By Eric Solomon | March 15, 2000
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| A bold new flava: The Gift of Gab and
Chief X-Cel of Blackalicious |
Buy Blackalicious's music
Visit Blackalicious's Label
Quannum
Read Choler's review of Nia
Read Choler's review of
Blazing Arrow
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As members of the Bay Area's Quannum Collective, the hip-hop crew that includes the dynamic duo Latyrx (Lateef and Lyrics Born) and the esteemed DJ Shadow, Chief X-Cel and the Gift of Gab, a.k.a. Blackalicious, might be in danger of fading into the background. Then again, few groups are able to build a solid reputation on the strength of a single EP. Blackalicious' 1994 Melodica EP displayed an incredible range of styles, from the soul-searching "40 Oz. for Breakfast" to the abstract battle rhyming -- MCs trying to outdo one another with perpetually sharper rhymes -- of "Lyric Fathom." The collection fastened itself firmly to underground legend status and made damn sure that the duo would never be outshone by their cohorts. And that was before the release of a subsequent EP, featuring the alphabet aerobics of "A to G," that really whetted the appetite for Blackalicious's first full-length album, Nia -- which, by all accounts, has even surpassed the high expectations surrounding its release.
The Quannum crew came together at the University of California, Davis, campus radio station, KDVS. It was there that Gab and X-Cel teamed up with Latyrx and DJ Shadow to form Solesides, the hip-hop crew that bowled critics over with a string of singles, Shadow's Endtroducing and Latyrix's self-titled LP before moving its base of operations to Oakland, Calif., and morphing into Quannum.
Flush from the success of their introductory Spectrum compilation (1999), Quannum aims to take over in the double-naught, with Blackalicious's Nia appearing as the first wave of their assault. "Nia," as Gab will tell you, means "purpose" in Swahili, and that's exactly what this crew is all about: purpose in life, in music, and maintaining focus on that purpose. Of course, it's not all about the struggle; Gab's balance between the playful and serious keeps Blackalicious from the preachiness that has doomed some other rap prophets.
Shortly before the unveiling of Nia, Choler dispatched special agent Eric Solomon to Quannum headquarters in Oakland, Calif., to interrogate Gab and X-Cel on their plans for global domination. In the process, he uncovered information on their past in Davis, their feelings on live events (specifically, a recent show in Oakland, involving Eve, Ginuwine, Juvenile and the Hot Boys, that ended in a riot and a load of erroneous media flap) and their continuing efforts to add a little flavor to the world of hip-hop.
Eric Solomon: I want to start back in Davis, Calif., because [Choler.com editor] Sean Flinn actually worked at [University of California, Davis, radio station] KDVS as a DJ.
Gift of Gab: What year?
From '93 to '97. He did industrial-type stuff, so you might not have run into him. I was just looking at my Melodica EP, looking at that P.O. Box in Davis for Solesides, and I was wondering about the transition going from Davis to the Oakland Bay Area, from Solesides to Quannum. How much of that was geography, getting out of Davis, which has a lot of cows but not a big hip-hop scene?
Chief X-Cel: I think the whole change was just the result of growth on every level, leaving Davis because we all graduated. School was really our only reason to be there in the first place, so after I graduated, I moved up to [Sacramento, Calif.] for a minute. Lyrics Born and Shadow all graduated a year after me, so they were still there. Gab was still in Davis, and Lateef was still going to school. Lateef actually graduated last year, but he transferred down to [the University of California, Berkeley]. It was just a chapter, you know what I'm sayin'? [We] went there for a purpose, and we just fulfilled what we needed to do, so it was time to move on, you know?
Gab: It was kind of like -- Davis was like a concentration camp, to get away from everything and feel each other artistically. We all had the same kind of vision, and it was a way to escape everything and get into our own world. But I think you should only do that for so long, you know what I mean? And I think that it was a good amount of time for that and to come back out here, whereas out here life moves a bit faster, so maybe the things you write about, even though we was in Davis, we were writing about the situations we were in before we were in Davis. But I think it was a good place for us to get into a cocoon of some sorts. That's what Solesides was, was us getting into our cocoon and building on a cocoon, and I think Quannum is more like the butterfly now. So that's the change between Solesides and Quannum, or Davis to the Bay Area. I would equate it like that.
I guess you guys are pretty large out in Europe. You were put out on Mo' Wax, so you had distribution out there, so I wanted to get your thoughts on the hip-hop scene out there versus here -- especially with this concert. Did you hear about the Oakland Coliseum thing?
X-Cel: Yeah. To a large degree, it's the same, for the most part. I hate when incidents like that happen, like the one you're speaking of, 'cause it's bad for hip-hop in general. There can be 50 shows in the Bay Area within four months, and they all go down cool with no incidents.
Gab: But they don't get in the paper, though.
X-Cel: And then one happens, or two, 'cause they blew the Jay-Z one at the Maritime out of proportion.
That went pretty smoothly.
X-Cel: Yeah, but it's been like that since the beginning, since '84 and '85 when they were having Fresh Festivals, you know, fights and incidents, right there at the Coliseum. And again, it doesn't matter how many dope shows go on, it's the one. If the same shit happened at a Blink-182 concert, then it'd be some other shit.
Gab: [Sarcastically] What went wrong, what went wrong?
X-Cel: They wouldn't even talk about it, you know, just, "The kids were in the mosh pit; boys will be boys." It's the same overseas. You can have 50 good shows, and you can have one bad incident. Case in point, last year, I guess Busta was playing at a show in London, and for whatever reason, customs wouldn't let him through. So they had to cancel the show, and they had a huge riot -- actually, it was two years ago --they tore the shit apart, and as a result, that whole thing is put on hip-hop. [Fewer] promoters want to book hip-hop, but we've always been faced with those changes, and it's just difficult when it happens at that magnitude 'cause it's really hard to get hip-hop in arenas. In the late '80s -- and it stopped in the early '90s -- it was the last that you saw really big tours, L.L., Eric B. and Rakim, Stetsasonic, Run DMC, y'know, being able to play arenas. Now, the only way you can get them is if you're cross-billed with an [R&B] artist like Ginuwine or Mary J. Blige or whatever. So it's just disheartening to see.
Gab: Fans are fans, wherever you go. We get the same kind of energy overseas that we get over here, and it'll just take one knucklehead or one idiot, whether it be out here or overseas or anywhere, for it to cause some trouble. But for us, for the most part, we get that universal feel from the people in the audience, so on that level, it's not really a thing where it's different; it shows us how universal everything is.
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