#wave generators

2. Where do you write? Do you have a routine time you write? Do you discipline yourself, or just let the words come when they will? Do you typically write on a daily basis?

I definitely do not write every day. I make beats every day though. That feels like the most important area to apply discipline, for me. It seems like no project I take on can really take shape until I have my dream beats, or at least some rough sketches of my dream beats, and getting those dream beats made just takes so much time. No matter what, there’s always a lot of trial and error, and a lot of weeding out material that ends up being in the “close, but no cigar” category. On the other hand, the rhymes tend to feel like they just fall into place once the beats are there.

3. What’s your medium—pen and paper, laptop, on your phone? Or do you compose a verse in your head and keep it there until it’s time to record?

Notebooks are my personal preference, but keeping the contents of these notebooks organized gets hectic. My wife and I have a million notebooks lying around the house, and it’s a pain in the ass to go digging through these pages trying to find these random lines. One thing I like about writing on the laptop is that you can think, "What was that rhyme I had about grapes?" and just type "grapes" into the search bar, and it’s all there, without fumbling around.

4. Do you write in bars, or is it more disorganized than that?

The first thing that usually jumps out at me is a rhythm and a cadence, rather than the actual words. I would say maybe half the people I work with are like that. We get an idea of how the entire verse should sound before we know what we’re going to say. I think an easy example of this is how the Beatles were saying "scrambled eggs" before they settled on "yesterday." 

5. How long into writing a verse or a song do you know it’s not working out the way you had in mind? Do you trash the material forever, or do you keep the discarded material to be reworked later?

Almost every idea starts as another idea, and it never goes exactly the way I had in mind when I started. If I end up with something underwhelming, I try to ask myself why. Maybe the rhymes just don’t really come alive on the beat I’m using, and I need to switch the beat up. Maybe the rhymes are nothing special, but there’s one potent line that becomes the first line of a new rhyme. If I find myself doing something that falls flat, I try not to panic or throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s usually a reason I was compelled to write these words or chop up these samples, and if they’re not coming together the way I hoped, I just need to rethink it and try again.

6. Have you engaged with any other type of writing, whether presently or in the past? Fiction? Poetry? Playwriting? If so, how has that mode influenced your songwriting?

I’ve kept tour journals over the years, and I’m always playing around with the idea of editing them into a book of some kind. I think I’m pretty good at putting it all together, but I get stuck on “What would make someone actually pick this up and read this?” I feel like I need an angle to tie it together if I was to actually try and release any of this to the public.

I had a screenplay idea I was having fun with as well. That stuff is cool to work on, but knowing what an uphill battle it is to just get music out there (even multiple decades in), taking on the task of getting any other writing out into the world seems insane. I haven’t done any of that other writing enough for it to affect my music one way or the other.

7. How much editing do you do after initially writing a verse/song? Do you labor over verses, working on them over a long period of time, or do you start and finish a piece in a quick burst?

If there’s a specific bar or word that doesn’t sit quite right, I tend to notice it immediately and fix it in my initial burst of writing, rather than let it live and be not right. I think that makes me write slightly slower than other people. Sometimes I just get stuck on bar 11 for quite a while, where other people like to breeze past whatever issue they’re having with a specific bar and deal with it later. I look at the editing process as the time to edit the song, rather than the time to edit the verses. If the actual verses have a bunch of wack shit left in them, it feels pointless to try and work them into a song. 

8. Do you write to a beat, or do you adjust and tweak lyrics to fit a beat?

I would say any set of lyrics I use will end up having been tried over multiple beats, and it usually takes some trial and error to find a combination that actually clicks and means something to me. The only exception would be when I’m invited to guest on someone else’s album and there’s a clear direction like, “Your verse starts right when the drums come in.”

9. What dictates the direction of your lyrics? Are you led by an idea or topic you have in mind beforehand? Is it stream-of-consciousness? Is what you come up with determined by the constraint of the rhymes?

It’s all about feeling. I have a feeling and it comes out in the form of a sound or a rhythm or phrases. I don’t usually sit down and say, “Today, I’m going to write a song about Ancient Greece.” Most of my music just isn’t like that, but when I do tackle straightforward topics or stories, it’s more that the feeling (from the beat, but also just from life) pulls me toward that subject as I go, and I learn what I’m writing about as it’s happening. 

