|
|
 |
Buck 65
 When Buck 65 (Ricardo Terfry) answers the phone for an interview, he's just beginning of the tour for his 1957-themed album 'Situation'. In a van travelling through Arizona, the first thing he talks about is driving out across the desert in the warm night underneath a sky full of stars. Not the sort of observation you'd expect most rappers to make, and what's more his voice is genuine with appreciation for the calm and beauty.
"I think it's completely fair to say that I'm a real romantic, very nostalgic kind of person. It's been a very common theme through all my records, to reminisce back to my childhood and the small town I grew up in, and simpler times. I enjoy a lot of old-fashioned stuff. Old music, old movies. That sense of belief in magic, and in mysteries and wonder has always been a big part of me. In one form or another I find it's that side of me that's been showing itself in records pretty much from the start."
Deftly performing some on-the-spot mathematics, I realise it's impossible that Terfry grew up in the 50s, and that he must have combined his own sense of personal history with the more objective kind of past that the 50s inhabit. The record is themed around the decade, although in a lot of the songs, Terfry's voice sounds like it's speaking steadily out of the paranoia of the Red Scare.
"In 1957 there was this real explosion of ideas and energy, people started breaking away taboos. And now here we are 50 years later where it seems there are very few walls left. It almost feels to me that as a long-term consequence of this that we've lost our innocence. It's very exciting and maybe even necessary for people to learn from the processes of these things that happened in '57. That's what it takes for us to learn or maybe even advance."
Buck 65's music uses hip-hop as a reference point, and then stretches the borders of the genre until he's got a product that still sounds like hip-hop, but doesn't exhibit any of the images or ideas typically associated with it. 'Situation' has the staples - breaks, samples, scratches and of course rapping - but it manages to form its own kind of self-identifying aesthetic. Maybe that's a contradiction for a genre built on fragments of everything around the artist, but you get the impression that Buck 65 doesn't really care about whether you could call it hip-hop or not, although he does stay diplomatic.
"If there's one thing I've known for a long time, it's the age-old adage that you can't make everybody happy all the time," Terfry speaks slowly. "I remember with my record 'Talkin' Honky Blues' a lot of people said, 'where did the hip-hop element go?' and there was this segment of people who were bemoaning this thing they were pining for, what they'd gotten used to. Now with this new record, there's another of group of people going 'where did all the lush soundscapes go?'"
"But with regards to hip-hop in general, well the music that I fell in love with in 1986 is very different from the music that's being produced now. It's not really fair to compare them, either, but what I think it boils down to is that it's become so difficult to define. I'm a guy that could listen to a DJ scratch all night long, I'm nerdy like that, but I don't think there's a person alive that would say that DJ Q-Bert does and what Sage Francis does and what Soulja Boy does is the same thing."
In the middle of the desert during the interview, Buck 65 had also been away from his partner for a while and said that missing her and being awed by the environment were two kinds of conflicting emotions he feels constantly and is inspired by when it comes to music.
"I'm a man in love at the moment, and I'm missing my girlfriend and I can't stop thinking about it, but at the same time I'm sitting here contemplating the majesty of this enormous desert. I can't separate that from the fact that I'm missing my girlfriend, and if I write a song all those elements are going to come together. I just try to feel, and to write that down as honestly as I can, I'm not going to try to force them down one tunnel."
Ben Ford-Smith
'Situation' is out now on Warner
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
