It was September 28, 2001, and indie hip-hop’s most jocked crew, the Def Jux collective, had taken over Seattle’s I-Spy club for the night. Like most indie hip-hop shows, an odd cloistered feeling hung over the performances, as if they were happening in a bubble that’d been sealed off from the rest of the world. Of course, a few explosions had gone off less than two weeks before, and many more were set to go off in Afghanistan over the months to come. This was what made the shelter effect even more claustrophobic — despite the round-the-clock CNN briefings on TV, the consensus of the artists onstage this night was one of escape. Maybe that’s what’s meant by “underground.” A bomb could have gone off on the Earth’s surface, and no one would know it. No information got in or out.
Mr. Lif, taking the stage in the middle of the show, was the only emcee to make mention of life on the surface that night. Between tracks he weaved in a spoken-word satire, inviting Bush to his crib to chop it up about his designs on South Asia and where those civil liberties might be slinking off to. There wasn’t any sloganeering or cheesing-out, just enough acknowledgement to show Def Jux wasn’t hosting a retreat for world-weary backpackers.
Hip-hop and the rest of America have been “hauntingly normal,” in the year since, says Lif, baffled at the apparent apathy. “I grew up in an era in which rappers were consistently providing some form of social commentary.” Now they aren’t, and he has found himself as something of a voice in the wilderness since redirecting his lyrical sniper’s rifle from dud emcees to double-talking politicians. And yet he’s also managed to move units — his “Cro-Magnon” single was Jux’s best seller in 2001 — suggesting that perhaps he’s bridged the void between agit-prop and pop relevancy left vacant by his heroes KRS-One and Chuck D a decade ago.
August 2002. Mr. Lif is driving back to Oakland from Tahoe and thinking about his outfit, maybe a little too much. “Right now, I’m wearing a sweatsuit top by Mecca,” he relates over his cell phone. “It was actually given to me by the distributor, basically because they want me to rock their shit. They know independent artists are the cats who are out on the street — give it to Busta Rhymes and it’s under a mink or some shit.” Plying rappers with free product has been the cornerstone of the urban clothier’s marketing stratagem for years. The practice, of course, has the net effect of turning the recipient into a mike-wielding billboard. This raises a few concerns for Lif, since he talks a lot on his records about media manipulation and the shallowness of consumerism. In fact, it was seeing a billboard through the car window that got Lif pondering his duds in the first place. He began talking about how you have to be wary of the images being fed to you, a train of thought that led him to Mecca. “From my standpoint? Whatever. I’ll wear anything that’s free,” he says. “You save me a couple trips to the store and it keeps me warm? Fuck it, I’m wearing it.”
Therein lies the special something that makes Mr. Lif’s polemics palatable in these wishy-washy times — they come sans soapbox. We want our corporations accountable and we want our bling. We want our rappers conscious, but we won’t have them wearing rucksacks. Lif offers a nice balance. He’s an idealist trapped in a pragmatist’s body, and in illuminating the problems he sees, he doesn’t point fingers. He also doesn’t whine. “Sometimes things around me frustrate me,” he says, “but never do I separate myself from the problem.”
Lif went to Tahoe because it’s one of the things he wanted to check off his list after moving to the Bay Area. He also wanted to be with his girlfriend before his debut album, I Phantom, hit the stores and the promotional madness would begin. She had moved to Oakland from his native Boston in 2000; he stayed there longer because he has such an established following on the East Coast. Recording with Jux in New York and still doing frequent shows in Boston, he seems to be leading a bicoastal existence.
But he calls Oakland home now. Lif’s moved “to the only other place in the US I could see myself living,” as he puts it. “I’m on Telegraph a lot, walking up and down the street with my stickers, trying to let people know the records are in the stores and telling them about what I do.” His relocation has also allowed him to start from scratch again. In Boston, Lif had gotten about as big as an emcee could — he won four Boston Music Awards, and he could easily sell out any of the regular venues there. Now it’s here that he needs to make inroads, pressing the flesh as often as he can. “I like to bust my ass promoting,” he says. “As an artist or a human being, it’s good to just come out to a place and be at zero again.”
Lif and his left-leaning social commentary are very much products of Boston and its swollen collegiate population. Although he only spent a year at a university himself, all the outlets for an up-from-his-bootstraps emcee in town were academic — college radio stations played his songs and the two clubs that booked hip-hop shows were student haunts. As such, many of the topics that seeped into his lyrics were ones that might pop up in a graduate seminar — the looming ecological meltdown, US foreign policy, and the emptiness of a workaday existence. His background is still in battle rhymes and getting the crowd to go “ho!,” however, so don’t expect to find footnotes in his CD booklets.
Growing up in Beantown, the young Jeff Haynes, aka Lif, spent the bulk of his time in Brighton, a Russian neighborhood fifteen minutes from downtown. He remembers being one of maybe ten people of color who lived in his apartment complex, surrounded by retirees and Boston College students.
Sports, not rap music, was the siren’s call in Brighton. Lif played football and lacrosse for five years, and was a hockey goalie for nine, attending private grade school and then prep school. He took the reverse Will Smith route, going from suburban respectability to hip-hop legitimacy. He and his friends would buy the rap that came out, but didn’t participate beyond that. “The small black population at my school were so foolish as to be up on Naughty by Nature,” he says with a chuckle. “I remember we cut class in ’93 to go buy the tape with ‘Hip-Hop Hooray’ on it.”
He went off to college to play sports, but the rigors of keeping on top of practice and curriculum had him run ragged. Losing his passion for both, the displaced freshman began casting about for a direction. “Hip-hop basically hit me,” he recalls. “Largely because of the immaculate hip-hop that was released at the end of ’93 and the beginning of ’94. When Nas dropped Illmatic, a lot of things started making a lot more sense to me. I was very impressed with the way the press embraced him and spoke about his poetical content and his voice. … It helped me adjust my focus, made me realize I wanted to give my own commentary on the state of affairs.”
