Antipop Consortium are hip-hop's most notorious futurists

Hey Beans and Priest, great to see you guys. Thanks for taking the time. 

BEANS
How are you? Good to see you again, after the book club! 

That was fun, right? Priest, just to let you in, Beans and I just happened to join the same online book club the other week. We discussed the J Dilla biography. 

BEANS
Yeah. It was very cool. The next one is supposed to be about Lou Reed. One of the guys in the book club wrote the book. 

As New Yorkers, are you guys Velvet Underground heads at all?

BEANS
Uhm, I like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

The one that no one likes!

BEANS
Yes, I like the one that no one likes. When I think of Lou Reed, I think of that dope ass cover.

Speaking of books and odd influences: You guys have always been revered for your lyrical prowess – but who were your favorite writers, when you first started writing yourselves? 

HP
All four of us have an art school background. Being an avid comic reader was a major influence. Culturally, we all came out of poetry. So a lot of my writing was influenced by the folks I was around. From people like the writer Sapphire, who wrote the book Push, to my group members. A big book for all of us was As Serious as Your Life by Valerie Wilmer. It gave us a little bit of an insight to experimental music communities that existed before us. The poet Bob Kaufman was a big influence, too.

BEANS
I can attest to Bob Kaufman, Ted Jones, Ishmael Reed… Our bandmate M. Sayyid’s brother, Ousmane Power-Greene, wrote a great book recently, too. As a teenager, The Autobiography of Malcolm X really changed my perspective. Like Priest said, Val Wilmer’s As Serious as Your Life helped us contextualize what we were doing in hip-hop. It taught us about what happened before us in jazz. We knew we wanted to do something different and bring something new to the music that we grew up loving. 

Revisiting your catalog, I realized that your debut album Tragic Epilogue starts with those crazy electronic sounds, unlike anything in hip-hop at the time. Then, 10 years later, your album Fluorescent Black starts with something resembling math or prog metal... What would an Antipop Consortium album start with in this day and age? 

HP
We're honestly figuring that out now for ourselves! It’s hard to say, because it'll be a surprise to us – and hopefully to you as well, when we find it.

BEANS 
That's funny. I never really made that parallel with the intros before. Presenting the music that way, it wasn't contrived at all. It just felt natural to start the records way out there.

Le Guess Who? really is a festival for music discovery. So I was wondering where your heads are at, musically, at this point. With regards to your own music and others that inspire you…

BEANS
And in terms of current influences: I've been listening to a lot of Henry Threadgill and Julius Eastman lately. I've also been listening to the reissues of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On and I Want You. I feel like, if you want to make great music, you’ve got to listen to great music. As for the new stuff, I like the new MIKE record. I listened to the Roper Williams album with Fatboi Sharif and Akai Solo. I listened to the new Darius Jones record, and our mutual friend, the pianist Vijay Iyer has a new album with this singer…

… Arooj Aftab? 

BEANS
Yeah, that’s a dope record! I really like the new Armand Hammer, the new Earl Sweatshirt and the new Oneohtrix Point Never album, too… mostly Marvin Gaye, though (laughs).  

Glad you’re dropping some of those names – both MIKE and Armand Hammer are going to be at the festival this year. 

BEANS
Dope, I'd like to meet my MIKE, I like his stuff! 

A lot of those newer guys you mentioned, they are just so prolific, putting out project after project…

BEANS
In today's climate, I think that people’s attention spans are nuts. You have to put out music on a consistent basis, or you get caught lost in the sauce. At least once a year, just so people will keep your name in their mouth.

Priest, I was listening to your latest instrumental record as HPrizm. How do you feel about the possibilities of dropping music like this without necessarily having a label or larger infrastructure? Do you guys enjoy that kind of freedom? 

But yes, I do appreciate the ability to self release. I appreciate platforms that can amplify your voice organically, without all of the extra stuff that we don't really deal with. So shout out to Bandcamp, shout out to everybody who builds those infrastructures and mechanisms that make it simple. Because, you know, It's like a triathlon releasing independently, you're just wearing so many different hats. And you're interfacing with your fan base on a different level. 

