Velociraptors of Rap

Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson

The corner store at 5th and Folsom in San Francisco is one of the sketchiest in the city. Beers are sold in singles instead of six packs, and the most popular items aside from malt-liquor 40s appear to be Swanson's Hungry Man dinners — a whole refrigerated section is devoted to them. None of the Jurassic 5-ers really drink, so gearing up for the three-hour photo shoot across the street was like a scavenger hunt to find healthy things such as water and juice in this down-and-out part of town.

The L.A.-based hip-hop crew's six members (whose cell phones were blowin' up in the photo studio) are far from down on their luck. Less than 10 years ago, the group made a Brady Bunch — style merge of two collectives: Rebels of Rhythm and Unity Committee. Since then, the group dropped its Jurassic 5 EP (Rumble/Pickininny, 1997) and a full-length album, Quality Control (Interscope, 2000), and began playing huge festival shows such as the Warped Tour, Smokin' Grooves and Coachella.

Although two of the members, Chali 2na and Cut Chemist, juggle schedules with their other band (the 11-member Latin hip-hop/rock outfit Ozomatli), and everyone finds time to do solo projects, J5 haven't remotely fallen by the wayside. In fact, they took their recording ethos to new levels of perfectionism with their latest, Power in Numbers (Interscope, 2002). Throughout two years, in between tours and spot show dates, the four rappers — Marc 7, Chali 2na, Zaakir (aka Soup) and Akil — and two DJ/producers Cut Chemist and Nu-Mark recorded the 17 songs intermittently, followed by numerous mixing and mastering sessions.

“In my past, I had to finish one thing before I moved on to the next, but this album was the opposite,” says DJ Nu-Mark. “It was a much more loose vibe than it was with Quality Control. I used to be like, ‘Okay, the drums are done. Now, let me get a loop, and let me get the guys in here to do the lyrics. Now, I'm gonna mix it. Okay, go to the next song.’ This time, if we had lyrics halfway done on one song, it was okay for me to start another beat to give to the guys. With our own pre-production studio this time, we didn't have to worry about the red light of the studio just taxing us for the dollars. This time it was like, ‘Oh, that didn't work? Let's go outside and talk for a while and come back tomorrow.’”

QUALITY CONTROL

Power in Numbers — which features Big Daddy Kane, Percy P, Nelly Furtado and Kool Keith, in addition to the four J5 MCs — walked the line of input overflow. But the crew kept the lyrical balance in check. “We know that everybody is equal when we're doing songs,” says Zaakir. “Nobody is put out in the forefront. Everybody wants the song to be good, so with that, we have to compromise. We're concerned about coming out with the best result despite egos.” And while Chali derives lyrical inspiration from painting and Zaakir from listening to other MCs such as Black Thought from The Roots and Large Professor, the group's writing process comes down to one of the four sparking an idea and passing along the torch.

Meanwhile, DJs Nu-Mark and Cut Chemist bounce sample-inspired musical ideas off one another. A case in point is the album's last song, “Acetate Prophets,” a cut-and-paste scratch medley of world-flavored instruments, vocals and beats. “Cut had some loops, and I had some loops,” says Nu-Mark. “And it kind of evolved into the idea of going around the world and explaining what each country sounds like without saying, ‘We're in Rio.’ Well, one part says, ‘Let's take a trip to Rio.’ But when we go to Japan, we don't say, ‘Now, we're in Japan’; you hear the Japanese koto [stringed instrument]. We start off in Africa, then Rio, Japan, Mexico and Iran. One guy's like, ‘Viva la música!’ Another guy says, ‘Will you take my bags?’ in Farsi.”

“Acetate Prophets” is one example of a J5 song that required more than a handful of recognizable samples. In other cases, Cut and Nu-Mark manipulate and disguise sounds they find, and sometimes a sample they start with in pre-production won't end up in the finished song. But many sound bites from records and other sources at least spark an inspirational springboard into new song ideas. “Thin Line,” an infectious, melodic track about crossing the line between friendship and romance, was jerked around in many different directions before J5 and Nelly Furtado laid down vocals.

