Home
sign up| features / music interview |
 content by: editor |
 mike ladd interview
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The hip-hop terrorist makes a statement. So you’ve got your gangstas and your backpackers, but what about the post-futurists? Actually, that should probably be post-futurist singular, for in a hip-hop world ruled by the herd mentality, Mike Ladd stands alone. Less the black sheep of the family than a lone visionary who hasn’t so much seen the future as realised that the present is far weirder than anything Nostradamus could have imagined.“My work chronicles a timeline leading up to the point we’ve reached now, which is post-futurism,” Mike states in his gravelly East Coast accent. “After postmodernism blurred the lines between fiction and fact, post-futurism is the point where even the blur has disappeared, and science fiction and reality are completely unified and symbiotic. “Sci-fi is playing catch-up with a reality where things that were shocking in the 70s – like Reagan becoming governor of California – were actually the start of a process that means Arnold Schwarzenegger now controls the world’s fifth biggest economy. George W Bush refers to comic books in his speeches because they’re more real to him than actual events. How we feel about that is irrelevant because the momentum has already started.”  It seems the only way to escape is to immerse ourselves in an imagined past – which is where Mike’s Nostalgialator album comes in. But make sure you heed the warnings. “A Nostalgialator is the ultimate post-futurist leisure tool,” Mike says. “With one press of a button you can be back in a perfect past with all your favourite clothes and music. But I wouldn’t recommend getting one because you might actually end up in the reality of that past.” Indeed, rather than being a time machine taking us back to hip-hop’s halcyon age “back in the day”, Nostalgialator, the album, is more like Jeff Goldblum’s teleporter in The Fly – splicing and dicing hip-hop’s genes with rogue, avant garde DNA to create something barely recognisable as hip-hop at all. “I see what I do as way beyond hip-hop,” Mike claims, and Nostalgialator continues the prophetic theme of his Easy Listening For Armageddon and Welcome To The Afterfuture albums, as well as his Infesticons and Majesticons trilogy on Big Dada. That’s an ongoing concept project centred around the battle between the underground Infesticons and bling baddies, the Majesticons – the final instalment of which should be with us next year. “I’m not going to say who wins, but there’s going to be a lot of sex,” Mike reveals. “I was thinking of doing it as a Barry White-style thing.”  Of course, with such arch concepts behind his music, not to mention his past as an English lecturer at Long Island University and appearances at poetry readings, it’s easy to accuse the Boston-bred rapper of over-intellectualizing his art. “I actually find the academicization of hip-hop disturbingly parasitic,” he says. “It’s just that I don’t believe in dumbing down what I do. “Sometimes I think I should just write an essay so I don’t have to keep on making freaking records. But as a writer I’m actually quite happy to be living now, because I’m never short of ideas so long as I focus on the possibility rather than the despair of the times. If I thought about it properly I’d probably go nuts and join Al-Qaeda or something.” Hip-hop jihad has just been declared.
Paul Clarke
Mike Ladd – Nostalgialator, released 26 July 04 on !K7
 conversations
Read members' comments.
If you register you can discuss this article with other users. |
 |
related info
 useful links
note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
see also
also on bbc.co.uk
music  music archive Watch music sessions and interviews from 2002 to 2008. books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
geek rap
big dada
access 1000s of articles