{"id":145352,"date":"2023-01-27T22:35:27","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T06:35:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/culture.org\/an-interview-with-doseone-copy\/"},"modified":"2023-04-13T07:20:52","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T07:20:52","slug":"an-interview-with-doseone-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culture.org\/archive\/an-interview-with-doseone-copy\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Doseone Copy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the \u201cpersona\/ego projection\u201d as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon collective\/record label, which fuses hip-hop to indie rock, ambient music, poetry, and experimental noise.<\/i>Although Drucker has recorded several solo albums, his primary efforts have been collaborative. With the trio cLOUDDEAD, he worked with Yoni Wolf (Why?) and producer David Madson (Odd Nosdam) to create a pair of critically acclaimed albums that pasted non-sequitur raps onto sleepwalking funk beats and archaic keyboards. His most consistent collaboration has been with producer Jel (Jeffrey Logan) as Themselves. The duo has joined forces with German indie-rockers the Notwist as 13 & God and with other musicians in their current project, Subtle.<\/i><\/p>\n

The six musicians in Subtle tackle Autoharp, electric cello, flute, a bevy of samplers, and both live and mechanized drums. They are known for their theatrical live shows that include plastic forks, winged hourglasses, cardboard Roman column facades, painted skulls, and red velvet outfits. Each of the group\u2019s albums<\/i>\u00a0(A New White, Wishingbone, For Hero: For Fool, Yell & Ice,\u00a0and, most recently,<\/i>\u00a0ExitingARM)\u00a0has continued the story of Hour Hero Yes, a struggling rapper with a black-and-white zebra-striped face who, by turns, becomes stranded on a desert island, discovers he has the rarest blood type in the world, and is abducted to an underground bunker beneath the Hollywood sign, where he is brainwashed to write pop songs.<\/i><\/p>\n

Drucker ignores not only the boundaries between genres but between mediums as well. He has published a book of poetry, painted portraits of his fans to raise money after Subtle was robbed on tour, created a board game, and made several episodes of a wildly inappropriate satire of the<\/i>\u00a0Garfield and Friends\u00a0TV series. True to his prolific reputation, when I spoke with Drucker at his Oakland apartment he had just finished an appointment with his accountant to file his tax returns and was painting some enormous poster-size watercolors before meeting up with an animator to develop a potential series for the Cartoon Network, as a voice actor.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u2014Ben Bush<\/i><\/p>\n

I. ON THE MOUNTAINTOP
\nGIVING BIRTH TO FIVE BABIES<\/h4>\n

THE BELIEVER:<\/b>\u00a0So you have all these different groups going. For you, what is the purpose of collaborating?<\/p>\n

DOSEONE:<\/b>\u00a0I always liked Wu-Tang and how you had to follow each rapper from one record to another on different projects. We were interested in collaboration and not letting any project get stale, but in terms of listeners, I think it\u2019s mostly just confused people.<\/p>\n

Jel and I have been making music together for a long time. Our group, Themselves\u2014that\u2019s just the two of us\u2014started off as Jeff and I trying not to be as wack as everybody else who was doing hip-hop. When I write lyrics for Themselves it\u2019s intense, it\u2019s personal: it\u2019s my truth patch.<\/p>\n

I keep these piles of poems lying around to be used as lyrics, and when I write something that is a little more sagacious it goes into the pile for 13 & God, which is me and Jeff working with this German group, the Notwist. Markus Acher, who is in 13 & God, hears these incredible sounds and melodies and then has to work them into oddly appropriate English lyrics. He\u2019s approaching the language as an outsider and yet has somehow arrived at the phonetics and selective language of poetry. I had to unlearn years of grade school to realize if I take that\u00a0and<\/i>out, or that\u00a0but,<\/i>\u00a0if I just keep the wrong suffix, this is money, just listen to that! That\u2019s great. That\u2019s like something a wise man from Brooklyn would say. I love the inappropriateness of age-old wisdom in modern slang. These things are all so wonderful to me.<\/p>\n

