If you enjoy random pleasures like I do then you’d love meeting Giovanni Marks, also known as Subtitle, and also known as Gino. What a surprising pleasure it was. Brief as well, which is good in certain contexts. He introduced himself to me on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in L.A.. I was standing outside Vacation Vinyl waiting to interview a musician when he sidled up to me with his hand outstretched ready for the shake. As a taller than average woman it’s unusual for me to turn and look up at someone rather than down, so I was taken aback by his stature. The usual blah blah about being tall ensued. Then he disappeared.
This is where the insidious “Friend Suggestion” app on Facebook actually comes in handy. His face popped up in my news feed as someone who has mutual friends. Indeed.
After some emailing back and forth he brought me up to speed on his musical output, his history in the L.A. underground scene, even going to far as to school me on the why and way of the underground moniker. I argue it’s hackneyed and over used but having its subtleties and nuances as related to various points on the hip hop time continuum explained to me has made its usage crystal. (I suppose.)
If you, like I, enjoy brevity in certain contexts you will enjoy his latest effort, Blackjack Parsons, a bewilderingly short (17.3 mins) concept album that comes with a generalized back story regarding the making of the record. The intro track also generously offers up the point of fact that he will be releasing a full length album in the coming year. He repeats this news in the outro as well which seems campy and indulgent, but also necessary to the proceedings as they relate to the re-introduction of the Subtitle oeuvre. While others re-worked his bio/discography on 11/11/11 we had a lengthy discussion that culminated in what you will read below.
Note: Legging are the style of the day. Priceless!
FLABmag: Tell us about your evolution as a hip hop artist from the west coast? How was it that you avoided the quagmire of “gangsta rap” given that it is considered (by the mainstream) the dominant idiom of rap from California?
Giovanni Marks: I just did other stuff. Hip-Hop was always around and the first stuff wasn’t really gangster rap. Even then, the stuff that resonated with me at a early age was De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, 3rd Bass (and by proxy, MF Doom’s old group KMD), basically stuff from the east coast. This was just because that was the type of sound coming out on a major level, so to speak. As soon as I heard of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, The Pharcyde and Freestyle Fellowship, I was sold on west coast hip-hop.
Not to be misleading, I listened to gangster rap too! At the time, I was living in Compton/Lynwood and gang life was a daily thing for everyone. Dre, DJ Quik, Ice Cube, Hi-C, Compton’s Most Wanted, whoever, all of that was getting listened to as well. It was just there, so in regards to rap, it got consumed. Since I wasn’t a gangster (nor did I have pressure to join a gang, due to expressing potential to do different), it wasn’t hard for me to not talk about “gangster shit” or carry on like I lived that lifestyle. As far as it (gangster rap) being the early staple of the west, that was because Hollywood made it happen that way. There was a whole stage of L.A. rap that was on Macola Records (and other imprints either serviced thru or owned by Macola) that remains almost unknown by the general rap loving populace. This is where Dr. Dre made his onstage debut, in sequins and mascara on behalf of the World Class Wreckin Cru.
FLABmag: Define “underground” as it relates historically to west coast rap, where is your place in that scene and does the term hold as much weight today (given it has been co-opted by the mainstream and is used liberally to define pretty much everything that isn’t on the radio but still wildly popular via internet music blogs and social media outlets)?
GM: Underground west coast rap and it’s story of ascendance is too long to tell today. On the west coast, it was more like a minor league baseball system where you did your thing for however long until a larger label noticed you and “bumped you up” so to speak. Around 1997-2000, the industry took a crazy flip and this dovetailed with the whole dot com boom. What this translated to was a lot of dudes in the recording industry with lucrative deals all of a sudden finding themselves indie before there was a name for it, and a lot of other dudes being raised in this new alternate and blossoming DIY system. Just like now, there were more labels than there were administrators, which meant the bottom line was selling music versus making the best music that could be promoted to a large audience. By the time I “arrived” there wasn’t really any label infrastructure for hip-hop that wasn’t some top 40 type of thing. There were lots of really creative, and for the most part, engaging rap, but since rap labels weren’t touching this stuff, it was up to rock and electronic labels to break these artists that had been floating around forever. This made the music look less authentic for some reason, which meant that all of the ideologies and invention meant for hip-hop fell into the wrong hands.
As far as the co-opted thing, I don’t really think that’s the case so much. If so, it’s a buzzword like hipster is a buzzword, or swag is a buzzword: some uninformed individual with a coveted opinion set out to reinvent the wheel into something more relatable to that particular individual and whoever they view as their constituents. All of a sudden, stuff that people have been doing for years (or been into) falls under this broad brush for literal lack of a better term. Everyone who missed out the first time has a chance to go triple hard this next go-round, while the people who were there from the start become “regulars” and “scenesters” over something that was just there to entertain them in the first place. A lot of music is exactly that, just there. We use the classifications to make it more exciting or exclusive/elitist, but the truth is that it (and everything else) exists.
