Last month, our journalist Lachlan sat down with alternative hip-hop, "Art Rap" artist and comedian Open Mike Eagle. Their conversation covers Mike's origins as a rapper, adoption of his name, and time in Thirsty Fish and Swim Team, as well as insights into how his new album Component System with the Auto Reverse reflects his musical philosophy, album-making process, and ultimate legacy. In addition, they discuss the structure of the current underground hip-hip scene and, of course, what "Art Rap" actually is.
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There are few artists easier to piss off with an opening question than alternative “Art
Rap" hip-hop artist Open Mike Eagle. It comes down to what Art Rap actually is. A question Mike is so sick of that it’s voiced on his most recent album Component System with the Auto Reverse: ‘“What the fuck is Art Rap? In every damn interview.’ So, I felt it right to ask. Since his debut Unapologetic Art Rap, it has been the monster of his own creation, initially feeling like something necessary for starting off but now having outlived its usefulness by far. Describing himself to now be in the headspace that a different sort of nomenclature is needed for what it is he does but unable to find it yet, Mike in hindsight sees the genre label to not be aesthetic but economic. Everyone within the genre approaches it in different ways, so such distinct aesthetics come naturally. “There are people you can feel akin to regardless of their artistic approach.”
With this core article of Mike’s music, we took a further step back to discuss how the
openness and comedic wordplay of Open Mike Eagle all came to fruition in hip-hop when embarking on his career. As it turns out, it can be exemplified in the baptism of his rap name:
‘You know, as with most things with me, there’s an element of practicality with it that is kind of the reason for it to be. I was originally just called “Open Mike” and that was never really a name I gave myself. It was a name that came from events in college that I used to participate in and ultimately went on to host. They were gatherings of all the local emcees, poets, and sometimes people would show up and read essays. They were open mics that would happen in people’s apartments, we’d also do a bit on campus. Ultimately, it was a gathering of the emcees and the creatives, the hip-hop people. I always hosted and always free-styled and people just started calling me “Open Mike”, my name being Mike and me being at the helm of those events. And so that was just my name for a while. Then when I moved to L.A. and started making music, I was still going by that name because I hadn’t thought of a better one. But there were two other guys. There was a guy in Boston, I think he was down with the Demigodz, his name was “Open Mike.” Then there was another guy from Germany called “Open Mike” who was a rapper. Me and the guy from Boston had a conversation about it and both decided we were going to keep using it and then on my Myspace pages, the German guy, he used to post his music on my page. And it was so fucking annoying that eventually I was like “I need to differentiate my name, I don’t want to be exposed to this confusion” and, you know, my name being Mike Eagle, I’ll just put that on the end. That always stuck.’
Mike continued to detail that every year he has an internal conversation about whether he should change his name or not but never does. ‘Currently the dialogue is about whether I should keep the “Open” and just go by Mike Eagle.’
The development of Mike’s character as a rapper was further benefited through his
involvement in the groups Thirsty Fish and Swim Team. Mike and his peers were the sixth or seventh generation to come through the Good Life Café’s Project Blowed. With every wave, all the standouts – everyone who is taking it seriously, who is better, who is blowing up in there (‘not like “blow up” like get popular, it’s like “you made the crowd react”) – identify each other and form groups. Mike and Psychosiz, a fellow member of Thirsty Fish, were in a different group called Parts Unknown and Dumbfoundead, the third member of Thirsty Fish, was in a group called Public Access with Leer Flip and MetaFlow. The three of them then got together in Dumbfoundead’s old, old apartment and made their first song “Snuggleberry Bushes”, from which they developed a chemistry that would become Thirsty Fish.
‘When it comes to what that did for me rap-wise, it just kept me very sharp because
everybody in the crew was hungry and had amazing skill sets. We would cypher and roast each other and keep each other on our toes writing verses. Trying to have a standout verse on a track. The spirit of mutual admiration and respectful competition was very important in making me a better rapper. I was coming from Chicago where my whole metric and idea of what was good was very narrow. I came to L.A. and got exposed to a bunch of different styles and metrics in how you could regard a verse or rapper or performance. I had a lot to learn and learned a lot. My cohort was Swim Team, we all came into “school” together. We pushed each other to be better all the time.’
