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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Dabrye: Motor City mech-hop
Wednesday 12 July @ 12:50:10 |
 by Steve McPherson
Producer Tadd Mullinix will only allow two official pronounciations of the title of his hip-hop alter ego Dabrye- DAH-bree or dah-BRAY, for the record. When a man has many aliases (besides Dabrye, Mullinix makes music under the names James T. Cotton, SK-1 and several others), you start to wonder where a name like Dabrye comes from.
“Out of my ass, man,” explains Mullinix with a laugh via phone from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I just totally pulled it straight out of there. I just put letters together- it’s a graffiti technique of just throwing letters together and seeing what looks good. The phonetics are probably all wrong the way I say it, but I don’t care.”
Mullinix may have cut his teeth with electronic music ranging from acid techno to pure abstract electronic experimentation, but his newest album, Two/Three, is the kind of hip-hop project he’s long been out to craft. Hearing him talk about the joint Ann Arbor/Detroit scene he’s come out of, it’s hard not to hear echoes of the Minneapolis/St. Paul hip-hop scene.
“I can specifically say from the Detroit angle that there’s a lot of talent in Detroit and it’s been slept on,” says Mullinix- and not without a hint of acrimony. “I mean [producer] Jay Dee finally has a [magazine] cover- that’s Wax Poetics- it’s just so ridiculous to me that it’s taken this long and his death to finally be on a magazine cover. It’s definitely slept on. California and New York have an automatic tradition to fall back on in that people are already oriented to those sounds, but I think Kanye and a lot of other people are coming out of the Midwest and I think we’re gonna bust out of that whole problem.”
The shadow of James Yancey, aka Jay Dee aka J Dilla, looms large over Mullinix. Yancey was already a legend in the hip-hop world when he passed away last February from complications associatedwith lupus at the age of 32, but mainstream recognition of his talents had been slow in coming despite his key role in producing epochal tracks for everyone from Tribe Called Quest to D’Angelo to his own work with Slum Village and projects like the MadLib collaboration JayLib.
The heart of Dabrye’s album is his collaboration with Jay Dee that closes the album. “Game Over” was the first track recorded for the album and showcases Mullinix’s uniquely glitchy take on Jay Dee’s soulful beatmaking. The backing track is all fuzzy and brown, analog synths burbling up while bent bells bounce up and down before messy accordions come in to provide the counterpoint to the theme. Above this, Jay Dee displays his underrated vocal talents with fellow emcee Phat Kat, but his greatest contribution, whether it’s actually his work or just his influence working through Mullinix, is in the beat itself. Composed of nothing more than a boxy bass drum and a clutch of handclaps, the rhythm track has Dilla’s loose groove fingerprints all over it, and this is where his legacy is most evident on Two/Three.
People with little experience with hip-hop tend to think that its reliance on samples and beats over live instrumentation makes it mechanical, and for them, Two/Three is a great lesson in how to breathe life into the music by making it messy. Take instrumental track “Jorgy”: nothing in the track is quantized, and eighth notes from the piano and drums fall into the cracks left by the unsteady bass, much like the claps from “Game Over” that refuse to conform to a metronome. I mean, we’re talking about some seriously FAT notes here; notes that spill over onto their neighbors, bumping shoulders like folks at a summer barbecue. It’s the essential character of what makes soul music such sticky good eating, and you have to wonder what people who don’t “get” hip-hop are talking about when they say it’s not music. They must be talking about the pop rap that’s as far from what Dabrye is doing as Celine Dion.
“When someone sells out, it’s obvious,” says Mullinix when we start talking about where the line between the underground and the mainstream really lies. “Like the Black Eyed Peas. Back in the day they used to rhyme about how wack it was to dumb down your lyrics and then what did they do? They sold out. You can compare their lyrics and they used to be dissing exactly what they’re doing now. Basically, to me, that tells me whether someone’s selling out or whether they’re no longer underground, but there’s still so many artists in the mainstream that people who like underground hip-hop are still into. So I don’t know if there’s really a sonic quality that goes along with whether something’s mainstream or not.”
Whether it’s something that’s palatable to more mainstream ears or not, Mullinix has definitely staked out a distinct sonic territory. Bulding from that rhythmic foundation of nudging things around the beat, he layers in electronic textures that add uneasiness and a subtle amount of menace to the proceedings. It’s not exactly uncharted territory, as anyone who’s spent time with El-P’s productions can attest, but where stuff from the Def Jux label has a kind of mechanical, lurching, killer robot feel to it, Dabrye has crafted an entirely fleshier cyborg here. The synths here may have been crafted in factories in the 1970s, but Dabrye has dug them out of the junkyard and reheated them in a broke-ass toaster, and their gently warmed-over character keeps the mechanization as an overtone, rather than as the dominant color.
Of course, the music on a hip-hop album is only half the battle; Mullinix was fortunate enough to amass an able cast of emcees for Two/Three. “I made a wishlist and then the label took that,” explains Mullinix matter-of-factly when I ask about how the collaborations came about. He scored big with a couple of names in independent hip-hop, including Rhymesayers artist MF Doom, Vast Aire from Cannibal Ox, Beans (formerly of Anti-Pop Consortium) and, on the best track on the disc, AG.
“My Life,” on which Andre Barnes aka AG relates the story of his upbringing in New York City, is not distinguished by its subject matter- there are plenty of autobiographical hip-hop tracks out there. What really elevates it are the unmoored stabs of guitar that open the track and the skeletal drums that barely support them. Without bass or other supporting instruments, the ultra-compressed and fractured chords seem ominous, but when the support finally comes in in the form of swirling organ, the brittle clusters turn melancholy and the song opens up into a swoon under AG’s intoned, “But now it’s good.” Following the hard-luck story of the verse, the interlude both lifts up the song and acts as a hedge against future tough times. If “Game Over” is Two/Three’s heart, then “My Life” is its cracked soul.
“It’s necessary, man,” says Mullinix in the midst of talking about Two/Three’s status as Ghostly International’s first true hip-hop release. “You just need to keep pushing the envelope and try[ing] to do something unique.” For a man with at least three other alter-egos, a raga/jungle label called Rewind, production work for the Dirty Criminals and an ear for finding the ghost in the machine when it comes to melding soul and technology, pushing the envelope doesn’t seem to be a problem. ||
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