All Over the Map
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Rhonda Baraka
Lyrics Born steps aside from his lonely sampling ways to be Everywhere at Once with a gang of musicians and influences running the gamut from Timbaland to The B-52’s
Novelty has nothing to do with it. Even if being an Asian rapper didn't make him an anomaly in an industry dominated by young African-American men, Lyrics Born would still be in a league of his own. The 35-year-old MC/producer, who is half-Japanese, half-Italian/American, stands out not so much for his ethnicity but for his knack for creating music that defies contemporary trends.
With a nod to old-school R&B and hip-hop, Lyrics Born's music has been lauded as a departure from the chart-toppers of today. While — not unlike his peers — Lyrics Born seasons his rhymes with a few witticisms about his skills and a tale or two about the ladies, he seems to make a special effort to bypass most of hip-hop's tried-and-true trends, a tactic that has garnered him critical acclaim and elevated him from an underground niche rapper to an international contender.
His new album, Everywhere at Once (Anti, 2008), is a ballsy blend of genres, including hip-hop, pop, rock, R&B, reggaeton and funk. From one song to the next, Lyrics Born digs into a different bag of tricks and comes out with something that is unlike anything else in popular music today. The riskiness of such an undertaking is not lost on Lyrics Born, but it is somewhat consistent with the artist and the man he's been from the start.
IT ALL STARTED WHEN…
Born Tom Shimura in Tokyo, Japan, Lyrics Born (formerly known as Asia Born) has been a child of hip-hop since its early days. Growing up first in Salt Lake City and later in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lyrics Born says he was about 5 years old when he began to indulge his interest in music. “I knew from a very early age that I definitely wanted to be some kind of entertainer,” he says, “but it wasn't until I was a few years older that I realized that [a rapper] was the type of performer I wanted to be. When I first heard Sugar Hill Gang, I was like, ‘Oh, you mean I don't have to take guitar lessons; I don't have to take piano lessons; I don't have to take singing lessons? This is for me.’ It was really that simple.”
It was that mentality that has raised the ire of hip-hop critics who view the art form as a shortcut to the music industry and a poor substitute for traditional music skills. But Lyrics Born scoffs at such criticism. “I think just because it's self-taught, that doesn't invalidate it,” he offers. “In the '20s and '30s, they weren't teaching jazz in school, and I don't hear people saying that about jazz musicians anymore.” But he hastens to add, “Of course, I'm not dissing music. I'm the first person to tell you that I wish I could read and write music, but it doesn't take the place of me knowing how to rap.”
As a child, Lyrics Born didn't have to look far to find support for his creative endeavors. His father was a novelist, his aunt was a singer and his mother had what he calls “an artistic flair.” Translation: Pursuing a career in the arts was not frowned upon in the least. “My father was probably my biggest influence,” he says, “because I could see what it took — sometimes staying up all night to get things done. When a lot of my friends' parents were getting up, going to work at 6 a.m., he was just going to bed.”
Just as Lyrics Born's creative pursuits were encouraged at home, he also found a nurturing environment outside his front door. Growing up in Berkeley, he says he was surrounded by a “wealth of revolutionary ideas” and a “wealth of musical talent that has always gone against the grain.” “I just think it's kind of in our blood,” he says. “People from the Bay Area are very independent and the area is very diverse, so it's not really that unusual for a Japanese rapper to come out of the Bay Area.” He stresses that because there was essentially no music industry in his backyard, many artists started their own record labels. “That gave Bay Area artists a certain kind of hustle,” he notes.
When Lyrics Born migrated to Davis, Calif. — a city located about 15 miles west of Sacramento — to attend the University of California-Davis, he hooked up with a like-minded ensemble of hip-hop heads (DJ Shadow, Lateef the Truthspeaker, and Blackalicious members Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel) to form SoleSides Records and Quannum Projects. “We came up together doing this,” he recalls. “We listened to the records that other artists were making, and we tried to outdo each other and outdo everybody else. That's how we raised ourselves, and that still carries over to this day.”
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