INTERVIEW: B L A C K I E

THE NOISE GOD SPEAKS

Noise God is the name of the new record by Houston legend B L A C K I E. The title is both a joke and not at all. His blasted, no-rules style has played a pivotal role in the development of a contemporary genre of music that some refer to as noise rap. B L A C K I E’s influence is important to note, but I’m more excited about the fact that, two decades deep into the game, Michael LaCour continues to put out amazing albums that expand on the musical language he pioneered. 

Though he’s made jazz records and industrial records and records that are straight-up hard to classify, B L A C K I E’s new one drills into a more rap-focused approach. It squeezes new life out of well-worn flows. It’s a reminder of the raw power latent in the work of Kool Keith, Pimp C, and Schoolly D. It’s steeped in mirth and distortion, and it’s one of my favorite records of the year. As it happens, I interviewed Michael for Sex magazine around this time a decade ago. It was great to catch up with an old friend on the phone.

Have you toured since the pandemic? 

I really don't even think so. I don't even think I've driven too far to play or anything. I was out in New York at one point. But I ain't tripping, man, me and you and a lot of fools, we did that shit to where, like, I know what that's about. I did that.

I miss touring sometimes, but I wonder if I'm still built like that. Do you feel that way? 

I know I could do it, but I know how tiring that is. It’s just one of the things. Let’s say you do a desk job, or any kind of job—warehouse jobs I had. Once you do anything enough, it's like, tiring as fuck. So it may as well be driving everyday to start shouting in a microphone. But it is fun, and I miss people. 

Yeah, the social part of it. 

Yeah. You, fools in Richmond, Virginia, fools out in Oakland, just real homies everywhere, people where like right now, man, if I walked up to you, it'd be just like when I walked up to you the first time. It’s some weird connection between traveling ass fools. 

For sure. You don't have that in your life now? 

I don't know, it's just different. I was just kicking it with my homie, he's a DJ now, he used to be one of the most intense drummers, and he just started playing drums again, but it's the same kind of thing. I could go years without seeing him, but as soon as he walks up, it's the same jokes—we’re on the same page, perpetually.

I don't know if I have it in me to play shows for 10, 20 people in a weird basement or something, like we've both done a billion times. 

Yeah, for real. 

So, tell me about the name of the new record. 

Oh yeah, Noise God. Just fucking going off. Living it.

I know you’re kind of fucking around, but it's cool to hear that flex applied to noise music. How do you feel about your influence now? Do you feel more at peace with that?

I don't think about that kind of stuff. I spend so much time thinking about what's the next thing. I still got stuff that I'm trying to do, and it's just gonna take a minute to do. So, the whole name, I come up with the names of the songs and the album titles before anything is even done. Like, it'll be scraps of paper with all kinds of bizarre stuff written on it. Graphs. Then I like, have hard drives of beats where I totally ran out of names, so they’re all labeled with just dates and letters.  I’ll scan some stuff, take some copywritten image and print them out and trace on top of it and write down titles of things. Sometimes a lot of it just be random. What I was trying to do was really just break it down and see it, in a form. So, it's kind of a joke, non-sequitur, a lot of it is just like absurd, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. 

It's a comedy album. I always wanted to make a comedy album. I was just thinking of things—the next thing to do. A long time ago, I was in the truck laughing with some homies, we had come up with so many dumb things to try out, and finally I'm getting around to doing some of them. And that was one of the bizarre ones: making a comedy album. It's funny to flex, but then it's also just funny in terms of like, I was trying to make a comedy album.

That song “I Can’t Tell.” I mean, it's political, and it is very intense, but also I almost felt like I was listening to a Kool Keith record or something. 

It’s funny you say that, man. That’s part of the joke too, right? It's like, I got all this other music from way back, where I'd be screaming and playing a saxophone, and it was really noisy. But then this one's called Noise God, and I just got this weird like, Del the Funky Homosapien, or Schooly D type of flow the whole time. I was really just trying to stay on some Mac Dre, sinister, almost Pimp C—just trying to channel my favorite rappers, how they sound so sinister without screaming. Trying to be on that wavelength, using the comedy to cut through even sharper than someone screaming. 

I feel like a lot of the time when people try to channel that era of rap, it's often through this kind of corny neo-backpack rap lens or something, but I feel like you got to the essence of what makes that kind of rhyming so good, but it was also through the B L A C K I E filter, which was really exciting to me. 