BEANS
There used to be a middle class for musicians, but that has vanished. Now it's like, you’re either way up or down below. To Priest’s credit, he himself put out the single Disorientation, which led us all the way to this interview now. So it's not something that was foreign to us putting out music in this particular way. But it can be exhausting. I just feel lucky that Priest and I came out when we did, because we have a certain pedigree. It's just noisy, you know, and the fact that we've been around for a while helps us cut through the noise.

You just mentioned your first single Disorientation, which came out in the late 1990s. That whole era is now considered the halcyon days of underground hip-hop, so you would assume that you guys found fertile ground for your sound. But it didn’t get any airplay on underground radio at the time, right?

HP
The reason that tracks like that stood the test of time, is because of how far out it seemed back then. Years later, we can look back and say, okay, a lot of the guys that weren't ready for that sound then now sound like us from that time. Meanwhile we're already in a different place. Tracks like Disorientation are proof of concept. They were an experiment. We had a distinct advantage, because when everybody was on jazz loops and what have you, our mind was trying to add on to the vocabulary, as opposed to trying to emulate the past…

… which is pretty much the whole jazz ethos, right?

HP
Exactly! And those avant-garde jazz artists were organically our peers. You know, Marion Brown was a mentor to us. Djinji Brown, his son, was our good friend. So we were interacting with both generations. Just from having that oversight, it forced us to put our influences together and go somewhere else. And with our group being so lyrically dynamic, it's like we were putting two high-impact forms of art together and exploded in many different directions. When I say we're not nostalgic, it is because even then, we weren't looking at the past to emulate it. We were looking at something that will last for the future.

Beans, we just started a new series about the importance of record stores as physical spaces. It’s interesting to hear that you worked at Other Music, the now closed experimental record store in New York. What did working there teach you? 

BEANS
Funny, I'm wearing the store’s t-shirt right now. Other Music wasn't a job. It was education, and lots of fun. At the time we had just worked with DJ Vadim on The Isolationist. So when people were like, Yo, what's the latest hip-hop? I was like, yo check this out, you gotta buy this joint. I was hustling our own stuff heavily (laughs).

How does it feel after all these years when guys like Elucid from Armand Hammer point towards you as inspirations? You were always regarded as avant-garde and different, but purely on an MC level, do you feel you got the credit you deserved?

HP
With MCs it's always an ego thing. That's not what keeps you getting better in my opinion. Because as soon as you get that bag, you’re like, yo, I'm a legend. At least for my own sanity and approach to writing, you know, I reached the point where other people’s opinions are not a big thing either way. On the other hand, when someone is clearly influenced and inspired by you and won't ever say it – that's bugged out to me. There were moments in time that I'm proud of, where I could see the influence from our catalog on parts of the industry, and in that way I don't always feel acknowledged. 

I also wonder if people realize how much fun you must have had making these records. Because when I now go back through the catalog, there's proper jams on all of these albums.

HP
{chuckles} I'm glad to hear that.

BEANS
As Priest said, we are fans first. As fans, we like to hear the music in a particular way. We very much scrutinize music and what we're hearing, and we have a lot of varying opinions of what we agree and disagree upon. But we can all agree that if it's not bumping, it’s not worth it. It's either really dope, or it is wack. And we're not trying to make that shit just for ourselves. You don't want to be associated with anything that's wack. 

Now that you’re regrouping after several years for new shows and a new project: How did your relationship to your own body of work change throughout the years? 

HP
Having this project and these dates coming up forced me to listen back to a lot of things. And when I did, it took me down a rabbit hole, like: “I used to hate this song – but actually, it's doing what it's supposed to do.” I've had many moments like that recently. When we were creating, it wasn't so much for anyone’s approval, but we always were conscious of the listener. Whether we're performing or recording, we're thinking about the listener more so than other MCs, or things of that nature. Having some time and distance to your own work can allow you to be a listener again. Like, this is cool! I can play this. That's something that developed over time.

BEANS
I gotta be honest. In the times where we weren't in each other's lives like that, there was always a point in my mind where I went: this chapter of my life feels unfinished. So, I just let my imagination run wild with the things that we could have done as a group, that we didn't have a chance to do back then. Another mentor of mine is Vernon Reid (of Living Colour). He called me up like, “y'all got to work that out”. And then, after time, we as a group came to an understanding.

Antipop Consortium perform at Le Guess Who? 2023 on Friday, 10 November.