Twenty-seven-year-old Nick Carletti Hyams is a swarthy,
gruff-voiced, part-Jewish, part-Italian rap artist who rechristened
himself with the stage name “Lush One.” PhillipDrummond is a
twenty-eight-year-old psychology graduate student with owlish glasses
and stacks of spiral-bound notebooks cluttering his apartment. (He
ripped his radio handle from a character on Different Strokes,
and won’t give his real name, for fear of Googlability). The two met in
an online rap battle forum in 2004, and realized they lived a few
blocks from each other in South Berkeley. Their shared passion for a
peripheral scene of hip-hop — one based entirely on high-stakes
verse sparring — led them to become friends and eventually,
colleagues.
Now, the two helm the West Coast chapter of a rap battle league
called Grindtime, which imports the art of rhymed insults into what’s
essentially a WWF championship format. They produce regular events in
which MCs try to out-insult each other in a series of timed matches.
Lush is president of Grindtime West Coast, meaning he runs the MC
battles and hosts the events. As vice president, PhillipDrummond runs
the beat battles, steers the marketing, and moonlights as a business
consultant (and part-time psychologist, says Lush). At their next
event, Battle of the Bay 5 (scheduled Sept. 4-5 at the Oakland Metro
Operahouse), they’ll have more than fifty MCs go head-to-head in
twenty-eight matches, along with eighteen “beat battles” that pit
underground producers against one another, in a similar template. The
competition is so stiff, says PhillipDrummond, that they’ve defied the
spontaneous nature of traditional rap battles, allowing contestants to
research each other and write their verses ahead of time. It’s
braggadocio for nerds.
Despite being rather improbable rap moguls, Lush One and
PhillipDrummond are very attuned to the sensibility and value system of
hip-hop. They grandstand; they name-check people who are more famous
than them; they meticulously count YouTube hits on the Grindtime web
site. Moreover, they seem parochially tied to a particular hood —
or rather, a particular part of the country, which Lush One renamed
“the Fresh Coast.” Lush touts Grindtime as a form of community uplift:
“A lot of the people taking notice are from all over the place, and
they’re acknowledging now the West Coast and the Bay Area as like, a
pocket of real, like, true lyricism,” he said. “Kinda like, the
epicenter of where dopeness is at.”
Becoming the epicenter of where dopeness is at wasn’t just a matter
of having a concentration of talented rhymesayers in one place. It took
a college student to commandeer all the rappers, and organize things.
Enter PhillipDrummond. Raised in New York City, he got into the MC
battle racket while studying psychology at a southern California UC, and
persisted after moving up to Berkeley for graduate school. He also
makes beats for underground rappers, and supplied all of the tracks for
Lush One’s new album Music for Dope Runs. The album —
which combines autobiographical raps with a storyline borrowed from the
movie Maria Full of Grace — has a sense of organization
that verges on neurosis. As PhillipDrummond points out, seven tracks
are labeled on the CD jacket: a red logo for true stories about Lush; a
yellow one for fantasies about Maria. Phillipdrummond says that
Music for Dope Runs “doesn’t actually espouse or condone dope
running;” rather, it’s a collection of yarns that tie together
thematically. “Full Boat” tells how Lush jacked a kid for a whole bunch
of weed in high school. “Luxembourg” details the time he got poisoned
by the Russian Jewish mafia. “Skyline Motel” is about his adventures
living in a methed-out flophouse. According to PhillipDrummond, such
plotlines became grist for Lush’s highly literary rap style.
Battle of the Bay 5 will comprise several events: two MC battles
featuring such heavyweights as The Saurus and Illmaculate (who joust on
Friday, in one of the most anticipated bouts of the weekend); plus a
three-round beat battle that requires each contestant to bring in an
original synthesizer track, to find a particular type of sample (i.e.,
polka or mariachi) and cobble a beat from it, and to flip one sample
that’s been pre-assigned to them. The weekend actually kicks off
Thursday night, with a preliminary beat battle outside the variety show
Tourettes Without Regrets, said PhillipDrummond. Producers will idle
outside the Oakland Metro playing original beats on their car stereos,
and let the crowd judge whose music sounds better.
PhillipDrummond said he recently put on a similar event in Modesto,
and it went off without a hitch. He likes the authenticity of a car
stereo battle, and the idea of taking hip-hop back to streets. All the
same, he’s a born strategist who loves putting hip-hop to productive
use. He’s currently working on a dissertation that links hip-hop to group therapy. He loves the idea of
battle raps that can be plotted out months ahead of time, with all the
raps pre-prepared. (“Just like an insult essay,” he said. “Like a
diatribe about why the other person sucks”). He particularly loves
Lush, since Lush is the type of MC who will Internet-stalk his
opponents months before meeting him, call all his friends to get the
real dirt, and then come up with a huge arsenal of personalized
insults.
“I’m not gonna let somebody metaphorically cut me down,” said Lush,
hanging out in PhillipDrummond’s studio apartment on a recent Wednesday
morning.
“Metaphorical castrations,” PhillipDrummond interjected.
That day PhillipDrummond was padding around in bare feet — he
doesn’t allow shoes in his apartment — and a T-Shirt that said
“Keep Hip-Hop Blue.” Lush sat at the computer in a swivel chair,
wearing a sideways cap and a pair of sunglasses clipped to his shirt
collar. PhillipDrummond’s apartment has a grad student look to it
— a claustrophobic hodgepodge of notebooks, papers, vinyl
records, sneakers on display above the fireplace, dishes stacked in the
sink and a refrigerator crowding one corner. Seeming perfectly at ease,
PhillipDrummond began to wax philosophical about his artistic vocation.
“The Fresh Coast essentially came to mean a really, really elite group
of California and West Coast MCs — including Immaculate up in
Portland — that really raised the bar,” PhillipDrummond
explained. “In terms of battling, in terms of rhyme structure,
metaphors, delivery, style of raps …”
“And just a bunch of cats that are able to have fun with it,” Lush
butted in. “And not take themselves necessarily as seriously with
preconceived images, and just, a bunch of people just being themselves
and personifying what it is to just be — fresh.”
The whole thing apparently started when Lush prevailed at a 2008
battle in Florida. He’s unable to tell the story without getting
sentimental. “I felt like I had the whole entire state on my back, and
no one even knew it,” he said. “This is how lame it was. After I
murdered this kid, and we ripped it, and like, we’re on stage in
Orlando, you feel me? My crew, DelMon [Lush fronts a local rap group
called DelMon, short for Delinquent Monastery] performing after I
murdered this kid, and I got the whole entire crowd in Orlando throwing
up West Coast signs. So I come back, you know what I’m saying? This is
how fuckin’ corny it was — right? I’m listening to Kanye West on
my iPod, or whatever. On the little radio channel, on the thing, with
the headphones — right? And the homecoming song comes on. And I’m
getting choked up by it. You feel me? Like, they don’t even know!” Lush
threw his hands in the air with a kind of pneumatic urgency. “Cali
don’t know!”
“And at that point,” said PhillipDrummond, “Florida cats really knew
that they had to step their game up.”
Lush beamed.
