To Be on Your Own, But Not a Complete Unknown
Melissa Wheeler
Beans Loses Home Moorings, but keeps his vision
New York-based abstract rapper/producer Beans is temporarily homeless."I got kicked out," is all he says by way of explanation of why he is bedding down in a hotel in his hometown of New York City a day after stepping off a tour with the Unicorns.
Later he will narrowly elaborate, but many tracks on his second solo album on Warp, Now Soon Someday, have already ratted him out. On top of trademark sparse, old-school aesthetic beats to background his rapid-fire rhyme style, lyrics allude to the strife the fecund and dexterous rapper has endured in past months. Take for example Win or Lose You Lose:
"Will cigarettes be the death of me?/ Lungs screaming happy emphysema/ smoke when I'm depressed helps relieve stress/ a part-time father a baby's mother/ can't be bothered couldn't be/ the man she need of me/ she can be frivolous/ so hope rest in the eyes of our daughter/ Sanura I'm a stranger in her aura."
"I'm a pretty introspective person, and believe it or not I'm very personal and vulnerable with my lyrics," he said.
"I talk a lot about what's happening in my life at the moment ... that album is pretty current. I was dealing with a lot when that was happening. If you listen to Win or Lose You Lose, that whole first verse is talking about Anti Pop breaking up, talking about not seeing my daughter anymore, talking about not even having a place to live. Gold Skull was written as an argument with my daughter's mother. Yeah, to be honest, it is one of the more personal
ones, for me. Well, Crevice is the most personal."Crevice is the story of Beans dealing with the death of his father when he was around 10 years old, which he says he "didn't take too well."
After his father died, he became interested in the military and joined the Naval Sea Cadets.
"I wanted to be a mercenary for a minute," he says, and starts laughing.
"Get paid to kill people to get over how I was feeling."
That didn't last, and Beans returned to the creativity he had always manifested. As a kid, before the passing of his dad, he can remember being a devout Kiss fan and begging his mom for the make up, dolls and records. He would rope his younger brother and sister into putting on the makeup and using tennis rackets for guitars.
Despite these early indications, music and writing wouldn't become his focus until his last year of high school. His father, a nurse by profession with a passion for writing poetry, introduced him to comic books and the young Beans used drawing as an early creative outlet.
After the death of his dad, he "really started to mess up in school," so for high school he went to a small arts school in New York City. It was then that his fashion sense emerged to reflect his unconventional artistic drive. Beans bounced to a public school halfway through Grade12, and it was his last year in that public school where he slipped into the music stream.
"I went to this Black Expo, this convention for independent black businesses, where I put my name in a draw and won a how-to-DJ-scratch video," he recalls. "My brother was like, 'It's a sign! It's a sign!'
But a friend who knew my financial situation said it was cheaper to just write."
And so Beans began to write, and kept on throughout his half-year in Atlanta studying graphic design at the American College for the Applied Arts, and then over the next few years in the Connecticut Institute of Art, studying commercial and graphic design.
It was around this time that he met Nine, a poet at the beginning of her career, who introduced him to the poetry scene.
"Poetry allowed me to become more expressive in terms of how it's said, because at that time my only influence from music was from straight-up hip-hop and I was trying to find other things to hear," he says. "But I was really searching for other ways to do things. I was pretty bored even back then, and what poetry did was open me up to how to say things differently."
The first time Beans presented one of his poems was at a Nuyorican Poets slam in New York City, but it was the first time he read at one of the Rap Meets Poetry events at the Fez club in NYC that he would meet his future Anti Pop Consortium collaborators High Priest, M. Sayyid and E. Blaize.
That was the early 1990s, and it wasn't until 1997 that they began to work together, putting out a series of five cassettes on Anti Pop records called consortiums, and starting the infamous "Disturb the equilibrium. Anti Pop Records. We will crush you," sticker campaign.
They released four albums before breaking up in August 2002, an event which was squarely blamed on Beans.
"If you listen to it, I didn't contribute much to Anti Pop," he says. "It is Priest and Sayyid on production and vocally. I mean, I did a verse here and there, but I didn't have a direct input because I always wanted to do my own thing. I work better by myself, and now I don't have any concessions to make."
BEANS W/ TORTOISE AND FOUR TET
EXCLAIM! 12TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY
FRIDAY, APRIL 16 AT 8 P.M., $16 ADV.
CAPITAL MUSIC HALL
Was this show Rap or Spoken Word?
Beans Stole the show on Friday night at Capitol music hall. Tortoise was good, REALLY GOOD, but Beans was like nothing I have seen before. His Lyrics were amazing (though he rapped so fast it was hard to make them out). Trying to put it in words is difficult but I don't remember seeing a person do those thing with words and breath before. It was a very fast, Ragga, rap, poetic, Breath of Fire hold-up. No-one looked away while he was on stage.
The crowd stood and stared. eventually clapped, and did nothing to make the man do an encore.
Beans is by far the best rap show to EVER hit Ottawa. Who knew there is still original talent in the hip-hop scene. Just when you think they have done it all, one man takes you back to the Seventies and shows you how it is supposed to be done.
It just goes to show originality will not come from technology but from a person who can express the most complicated things in the most basic forms (without the Vulgarity).
How did this show not sell out? And how can people stand and stare at music SOOOO good and not move a muscle? I am not complaining, once we started dancing people just moved out of our way. We had the best seats in the house with loads of room all night long.
|
|
Kyle Fisher
|
{8 votes}
|
|
|
New York-based abstract rapper/producer Beans is no idiot. Far from it, in fact.
Rap artists get this rep for being hissin' & pissin' posers who seem to have a mad-on for world that did them wrong. The system did this. My pops did that. Screw the world. Here me roar. It's an old tune that we all know well. Rap artists weren't the first to embrace this frustrated at their lives/willfully fighting to make their own fate crap. Listen to a few rock n' roll or punk albums and you'll see what I mean.
Beans spent some time here but has moved on to much deeper stuff. He's mined his life with a maturity that wasn't there before. He's hardly the wise old man on the mountain top but he's finally shown that forward motion that has long been hinted at. Some artists just cannot evolve is closed environments, Beans is one of those. His ended partnership is blessing in disguise.
The article is quite illuminating. If you think rap artists have no depth to them then I'd suggest the you re-read this article and some of Beans' lyrics.
|
|
Pedro Eggers
|
{2 votes}
|
|
|
This article left me with a saddness...I feel that Beans needs a big break. His determination and will for music wants to thrive. He is better to be out on his own and to make his emotions and feelings known to the world through his music. He has gone through hardships and with the death of his father...turning his life inside out..sent him off in an unknown direction. His determination to work toward a music career has come through and with his poetic background..the lyrics he will produce and set forth for us to hear will make him a star in his own right. They say he is an abstract rapper...guess this is where Kiss came into play....can't get any more abstract than the group KISS....getting his sister and brother to do it up and play the ol tennis rackets..shows me that his music was real and his fantasy was in there. Now he has flourished it into his rap...a job well done. I give praise and recommendation to Beans for his hard work and not giving up....on your own you will climb...keep writing those poetic lyrics. Poetry is a key to all great musicians. I really liked this article.
|
|
Jennifer Berardini
|
{1 vote}
|
|
|
