Photo by Chelsea Memmolo

It’s easy to view Rhode Island rapper B. Dolan as a man of contradictions: he rejects the term “political rapper,” yet he pens songs like “Film the Police” and “Lucifer;” he performs at metal bars, yet he smiles during his set; he’s an independent rapper (i.e. not rich), yet he gives discounts at the merch table. How can one person sustain these discontinuities? By rejecting them, of course.

Joining us for an engaging, 50 minute conversation before his riveting performance at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, B. Dolan gave us one of our best interviews of the year. Read it below. He’s passionate about hip-hop and its artistic and political potentials in wholly original and refreshing ways.

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RESPECT. So my first question is what have you been listening to lately?

B. Dolan: I’ve been listening to a lot of Circle Takes the Square and United Nations because for the past ten days I’ve been on tour with them [laughs].  Which has been really cool. Because I don’t always make an effort to seek out hardcore music, but I’ve been around that scene and that scene is big in Providence. We came up around those shows as well as rap battles and hip-hop events and spoken word events. But it’s been cool to be on this tour and listen to these guys a lot. And see them in a live environment with their friends and how their music is translated and all that.

I’ve been listening to James Blake this summer. I really like that album a lot. The song “Retrograde” is still the song of the year for me. So I’ve been really inspired by him. Also a lot of my friends have put out music this year. Prolyphic & Buddy Peace from Strange Famous put out an album and produced a bunch of new material, Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip have a new record. Strange Famous has put out a lot of stuff and obviously I’m very involved in that and hear everything that’s going out. I think there’s been a lot of inspiring music out this year. And I’m also always listening to old stuff for digging and inspirational purposes. I have weird little obsessions with labels and imprints.

Do you follow their entire history or something?

Yeah, like there’s an imprint called Cadet Records and I obsessively collect all the records that they put out. They were an offshoot of Chess Records and they worked with a lot of famous blues musicians like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. But the engineer at the time was a psych rock engineer and so there’s this group of albums that has like blues songs with psych rock production and engineering, which is really interesting. There’s a lot of separation: drums in the left channel and guitars in the right channel, that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of breakbeats on it too. I’m always seeking a lot of music and listening to a lot of music at the same time.

What do you think the significance of “Film the Police” is after learning about the NSA’s mass surveillance?

I think in general filming the police is…we made that song in the wake of what happened with Oscar Grant. And that was a great demonstration of how important it can be for citizens to document what’s happening in the streets, especially when it comes to the people who have a monopoly on force, which is the police. And certainly I do think that since 9/11 there’s been a large trend towards more surveillance, less civil liberty and expanded police privileges and protections, as well as just money that’s been dumped into police departments for homeland security budgets that has resulted in militarized cops with these like futuristic weapons and riot gear. And so it’s more important than ever that we be able to document them.

The NSA stuff is almost a separate issue to me because that deals with our privacy and our ability to communicate with each other without being monitored by the government. I guess in some ways you could draw a comparison and say that filming the police is our way of counteracting the government’s surveillance of us. It’s just symptoms of an information age where power is in images and information. To the degree to which we can capture those things and disseminate those things ourselves, that’s how we’re going to have to resist huge overreaching government and all that comes with it.

I ask because one of messages of “Film the Police” is that you see your rights being violated in your face and you respond to it by documenting it. And with mass surveillance, even though you’re right in the sense that it’s a different kind of violation, I feel like just thinking about The Wire, they use that surveillance to be more brutal as police officers. You don’t even have to be charged with anything, but what they do to you is “justified.”

Yeah, I can see that. I’m not quite sure what else to say about it. What do you think?

On the relationship between “Film the Police” and the NSA?

Yeah.

It’s kind of embedded in another question I was going to ask, so I’ll ask that. So John Pike, the UC Davis guy that maced those students, was recently awarded a worker’s compensation amount that was greater than the settlement received by the people who he assaulted. And I was kind of wondering, what do we do when filming the police isn’t enough?

