| Doling Out The Dope: The Jump-Off Brings Alt-Rap To The KC Masses Posted 06.01.06 @ 10:18 PM | Permalink | Email Article Link
 Hey, yo kids! (What's up!)Remember when I used to be dope? (Yeah...) The mid-May air is damp and sticky - the sort of oppressive humidity familiar to anyone who has spent time in Kansas City. It's an evening ripe for rolling down the car windows and turning up the stereo so loud that the people driving past take pause to hear more clearly the sound bellowing from the ride next to them. And tonight it’s a sound that is a rarity on radio airwaves: De La Soul and Teenage Fanclub's "Fallin," a track from the 1993 film Judgment Night, and one of the most perfectly constructed alternative rap songs ever produced. [Click to listen.] The lazy lyricism coupled with such a soothing, sampled loop makes war seem irrelevant and hatred an impossibility...as long as the song just keeps on playing. This soundtrack is courtesy of “The Jump-Off,” a Sunday-night, hour-long radio show that features alternative and underground rap, old-school rap and most everything else rap-related that no longer (or, maybe more accurately, never) graces the ears of commercial radio listeners. Even more notable is the fact that “The Jump-Off” is broadcast on KRBZ, 96.5/The Buzz, a corporate-owned, alternative rock radio station broadcasting from deep within a Kansas City still divided by racial and cultural differences. But let's get back to De La Soul...after a short history lesson. I owned a pocketful of fame... (But look what you're doin' now!) I know, well I know Genrefication: [noun] The process whereby an art form begins to subdivide into itself.  I lost touch with reality, now my personalityIs an unwanted commodity (believe it!) The guys that run “The Jump-Off” are young and fully dedicated to the rap artists they love. They're also white suburbanites. One's an MC and one's a DJ (although not the type normally associated with hip-hop culture). Slimfast (he’s the DJ) is known to most of KC as the right-hand man, whipping boy and producer to Lazlo, the Buzz's highly rated afternoon personality. Slim's been pitching “The Jump-Off” to the Buzz for a few years and is the driving force behind the show. "There's a gap between me and the people I had to sell this idea to," Slimfast says. "I tried to explain underground rap to my bosses but they just couldn't understand because they couldn't separate rap from what they heard being sold as rap on pop radio. There were a couple of things that saved me: 1 - Epitaph Records started signing hip-hop artists. That legitimized hip-hop as alternative music, as punk rock. For me, there is nothing more motivational than rap and it's that same kind of motivation that punk rock gives you. 2 - I finally got Lazlo to go see Mac Lethal live and he finally saw for himself the motivational aspect of the music. Lazlo was receptive to Mac's humor and thought he was cool. I asked Lazlo if I could get Mac on board, would he give us a show? 'E-mail and see what he says,' Lazlo tells me. Mac was down and Lazlo gave us the slot." Mac Lethal (he’s the rapper) puts out music on the Rhymesayers record label, owns a record label of his own, Black Clover, and helps outfit “The Jump-Off” with fresh and sometimes obscure tracks as well as providing artistic and industry connections. Both men share a love for the music and a similar philosophy for producing the show. "We never have anything planned," laughs Mac Lethal, finishing up a cigarette a few minutes before show time. And the freestyle philosophy works. The two banter back and forth about which songs to play and give each other plenty of shit for playing tracks the other doesn't like. Slimfast says that, "choosing [songs] is difficult because what's mainstream to us might be underground to a lot of people. On the radio, I have to remember that 90% of those listening don't know who Atmosphere is and we only have an hour-long show so we're torn between playing artists enough times to get them some name recognition but still trying to keep fresh songs in rotation." [Click to listen.] The show works off requests and intuition. Slim works the boards and Mac mans the phones. "We just got a request for Eazy E," Mac says to Slim. "That's why we shouldn't announce that we play old school hip hop." "We don't play enough old school," Slim answers, but understands Mac’s point. Such calls don't surprise the two. Given the homogenization of contemporary commercial rap, contrasted with how genrefied rap music is as a whole, the difficulty in choosing what songs and artists meet the criteria for “The Jump-Off” should surprise no one. Can't believe I used to be Mr. Steve Austin on the mic Six million ways I used to run it For a few brief years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was easy to turn on BET’s Rap City and catch a Spoonie Gee video followed by a Too $hort video followed by a Big Daddy Kane video followed by a Three Times Dope video. Viewers would be treated to plenty of differences in sounds, style and approach utilized by each rapper. Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy were still relevant. Ice T was still making questionably listenable albums. Oddly, acts like Arrested Development, P.M. Dawn and Me Phi Me got radio play. Vanilla Ice managed to embarrass all rappers and set back other legitimate white artists like 3rd Bass and Young Black Teenagers. 2Pac had yet to become a martyr for an industry blinded by its own braggadocio. Those years were a very interesting time in rap’s history, simply because the market hadn’t yet figured out what to do with the art, though they knew it sold like crazy. The market eventually caught up and the face of rap that is presented to the public today is much worse for the wear. “I don't want to say that all mainstream rap is bad,” Slimfast says when asked about the state of the industry, “I think there are plenty who are cool, as long as they don't take themselves too seriously. I would have quit listening to rap altogether if I hadn’t spent some time in Germany. I met rap stars over there who were incredibly popular, making music that would be considered underground rap here. These guys idolized Guru and Ugly Duckling at a time when DMX and Nelly were getting radio play over here. So when I got back from Germany, I went on a hunt looking for more alternative rap but couldn't find anything.” [Click to listen.]  