Moving into the present, we discussed a few flashpoints from Component System. With
"Tdk Scribbled Intro”, there is a lyrical musing of what it is to make a mixtape or an album. Asking how well the track reflects his philosophy of making music more generally, Mike saw, buried within the track, a thesis for how he approaches all creativity. A lot of it is leaning on life experiences and what sticks out. That could be things Mike has experienced, it could be a show on television, or a joke he’s heard. ‘To me, who I am is a collection of all these yesterdays, that’s me as a person. And in my creative exploits I’m always trying to paint a clear sense of who I am. I can only really do that by pointing at things that live in my mind, and they’re all from yesterdays. There’s a literal perspective that, if you’re hearing an album, these songs are all recorded in the past. Whether it was a week ago or six months ago. The way we package an audio product is that “this is your new music” but there could be a song on there I wrote five years ago or recorded two years ag. So, there’s something literal about each album being a collection of yesterdays. With this album in particular, I wanted to go further and embrace that and find a way to remind people that that’s what they’re listening to.’
When “Circuit City” dropped as a single, Mike put out a tweet that perfectly describes the culmination of varied and diverse subjects, styles, and sentiments:
In the togetherness of its random bits and pieces, Component System held noticeable
differences to Mike’s previous two albums Animé, Divorce, and Trauma and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream, the process of making which was brought up. Mike sees Brick Body Kids as a mural he was trying to paint to mythologise a specific place from his life, and Animé to have stemmed from personal life change and anime escapism, both having everything in a framework. Component System doesn’t share this focus, having been put together by a feeling more than anything. As a result, unlike the other two, this album didn’t have its pieces put together by a front-brain thought. ‘The reason I fell in love with hip-hop music is because it gives you this feeling that really touched me. I wanted to make something that aimed at that feeling. I don’t even know if it’s actually describable, I just know it when I feel it. So that’s what makes this project different. I wasn’t operating from my front-brain as such, instead my kind of back-brain reptilian sense, feeling around for things and I know I have it when it feels right.’
Even with each track incorporating this feeling, each of their diverse range all have their own things going on on the album. There are different functions that have to be served by the overall piece. So, once the central concept was established, certain songs were written to fill in a hole or serve a particular purpose. For the most part though it was a case of finding the right beats and then making music. After that there is an additional layer of functionality later in the process but that’s the flow of how Mike’s records tend to be put together.
Component System’s ‘Kites’ is rooted in the idea of dying and looking down on the world
and your loved ones, a particularly emotive and touching penultimate track for the album. On its basis I asked Mike what, for him personally, would make him most satisfied and comfortable to look down on when he’s gone; what legacy-wise he would be most content with achieving. His answer complements the emotion of ‘Kites’ quite damn well:
‘If there’s a lasting space made for, especially, young black people to be encouraged to
be encouraged to embrace imagination and whimsy, the self-importance of… being able to celebrate one’s own existence. Not necessarily seeing themselves as a collection of struggles but seeing themselves as a collection of triumphs, no matter how big they are. That’s the whole thing with my stuff: every word I write and record and put out is a triumph to me, and not that everything I do is good or special but I understand the math equation I was born into: a young black boy, born to unmarried parents, on the south side of Chicago, in the 80s, with the world around me. I’m not supposed to be talking to you right now, that’s not how the math equation works, that’s not the person I end up being. So, every lyric, every song, is a celebration of possibility. Like, I’m not an optimist, I used to be an optimist. I’ve changed and am very cynical now. But that’s what I want to be able to leave behind, if I’m able to accomplish that, if more people who come from situations where they would typically be marginalised and locked into certain futures, if they feel empowered to embrace possibility, that’s what I would like to see.’
Within this there is an influence on the specific aspects of the intended impact of Mike
Eagle’s music. Sometimes there are just things that have to be said and they might have a clear beginning, middle, and end. If you look at ‘For DOOM’ for instance, there was something that needed to be said in how DOOM and his life impacted on Mike’s. Through the track he is able to celebrate a person who showed him possibility, continuing a unique cycle of something than just music.
Changing the subject slightly, I thought Mike would be the best rapper to speak with
about the current circumstances of underground hip-hop, with high numbers of producers and versatile rappers working within closely networked communities, and how these communities have developed through hip-hop’s history and impact on the industry today.
‘I think the realm that we’re in now, the status of things is informed by a few things. Like
with the underground boom of the late 90s, early 2000s and how you had Rhymesayers and Quannum Projects and Galapagos4, you had what was going on in the mainstream but you also had a very vibrant economy in the underground, living legends. These economies – Anticon, people who worked with different people within that, Sage Francis came from Anticon and he’s dealing with a bunch of people in the North-East and Galapagos4 is from Chicago but they crossed over into Rhymesayers sometimes, Rhymesayers would sometimes get Grayskul from Seattle, they would get Abstract Rude from L.A. Quannum was in the Bay. Oh I think economics is a lot of it because a lot of those record labels and crews, high rolling the bank, sustained themselves from selling CDs, not so much even vinyl then because CDs were the main way consumers bought music, $10 a unit. If you had three or four acts in your umbrella that could sell five-, ten-thousand CDs a year, that was enough money to keep an economy going and build up a bunch of names. Mars was very smart. The people who saw “oh okay, there’s these different economies but we’re also like-minded.” Scribble Jam was very important in bringing people together, because everybody was on the same aesthetic wavelength but doing it in different pockets of the country. With the way the economics of has changed as it has gone to streaming, there’s a lot less money in the system which meant all these little kingdoms for the most part disappeared. But the aesthetic remains. Now we’re dealing with people, me, Billy Woods, Quelle Chris, we’re like the survivors of that era, Serengeti, Denny Brown to a degree. We lived through that, we connect with each other based on the aesthetic. We’re all facing in the same direction, even though we’re doing it differently and so I see the scene, as it stands right now, as a bunch of people choosing to stay connected based on how connected things used to be, because we’re informed by that, there’s no flag to fly right now necessarily but we all look and see each other and support each other and make music together and keep it going that way.
