God, man, these protests have been going on throughout I-don't-even-know-how-many years, and here we are again." I'm just wondering if this is the most effective method to bring about change.

So I'm more inclined to withhold some of my opinions, and not even be involved in any demonstrations of any sort and just really try to figure out a method that I feel is more potent. That's why I'm trying to do this thing with the video game, because I know fucking kids like video games. I'm a junkie, I been a junkie fucking vidiot for fucking my whole life. So it's like I've got to find a couple alternate methods of reaching people and of doing stuff that they're going to really enjoy and take interest in.

Pitchfork: People have come to expect the informed rage from you. I've obviously approached this interview with assumptions about you. "Awww, that Mr. Lif, he'll go off on this current events question!" So that's interesting that you want to mix it up. Plus, there has never been a Starbucks that has looked outside, seen the protesters, and said, "You know what? Those folks outside are right. Let's close up."

Lif: Exactly, it's all good to protest; it shows that were doing something, but it's almost a default setting. "Okay, there's something going on in the world we don't like. Let's go walk down the street and fucking hold our signs up." I'm not trying to belittle it, but the situation is far more complex than that. I definitely need to do some research and to see what methods I can use to be more effective.