10. Do you like to experiment with different forms and rhyme schemes, or do you keep your bars free and flexible?

I don’t go in with plans like that, so I guess it’s always flexible. I definitely have a few familiar patterns I fall into, whether I mean to or not. I do only simple things, because that’s what I want to hear. I learned a long time ago that I don’t want to be re-inventing the wheel, and reaching for some undiscovered pattern or scheme. The way I see it is that when it comes to the mechanics of rap, the greats gave us all the building blocks that exist (more or less) and now it’s up to us to rearrange them or break them apart, in whatever way feels right. If you try to outgreat the greats, you end up being like the guy at your local Guitar Center trying to shred one millisecond faster than Yngwie Malmsteen. It’s like, "You missed the boat, buddy. We’re all over here now."

11. What’s a verse you’re particularly proud of, one where you met the vision for what you desire to do with your lyrics? This is from “The Joy You’ve Made Will Never Fade.”

This place was a dead mess, till those punks cleared a path they ran wires through the wall, and ran water to the bath and they put up those posters, and they took people in With the thinking that the loser would be later to win But when the shows all ended and the building got sold It was filled with beer bottles, blood stains and black mold and those punks that had the spark, they were back to square one left to pick up those pieces, starting where they’d begun but the spirit they fostered, it reverberates round in every corner of the city, from the northernmost down and it may be cold comfort and the future may sting But a voice gave to the voiceless is an unending thing Now the singer sits broken, and his voice box is blown He gunned it till he saw smoke, now he’s resting those bones And his daytimes are bleak, and his nighttimes are cold but your spirit keeps floating through the river of soul Cause I got your first album, back when I was just a kid Now that I’m grown it means more than back then it did And when I put on that music, I’m fifty feet tall I feel my heartbeat start racing, feel my defenses fall And we drive through that darkness, on a west Texas night Those songs that you sang are my one lantern light

12. Can you pick a favorite bar of yours and describe the genesis of it?

This is from me and Darko The Super’s song called "My Are Bend Back": I can’t stand at a standstill Tom MacDonald CD’s landing all in a landfill When it’s time to rock the damn bill We don’t need Skull Snaps, Rapper Dapper or Mandrill I wrote this verse on a hot summer day, stuck in a traffic jam for hours in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. It felt like the right beat to have on loop in the van, and I was just having fun, playing around with words. I always liked the redundancy of the line, “I shot him with the shotty, then I jetted on the jet,” from Special Ed’s "The Mission." Dipset would do the same thing with the seemingly unnecessary repetition of words. It’s like the opposite of what we’re told good lyricism is supposed to be. 

As for the Tom MacDonald diss, I remember my friend that ran my first label saying CDs are junk now, and they’re all just the future contents of a landfill. Maybe that’s true, but I think that Tom Macdonald CDs might as well be put in a landfill right now, and even his fans sort of agree, on some level. 

The last part is a play on the outro of Ultramagnetic MC’s "Checkin’ My Style," where Kool Keith says, “We don’t need Chic, / We don’t need Sister Sledge.” That part always intrigued me. I only half understand why he said that. Didn’t they kind of need to sample all the groups they sampled, to do what they did? I came to think of it as maybe a message about not being overly deferential to these public domain hip-hop reference points. I guess in that sense, if they don’t need Sister Sledge, we don’t need Skull Snaps either. (But we sort of do? I don’t know.)

13. Do you feel strongly one way or another about punch-ins? Will you whittle a bar down in order to account for breath control, or are you comfortable punching-in so you don’t have to sacrifice any words?

I’m a recovering punch-in fiend. It all began at age 14 when my friend Gregg let me borrow his Dad’s Tascam four-track. I started writing songs by coming up with one line at a time, recording it, rewinding the tape back, writing one more line, arming the other track and recording again. I always liked rappers that would play around with that setup and get crazy with it, so that it sounds like there’s two or three different versions of them hanging out together in the studio. (Example: almost every song on the second ODB album.)

The downside was realizing that you can’t really recreate that at a show. You don’t want to end up like the guy Ghostface was talking about when he said, “Trying to spit his darts and can’t even spit 'em.” I always loved how Boogie Down Productions would take a line that could be a punch-in but then have somebody else say it, and then split the lines up that exact same way when they rock live. (Peep the version of "Jack Of Spades" from Live Hardcore Worldwide, as an example.) I think that’s a cool idea, but I’m trying to do stuff like that less now, in that it just becomes one more thing that whoever’s onstage with you has to think about.