‘The thing with the producers, that’s the new part. You have someone like the
Alchemist, who can work with Jay Z and Jay Electronica in the mainest of mainstreams. He can have a beat on anybody’s record but because he messes with the music on a serious level, he could be making stuff with Armand Hammer or Boldy James. Someone like Madlib working with different levels of people is new.’
With these changes explained, Mike sees there to be a need for improvements or
general changes he hopes to see take place in the hip-hop industry in the future. ‘I do think it’s about time for some sort of union. I mean we’re independent contractors, so it wouldn’t be easy but what I think the first thing that needs to happen is that rappers and producers, people in hip-hop who did things important, regardless of whether they made a lot of money in the industry: people need to be reaping the benefits of this culture somehow. It can’t just be the people who went diamond, this industry has such a long history of people who made very valuable contributions, genre-defining contributions, but they’re still scrapping by. If we’re forcing it enough that they’re still alive. Hip-hop needs to be able to take care of its important, ground-breaking artists. I don’t know if that’s unions, I don’t know if that’s the labels deciding to grow different coloured hearts because right now they have black hearts; they don’t care about anything. It could even be tied in with the government somehow, because there is some cultural stuff that they deem to be important and they put money to it. There are funds and foundations. We need to protect important artists, and important might not strictly be definable.’
Finally, within these topics of hip-hop evolution and album composition, the question of
seriousness with and dedication to music rests importantly as the base of any musician’s attitude. For Mike, music has to be taken seriously in ways that makes him pay attention to it in ways he doesn’t always want it to. Yet this attention is taking place in a time where there are fewer rules than ever before. There are now better ways to be heard and ways to allow people the opportunity to engage with an artist economically. The basic steps for making a music product – music, merch, touring – persist, but the way you present yourself as an artist, the ways you can engage with social media, direct marketing, and email lists is very different.
‘There’s a lot you can do and no real right or wrong. I think that’s quite unprecedented
because for a very long time there were these concrete ways that you had to do things. You have to take it seriously in terms of money. The cost of living has never been higher. If you want that level of revenue out, you have to think about how you’re going to build machinery around you and allow that work. The benefit of 2023 is that it doesn’t have to be the same machine that the next person has, you can build it how you like. But you have to take it seriously if you’re trying to eat. If you’re not trying to eat you can do whatever you want.’
But there is, of course, still time for unseriousness.
‘There’s a game of perception as a rapper, that I don’t take very seriously at all. My
business I take very seriously, but my perception and how people perceive a rapper. I’d go as far as to rail against that: there’s a certain aspect of rap fans who can’t accept a rapper if that rapper doesn’t take themselves seriously enough and I don’t fuck with that. I think there’s a lot of racial projection in that, a weird cultural voyeurism. Because if I’m not presenting myself as quote-unquote “hard,” that must mean I’m not from a ghetto anywhere, that must mean I don’t have credibility anywhere or cashé. Like I said, I know where I come from. I know I’m not supposed to be here, but I know that every experience I have along the way is real and valuable and none of where I came from, the locations and circumstances, they don’t have to define my perception as an artist. Again, what I live for is a future where everyone feels that they don’t have to be locked into their circumstances, their perception of themselves or how people see them. It’s all about the possibilities. The bullshit game of “so-and-so ain’t real, so-and-so ain’t…,” I don’t fuck with that at all, but the money part is. No way around that.’
Be it through knowledgeability and intelligence within hip-hop and the career path he
has traced through rap’s development, approaching music in diverse and occasionally sporadic manners but with a distinct carefulness, or purposefully, and cynically, acting against conventions expected of him, the compellingness of Open Mike Eagle as an artist is clearly reflected on his outlooks and perspectives. Outlooks and perspectives that the world of rap would look very different and much more bleak without. Still, despite all this, after the whole interview, we never found out what Art Rap actually is…
By Lachlan Kiddie.
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