The Grouch Set to Leave Paradise for West Coast Tour

Over the past decade, Oakland, Calif. native The Grouch has proven to be the embodiment of the independent musician. Alongside his crew the Living Legends, Grouch built an underground empire from the ground up, building a reputation by pounding the pavement with dope product, selling his music to fans hand-to-hand. He always made himself visible and bridged the often-murky area between supplier and consumer. Hustle aside, it was his music that resonated with fans. Instead of a fast food filling, Grouch based his lyrics in reality—honest and candid, intelligent and insightful. Through 10 solo albums, five group collaborations and more than a handful of Living Legends projects, Grouch has never led fans astray. An inspiration for anyone looking to make it happen by doing it their way, his career has shown that hard work and dedication go a long way.

In support of How the Grouch Stole Christmas, his aptly titled 11-city West Coast tour, the man whose fuzzy 4-track songs I once put on a Maxell mixtape spoke from his newly settled island paradise on topics ranging from modern-day subsistence living to Dr. Seuss—and of course, music.

I understand you’re out in Hawaii at the moment. Is that for work or pleasure?
Nah, I’m living out here doing the family life, growing vegetables and chillin’. Working of course, every day, all day, grinding over the Internet and over the telephone. It’s not a permanent thing, I don’t think, but we like it out here a lot so we wanted to give it a trial period. We were supposed to stay six months, but at the end of the six months we were like, we got to go for another six months. We’re taking it as it comes.

You said growing vegetables, are you really on some subsistence level shit out there or what?
Nah, we’re just living. We’re staying at a house that get its water from the rain and has solar power, and we have a good vegetable garden going. We’re just doing natural family life: kicking it, and jumping in the ocean and drinking coconuts.

That sounds amazing.
Yeah, it’s been a real good experience. It’s a good change, and we did it at a good time. It’s still the United States, but it feels a little bit detached out here. There is less advertising, less TVs around.

Your latest tour, How the Grouch Stole Christmas, is going to take you away from your paradise for a couple days. Off the top, it was nice to see fellow Living Legend Eligh’s name right there with yours.
Yeah, it worked out good because me and Eligh have an album coming out March or April of next year. People always ask when the next G&E album is coming out. Me and Eligh are good friends so when we do shows, it’s always fun, and people love to see the combination of us two. We’re both on the same page, as far as us both doing sober shows and all that, and we’re both at a time in our careers where we are taking everything very seriously and trying to step our games up.

I was going to say, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard mention of G&E as a group. What can you say about the album so far?
We’ve got a strong single with Gift of Gab, so you’ll hear that. But as far as everyone else, we have Mistah Fab on there, Sage Francis and Slug on a couple different songs. We’ve got a song produced by Flying Lotus, a joint produced by Amp Live of Zion I. It’s going to be a good release. I’m really proud of the music so far.

The Bayliens are also scheduled to play, but there is one name that I didn’t recognize: Paul Dateh.
Yeah, he’s dope. He’s from L.A. and played violin on my last album; he’s also a vocalist too. If you Google him, there are some pretty amazing videos of his violin skills, and how he combines them with hip-hop. He’s just coming up and making a name for himself. When you watch the set though, you’re like damn that was dope. Every time I have him open up for me, he gets a really good response. The Bayliens, they’ve been working real hard and I like the way they do their stuff, so it all works together.

Alright, last one to wrap it all up. Looking at Dr. Seuss as a writer, in terms of his story telling, his structure, his rhymes, how would you rate him in MC terms?
Dr. Seuss is a dope poet, and would make a dope MC. I think if he wanted to rap, he could probably have some tight raps. I don’t know how much of a coincidence it is that I’m using one of his themes, but I’ve had a lot of people tell me that my rhyme style reminds them of Dr. Seuss. I don’t know if that’s a diss or not [laughs]. It wasn’t like, “You have the most Simple Simon rhymes in rap,” but I have been told that they can see a resemblance, and I take that as a compliment. I like the dude’s style. He’s not the most complex, but he’s successful for a reason. The way he put his books out there, and the content in them with the pictures and the whole package, I really respect the dude.

Simple or not, at the end of the day he’s saying something of substance, which can always be said of your music.
Exactly.