It certainly seems to have been that kind of summer. George Zimmerman got his gun back from the state of Florida. They really gave that guy his gun back. You don’t need a better symbol than that [laughs]. And certainly, filming the police was never meant and has never meant to be a fix-all. I try not to even make statements…I try to be clear that this isn’t a fix-all. It’s just an immediate practical thing that you can do. To me, when I think about making political music, I personally am turned off by emcees who rap in sort of feel-good bumper stickers and generalities about social issues. I think it’s really easy to get applause saying something like, “Every politician is the devil!” You know, just the generalities that we all know are true. Yeah, politicians are fake and fucking government is corrupt and shit’s fucked up, etc. You can say that shit and people will go along with you because it feels good to agree with that, but in the end, you’ve just produced a song that to me isn’t going to do anything.

So when I make an [overtly] political song, I try to be very clear and very explicit and even narrow in what I’m talking about. So “Film the Police” is literally about filming the police. It’s a reminder that if cops are doing some shady shit in front of you and you have a camera in your pocket and should use it. It’s just a reminder like, “Hey, that phone you’re carrying around can take pictures!” So if you find yourself in a situation where you see someone is being abused or you yourself are being intimidated or harassed, you’ve got a weapon there and you should use it. That’s literally the beginning and the end of that. Yes, it’s attached to other issues. Yes, it’s become a thing that’s gone beyond that song. And it will mean other things to other people and I’m happy about that.

If you search the hashtag “#filmthepolice” there are plenty of people talking about it that have never heard my song and I’m excited by that. I think that’s really great that I can contribute just a useful phrase. But at the same I time I know that it’s not a – when I perform it live, during one of the choruses I say, “And fuck the police. Still fuck the police.” “Film the Police” is not meant to supersede “Fuck the Police.” It’s more like we have a new way to fuck the police: this camera in our pockets. But I know…what does filming the police do to fight globalization? Nothing. The fucking device you’re taking out of your pocket is itself probably a violation of worker’s rights in another country and has not been produced under ethical standards, and represents people being taken advantage of. And that’s apart of things we’ll have to fix before we can get to being a more just society and world. There’s a lot of shit to tackle [laughs]. And I try not to get lost in that. If you think about everything, you get overwhelmed. If you narrow your view and think about something immediate and tangible, I think we can make small, incremental steps. Children of Men is my model for revolution [laughs].

I haven’t seen it yet.

It came out around the same time as V for Vendetta and I began thinking that the contrast between those movies was like fantasy vs reality. The fantasy is V for Vendetta, where a guy with a mask is gonna get on tv and say the right combination of words that will trigger a mass consciousness shift in the world population and the revolution is going to start today. With Children of Men, everyone does what they can for five minutes and will pass this precious cargo along to the next person, who does what they can for five minutes. Most people probably don’t even get to see the end result, but we’re still working and just handling what we can in the present and offering ourselves where we have the power to act, which is often in our immediate environments with family and friends.

You mentioned being narrow, or rather being very specific. I think that’s apparent in songs like “Lucifer” and “Come to Jamaica” where you mention Warren Anderson and Bugsy Siegel. I feel like by focusing on them you’re able to make your criticism and also note how that criticism is very specific. I think that that actually helps the songs travel further than ones full of generalities.

I’ve always been conscious of characters and of the power of a character, like the name and a person with a certain personality. That’s interesting. Whereas a generality is powerful in other ways, I feel like people connect more immediately when they can picture a person. And that for whatever reason seems to find it’s way into my writing a lot. I do a lot of character studies in my writing. Whether it’s people like Warren Anderson or Justin Timberlake, or Joan of Arcadia or Vin Diesel. I like describing people and personalities. Because the personal is political. The generalities are kind of boring. They’re kind of abstract and kind of stale and sterile. But all of these political ideas do touch down in peoples’ lives. And that’s where the stories and the humanness are. So yeah, in any instance, I’m more interested in where the political ideas come home and manifest in people’s actual lives. Which is why I object to the term “political rapper.” What’s political? What’s personal? Where is that line? Politics is in my day to day life if I can’t feed my family. Or even if I never have to worry about feeding my family. Politics is deeply entrenched in peoples’ realities.