14. What non-hiphop material do you turn to for inspiration? What non-music has influenced your work recently?

I find myself so immersed in rap that I don’t even go out of my way to listen to it as much as I go out of my way to listen to everything else. Here’s a few things I’ve been stuck on recently: Dead Moon, The One Way Street, Linda Smith, La Dusseldorf, Elton Britt, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Ted Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin. Outside of music, I think the biggest thing influencing me (by far) in the last couple years has been living in a new city, after living in one place for 40 years.

15. Writers are often saddled with self-doubt. Do you struggle to like your own shit, or does it all sound dope to you?

I think the general idea is to be loose and wild while you’re jotting ideas down, and then be more critical when you’re in editing mode. I think I’m good at jumping back and forth between those two modes, and if I find myself doubting the material when I’m editing, it just means I should leave it on the cutting room floor and try again. The only debilitating doubt I feel has less to do with my music and more about “How are any of us ever going to make money to live?” Those kinds of questions are a whole separate issue, obviously.

16. Who’s a rapper you listen to with such a distinguishable style that you need to resist the urge to imitate them?

This might be hard to imagine now, but when I was in high school, my rap style was a blatant Ghostface impersonation. I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing at first. There used to be a radio show in Baltimore called The Cypher where you could call in and battle other callers over the phone. I called in once and taped my appearance. When I played the tape back and heard how blatant the GFK influence was, I knew I had a problem. It took a while to strip that influence away and build my own voice up. Some voices are so unique and idiosyncratic that you can’t work in too much of their flavor without sounding like you’re doing a Saturday Night Live impression of them.

17. Do you have an agenda as an artist? Are there overarching concerns you want to communicate to the listener?

I think the agenda is to try and create big feelings and big experiences for people, like the ones I’ve felt as a listener and as a live audience member. I think I’m acting on the same impulse I felt when I was going to shows at age 12. I would listen to albums and go to shows, and want to join in on the fun. I’d imagine it was me up there doing it, and that I’d have my own way of doing it, and that I’d find a way to keep doing it forever. I don’t really think of it as expressing concerns, if only because I probably have the same concerns as everybody else.

RAPS + CRAFTS is a series of questions posed to rappers about their craft and process. It is designed to give respect and credit to their engagement with the art of songwriting. The format is inspired, in part, by Rob McLennan’s 12 or 20 interview series.

But first… Fellow Jerseyan Rose Image! was the opening act and led us on an exploration of uncertainty! NAHreally (who was in the place to be smilin’ and lankily profilin’ as he does) prepped me beforehand about Rose Image! Little did I know Rose Image! was the spirited fellow in pink hat and overalls excusing and squeezing his way between Sko and I at the bar. (Sko was edifying on the history of double albums in hip-hop; there’s been “90, with some asterisks,” according to his calculations.) Rose bedecked his stage table with stuffies beside his laptop, but that was only after he entered the performance space in theatrical fashion, wide-stepping through the crowd, lifting an imaginary helmet from his head as he bounded upon the stage (“Mission Start!”). He proceeded to lead us through his songs—his log entries—and engaged and entertained, showmanship and styles, high-stepping till his hat flew off like the helmet was intended to. There was no half-steppin’ with this young artist. He’s got a lightblue spirit! (And, yes, everything ends in an exclamation point [!!!!] with Rose Image!)

I picked at a Frederick Seidel poem the other morning, and a line in the third stanza read, “Who climbs a ladder through the stars to reach the moon, / And plucks at his laptop and it becomes a lute.” Not lutes nowadays, but loops, yes. Big Flowers debuted a heap of material from their long-anticipated album, Save the Bees, but because the aux port turned unruly, we heard an impromptu rendition with all Height Keech beats backing them instead of the Messiah Musik joints. “That’s what we have community for,” says Michael [Big Flowers]. We were treated to a brief acapella rendition of Debbie Harry’s “Rapture” verse by Nosaj during the tech-diff intermission. Appearing as something of a kerchiefed Willem Dafoe Last Temptation of Christ, anarcho-poppy plucker, scissor freak, Free Palestine leafletter poet, Big Flowers—barefooted and bangled—went otherworldly over a series of beats I can only describe as “Rock Hard” / “Rock the Bells”-era Rick Rubin for a post-ruined amerika where bearded gurus die in miasmic nuclear meltdowns. Flowers was impassioned, the musculature of their neck as defined as their nanomite verses—each word functioning in formlessness. I saw them perform on 9/17/22 at the Kingsland, and this level of ardor is the norm. They said at the start of their set that they weren’t fresh on stage banter, but they shouted-out Geng PTP who’s factored in as mentor and executive producer roles for the forthcoming project. No doubt, everybody will be ready for it.

