AN INTERVIEW WITH RHYS LANGSTON

What came first for you: learning and being interested in writing, or in music?

I would say I also had an interest in words and interest in writing. I was fortunate enough to go to a public school that did have music programs, though. For the younger kids, we had these sing-alongs that we learned, and we did, like, acapella renditions of them. That was elementary school. We also had an elementary school orchestra. I was the only kid in elementary school orchestra who played electric bass. It was, like, really the only time in my life I really formally ever played instruments. I don't really know how to read music anymore, so I peaked in fifth grade instrumentally­—in terms of being a concert bassist perhaps. But in terms of consciously being interested in things I could say, I never really got music. I was just like, “I like it, but this is just way too difficult to try and learn anything.” For me, it was not as intuitive. So writing was definitely the way in. I think like, rapping particularly and whatever offshoot I've taken from rapping into what I do now, like in other genre explorations, that seemed, like, the most sensible, because I was like, “Well, I have all these ideas. And there's a musical way I can put them in there.” So writing first, and they kind of work side by side. Writing was a little bit forward for a minute, then music kind of came into the picture. I think when you're in your teens, it's becomes a cool thing to be interested in music. It's a social signifier.

When you think about things that influenced you, and your most recent album, are you drawn to writers, rappers, or specific sounds? Or are you interested in the intersection of those things?

 Yeah I mean, for me, you know, I also work in visual art and stuff. The hair on that album cover is my real hair epoxy resin-ed on. I've always been someone who is really process-based, so I like working in whatever medium I'm working in. With writing, it’s like getting into just the ins and outs of the grammar, the language, and stuff and with music like programming drums playing out parts, laying them over each other. But the ideas are always very central. Sometimes there'll be moments when I hear something and I'm like, “Oh, I really liked that juxtaposition to where this person overlaid the drums to this other part of it. And I often find that I’m interested in the randomness of everyday conversation, random events, and random occurrences out in the world.

Tying that into Language Arts Unit, that felt like a massive project, and a big undertaking, at least from the outside. How have you been able to move past that and work on new things?

 Yeah, I guess, you know, with creation and doing thing, I think in this world, it's easy for those to become the next project is a commodity. I’m not even trying to say this in terms of like, some Marxist shit, but like, the next project is a commodity, and therefore, everything has to be like, packaged and bundled and working on something towards the next thing. And oftentimes, that is true. Things just kind of, naturally snowball do work on them. And I've been lucky to have stuff ready. I think, you know, like, even though it's a very different time right now, I have managed to keep up creating, keep creating, keep doing things. I look at it as a habitual thing, and it's hard. Sometimes it'll be, you know, four or five days, I don't feel like I'm really doing much. But I think there's like an accumulative or cumulative way that I just keep doing stuff, and I think I'm always have a mind to certain ideas or, like a certain focus, not even a focus, maybe even a lack of focus lens on things, um, that I'm always working through, you know, trust in myself. I was working on projects in between working on Language Arts Unit. I put out Language Arts Unit and then last year, I put out this three track, I wouldn't call it parody, SoundCloud rap, but like a little bit more of like, owning the conventions. Then playing with the conventions of like SoundCloud rap, I was working on that in the midst of working on Language Arts Unit and one of the songs actually on that was supposed to be on Language Arts Unit, but just didn't really get done in time. So, there's a way that like, things are incremental, and they build up. But another thing about that is, for a while it took me a moment to understand just how depressing it was to put out this major thing. The day of my show, L.A. had announced that the following day, they would be closing everything down. So, I actually pulled the plug on my release show. And I was like, “It's not gonna happen. People might come out because technically it's not the day yet, but whatever.” So I've been dealing with the burn of that, and I think it's helped that I've had things in the works, you know, like this project. And Stalin Bollywood is like, coming out now or coming out very soon. This had some drippings, you know, of the early, early singles and stuff from it out. Some of the stuff I was working on 2018, you know, in 2019, same time, I was like, editing the book of Language Arts Unit, and working on the mixes and stuff like that, and also writing new songs for Language Arts Unit, too. So, it's something where, you know, it's been hard, especially in the last year, it's been really, really, really difficult to be like, “I'm doing this. I'm doing this in a forward motion.” I just feel like, “Oh, am I making anything right now. This thing I put my whole life into got blown out by a dead organism that is, you know, mutating and requires a vaccination,” you know? I think what's helped is having things already in motion. And being able, when I'm frustrated at the beginning of things, to be able to look back and be in the middle of something else. So it's like, “If I can't feel like birthing this totally, let me nurture this other thing. Then the other thing, I don't want to be in the middle of this, oh, wow, this is almost close to being done. Let me like, work on this.” So having things many things are very, very different stages, being able to jump between those stages.