“I took a sample, and I was going to go in one direction with it,” says Cut Chemist. “I chopped it up, took maybe five different second-long parts of the loop, rearranged them and made the loop into something a little bit different. Then, I filtered it in that structure so the sample was evolving into a different direction and took the filter and the notes and reconstructed them again to make this other chord progression. Then I was like, ‘Hmm, that chord progression sounds like “Les Fleur” by Minnie Riperton.’ So I took the acoustic guitar line from that song, put it over the filter, and it went perfectly. Then I said, ‘Hmm, this sounds like this French library record that I know.’ So I took that, used the [Pioneer] CDJ-1000 to time-compress it and then put that in key with the beat and guitar. So I utilized everything that I know about sampling to make the song: chopping, looping, time compression, drum programming, filtering, chopping with filtering, et cetera. There are all these elements that make it really fluid and live-sounding. I was really proud of that. When it started with the first record, I was like, ‘This sounds like a cool, almost RZA-ish New York hip-hop sample.’ And then it just totally went the other way to this real soft, acoustic kind of song about relationships. But when you put to the two ideas together, it makes sense.”

A track featuring Percy P and Big Daddy Kane, “A Day at the Races,” followed a much more simple progression. “That beat was made in 1992,” says Cut. “It was from an old beat tape that I had on my [Akai] MPC60 — a loop from a David Axlerod record. The whole song is just a four-bar loop, which is funny because it's the complete opposite of ‘Thin Line.’ Rather than freaking the sample 20 different ways, it's just one loop, and I didn't do shit to it. I think it's a good example of me exercising when to really chop something up and when not to. Certain samples, you just let them ride and let the rappers really highlight them.”

CRATE DIGGERS

For the old-school sympathizers who might be turned off that J5 sometimes use sizable loops to piece together songs, Nu-Mark has a few words. “I've always labeled it an ‘audio mosaic,’” he says. “You take a little bit of this; you take a little bit of that. It's like cooking. But a lot of people don't look at it that way, because they see that pop stars sample very known music. And when R&B groups sample hip-hop stuff, it's like they're eating their own shit. But I think people who slam that sampling isn't creative need to talk to someone like myself, who really has his head wrapped around samples, loops and record digging to really understand what we're doing.”

When Nu-Mark digs for records, he not only looks for funky soul but also indulges in rare Italian breaks, Hungarian breaks and “strange things from different countries that I know might not be as tapped a resource,” he says. As for breakbeat battle records, Cut Chemist has one mainstay. “My favorite scratching record has always been Super Duck Breaks by Babu,” he says. “The scratches are in the right place; the instrumentals are in the right place. It sticks, and the sounds are overly compressed, so they're really loud and punchy. I've been using it for five years, and it's still in my DJ bag. But for recording purposes, that's when I dig for my own scratches. When it's a live thing and I want to just explore something percussive and more performance-based, then I just use a break record.”

HIGH FIDELITY

Pieces of gear that are easy to take for granted when making an album are studio monitors. But they play an important role in J5's mixing stage. “I have two sets of speakers in my house,” says Nu-Mark. “The thing with monitors is, you have to kind of prejudge them a little bit. If you mix on [Yamaha] NS10s, there's no bass, no sub response, so you end up turning up all those frequencies. And then you listen to it in your car, and you're like, ‘Whoa, this is muddy, dude.’ I start with my NS10 monitors, and then I go to the big Cerwin-Vega speakers — with the low woofers that I can hear the bass out of — and keep going back and forth. Then, I'll go to my car and listen to my beats in there. At the pre-production studio and at the recording studio and at the mastering studio, I constantly reference.” When the bass isn't enough, Nu-Mark uses an E-mu Mo'Phatt to get crazy sub sounds. “It's a module that has a low-frequency bass sound and adds a frequency that you can't get from samples,” says Cut. “If you do find it from a sample, it means you really looked for it.”