Subtle formed because of Dax. He has always been the glue that holds the band together. Dax is who each of us in the band try to think like when we try to think like a Subtle member. Subtle has always had a code of its own, and for a long time I didn\u2019t know what it was. I would just know when a poem wasn\u2019t right for it. It\u2019s become this epic story of Hour Hero Yes and these records that all interrelate with each other like the back of the Cap\u2019n Crunch box where you have to collect all three and look at it with a decoder ring.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0You clearly have a lot more interest in melody in your more recent stuff. The new Subtle album,\u00a0ExitingARM,<\/i>\u00a0seems like the first time where you\u2019re doing more singing than rapping.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0We wanted this album to be songs people would listen to in the car and sing in the shower. So the album is full of singing. You know how every Thom Yorke song has the mountaintop note in it? And Bj\u00f6rk, too. It\u2019s like they\u2019re on the mountaintop giving birth to five babies, all the stars coming out of their bodies, celestial, planisphere touching all over the place. They hit that note all the time. I really respect both those artists and I can\u2019t sing like they can, so what we tried to do on this record was apply one of the great truisms of rap, which is that you cannot kick the same style twice. So I transmuted this age-old, cockeyed rap tenet that should never be fucked with and applied it to vocals.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s all these rap truisms that I try to take very seriously: kick knowledge, don\u2019t take shorts, and represent. On\u00a0ExitingARM<\/i>\u00a0I tried to build my own truisms. I found words that I had deliberately kept out of poems because they had no weight; they no longer said anything. I learned that if I refilled them and used them the right way they are these age-old, perfect words that will not tarnish or disintegrate:\u00a0obsession, beauty, luck. Love<\/i>\u00a0didn\u2019t make the cut. It\u2019s too brutal. That word is like the porn industry of meaning. I did pick a few big fights, though. Nobody tries to explain luck. Nobody writes philosophy about it, and I really went to town on it.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0You have a lot of different, distinct voices you use in your singing. There\u2019s, like, a backup singer voice, a Snoop Dogg voice, tons of others. Do you give them names?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0No, not names, but sometimes I\u2019ll say that parts \u201care\u201d someone. On each of the Subtle albums the single pays tribute to a pop starlet. Our first single, \u201cF.K.O.,\u201d was, of course, \u201cFuck Kelly Osborne.\u201d The song \u201cMercury Craze\u201d started because I heard that ridiculous Gwen Stefani song where she\u2019s spelling\u00a0banana<\/i>\u00a0and I decided I wanted to spell\u00a0blood<\/i>\u00a0instead.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0I was listening to Busdriver on the way up here. He\u2019s another rapper who will throw some melodic stuff in there, some singing, where he\u2019s hitting the notes but also doing some crazy stuff with the rhythm. A lot of the time his subject matter isn\u2019t all that ambitious, but his style is pretty impressive.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0I\u2019ll tell you what: rapper heaven. I may not be much else in this world but I guarantee you I am getting into rapper heaven. Bus is getting in, straight up, and of course Myka Nyne, who is the father of our styles. In rap there\u2019s a line in the sand: you can\u2019t bite a motherfucker\u2019s style, but we both owe a lot to the guys from Project Blowed. Myka Nyne changed everything. Whatever you want to call it: he is the Jimi Hendrix of rap; he is to rap as Eric Clapton is to white jazz. He doubled the capacity of our avenue. He styled, he sang, he wrote content. To me that was the complete MC. He is the mold.<\/p>\n

Another one who mostly didn\u2019t sing but did sing sometimes: Saafir\u2014absolutely rapper heaven: throne. Tupac has to carry his bags into rapper heaven. Shit you not. Tupac had better pick up his bags. They were both backup dancers for Digital Underground, and then Tupac became the drama-school embodiment of all low-rent urban energy, the anti-creativity\u2014\u201cDeath is cool\u201d\u2014prepackaged dead rapper. He started all that while Saafir changed rap. Saafir\u2019s the dude who served the Hieroglyphics crew. You know about that?<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0No.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0That was the first lesson in the freestyle class I\u2019m teaching.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0Where are you teaching freestyle classes?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0It\u2019s with Youth Movement Records, YMR, this nonprofit that takes kids and teaches them to record, how to use the equipment. By the time they\u2019re twenty these kids are making music. Until I moved to Cincinnati I didn\u2019t know anyone who even had beat machines and four tracks. Because of YMR these kids have access to all this stuff, which is astounding.<\/p>\n