In most genres, you have to dig for the gems which is why that euphemism is used. Now that the world is smoked out on information, you have to dig harder because everything else worth checking for is hidden in plain sight. Last week I would have said something entirely different, but this week I honestly believe the idea of “underground” music is thriving and flourishing in this new media landscape. People making music with a 4-track can get it heard as long as they have access to a computer. Even if they don’t, if they are clever enough then they can figure out a way to dress up CD-Rs and cassettes and sell them as “physical merchandise”, which wasn’t even an option unless you were selling “imaginary merchandise” to go with it or as an alternative. And to make this weirder, underground stuff was ALWAYS viewed as stuff that was not on the radio or off the radar. Once the stuff (whatever it was, let’s say music) sold it’s way out the ghetto, then it was classified as “independent” versus underground. Where I exist in all of this is nowhere because only my die-hard supporters/fans monitor my output at this point. I model myself after someone like Kim Gordon or Mark McCoy, where they do whatever they want and the stuff that sticks, does exactly that. If it ends up available on the open market, the people who sell the most copies in bulk can call it what they want.
FLABmag: Tell us about your experience on Gold Standard Laboratories? How did you get involved with the label? What was it like being one of the only rap groups over there and what was it like being surrounded by punk and experimental electronic bands?
GM: I met Sonny Kay through Chris Hathwell from Moving Units and we started hanging out around town when he would visit L.A., this was in 2001. He played Omar some stuff and I guess he liked it too. I originally wanted to work for them and NOT make music, but they talked me out of that, as well as doing all instrumental stuff. In retrospect, I would have been better off if I did the latter, but how I sound now isn’t necessarily how I sounded then. I was honored to be seen and heard alongside these dudes because I was listening to their stuff beforehand and loved everything about the records. Being the only rap dude was fine because:
a. no one in my community was even kind of tripping off what I was up to at the time, this made it easy to do my own thing and not compete for limited space.
b. no one on the label sounded like anyone else, this meant that we could theoretically explore the full breadth and width of our sound, as logistics permitted.
Of course there were many, many obstacles that got in the way of us promoting good music to the people that wanted it, but the catalog numbers won’t change and I’m VERY thankful to be a small part of the story that was Gold Standard Labs.
FLABmag: You worked with Thavius Beck on the Lab Waste project, also on GSL, but are primarily know as “Subtitle” (also released on GSL). How did the LW project come about and what was it like collaborating with T. Beck? Where did you come up with the tag “Subtitle”?
GM: The subtitle name came up in high school, so to explain it at 33 would be to demystify it. This means that I would have to change my name and cry in the shower every morning. As far as working with Thavius, he and I have had a working relationship for the past 14 years that carried over to GSL. We were supposed to release our record on Gold Standard after touring with The Mars Volta in 2003, but that didn’t happen and I just ended up dropping my solo record in 05. We ended up releasing our first record through this imprint a rapper named Busdriver had through this label Mush Records, named “Temporary Whatever.” Collaborating with Thavius is always super fun, even though it’s few and far between these days due to our schedules. We both know what we make so we just sit down and come up with a slew of ideas when it’s time to record. I’ve been a fan of his forever and he’s a great teacher. As far as writing raps, it’s like we’re some 23 year old rappers, and that’s when we DO rap!
FLABmag: Your music is clearly not just straight “Hip Hop” as it has come to be understood in the mainstream, and even in the so-called underground, but the “art rap” label seems marginalizing and not quite right. Given the inability to accurately define what it is you are doing in terms that are understood within and outside the hip hop genre, how would you describe your sound?
GM: I mean, I joke around and call it ‘Crev-Wave’ just to be a fool, but it’s always been and always will be HIP-HOP. I gravitated to that style of music and that is what I draw from in terms of expressing myself. In the past, I have experimented with different types of styles but this was still coming from a rap foundation. Once I met other musicians that appreciated hip-hop for what it was, and were influenced by it as much as the music that they themselves created, I knew that I could make whatever I wanted as long as I was doing justice to the form and format. I got lumped into the whole “art-rap” thing by association. Many moons went by where I was doing straight sounding hip-hop over production by producers popular in hip-hop to no response whatsoever, but that was boring to me. I probably alienated my fanbase with every record because I was trying to outdo myself in my mind, as well as appeal to an audience that I ultimately never had the budget to connect to. Once I realized that all of the intellectual posturing in the world won’t get you in Wire or XLR8R quicker than a good publicist and better ad placement, I kind of phased out the artsier than thou line of logic and remembered that I was a rapper versus a rapping curio.
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