What are you personally most proud of? Language Arts Unit, or even anything that you've been working on in the last year?

I think what I've been most proud of has changed now. I have things I'm working on that I'm very, very proud of, but for a while it was Language Arts Unit, the book, and the audio. Even like, the cover art, you know, is a whole other dimension. I was like, “Damn, if I never put anything out, people wouldn’t know that I can do all these things.” And it's partially an ego trip, and partially just like, “You know, there's a lot for people to come through here.” Theoretically, if I stopped putting any music out, there would be enough to communicate a world. I think for this project, there was a threshold that I pierced in terms of being able to completely do something myself and be self-sufficient. I didn't produce every song. I produced about seven and a half out of the eleven and a half songs, because one track has two tracks on it. All those I mixed from start to finish. I made them sound like I paid someone thousands of dollars to make them, and I can confidently say, it feels really good that I had less resources than I do now. I made something I feel like someone would pay like ten grand to get mixed by someone else. Not because that number equals how good it sounds, but because of the amount of effort and the amount of money that professional mixing requires. There's a level of also maturity to the music too. I don't think there's anything wrong with being immature, but there's a level of maturity that I think was in this project that I really feel really good about, you know? I just think everything seemed really intentional and I like the intentionality of it. Things can be really abstract, and things can be somewhat difficult. But it feels like there are grooves for everything to be placed in—to a certain extent.

That makes sense, especially in context with the new project. To me, Stalin Bollywood is a lot more abstract, at least on the first couple of listens. Could you talk about why you wanted to explore a new direction, and what inspired this new album?

Yeah, for sure. I talked about this with someone else who was asking me about it, and I think it bears repeating when anyone has asked me about this, whether it's casually or whether it's in a format like this. I really realized how many different influences I had that I didn't know, or rather, I wasn't able to articulate. I wasn't musically savvy enough to. Finally, you know, I think I'm getting more and more in control of what I'm able to do and kind of communicate new sound. So for me, this was like another way to talk about thresholds, you know, like breaking through another kind of boundary where it's like, “Huh, I can take it out of this entire box that I've already been taking another box out of. I think it was paying homage to a lot of the music that I grew up with that I don't think I felt comfortable enough musically, but like also personally, to be able to share. You know, just a lot of rock music, a lot of vintage rock music, a lot of post punk music, a lot of new waves. Just like kind of, you know, stuff that is more experimental. I felt like I stretched hip-hop out in many different ways. This is still hip-hop. I'm still rapping, but it was like, okay, especially writing Language Arts Unit, you know, I was very much communicating what it is to make hip-hop in the maelstrom of appropriation, post appropriation, algorithmic capitalism, yadda, yadda, yadda. Let me see what I can do trying to insert myself in another context. I think it just kind of happened naturally, where I was trying to play a bit more bass guitar and being like, “Well, if I can play bass, I should try the guitar. I suck. But alright, let me just keep going with it.” I was just really working and grabbing what I could, I think.

 That's pretty interesting to think about. I can definitely see that genre blurring, and I think that's really present on the new album as well. On the lyrical front, you dive into a bunch of controversial topics on the new album.