I went in to talk to them about doing music and being a rapper. They want to know about battle rapping. That\u2019s the thing they\u2019re most interested in. They think\u00a08 Mile<\/i>\u00a0is real. I was like: \u201cY\u2019all don\u2019t know shit about battles.\u201d So on the first day I told them about Saafir-Casual.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve listened to many versions of the story from reliable sources and this is what I\u2019ve heard. It was around \u201993. Hieroglyphics is huge. Del is huge. Casual is part of Hiero, he\u2019s on a major label. Saafir isn\u2019t yet, but is bound to get signed. Apparently the beef started because on Casual\u2019s first album, he has Saafir on there, who freestyles for a minute-thirty and kicks the dopest shit on the record\u2014totally steals the sun. He wasn\u2019t part of Hiero, and after that he doesn\u2019t really interact with Casual. Casual doesn\u2019t like it. There\u2019s the usual \u201cWho\u2019s the better MC?\u201d shit-talking energy between them. So they battle onstage and at the end of the battle Saafir pulls out Casual\u2019s wallet. Apparently, he\u2019d picked his pocket while serving him.<\/p>\n

I try to teach these kids that there\u2019s a difference between freestyling and battling. You want to have a line between them: when you are battling someone you should be able to serve them into the ground; when you\u2019re freestyling try to keep it creative, steer it away from a fight. With freestyling it\u2019s not about \u201cSay something funny!\u201d That has nothing to do with it. It\u2019s about becoming quicker on your feet and knowing that your entire day can go into your rap if you\u2019re on it.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0When I saw some videos of you battling at Scribble Jam\u2019s freestyle competition I was surprised at how physical it is. Like there\u2019s the one where you drop your pants and the other guy is flailing on the ground. Is that an unusual example?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0That was P.E.A.C.E. from Freestyle Fellowship. P.E.A.C.E. was amazing. That was the thing that made me want to stop battling in those stupid competitions. P.E.A.C.E. is an idol of mine. I grew up listening to him and he changed the way I rapped. The first time I met him was up there onstage and all I could think was: Jesus, I memorized all your songs, so to get up there and just belligerently berate him was just not realistic. P.E.A.C.E. fucked that up; I couldn\u2019t do that.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0You were supposed to be serving your hero. It\u2019s like you meet Marilyn Hacker and you have to diss her.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0\u201cNice fucking face.\u201d I\u2019d rather serve people who are just body count to me. That\u2019s how it should be. If I\u2019m battling you I don\u2019t want to be friends. If you are wacker than me then\u00a0you are wacker than me<\/i>\u00a0and I don\u2019t want to be your boy. Right now Jel and I are working on a new Themselves record, which is our group that\u2019s all about raw raps, and so teaching these kids has been part of a metaphoric year in my life.<\/p>\n