I'd be cracking up writing down some of that shit, some of it was just written on the spot, too. Then also just trying to... Like, I can bar out, right? Which is kind of the punchline of the last track, which is me just barring out. A lot of this stuff I'd be trying not to rhyme, which is even funnier to me. That's a style I've been dabbling with since the pandemic. I had written all these raps, and then the day I was supposed to record, I scratched out all the rhyming words and put in words that don't rhyme. And then I’ll keep rapping like I'm about to rhyme, so whatever actually rhymes at that point is random or happenstance. I don't know, that's just some dumb style that I've been on. 

That last song, you're rapping your ass off. I haven't heard you rap like that before. It's just relentless. 

That's how I actually rap. From when I was younger. That’s what I got on my phone, those battle ass bars, just stacking syllables, just going the fuck in—that's my favorite shit, and I got that shit. So when I do that weird ass sinister sing-song style, where I'm not rhyming, that's what's fun to me. That's what's funnier to me—I don't know man, just fucking off, you know, playing outside the scale. 

Do you ever watch rap battles on YouTube

Oh hell yeah.

The sort of Grind Time, acapella shit—is that shit even rap music? Sometimes it feels like they're just saying limericks. 

This might be corny, but it's all poetry, you know. I like how they break the language. They’ll say something, and it'll be such a quadruple entendre, they keep saying the same word, but because of how they say it and the context they say it in, it's flipping. More often it's black folks, so, not to get all super Afrocentric, but that shit is mad amazing to me—to break the language, the English language that was bred into us from slavery, as enslaved Africans, I fuck with that shit so heavy. I'll be watching videos on African American history, African vernacular, black English. I’ll be going the fuck in on some learning shit. It's hard for me to sit and just be entertained, I like to be learning something all at all times. Some nerd heavy shit.

I guess this is a space to talk about shit, so… This is all technical stuff I’ll be thinking about, but I don't ever get to say out loud—the beat for “Noise God Freestyle” was not the beat that I recorded those vocals to. For it to still fit on the beat, and be barred out, like crazy heavy, I was maybe trying to approach the realm of free jazz or other extreme forms of music, like grindcore or a blast beat. I guess that's what it is, it's trying to be a lyrical blast beat, where there is no BPM anymore. This is about rhythmic violence, you know what I'm saying? Grindcore and death metal, some of those blast beats, there ain't no BPM, that ain't the point, the point is it's just grinding. So that's what I was trying to do, or that's what I achieved with that recording, because no matter what beat I put it on, it was just poetic and sonic violence, I guess. The beat I swapped in is louder than the metering plugin can detect. Lyrically and sonically its pushed to the max.

It fits in with a lot of other stuff you've done. Like you said, you've played the saxophone, you've worked in various extreme modes, but this is just you being extreme in this hyper-lyrical mode.

Exactly.

It's cool to me that you're finding new pockets for your sound. I wasn't processing your new record like it was a comedy record, but it was definitely funnier than anything you've ever made, and now that you say it, it's like—obviously. 

“Bitch I Should’ve Robbed You.” Like, yo, what the fuck? That’s funny as fuck. That’s something I’ll be saying all the time, dude. I got so much love for the world, you know what I’m saying? Then people do me dirty. It’s life, people are gonna do you dirty. And so, that's how I cope with shit. I would often walk away from people just thinking, like, “Bitch I should’ve robbed you.” It would have been simpler and saved me time.

Some people probably associate your music with a very serious, severe attitude, so for you to hit them with this other side—there's probably listeners who aren't necessarily sure how to process it, which probably makes it funnier to you, I would assume? 

I think it might be something about where I grew up. Some of my old friends, they get the jokes, they were laughing their ass off. Every region, every group of people got their own sense of humor about things, and yeah, one of my homies, he hit me up about Noise God. I was happy to hear from that fool. He was making some wild ass noise rap back in the day. He did his thing, he didn't even tell nobody. We know so many creative people, and not all of them be on the internet, or not all of them even want to play a show—they'll just record the shit in their home overnight and send it to you that weekend.

Sometimes I feel like whether or not you share your music with the world, it’s the process of creation that's the most important thing.

Some cats, they didn't even need to play a show, they didn't need nobody looking at them, they didn't need to drive somewhere and sell a t-shirt—they just had to get it out a few times. I brought that fool up because he gets the jokes a lot and he was around even when I wrote B L A C K I E, all caps with spaces on a piece of paper way back when we were teenagers coming up with just stupid shit. That shit was so funny to him, it was funny to all of us, but he was one of the main ones like, “Fuck, Mike, that's fucking hilarious, fucking do that shit! Fucking make them spell it in capital letters and spaces.” He was always in my corner, even in these old photos of people crowd surfing in the background. All of them get the fucking sense of humor about this shit. 

