#professortoon

Professor Toon is one half of the Durham rap duo Toon & The Real Laww. He confessed that he’d been cursed with an abnormally thick tongue, which he said limits his functional vocabulary but lends his flow something of a Sylvester the cat quality. Toon and The Real Laww will be opening for De La Soul at Hopscotch in Raleigh this September. We talked to him after filming his City Session freestyle in the store. Quarters were cramped, we did our best.

Glass Reflex: This has got to be your first time being interviewed by someone underneath a table.

Professor Toon: I got interviewed to be a troll once. It wasn’t under a table though, it was under a bridge. Similar, though.

GR: “Area Troll Breaks into Durham Rap Scene.”

PT: “Area Troll Opens For De La Soul.”

GR: In all seriousness, how long have you been doing rap music?

PT: Okay, this is a two-sided question. How long have I been pursuing rap? Four years. But how long have I been a professional rapper? Probably since late 2011, because that was when Saleem [Saleem Reshamwala is a Durham, NC-based filmmaker, better known by his filmmaking moniker Kid Ethnic]. kicked off everything.

GR: Did you already have a song?

PT: I did, and he saw me perform at a benefit show. I was trying to break into the Durham scene. Even though I’ve been here a while, I didn’t have any contacts or anything. So he saw me and hit me up on ReverbNation, and he told me he was fresh off the boat from filming with National Geographic, and he wanted to film my music video with his friend. So we shot it one day and we had the video two days later.

GR: So after that, you got some shows?

PT: Yeah, some area publication posted the video and people were like, well, do you do shows? Do you perform? And I was like yes, I do. All the time. I didn’t yet, but I wanted to let people know I was available, all the time. Opening gigs started to come.

GR: For sure. With all those shows, you were getting booked as a duo with Laww?

PT: Yeah, Laww was gone for the first four months. But he came back the weekend that Saleem shot the video. And he had to leave and go back to Cali shortly after. He came home from deployment [with the Marines], but he had to go back to base or wherever. By the time he came back, we had shows booked up and stuff. It was cool.

GR: Your relationship has also resulted in the DURM Hip-Hop Summit. Can you talk about how that happened?

PT: Funny story — Laww was like, let’s throw a hip-hop festival. I was like, we don’t have any money. And he said, well, we’ll get the money. I was kind of the pessimist, and he was the optimist, and it turns out he was right. It’s still a hip-hop festival so it doesn’t make a shit-ton of money, but it’s a labor of love.

GR: Does that dynamic you just described between you and Laww carry over into your performance and writing?

PT: In interviews, he’s the straight face, I’m the comic relief. On stage, it’s completely the other way around. I just sort of zone out. It’s the only place I can be serious.

GR: You told us while we were filming about your theatre background. We had Defacto Thezpian in here last week, and we asked him this same question: What sort of impact has that experience had on your work?

PT: Yeah, man, my teacher, Mr. Green, he was one of the first people who told me I had a knack for feeling out a crowd or whatever. I ran with that. I I just kind of fell in love with performing, but I hate learning lines.But it’s just one of those things where you remember shit like, never turn your back to the crowd. I cross the fourth wall all the time. I don’t remember none of the technical stuff, though. I’ve been in a few plays, so I know what works on stage and what doesn’t.

GR: So what do y’all have on tap for this year’s summit? How has it grown?

PT: The difference this year is growth as far as running a festival of that size. At first, the hip-hop summit was just a concert with a butt-ton of people on it. The second year was a learning experience with scheduling and organizing and making things don’t overlap. This year, we’re just taking over a corner of Durham. We got some input last year that no one was keyed into the fact that we had free transportation to each venue every 15 minutes. So we have to do a better job of making it easier for people to see everything they want to see.

GR: Another thing we wanted to talk about was how your child — Tiny Toon — has influenced your ability to organize and schedule these things. Even filming this video, we had to change our plans, but obviously it worked out.

PT: Scheduling with a child is super difficult. Doing shows is pretty easy as long as Mom is cool with handling stuff, but rap is my second job for me beside my day job. I can watch Tiny Toon until the show’s over and people are prepared to hand me a sleeping baby at 2 a.m.

GR: Do you have unlikely influences?

PT: Poops.

GR: Poops?

PT: Poops. Dead serious. Check my Instagram. Hanging out on the pooper is like a spiritual moment for me. I wrote “Be Famous,” the chorus, on the toilet. How I got that from taking a poop? Not sure. But girls love to sing along to that one.

GR: So you’re just a “well-Tooned” machine

PT: I take my rhyme book into the bathroom all the time, because I never know when something’s gonna hit me. But other unlikely influences? Baby shows. DJ Lance Rock is a beast. I have a kid, so I see a lot of that. I’ve taken like little things from his beats, his little bloop-bloop-bloops, and turned them into trap beats.

GR: What do you see in your future then, in terms of longer term goals and more immediate projects?