After mentioning in my Kool Keith interview how crazy the Mike Ladd interview I did was, I thought I'd go back to it... Unfortunately, two computer hard drive deaths and over 6 years later some of the interview seems to be missing. It had something to do with his son asking for money and saying 'badaw'... I don't really remember but it was strange and funny and went for about 10 minutes.
On the other hand, I talked to Mike Ladd about some cool and interesting stuff from the war in Afghanistan to Sun Ra. Check it out.
Could you explain a little about what the ‘Nostalgialator’ is.
It actually came out of a song I wrote a while ago for somebody else and he didn’t end up putting it out and I always liked the idea of the ‘Nostalgialator’ which was this machine… Have you ever seen Woody Allen’s Sleeper? There’s this machine in it called the ‘Orgasmatron’ which kinda like simulates you having sex; you just get in it and Woody Allen gets in it by accident because he’s hiding from somebody. You’re supposed to get in it with somebody and it enhances your orgasm or whatever and he gets in it by himself and he comes out totally smokin’ and his eyes all googly and shit. So the Nostalgialator is loosely based on that. It’s sorta like an Orgasmatron as time machine. It doesn’t actually take you back in time. If you’re watching the news and you’re like, ‘Oh god, shit sux right now I wish I was back in the good old days; I wish it was 1984 everything seemed so cool back then.’ You get in the Nostalgialator and it takes you back to 1984. The only problem is that the guys who designed it fucked up, and they made it too big. It’s supposed to be a home appliance but it’s way too big. [The Nostalgialator is about five stories high]. And B) It takes you back to what it was really like instead of the nostalgic idea of what it was like. Say you wanna go back to the ‘80s, instead of ending up at a breakdance competition, you end up in El Salvador getting chased by Reagan’s Contras. It’s a problematic machine that I don’t recommend getting in.
It’s kind of like The Majesticons, it’s half critique half tribute. Part of it is recognising my own obsession with nostalgia – which has more to do with my personal life. I try not to reminisce about periods of time or periods of music. I’m always trying to make music that you haven’t heard before. I don’t know if I always succeed. I respect Lenny Kravitz and shit but I’m not going to buy a Lenny Kravitz record because I have all the records he’s ripping off. It definitely works for him and people like that but I, personally, just can’t do that and don’t get into buying stuff that’s already been made; if I’ve got the original I’ll listen to that. That said there’s a couple of Lenny Kravitz songs I’d give it up to. And that said, any good music is made from a series of influences. So, on this record I did kinda look back to what I was into in the late-eighties/early-nineties. That was like Fugazi, Bad Brains, Divine Styler, Jungle Brothers even Dinosaur Jr, Pavement, I was a big Pavement fan.
Yeah. In fact, Pavement probably influenced me more on my first record in ’97 when Wowee Zowee had just come out. So, I sorta let myself get influenced by that again.
I don’t know. To me it’s a lot of the same stuff my friends listen to. Even though those cats do hip-hop. I mean, it depends on the cats. If you talked to people I hang out with like Anti Pop Consortium, or even El-P they’d have some of those influences. El-P’s a little younger so there’s a difference, but just as eclectic.
Do you think a lot of hip-hop lost its imagination?
I dunno. To me hip-hop is such a huge phenomena that there’s some parts that are ridiculously imaginative and other parts that aren’t. But there’s hip-hop that’s interested in trying new things and then there’s hip-hop that’s there to make money. There’s hip hop that feels like all it should do is break barriers and surprise people with how different it is and there’s hip-hop that has a message. People have different approaches. Talib Kweli, for example, he needs to go to pop-rock because he knows he’s got something really important to say but he wants to say it to everybody so he’s like, ‘okay, in order to do that, there’s certain real mainstream stuff I gotta do.’ And he’s been really, really smart about that.
Do you think the message can be lost if you take that approach? It might be lost on the audience that picks up on it?
It’s a double-edged sword. It’s real tricky. My personal problem doing that myself would be, clearly my message is gonna be sandwiched between a Coke commercial and a McDonald’s commercial and, yes, it definitely dilutes the message. At the same time, Talib Kweli, because of his efforts it will get out to way more people than will ever even know who I am. So it depends on what sort of concessions you’re willing to make. My main issue ended up not being that because I think I eventually became selfish. At the same time, the main reason I haven’t gone pop is because I can’t do that shit. Seriously. I can’t wear the gear. For me it would be a little bit of lying to myself and lying about who I am. I’m a kid who grew up in an academic neighbourhood in Boston; my mum’s a professor. I kinda grew up in the ghetto with my Aunt but basically I’m a middle class kid and that’s not very marketable in the pop ghetto world. They don’t wanna be: [loud announcer’s voice] ‘son of academic, kinda bourgeois, kinda ghetto Mike Ladd comes out with a new hit… And he’s 33!’ None of those are high market value qualities. And I can’t front. Some people can put on a persona, you know, Damon Dash went to prep school but he’s developed a whole style that avoids that topic. Puffy is a middle class kid but he’s found it necessary to play against that. I can’t lie.