II. THE SPEAKING TEST<\/h4>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0You\u2019ve recorded a couple of spoken-word albums and kind of a book-on-tape version of a collection of your poetry called\u00a0The Pelt.<\/i>\u00a0How is that stuff different than what you might sing on an album?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0It\u2019s more like they feed into each other. If you go back and listen to\u00a0Circle,<\/i>\u00a0the album I recorded with Boom Bip\u2014I had just fallen in love with beat poetry: self-expression using human language, telling stories because of how it feels\u2014and can it be spoken? Yoni and I started writing poetry and then we started writing better lyrics. Part of it was that we invented a \u201cspeaking test.\u201d Even if a line sounded good when you were rapping it or singing it, if it didn\u2019t sound good saying it to someone, we cut it. Everyone in Anticon used that for a while.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0You sent me a copy of the\u00a0Ought Almanac of Amassed Fact,<\/i>\u00a0which is a collection of poems sort of in the form of an encyclopedia. You said you\u2019re going to be printing copies, but then there\u2019s also three hours of recordings where you read it aloud.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0I\u2019m making artifacts from this other world. With\u00a0For Hero: For Fool<\/i>\u00a0I made a hundred board games; for this record I\u2019ve made a hundred almanacs.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0But is the way that most people will experience that is through this website, exploring the world that these songs occur in?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0The almanac is sixty-five pages, and I worried that maybe no one wants to read a book. I decided I could either bitch about that and not do it; or I can be digital. The writing is inspired by some of my favorite poets, like Marilyn Hacker and Galway Kinnell and also a graphic novel that Dax gave me called\u00a0The Invisibles,<\/i>\u00a0by Grant Morrison. So, there\u2019s a bunch of kind of superhero bad guys in it, and I use different language depending on which character the section is about. If I\u2019m writing about Reverend Pittman it\u2019s more biblical and so I write in all of these absolute terms. If he just enters a room to move a glass on the coffee table, then he gets described all over again\u2014\u201cReverend Pittman, the sweeper of all take and his obsequious make\u2014\u201d So, he gets reintroduced constantly. If it\u2019s about Dr. Moonorgun I wrote it in very clinical terms, like some sort of consumer electronics manual and used extremely long sentences that have many\u00a0if<\/i>s,\u00a0and<\/i>s,\u00a0or<\/i>s, and\u00a0but<\/i>s. The idea of Dr. Moonorgun came from thinking about cancer and the phrase\u00a0Shooting the moon<\/i>\u2014how you go to the doctor even though you know that it\u2019s the end. The doctor just makes it more of an ambiguous death end; terminally black when your health goes cyst-y.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0The doctors and the mailmen in your songs are always evil.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0I was always into conspiracy theory. The first record I was on was an Illuminati record. I don\u2019t have health insurance and so to me, they\u2019re just bad people who keep me sick. Fuck \u2019em. I diss \u2019em on my records.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0From my understanding of the story, I always pictured Hour Hero Yes as a contemporary rapper with a black-and-white-striped face, and then on the album covers he always appears as, like, a Prussian general. Is there any logic to it?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0He\u2019s a hero. For album covers I do him up to look courageous. On the front cover of\u00a0For Hero: For Fool<\/i>\u00a0he has clouds and a halo behind him; he\u2019s a general. His arm is raw and in the wind and he\u2019s not flinching. His face is striped, his hair is on fire, and his eyes are open and clear. But the album title is about the dichotomy of oneself. So on the backside he\u2019s wearing prison garb and doesn\u2019t have eyes. He has one wing and he ain\u2019t going nowhere. He has Death and Fairness talking in either ear\u2014fingering either ear, actually.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also about that feeling onstage during a live show. That\u2019s where the pun came from: it\u2019s about my hour onstage. It\u2019s about this one solace: for one hour you are totally fucking \u201con.\u201d People in the crowd are saying, \u201cI\u2019ll be damned! Look at that, he\u2019s full of God!\u201d Sometimes when I\u2019m onstage I can drop a glass of water and catch it without any water falling out and then get up and say something hysterical and rap on beat, turn around, spin or sashay\u2014shit that I do not do in normal life, that I never thought possible. Only up there am I completely galvanized. Recording is a lengthy process, but onstage it\u2019s completely different; tape is not running\u2014life is running, and cannot be rewound.<\/p>\n