andrew was next to step up, and heaven ain’t a halfpipe, but hell may well be a grind rail—he was loose-limbed from an earlier skate session (hovering high-pressure system be damned). His set was comprised of tracks from his Height Keech-produced project (dropping in a matter of days), Can I Write A Requiem For You When You’re Dead? Keech—if you’re one to pick up on patterns—was very much the maestro of what was heard on this particular night. andrew stood centerstage, his feet teetering yet toe-steady on the edge, for most of his songs. He shared his honesty-raps full of found material and gallows humor. “I had a dream I got decapitated with a long-bladed knife,” he says early on “soda & chocolate,” but—not to be outdone—hits back with an anecdote about his belt not fitting right: “Maybe it’ll fit later, but either way it fits my throat, / It seems sturdy, and yeah, I like the design, / You gotta look cool—it’s no exception when you die.” Sko rocked with andrew on “purple & gold,” and Height, Darko the Super, and ialive joined the crowded stage for the “based on a drew story” posse cut. Most memorable, by all metrics, was the hook for “PCP,” a track which will include feature-fiends Alaska and Defcee when the album drops. andrew had the room humming along with its initial reprise: “My lower back hurts when I breathe deep, / When I was thirteen, I smoked PCP, / Alcoholic half my life, but now I’m clean…mostly.” I spoke with Sasco and shemar while Wave Generators prepped their performance. Sasco has an album soon coming, and it hosts what seems to be the whole-ass Hit Squad of underground renaissance NY-centric rap heads: Big Flowers, shemar, miles cooke, Nakama., Sunmundi, and even the elusive Hester Valentine, whom I had inquired about.

When Wave Generators—Nosaj and Height Keech—took the stage in their matching mechanic coveralls (raided Steve Albini’s closet, seemingly), the anticipation had built from the groundwork laid by Nature Boy Jim Kelly’s in-between music selections. Nature Boy Jim Kelly (one of Nosaj’s alter egos), bandit bandana’d, let us know how we got here. He was calling all active agents. The way I started to convulse, you’d think he’d released nerve agents. Never mind if you’re familiar with the pair of New Kingdom albums from 19 Naughty III and 19 Naughty VI (Heavy Load and Paradise Don’t Come Cheap, respectively), most heads got familiar through the faith healing of ELUCID who summoned Nosaj’s foulgrowl for the hook on Armand Hammer’s “Leopards” in 2020: “The savage in me I can’t stop, / Y’all made me this way—I’m too far gone to turn back now, / Ain’t a block, nigga, I can’t rock, / Streets raised me this way, / You know the vibe, nigga, I can’t stop.” A chorus of resistance, of refusal, and the ironic use of “savage” not so different from Baldwin saying, I was a savage about whom the least said the better. The re-ignition [word to Bad Brains] of Nosaj begged to say more. So he did, and on the Small Bills project with The Lasso the following year, ELUCID invited Nosaj to lay down another refrain for “Hush Harbor”: “I might be wrong, I might be right, / I’m too far from the shore to turn back, I can’t lie.” Both refrains referred to Nosaj as having come “too far” to “turn back”—he’s always been forward-thinking, a follower of Newton’s First Law of Motion, a momentum mensch. Though the cultural currents often want to push back and wash away—further back than the Gee Street Records catalog; further back than antebellum, than slaves assembling in secret; further back than transatlantic re-routings; way back—back into time! (as The Jimmy Castor Bunch always said)—Nosaj has never been a troglodyte. This all checks out. On After the End, Wave Generators’ debut for steel tipped dove’s Fused Arrow Records, there exists an overriding concern with reestablishing oneself—of re-routing and re-rooting when one feels deracinated, when one feels thrown off-course. Appropriately, where Busta Rhymes might Tear da Roof Off, Wave Generators tear the roots up. Both, though, have eschatological preoccupations—the album title itself (after the end) suggests the end is not even the end, my only friend. There’s more to be said, had, good, bad, armagideon time, [difficult listening 4] armageddon, volume 1 through volume 10 (word to Dino Hawkins).