That’s a good question. You’ve just touched on two things. Everyone in America says they’re middle class, whether they’re a lack of a paycheck away from welfare or whether they’re a fucking millionaire. No one wants to be the richest guy and no one wants to be considered poor which is this wild American phenomenon, everybody’s like ‘I’m middle class.’
I can imagine that. This would probably be one of the links between Australia and America. It probably has something to do with the post-colonial system… I dunno. But, the other thing is, at the same time, there’s this whole ‘pull yourself up from the bootstraps’ thing and in the entertainment industry – especially on a pop level – it’s considered to be really crucial. Even with Britney Spears there has to be this Cinderella story.
…It makes people feel comfortable in some way. Once you get to that huge elevated status, people really need to know that person came from a regular place. And so the worse that ‘regular’ place is, it kinda makes them feel better in some way. I haven’t quite figured it out yet honestly, except with something like hip-hop it’s really important because – even though there’s been a vast number of kids from suburbs – there’s still that idea that you had to come from the hard life or the crazy life. Even I’ve found myself highlighting the points in my life that were hard. When I was nine, ten or eleven, I did live in the ghetto with my Aunt so that comes out more.
I taught at a community college in Brooklyn most of the time, most of the kids and adults didn’t really have time to dig up my stuff. Most of them were into whatever was top 40, Missy and Puffy and we’d talk about stuff like that and we didn’t usually talk about the fact I was doing what I was doing unless it fit in with what I was teaching. Every class either one or two people had heard of me, maybe ‘cause they’d go to the same open mic night in Manhattan or Brooklyn, or I’d play my stuff and they’d say, ‘I like that stuff, it’s bugged out.’ For most people it’s too weird. I don’t think it’s weird. People just have very different sensibilities.
Why do you think people think it’s weird?
I dunno. For me it’s pop music. For me it’s indie-pop, but it’s still pop, you know?
Certainly in this day and age it gets tougher and tougher because my aesthetic is more like Bad Brains, even the hip-hop I listen to has a dirty sound. And that sort of thing just does not fly in pop, strictly because you can’t play it next to a N.E.R.D production. That stuff has a certain sound that has every plug-in in the world running and it just has this four-dimensional sound that you can’t play a classic Jimi Hendrix record next to that. But this is the sound I like.
There’s a track on the album Off To Mars, which says something along the lines of people like George Bush etc can go off to Mars, like they seem to intend on doing, and we’ll all be better off here. I s that right?
Yeah. If there’s a chosen people, I don’t wanna hang out with them. People in the song, it’s people like George Bush who are planning on going to Mars, I’ll stay here. They can have it!
It struck me as the opposite of what Sun Ra would say?
Well Sun Ra really believed he was from Saturn. I have questions about myself, I think I’m pretty much an Earthling. Sun Ra, that was an honourable thing, he was like, ‘Defend Mars,’ you know what I mean. He was like, ‘They’re coming, we gotta get ‘em before they come over here.’ That’s a different perspective.
Yeah, much more for personal reasons.
That made it easier but it was for romantic reasons.
It depends. When I do go home I’m like ‘My god, this is a country at war and it has that feeling of what I imagine the U.S. was like during Vietnam. Everything is exactly as it was but then you see these little hints like you see people in uniform. You wonder who is a veteran, who isn’t. I remember – I lived in The Bronx for a long time – and I was out… I dunno what I was doing. It was late at night and some dudes were looking for weed and I struck up a conversation with one cat, me and the guy who was selling the weed and the guy who was buying the weed and me and the guy that was buying the weed ended up walking together and he had just got back from Afghanistan. And you’d never be able to tell, you know. But we just had this wild conversation about how bugged he was to be back – he’d just been back for two weeks and all he did was smoke up. I mean that’s the thing about the atrocities: usually incredibly normal people from incredible situations are put through these horribly abnormal situations… For the most part, at least, until you deal with Special Ops people [laughs].
As an artist do you feel like it’s easier to get by in Europe?
I’d say it’s a lot harder to create over here. You know, there’s a lot of inspiration I get from New York so I go back a lot and people I know there are doing stuff that I’m really into but it’s easier to live over here; living in New York is really hard man. You wake up and you know you’ve gotta bust your arse that day. Here the pace is slower; there’s actually a social system so, if I did decide to stay here I could get things that, in the U.S. just sound like a fantasy. I mean, free health care, what the fuck is that? In that regard it’s easier, in terms of creativity it’s not. It’s strange because it’s not my culture – necessarily – although Western culture is becoming more and more homogenous – but there aren’t the same things that spark me. But I do like the life that I’m living and my personal situation is fucking fantastic so, for the moment I’m pretty happy.