Bigger Than Mother Earth

Days before heading out on his Paint the Nation tour that will put him on the road through November, Slug is faced with a daunting four hours of interviews. If anything were to deter me from the rap life, that just might be it, but just as he does with his music, Slug puts things into a whole new perspective. “I try to treat it like a job,” he says. “This is the best job I’ve ever had and I don’t want to get fired. I try and give it my all and prove to myself and my 80,000 19-year-old bosses that I want to keep my job.”

A dedicated and hard working employee of rap for the past decade, Slug has continually delivered dope product. Alongside his producer Ant, as Atmosphere they’ve released six albums, a handful of EPs and garnered an army of followers. If you know them, you love them and if you don’t, then you’re tripping. The following is 10 minutes with Slug, so read along and be sure to catch Atmosphere on Sept. 19 at Empire.

In preparation for this interview, I noticed in a Google search that Atmosphere (the rap group) shows up twice before the thing that protects Earth. What does that say to you?
[Laughs] I guess my Internet presence is pretty powerful. I’m one of those artists who kind of lives on the Internet. I’m much more relevant online than I am in your mall’s record store. I’m still surprised though [laughs]! Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t me going, “Yeah, I earned that.” But uh, damn. Sorry Mother Earth.

I’ve been able to watch your career unfold for over a decade now, and it seems you guys have made strategic steps to build things up to what you have today. In reality, how much of that was actually planned?
Well, I mean I was just about to correct you when you used the adjective strategic, because I don’t see any of it as strategic. I think everything we’ve done has been a common sense move. It’s kind of like something presents itself and a decision needs to be made, so we have gone with what makes sense at the time. Rhymesayers, in general, it was so simple to navigate because it was a small label with a small roster and staff. It just came down to what was necessary to do and what made sense.

Would you credit that to the label’s success, that it’s not some over-thought business operation?
Well, that’s not necessarily true either because, me, I’m a pothead, so I over-think everything. But it wasn’t a situation where we had a business model to go with. We didn’t have anything to base it off of so it was just a matter of what do you want to do about this or that. It’s not that I don’t over-think the decisions when those moments arrive, but more so I guess we didn’t really know exactly what was going to happen so we just took it as it came. The label itself was born around the same time as the Internet, and we knew we couldn’t follow the model of the majors.

I was looking at the pictures sent for this story, and there was a poster on your basement wall that looks like it was sent to you from an elementary school classroom. How does it feel to be recognized on a level like that?
Yeah, that was from some students in Palo Alto, Calif. They were fourth graders and their teacher must have been like 28 or something. I mean there are a million rappers she could have probably chosen to teach what she was teaching. She was just trying to teach her students how to think outside the box and write in rhythm while applying hip-hop to her curriculum. But yeah, that was a trip, to have a bunch of fourth graders autograph a poster and send it to me. That stuff trips me out, but at the same time I’m just trying to take it for what it is. You got to realize in the world, you’re your own universe, but you’re not the universe. You are what you are to you, but how other people take you and use you for their universe, you don’t have control over that. I try not to be too tripped out, and just think this isn’t about me, it’s about that person and what they took from it. When they relay that to me, I try not to let that go to my head or get too freaked out because it’s not a part of me and what I am, it’s a part of that person and how they took what I do. It’s funny though because I get e-mails from people that use our music in their classroom, just college professors and stuff like that, and it’s weird for me. I’m not a very academic person. I didn’t go to college, and I don’t know what those situations are like, but I assume that if they’re using me and Anthony [producer Ant] in any of their teachings, it must be pretty loose.

As a writer do you think about the individuals who you are touching or is it more for you, and just that creative release or I guess what people refer to as a therapy for you?
I don’t know that I would call it a therapy. People used to ask me that around Seven’s Travels, and I would say yeah because it seemed like an easy answer, but this was never a catharsis for me. It was more like, I want to be a rapper so I got to keep writing songs, so that’s what I did. As far as who I’m trying to impress or who am I trying to get a reaction out of, it’s always been Ant. If I can make him react, then I know I’m on the right page because he is a lot like me. He sees things the way I see them, and we agree on a lot of things. If he hears what I’m saying and he feels it, then I know I’m conveying it correctly. Where it goes from there is beyond me. Honestly, I can’t imagine why a bunch of 18-year-old kids would care about a song about parenthood. If they do, so be it, but I don’t know why. I got a son who is 14. He thinks I’m the Dave Matthews of hip-hop”¦in a bad way. All my homies, though, he thinks they’re the shit. Brother Ali is his favorite rapper, but he looks at me like a sell-out.