The image of Hour Hero Yes came from a poem I never wrote, which reveals what the stripedness is about. A long time ago I got this idea that after a poet dies, if you dig them up after they\u2019re fully decomposed, their skulls are striped because they kept things fair. It\u2019s like a referee thing. It was totally trite rap-thinking, wondering for too long about why the dudes at Foot Locker are wearing those shirts. I superimposed that idea onto one of my favorite things in the world: the skull. Ever since I was a kid I would feel my cheekbones under my skin. You can feel it coming just before you touch down on it. Before I ever had all of those ideas in a row, I drew stripes on a face from a magazine with black ballpoint pen and Wite-Out that [Odd] Nosdam gave me. I did that and thought it was just great.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0I always assumed that the black-and-white striped face was sort of a commentary on race in rap.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0Of course that\u2019s also true, but I can\u2019t stop on any broad topics, it\u2019s always personal for me. Sometimes I\u2019ll use a weighted term, but generally my big motifs, where I pull a line out and stop there, the meaning is definitely not \u201cGo out and vote.\u201d Although, of course, that is important. I will never diss a politician on one of my songs. It becomes the most dated thing imaginable. You may as well include yesterday\u2019s Cubs game\u2019s score; it\u2019s just that transient.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0I guess I was also thinking about lines like \u201cThe fate of your life may very well be determined by how good you look in white,\u201d and the album title\u00a0A New White.<\/i><\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0A New White<\/i>\u00a0was a phrase my dad made up. He was driving me to the airport as I was wrapping up a visit home. I was sitting in the car and we were talking about my mom and I was feeling really dark. At that time it was hard to do music and I was second-guessing myself all the time. He responded by telling me how he doesn\u2019t want me to be the kind of artist whose art derives from negativity.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s absolutely what I was when I first started writing raw raps. I\u2019ve always been aggressive and an underdog, and my dad was worried that I would always be that: constantly seeking inspiration from negativity. He doesn\u2019t want me to make dark art. He said a lot of artists make art for five years, some artists make art for ten years, a few make art for fifteen: very few do it until they die. Those who do\u2014except for those who commit suicide and obviously took Dark Door Number 3\u2014find a way to turn it on its ear and make it a positive affair. My dad\u2019s right. He\u2019s been an artist for longer than I\u2019ve been alive. So after this long conversation about dark arts and not remaining a dark artist, he said: \u201cAdam, I don\u2019t want you to stay that way. You gotta take all the shit, you gotta take all these grays and you\u2019ve gotta meld them and push them together into a new white.\u201d And I got on the plane and \u201ca new white\u201d was all I could think about the whole time, because I am worried and I always will be. My blood is hot and this earth is wack, this place is fucked up, and I don\u2019t care what anyone tells me, I don\u2019t care what any Reiki-wielding earth mother wants to tell me about this being some kind of birth place, I will slap the shit out of you. This place is heavy and people go down hard for being nothing except up in the wind.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0There\u2019s a song on your most recent solo album,\u00a0Skeleton Repellent,<\/i>\u00a0about mothers, and the liner notes mention a surrogate mother. I wanted to ask what the situation was with your mom.<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0So long story short, I fell out of love with my mother at about eleven years old and I knew it. I was not confused about the feeling. She had abused it and I wasn\u2019t in love. Now, I know: \u201cYou ain\u2019t supposed love your parents like\u00a0that,<\/i>\u201d but that\u2019s what love is. You know when the bath mat is really dirty and you have to wash it and then it\u2019s this fluffy new bath mat again? I don\u2019t think I have a quicker or cleaner metaphor for describing what love does to you.<\/p>\n

I am deeply in love with my male counterparts, all these musicians who I\u2019ve met through this music. I will never lose it, because I know what love is because I lost it at an early age. I love them deeply. I can\u2019t have a successful female relationship to save my life, but I mate with these guys like a motherfucker for life. Somehow, because we don\u2019t have to share a bed and intimacy, it can last. I don\u2019t know what that\u2019s all about with the human character.<\/p>\n

BLVR:<\/b>\u00a0A lot of the stuff on\u00a0ExitingARM<\/i>\u00a0is about hope in the face of cynicism. You and everyone else in Subtle have been through a lot in the last couple of years. What keeps you from thinking the worst and calling it quits?<\/p>\n

D:<\/b>\u00a0I just think about all of the people who are a part of me because of this music and how we\u2019ve changed and I know I don\u2019t want to quit. That\u2019s why I still want to do music and that\u2019s why I\u2019m going to cry if I have to stop. I really do believe\u2014not in people, not in God, not in hell, not in the afterlife and things that don\u2019t exist in this world\u2014but I see what has happened in my life and people around me have been cracked the fuck open and they\u2019re amazing and their tendons are stronger than I ever thought possible.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the closest thing to superpowers, which, from the time your brain starts sparking until death, is the coolest thing to think about ever. You could be on your deathbed and think, I wish I could just grow a lung. Wouldn\u2019t that be cool? At age eighty you could talk to somebody over a beer and still be just as enamored with the small thought of \u201cif you had wings.\u201d To me, that\u2019s a beautiful thing and that\u2019s what Hour Hero Yes is. He has a superpower and it\u2019s just that he can churn out a mean, raw, uncut oblivion poem, and that\u2019s my power. I don\u2019t have anything else.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Drucker, better known by the alias Doseone, has said his initial attraction to rap was as much about the \u201cpersona\/ego projection\u201d as a love of words. Drucker cut his teeth on the rap-battle circuit, exchanging rhymes with Eminem and other MCs, until his friendships with like-minded musicians led to the creation of the Anticon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145352"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/culture.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}