Yeah. 

I don’t know how to explain it. It’s funny, but it's not funny. Punks and weird underground rappers, one minute they’re laughing and the next minute they’re crying, trying to fight somebody. Younger kids that are on edge literally, that’s what we were all on.

Do you feel like when you're making music you're still communicating with yourself at that age when you first came up with the name and had this sort of fresh aggression? Is that part of you still there?

“I Can’t Tell,” you’ll believe this because you know me. I made that beat in 2004.

Crazy.

Yeah. Shit just be around. Ain't nothing changed. I'll be laughing sometimes. You ever watch this cartoon called Pinky and the Brain?

Yeah, of course.

You know what I'm fucking saying. “What are we gonna do today Brain?” And the brain be like: “Same thing to do every day, Pinky—try to take over the world.” That's what I feel like every day. I'm like, Well, what am I trying to do today? Same thing I do every day. Make the hardest beat on the planet. Since a very young age I’ve been on that same shit almost every day. 

The older I get, I feel like simply continuing on and making stuff is crucial.

Yeah. There’s no limit on your time until your time is gone. You can take a break. Maybe not even look at the shit for six months. But it's always there. So to me it's like, I ain't ready to do it until I feel like I'm adding to something or approaching a new avenue. I'm still having a lot of ideas, man. I'll be forgetting about shit I'll be wanting to do sometimes. I guess that is my only complaint about getting older, being an adult, is the brain fog or endless tasks. Just like, Oh yeah, I needed to run that wire to that thing and do that thing. Or like, Oh yeah, I need to check on that equipment. Sometimes stuff just be happening in the way that it needs to happen. I moved, so I can't really be screaming where I'm at right now. That's another reason why the flow got different.

It’s reflected on the record. You probably can't be blasting music out of your crazy PA rig. 

No, no. It's kind of a bummer. The dumb thing is that I got more speakers now than I ever had, but, yeah, I can't be blasting too much these days. 

So what kind of music have you been listening to lately? 

This cat Wayne Jarrett. A lot of old trap music. Ambient music also.

Do you like that Lazer Dim kid? 

Oh yeah, I checked out some of that. It's cool. 

It feels in conversation with your music, probably inadvertently, but it still definitely feels of a lineage. That energy is there, that distortion is there. 

As a student of music, especially hip hop, our age group and beyond, but even going back, it just seems like if you can do it faster and you can do it louder, people are gonna want to hear that shit. Maybe not a lot of people, and I guess it depends on a lot of other factors, but man if you can do that shit faster and louder—you got something. I just try to stay getting faster and louder. I know they're gonna catch up to me though. 

You swerved with this record a little bit. 

You think so? It was not conscious. 

Yeah. I mean I just think you hit him with some different styles. 

Yeah, yeah. A lot of that is just for my own enjoyment, man. Just laughing. 

I feel like you could make a movie to go along with this new record. You've never really made music videos, but something about this record feels like you could do that. 

That’s what I want to do. I don’t really do that shit. I don’t like being on camera. I don’t like seeing myself on Zoom, I get that weird vertigo where you're seeing yourself but then you start thinking you're not yourself, and then you're outside of your body, and then you can't get back into your body and all that.

Well, you could hire an actor to play both you and the ad-lib person.  

That’d be bugged out. One thing I think about doing, too, which is in that same vein, but I think I could tolerate it better—if I did a Mr. Humpty from Digital Underground. Because some people told me recently I looked like that guy. First I was like, what the fuck? Don’t tell me what the fuck I look like. I started coming back to the beach town vibe of, like, lets box? But then I was like, Shock G is tight. That’s real. If I pulled my glasses really far down my nose like E-40 and started sticking my teeth out even more, I don't know, maybe I wouldn't take it as serious, but I thought about doing a music video. 

It’s funny you bring that up, man, because I've been watching Richard Pryor stand-up again. And I'm like, Dude, I should just do the music video like I'm doing a stand-up comedy routine. I mean, it's kind of like what I would do anyway. You know, just put the sweater on, and then be on stage with the microphone. 

Yeah that's good. In front of a brick wall, maybe. 

Yeah. And then pan over to the audience and it's all just mannequins or something. I don't know. It's just Donald Trump sitting there.

Noise God is out now. B L A C K I E on Instagram and Twitter and Bandcamp