That really relates to my next question. In “Which Side Are You On,” you say hip-hop is “folk music grown from the struggle” and I agree with that statement, especially as far as the origins of hip-hop. But considering its origins as well as what it has become, what do you think the politics of rap are at the most fundamental level? Not just in terms of a song being overtly political, but even a song like “The Hunter,” how is that  a political utterance?

“The Hunter” is actually a really political song but nobody knows it.

I know it’s about becoming that which you hate.

Yeah, I’m glad that you dealt with it on that level. A lot of people think that it’s just a cool ghost story about a vampire hunter. But I was thinking about soldiers in Iraq doing horrible things for what they thought were good reasons. And they have that moment of realization where you look in the mirror and realize that you are the monster. You think you’ve been out there hunting monsters all your life, but then you realize that you are the thing to fear.

Okay, well maybe that wasn’t a good example.

[laughs] But no one knows that because it doesn’t necessarily come across in the song. But to talk about hip-hop is almost dangerous at this point because it’s such a huge genre with a lot of different artists making a lot of different kinds of music for totally different reasons. So for me I try to just judge people on the merits of what they were trying to make. So I’m not judging Kanye against Chuck D against Pharoahe Monch against nerd rap against Lil Jon. Those emcees might as well be in different genres. It’s like who’s a better jazz musician, Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong? They’re years and years apart and playing in different eras and niches of jazz. So I try to be careful about blanket statements for all of hip-hop. But for me, what inspired me about rap was when I heard Chuck D say that hip-hop is black people’s CNN. And Scarface, in a song with Ice Cube, said, “We were always considered evil. Now they’re trying to bust our only mode of communicating with our people.” And I was like, “This is what rap is.”

As time has gone on and the influence of rap has spread, I consider rap at this point to be poor people’s CNN too. It’s kind of transcended the black experience and become something that millions and millions of people worldwide are apart of. And I think that the power poltiically in it is that yeah, at it root, it’s a decentralized art form that can happen spontaneously anywhere. All you need is a dude that can bang on a lunch table and enough rhythm to rap your thoughts. In that, it has a power for people to speak with each other and be with each other in a way that doesn’t have to pass through a filter.

So commercial rap is what commercial rap is and if you’re making music for the club, then you’re making music for the club and if it bangs in the club, then I guess it’s a good song. For me, I choose to utilize it in the sense that I can say whatever I want. and I’m lucky to be on Strange Famous with Sage, which is an independent label. We don’t owe anybody anything, so we totally control our content and say what the fuck we want. I think that’s the power. I think there’s something political about people being in a room and not at home looking at a tv or the internet. Even if nothing “political” gets said on stage, the experience of coming out into the public and being physically present with a group of people and experiencing the same thing fights against the alienation that people experience and the push to just isolate yourself from other people and just look at a box and experience reality through that. Again, the personal is political, and a lot of what we do is at its root political even if you don’t think about it.

So I guess, to sum all that up, rap in some sense, gives people a voice. And whether they use that voice to make people dance, or whatever, giving nearly anyone a voice is kind of unique.

The post Interview: B Dolan Gets Sweaty appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.

Recently, we had the chance to chop it up with YOGY about a variety of topics including his past and current projects (Kings Wear Crowns and ’88 Hooligans), the many obstacles he’s faced in his life, and even the impact of Oscar Grant on him as both a person and an artist.

What’s the significance of your name? Is it an acronym? Short for something? 

YOGY is short for “You Only Got Yourself.” Deriving from life since my childhood. I represent every single-parent home urban kid. My father was locked up most of my life and my mom struggled with debt and alcoholism. It’s just a common feeling due to the circumstances that explains in a nutshell my foundation and now my mindset.

Growing up in the Bay Area, who were some of your biggest influences? 

Tupac is one of my biggest influences period. His All Eyez On Me album raised me. Yukmouth, E-40 , Too Short, San Quinn, Mac Dre, Hiero, Souls of Mischief…and this list goes on, from a musical standpoint. I’ve always been a fan, before anything [else], of the Bay Area music scene, which actually inspired me to create my own music.

Kings Wear Crowns is the current project that you released in April. What was the overall concept of this album? What goals did you want to achieve? 