He decided to make “the ill leap of faith” and drop out of school, before he even had his rhyming skills sorted out. With just one poorly attended show under his belt and a style that sounded like the stiggity-stiggity-stuttering Das EFX, Lif pronounced himself a rapper. His parents were less than pleased. Weighing his options between college and an artist’s life, Lif seemed destined either for office jobs and decent pay on the one hand or rapping and sanity-depleting remedial jobs on the other. Miraculously, he escaped both.
It was a good thing that his musical skills didn’t fail him, because this is one unhirable dude. According to “Live from the Plantation” from I Phantom, Lif spent his workdays punching clocks off the wall and fantasizing about dismembering the boss. He was dope enough to be able to quit his jobs and live off of rap, but it took some doing since Boston’s hip-hop scene had been lying fallow for most of the ’90s. No labels existed and the only keys to area clubs were for rock artists, so Lif and other area hip-hoppers like Akrobatik, Virtuoso, Insight, and 7L & Esoteric had to build their own infrastructure.
It was the same story that played out in many cities at the time — hip-hop cats going punk rock and supporting themselves. Looking back on this era, the best thing that came out of it was the critical voice it injected into rap music, the outsider’s perspective it offered on how success was changing the culture. But it also became reactionary and overly self-referential, devoting its lyrics to carping about bad contracts and the false glimmer of gold records. The only artists that remained relevant from those DIY bubble years were the ones who, like the Jux camp, were able to push the dialogue past underground economics and into new subjects.
Those years, 1997 through 1999, were halcyon ones for Lif. “That’s when things got crazy for us, when we first put all our records out,” he remembers fondly. “It was kinda raw, you know, it was like a crew thing. We were all coming up together, hopping up on any open mike we could find, and going for broke every time we hit the studio.”
Lif survived the various evolutions of the music by taking alt-rap’s critical eye and training it on more than just the ills of the industry. He broadened the attack to include consumer culture and politics, and was arguably the first emcee to raise environmental issues in his verses. “As we destroy nature in the name of cash,” he raps on “Arise,” “All justified by laws made by the legislature/You never say shit ’cause that claim they aims to.”
His inclusive subject matter and distinctive, nasal delivery — lots of jagged meters and offset syllables — brought him to the attention of Def Jux, a collective that became a sort of a beachhead for indie hip-hop’s second wave. Headed by El-P of the first wave’s most lauded group, Company Flow, Jux has served as proof that all the bravado of the backpacker rebellion wasn’t for naught. Lif had been holding out for more than three years to find the right label to release something longer than a single. El-P signed Lif up right from the beginning. With Jux, Mr. Lif basically chose the Harvard of artist-funded rap labels. Many of its full-length releases — Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, Aesop Rock’s Labor Days, and El-P’s Fantastic Damage have sold well beyond expectations, and now even get reviewed in such organs of the mainstream as Entertainment Weekly.
Much of the media attention paid to Jux is based on its glitchy, overdriven sonics and imploded beat structures — the sound of hip-hop giving up its last, anguished gasps, or so we’re told. Lif, who produces a fair number of his own beats, keeps his instrumentals high-tech as well — lots of wafts of digitized melody swirl behind the drums — but their swing is more straightforward. Wedged somewhere between the full-frontal boom-bap of KRS-One and the herky-jerk of modern-day dancehall, Lif’s Emergency Rations and I Phantom carry the Jux watermark but aren’t waterlogged by it.
Since that Seattle show, with the War on Terror kicked into full gear, Lif’s recorded output has become downright subversive. On “Home of the Brave,” released in June on the Emergency Rations EP, he advances the Noam Chomsky it’s-all-about-a-pipeline argument and suggests the anthrax scare was a government diversion. It’s definitely one of the most inflammatory recorded reactions to 9/11 in any genre. Further evidence that Lif doesn’t give a fuck: He debuted the song at the Knitting Factory, four blocks from Ground Zero.
Carrying over from Rations to I Phantom is a marginally executed series of skits about Lif’s disappearance at the hands of two “agents.” Nonetheless, the whimsical tones of the interludes serve as a counterweight to the record’s more urgent moments, which can be quite bleak. He spends the last two tracks of the LP languishing in a nuclear winter.
Now, on the eve of his full-length release, Mr. Lif faces the classic radical recording artist’s paradox. He wants to spread his message to as many people as possible, but using the music industry machine that can make it happen could compromise his unorthodox message. It’s like the decision of whether or not to wear the free sweatshirt. “I’m definitely cracking my head open to develop new concepts and new ways of communicating topics I truly feel are urgent,” he says. “And I do feel a state of emergency for humans and all existence on planet Earth. So obviously, the more powerful engine I have behind me pushing my records, the better. But do I want to deal with all bullshit to do that? The answer is no. If Jux as a label decides to go there and I can still roll with my camp, cool. I know I’ll be sheltered, and we can continue with the same type of movement.”
The real threat to his message may come from the US government itself, if you share in his outlook. But maybe the possibility of Lif actually raising some ire isn’t that far-fetched. If you’re willing to entertain the idea that the feds would poison their own citizens as a means of population control, the notion of some men in black paying a visit to a dissident rapper or two isn’t much of a stretch. “Believe me,” says Lif. “That’s something I think about on a daily basis, and I’m sure what I’ve been doing has not gone unnoticed.” Then he adds, half-jokingly, “If they want to take a good brother down, that’s their prerogative, and I’m sure they will when they’re good and ready.”