POWER IN MASTERING

“We spent a lot more time in the studio on the final process polishing and mastering this album,” says Nu-Mark. He's not kidding. Power in Numbers was mastered five times with the help of Bernie Grundman. “There'd be too much 3K on the hi-hat area, and I'd be like, ‘Let me take that down a little bit.’ And we matched our album up to, in my opinion, very well-sonic-sounding CDs. My goal was to make it sound at least a half-dB or a dB louder than everything else. I compared it to Slum Village, Dilated Peoples, Dr. Dre, Gang Starr's ‘Full Clip’ 12-inch and one of DJ Shadow's songs.

Another part of the mastering process focused on linking interludes into songs. “We like our album to tell a story,” says Nu-Mark. “We don't want it to just stop, have a gap, play another song and then have a second gap. We're not down with that.” To go with the main flute part in “If You Only Knew,” Nu-Mark used a street musician for the following interlude. “He was playing the part live on the street corner, and I happened to have my tape recorder with me. But he was actually playing along with ‘Quality Control’ from our last album because I played that for him. And then I just brought it home and beat-matched it to ‘If You Only Knew.’ So there are all these little intricacies.”

EMBRACING DIGITAL

Although Cut and Nu-Mark are just now buying Digidesign Pro Tools rigs, the producers have been easing into the digital realm, as evidenced by their use of a Roland VS-2480 digital recorder for vocals. “I've been finding out that I'm able to get my analog sound just fine with digital,” says Nu-Mark. “My mix sounds are coming out better. The analog thing kind of muddies up snares and hi-hats when I don't want them to be muddied. And I find myself going backward and trying to scoop out frequencies that I've never put in the first place.”

As for Cut, he appreciates how creative it can be to have limitations imposed on him by using analog equipment. But he's also looking ahead to whatever new technology is coming down the pike. “I like limitations because I think, ‘Well, if I can't do this, how can I do something close to it with this or that?’ That's the whole essence of hip-hop. Turntables weren't meant for scratching. But in order to make something more out of it than it was applied for, you come up with scratching. However, now they're coming up with things digitally, where there are no limitations, so it's completely up to your imagination, which is good. But when you step into a situation where, ‘Oh, I can do anything?’ Then, it's tough to know where to start.”

But with a new Pro Tools setup in his house, Cut decided that it's time to put his half-inch 8-track reel-to-reel — with the broken Rewind button — to rest. “I finally retired it with the Quality Control album, and I'm writing an obituary for that now.”

Essential Power in Numbers Equipment

Akai MPC60 MIDI workstation
Akai MPC2000 MIDI workstation
Cerwin-Vega loudspeakers
Columbia portable turntable
E-mu Mo'Phatt sound module
E-mu SP-1200 drum machine/sampler
Pioneer CDJ-1000 digital CD turntable
Roland VS-2480 digital hard-disk recorder
Technics SL-1200MK2 turntables
Vestax PMC-05 Pro mixer
Yamaha NS10 near-field monitors

The Pioneer CDJ-1000 Debate

“When I first saw it, I finally said, ‘Okay, that's it. We've finally entered the digital age,’” says Cut Chemist about the CD turntable. “CD technology finally caught up to what we needed it to do, and I welcomed it as soon as I saw it. I felt reluctant to embrace it before the 1000 because it didn't really apply to me and what I did, and now it does.”

Nu-Mark, on the other hand, has a few suggestions he'd like to offer to Pioneer. “There's an inherent buzz in it,” he says. “There's a loose ground, very faint, so if you have a low CD and you're trying to turn it up, it's not cool. I do like the Master Tempo function — you can change the speed of something without changing the tone. But it's not that accurate; it flutters a little bit. And they should have made the platter spin. That should have been step one, because there are certain movements when you're spinning that you don't do when it's stationary. But for testing out something that we just made and burned to CD, it's really good. They just need to iron some things out.”

Cut is not too daunted by the CDJ-1000's shortcomings. At a DJ battle event with QBert, DJ Craze and others, Cut Chemist acted as a missionary for the CD turntables. “I knew I was in one of those situations where everyone was a vinyl purist, and they would have a problem with them, because everybody says, ‘These CDs are a toy,’” Cut says. “And I went in there thinking, ‘Well, you can't call me a toy. So I'm going to use them, and you're going to like it.’ I went in there that arrogant about it, and they ended up bugging out and accepting it to a certain degree.”

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