Kings Wear Crowns in entirety is a mixtape that I wanted to show my abilities on…show that my potential is something special. An artist with ability to not only push in Cali but to stand out in other markets. The title is inspired by the belief that we are all born kings. As far as the concept with this project, I wanted to continue to build up my core fanbase, give them a few angles of how I viewed the world at the time I was recording. I want my fans to be able to grow with me. I hate putting expectations out because even that can limit growth. I’m just here trusting my struggle.

You didn’t have the easiest life coming up. If you could, go into some of the obstacles you faced and the effect that it has had on your music up to this point in your career.

I’ve had ups and downs. From the day I was born, I was diagnosed with VSD [Ventricular Septal Defect], basically having a hole in my heart. I was told early that I wouldn’t make it to eighteen if I hadn’t receive the surgery needed. I never had it. I was told I wouldn’t be able to do half the things that I’ve done so beat the odds of life in my mind. I’ve been homeless. I’ve had more than two handfuls of friends murdered, just by living to survive. We live to learn and learn to live, right? But on the flip I was also blessed to have sports as an escape. Football and boxing are probably why I’ve been able to manage my own demons. Those same demons I’m speaking of are leading into the next project I’m working on, where I’m not only speaking on the lifestyle but the emotion involved in my life since ’88, the year I was born.

How do you think you’ve grown musically and personally from your last project to the one you’re currently working on, ‘88 Hooligans?

I think with content, flow, delivery, subject matter. Each album I want to get deeper on the message I’m trying to deliver. As I get older, things change. I experience more, so the content will always continue to grow. I want this album to sound like a soundtrack to the person who had a troubled past. If you experienced what it’s like to be from an inner city, the feeling of struggle, pain and anger aren’t the feelings people talk about. I want to give that through my own material, my own experience and hopefully spark the mind of people who relate, to want more for themselves.

Do you think this upcoming project could potentially help a wayward child growing up in your area? If so, how do you think this can help?

Like I said, I want the things that I’ve experienced, the things that have hindered me to be a reality, not saying my life was any worse than the next person living theirs, but just for younger people from this area to connect with somebody that came from the same things they may have/are going through.

Being from the Bay, I’m sure you’re familiar with Oscar Grant. Have you seen the Fruitvale Station film and if so, what are your thoughts on it?

Fruitvale Station was powerful, I didn’t see a person leave the theater without tears or at least water in their eyes. I feel like the timing was perfect with the Trayvon Martin case also going on. Being from the Bay, living in the actual city where it took place made that movie feel that much more real. It made me feel like any one of my homies could have been Oscar Grant that night on the BART. The Oscar Grant story also puts it into perspective how the justice system is only meant to affect us but that’s a whole other topic.

Has Oscar’s story had any effect on your music, if so what kind?

Not only the Oscar Grant story, but all the problems stemming from growing up in the society filled with injustice from our own justice system, racism but most importantly the mindless black on black/brown on brown murders that take place in cities like this everyday have effected me more so as a man. It has inspired me musically to change my approach, for the fans that do listen to YOGY. We need the guidance because we grew up in an era without fathers, without leaders. I just want to represent the real reality of our culture. I can name way more people doing bad or living average then I could living like the videos & movies. All in all, prayers are with Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and anybody that was taken away before their time.

What advice would you give to a kid growing up in Oakland and wants to be a recording artist?

Eliminate the word “CAN’T”.

You’ve been fortunate enough to open for some of the biggest acts in music. Have you learned any valuable lessons from them that you can apply to your own career?

Show sets are important. Stand out. The energy that you leave with the people in that building is everything. Connection and engagement are everything.

Adding on to that question, where do you see yourself in the next few years? Will you be expanding your reach into different areas or anything like that?

I have so many things I want to accomplish not only in music but in acting, fashion, even video game design. I’m ambitious. I’m always thinking of ways to change the scope of shit.

Tell me something that your listeners may not know about you.

I got a thing for Jhene Aiko….[laughs]

The post Interview: YOGY Speaks On His Struggles, Plans For The Future & Oscar Grant appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.