The lexical meaning of gene- [“to give birth, beget”] and the Greek genea [“generation, race”] let heads know Wave Generators are still going on, strong-going, headstrong. Wherever they set up shop is the stronghold. Similar to artists like Mike Ladd or the Infesticons, Wave Generators welcome us to the afterfuture. They chugged through much of their album, filling the dark stage in a way the previous acts didn’t necessarily seem to, their physical forms formidable. “Where I’m going I can’t call it—I don’t know where it is,” Nosaj says on “I’ve Got My Whole Life Ahead of Me,” sound advice for any 40 or 50-something. “I’m about to bang to the moon, / Alice Coltrane: play it in my motherfuckin’ tomb!” Some real bliss: eternal now shit coming out the speakers. These Wave Generator songs are about illimitable promise, as so many of the titles indicate. “I’m Setting Up in a New City” finds Nosaj shouting post-apocalyptic post-mortem post-rap[ture] rhymes: “Ooh, baby—it’s a wild, wild world, / It’s after the end of this experiment.” Weirdly, perhaps, I began to think about the old call-and-response traditional, “I’m Building Me A Home.” In my mind, there’s a timeless symmetry between it and “I’m Setting Up in a New City”—a shared hope in finding safety and solace within the blast zone. When you hear me moanin’... When you hear me shoutin’... This earthly house is gonna soon decay. “Decay” like Fatboi Sharif and dove, mayhaps, but Nosaj is assuredly shoutin’ and moanin’. Nosaj isn’t alone. He arranges for GG Allin and Cyndi Lauper to share an electrifying embrace seconds later (and on “Reverse the Curse” it’ll be Santana and Coltrane). As with New Kingdom, the ongoing effort—advertentently or not—involves reclaiming rock music for its rightful heirs. On House of Disorder, an earlier offering from Mr. Furlow and dove, Nosaj invoked the Beatles: “John, Paul, Ringo, George-fucking-Harrison, / Niggas on weed, whiteboys on heroin.” He declares his “daddy was a black Mick Jagger” on “Cree Summer,” and seemingly subverts every performance of “Sweet Black Angel” the Rolling Stones have ever done as they sing for Angela Davis in a Dunbar-like dialect and with minstrel mystery. He’s not taking crowd requests, but on “Freebird” from his collaboration with V8 TFD (Acid is Groovy, Kill the Pigz), he sings, “I’m leeeeaving on a Jefferson Airplane, / My mind moving slow, Lord know when I’m back again.” Consequently, John Denver’s single-engine aircraft crashes into Monterey Bay and makes waves.

We are living in the age of—not the aged rapper—but of the venerable MC. Still, that’s no reason not to tap into teenage angsty disregard for parental hand-wringing. Waste not, want not your youthful verve: “My mom say I’m incompetent, / Last night I lost my confidence, / Told her I didn’t give a fuck, now I wish I fucking did.” Nosaj is kinetic—if MC is mover of crowds, then he’s ever-moving them through his own body movements: his arms spastic, his head and jaw shaking. You can hear it in his delivery, in his words. Height Keech, meanwhile, sounds reminiscent of MCA in his timbre—deliberate, clarified, keen-eyed. The formula of fuzzed-out riffs and raw-as-ruckus drums is especially pleasing in this age of meandering, percussion-light loops. Witness headbanging and just-freed-oneself-from-this-damn-straitjacket pop and lock maneuvers. Keech holds his own on the microphone, too. On “True North” (we’re still navigating, y’see), he’s got the Son of Sam and Kurtis Blow in his alley of allusions, and he’s armed with optimism as well: “We can’t let these hard times follow us and barrel down our parlor door.” Turning back. Pushing ahead. Coming and going. Followed and ditched. Running to and fro. Back and forth. Wave Generators utilize chaos to “Reverse the Curse.” With confidence: We’ll run these fascist pigs right out of toooowwwwwnn. Baby, those ain’t fireworks—them there live rounds, baby. What I saw on-stage during the Wave Generators’ performance matched a description I read in John Gardner’s The Resurrection (1966) the following morning, so I’ll leave you with that: “Then there exploded a terrible holocaust of chords and runs, each note precise, overpowering, irremissible—not music but a monstrous retribution of sound, the mindless roar of things in motion, on the meddlesome mind of man.”