Hip Hop Journalist Jeff Chang Interview: Part II

Why did you guys decided to form [legendary indie hip hop label] SoleSides?
Well, it was the kind of thing where these cats had all come to Davis as aspiring hip hop artists. Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab were high school homies who had formed Blackalicious two or three years before. Lyrics Born had been rapping in Berkeley and DJ Shadow was making mixtapes. But everybody was being kind of competitive with each other. And my attitude was like, get over yourselves. Why don't we all kind of link-up and pull our resources and just do this. I went off the graduate school in 1992 and I'd really been pushing this in the Spring before I left. So by the end of 1992 it was going. We started actually recording at the Automator's crib in San Francisco in the late Summer or early Fall. The first record was ready to go at the Gavin [college radio] Convention in San Francisco in February 1993. So that was the debut, the public debut of SoleSides.

To what extent were you guys conscious of some of the more successful indie labels that came out of the punk and post-punk movement, like SST in the United States, Rough Trade, which was very political, in the UK and maybe even Factory Records in the UK? Did you use those as models?
Well, we had all seen the Bay Area movement. We had all seen Too Short's cassettes and all these other cats who were and doing stuff by themselves, selling them in stores and developing their audiences. E-40 and the click were getting started at that time. And Hammer, and all these folks -- Paris, and Digital Underground -- all produced their first records independently before they blew up and got picked-up by majors. There was never this idea amongst Bay Area heads that you had to make a demo and shop it around. We weren't in LA or New York, so you couldn't just take a demo downtown and meet with some guy on the 25th floor and play your demo and have him be like nodding his head as saying "yeah, that’s dope." Instead, you built your audience.

But I was also a big indie rock fan. I was a big fan of Dischord Records and SST and Husker Du, Black Flag and the Minutemen. And Twin Tone Records, Touch 'n' Go Records in Chicago, and all these independent labels out there doing their thing. These were all big models for me. It was like -- what if hip hop had an independent infrastructure that looked like that, you know? And in a lot of ways it was really romanticized. We didn't know as much as we do now about the down side and some of the pit falls, like some these labels didn't, in fact, always pay their royalties on time. But, we had a romantic notion about it and we looked at what was happening in hip hop at the time along with the model of these independent labels. As for the UK labels – not so much, just because we didn't really know that much about them.

Bostonist used to read Nelson George's column in the Village Voice religiously back in the early 1990's. I was wondering to what extent pioneers of hip hop journalism like Nelson George and Harry Allen influenced you as when you were starting out?

Are you kidding? Man, I could go on for days about these guys, and women as well. I'd say Greg Tate, Nelson George, Harry Allen, Joan Morgan, Dream Hampton. You can tell by how quickly I'm rattling them off how big of an influence they have been on me. James Bernard, Reginald Dennis. Shoot, all these people that I used to read religiously made it seem possible for folks to actually talk about what was affecting them in a real direct way. Each of them was a pioneer in their own way in terms of expanding the discourse. It wasn't simply about writing "this is a great record, go out and listen to it." You know what I mean? Even as a teenager I was a huge fan of music criticism. I used to read Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus. And Ben Fong-Torres. Shoot, Ben Fong-Torres at Rolling Stone was a huge influence. I mean, just his byline was earth shattering to me as a teenager. I was like . . . "is this guy Chinese and Mexican? Music critics are supposed to be white." I was like "I'm going to read this guy every time I see his stuff just because his name looks like someone in my family."

On your website you mention in an interview that, in addition to the cannon of hip hop journalism and scholarship, you were also influenced by books like Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Don DeLillo's Underworld, and Robert Caro's The Power Broker. These are some of Bostonist's all-time favorite books, by the way. But that demonstrates that you bring a different and vital perspective to the research.

Well, I don't know if it's different. I mean, these are your favorite books as well, you know what I mean? But I guess what I was trying to do was to take a little bit from all of these folks and put it together in a different way. There are a lot of people out there doing fantastic writing and research that bridges culture and politics and gives you a completely new way of understanding the world when you close the book. These are the folks that influenced me. Also Trisha Rose's Black Noise and George Lipsitz' Dangerous Crossroads. These are the folks who, when you close the book, open the door and walk outside, its just a different world.

Bostonist certainly had that experience when we finished Can't Stop, Won't Stop

Listen to the entire interview here.

Post contributed by Matt Durutti

Enter our contest for a copy of Can't Stop, Won't Stop, which ends this Friday, March 10 at noon.