Alt-rap has been taking shape for some time. Those early Native Tongue albums created a blueprint for rap fans and artists who were looking to push the form sonically and lyrically. The Beastie Boys brought the indie (read “white”) kids into the fold with Check Your Head. And as those indie kids discovered old albums by the Pharcyde, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, and Tribe, they thought to themselves “This music is bitchin’,” and began to make their own albums. Yet none of the music made by any alt-rappers got much play. Sure, the alternative presses paid plenty of lip service to the albums and artists involved in the scene and, every once in a while, an artist like The Roots or The Streets broke through to the mainstream as did the inevitable anomalies in pop rap music, like OutKast. But commercial radio still hesitates to touch the likes of Doctor Octagon, Cannibal Ox, Beans, Blackalicious and a host of other artists rapping their asses off, but in a manner very different then what you might be used to hearing bump out of the local, urban-demographic, radio station. [Click to listen.] So, perhaps appropriately, it’s fallen on the shoulders of an alternative-rock radio station to pick up the slack.Tonight, Slim tries to prod Mac into starting beef with another rapper. "There's a real lack of MC beef in alternative hip-hop," Slim explains. "You should start shit with Sage Francis." "But I like Sage," Mac counters. "It doesn't have to be real. What about Blackalicious?" "I'm not starting beef with Blackalicious." "Joe Good?" "He's on my record label!" "Even better - hometown drama." The two laugh and the song ends. Slim brings his beef idea to the listening audience, suggesting that Mac beef with KJ-52, a rapper known only to the two as white and Christian and that he had some problems with Eminem. Mac plays along throughout the show, somehow fitting a diss of KJ-52 into every bit of his and Slim's on-air time. The audience is responsive to the music and the two guys who bring the sounds to them. Nearly every track has a caller ringing during or after, asking about the song, the artist or the program itself. "I told Mac that people are going to freak the fuck out that we're playing rap after two hours of 'Homegrown Buzz,'" Slim says about the first few weeks. "To a lot of our listeners there was no difference between what we're playing and Nelly or Chingy. That first week, we played Blackalicious' 'Deception' and immediately started getting calls about it. For the next month and half people were calling to request that song. People started calling our mid-day guy requesting that song. Within three weeks, word had started to spread, people knew that on Sunday nights we were on and those that didn't want to listen tuned out. But a lot of people who never listen to the Buzz are tuning in. The surprising thing is that our long-time listeners are begging me for more alt-rap." Unfortunately, not every call is amicably inquisitive or supportive. Over the deep beats that fill the studio, Mac plaintively answers another call and can be overheard explaining what the show is and how long they've been on the air. He hangs up the phone, hangs his head then looks toward Slim. "Stop playing that 'nigger shit'." "What?" Slim isn't sure he hears right and turns down the in-studio sounds. "That guy just called to tell us to 'stop playing that nigger shit'." The show goes on. "We get a few calls like that every now and then," Mac apologizes. Slimfast is quick to add, "But those people aren't Buzz listeners, you know. Those are people scanning their radio and expecting us to play a certain style of music and not hearing it. Regular Buzz listeners are cool with what we're doing and either they listen or they don't." Yet in a town like KC this type of call is about as surprising as the evening's sticky atmosphere. The rap scene in Kansas City is as divided as the population. The hardcore, Bay-Area influenced sound is what’s being played on commercial rap radio and sold out of trunks at the gas stations on State Avenue and 32nd Street. And that’s not the type of music being played on “The Jump-Off” or to which the rap audience down at the Peanut’s weekly rappening, Hip-Hop and Hot Wings, is listening. "We wouldn't get those calls if we were in another city," says Slim. Quite frankly, that's all the more reason Kansas City needs “The Jump-Off.” If Slim and Mac are able to help bridge that divide through promoting rap music, we could see develop a definite, Kansas City rap scene . Maybe then more local artists would get air-time on “The Jump-Off.” And maybe the various rap camps will be able to again share that precious air-time. When Slim drops in a Mac Lethal track, Mac flips him off. Mac doesn't like answering the phones when people call in to ask who they're playing. "What am I supposed to say?" he asks, obviously somewhat irked. Eventually, he sucks it up and offers the information in the third person, as though he isn't the artist the caller is interested in. Slimfast just keeps the music flowing and the heads bobbing. When asked about locals besides Mac or Joe Good, Slim doesn't miss a beat. "I'm stealing this from Lazlo - you don't get a free pass to be on the radio just because you're local,” Slim says. “Don't sit around and complain if you're not that good. We're not gonna lower our standards to play something just because you're local. It's gotta be dope beats, dope rhymes, dope cuts. In order for us to play it, it needs to be either influential to the history of rap or have some type of cleverness or originality. But rap is also about beats, about the music. A lot of producers out there are every bit as important as the MCs working. I don't care how talented a MC you are, if you don't have the music, I've no time for you."  I guess Oscar Goldman got madCos I got loose circuits (so loose, sigga-sigga so loose...) Kansas City is no longer the only city listening to “The Jump-Off.” Since the Buzz began offering streaming audio, any listener with a computer and high-speed internet can tune in no matter where they are. Since Mac Lethal has many connections in the alternative rap scene, many of those remote listeners are the very artists that the show promotes. Slim recalls when he became aware of the show’s reach. "I said on the air one day that Sage Francis is a gateway drug for someone who doesn't know much about rap,” Slim explains. “They listen to him and immediately want to hear more and find out about artists like him. Then Mac looked over at me and said, 'Sage liked what you said.'" Sage had been listening on-line and text-messaged Mac his thanks. Tonight, Slim and Mac call up Joey Beats, a Rhode Island artist, to ask about the intro to the show he's supposed to be working on (and to mention Mac's new beef with KJ-52). [Click to listen.] Off-air, the two pass around the idea of having more guest calls in the future. I be the Mother Goose with the eggs That seem to be...Fallin'... When asked about the future of the show, Slim is cautious. --Jason Preu (email) |