I had to push back the release of one of the videos, which was for the first track, which is the track “Hoes on My Dick,” because I look like a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, I understand that can be seen as Islamophobic. And I'm certainly playing with the limits at which we pick things apart, you know, I mean, I can come out and say right now that lyric, if you look at in the context, you know, “Hoes on my dick,” because it looks like a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad. Get blasphemous and get hard, quick, you know, that’s the full thing. I'm basically personifying blasphemy itself. I'm not saying, you know, this is what Islam does. I'm not saying that the Prophet Muhammad deserves to be drawn out or anything. I'm saying, I am blessed to be personified. I was about to put that video out. I got a calendar, and I looked at it and said, “Let's put it out the 14th of April.” And I was like, “Oh, wait, the 13th of April is Ramadan. Let me wait another week.” You know, but I think there's a lot of punk music that criticizes religion, because a lot of companies that came into Europe and the Western European tradition of the church, you know, even though a lot of those countries secularized, that tradition is on the ground there, and so a lot of foundational punk music would fuck around with religious desecration. And I was like, “Hmm, let me do that in a way that feels modern or like contemporary.” You know, I think someone was talking to me about the second track, which is “the pope is a(n unrepentant) rapist.” And he's like, “Well, you know, it's difficult because like, the word rapist has kind of sailed in terms of its effectiveness, in terms of being able to be cavalier with it.” And I said, “You're right.” You know, because there's a certain thing where you have to realize, right, you know, it's like, I'm saying this for shock value, but what is a shock value leading to? I'm gonna just see what people say about me, just what people say about a lot of things. I basically go from playing with blasphemy around Islam without critiquing Islam, on the first track, then I go to, you know, calling out rape apologists in the Vatican on track two. On track three, I call out, Zionism and certainly modern settler colonialism and foreign aid, you know, in the Levant region of the world and the Mediterranean. And then from there, you know, it gets broken open. I think to a certain extent, those three things I thought about retroactively, I think I was just working through it. We’re in the golden age of controversy, if you will, you know. You need like a sex tape or you need to be cancelled so that people who are bigots will buy your shit, or whatever. Donald Trump was president. He was almost president second time, you know. People just love shock. They love being angry. A lot of the times—most of times—for good reason. The paradigm is in this like constant revving up, this constant need for ire. I thought about it and I was like, “Huh, how could this be interesting to frame what we think about now as a golden age of controversy, right? What was like the original controversy?” I was like, “Hmm, maybe it was like heresy, you know, being a heretic, being a pariah in that way. If early societies, more so that our now religion is interlinked with institutional authoritarian, monarch, monarchical power. The first controversies were heresies. They were misinterpretations of religious ideas, willful misinterpretations maybe sounds like, “Okay, let me start off that way.” Um, or maybe I'm putting that on it retroactively? Because I was just like, I like how these flows come back.

What do you think adding these contrasts within the lyrics of your project add on?

I think in line with that there's a certain level of natural visceral shock that I think has already come to people from hearing you know, the first thing that's been out. I think, being artfully misdirecting or taking someone on a winding path, whether that's in the lyrics or that's in the track listing was one of the things that I really enjoyed about creating Language Arts Unit. It was like a catalog of styles that things were directly contrast to each other. It'd be like some kind of throaty singing and then there would be shouting or whatever.

I think one of the major contrasts is the last track on the record, which is like a kind of mumbled weird shoegaze little track that I put together. That was recorded entirely on the guitar, except for the main vocals. I was tapping on the guitar bridge for the drum beat. I'm doing a lot of the other things, and I realized that the main pickup on the guitar right could actually pick up my voice if I went into it loud enough. So I was like having the effects would be drawn out of it. Sonically you know, this song is called “talkbox/polemics.” The whole project is this just like, “Are these polemics? Are these rapid-fire? Just like incendiary things that I'm saying. But on that track, you know, I freestyle everything so I don’t really know what the fuck I was saying, I listened back. I'm like, “Sounds like a word. Yeah, sounds like a word. I'm gonna say that word.”