by Jake Espinoza
By all definitions of an emcee, Illmaculate is dope.
He can freestyle, write, put a song together and also rock a party.
With this being said, he hasn’t released new music via retail outlets since he put out Police Brutality with fellow Sandpeople member Only One in 2009. The most recent Sandpeople album was released in the same year.
While the lack of new music available on iTunes may have hurt his local buzz—if such a thing exists for Portland rappers—he has remained relevant throughout the world’s battle rap scene with classic performances in leagues such as GrindTime and King of the Dot. (His battle’s regularly receive over 100,000 views on YouTube.)
He also released The Green Tape with Portland based producer Calvin Valentine earlier this year on FreshSelects.net.
For those unfamiliar with the Sandpeople movement, the group became the leaders of Portland’s hip hop scene after Releasing Honest Racket in 2007. The album was Illmaculate’s first appearance with Sandpeople.
Illmaculate was also a leader in the “Fresh Coast” movement that helped shape the evolution of the freestyle battle scene in the turn of the century. A good example of the change the movement helped create is a classic battle between Illmaculate and Swann from the 2004 Scribble Jam Tournament. Swann was one of the leaders in battle rap at the time. The popular formula for most battlers was to use a set up line followed by an unrelated rhyming punch line.
For example, Swann (poking fun at Illmaculate’s height) says, “When I step to the mic I glow like a shiny rim, everybody look at this shit, its Tiny Tim.”
The Fresh Coast movement introduced complex multi-syllable rhymes that worked together in a single thought—such as in Illmaculate’s line, “I hate to sound cliché today, but if you shaved your face with a razor blade you’d look like an overweight Macy Gray.”
This type of multi-syllable rhyming is common now, but in 2004 it was something that hadn’t been heard before. Watch the video here, fast forward to 1:02 and watch people’s heads explode as he says it.
Illmaculate won the Scribble Jam Tournament that year, and also won back-to-back World Rap Championships in 2006 and 2008.
My point is he is from Portland, and is a legend in his craft. There are not a lot of people who also fit this description.
He is releasing his EP Skrill Walton for free via his website www.irapbetter.com on November 8th, and his album “Skrill Talk” will be available in stores this January.
You can see him live in Portland on November 12th and in Seattle on November 15th.
Enjoy Part 1 of our interview. We’ll be brining you Part 2 tomorrow.
You have the Skrill Walton EP coming out this week, what can we expect?
The Skrill Walton EP is basically made of songs that were originally made for Skrill Talk, but it’s become such a magnum opus over the last few years I’ve been working on it. It’s become my version of Detox in a way. It’s gone through so many different phases; it has been like three different full albums basically. I have all this extra material that I was just going to sit on, but since we decided to move the (Skrill Talk) album release to January, we figured we had time to put out an EP with these songs that didn’t make Skrill Talk. Not saying that they weren’t good enough to be on the album, but they just didn’t really fit within the scope of what the album had become. A lot of the songs are just from the cutting room floor of Skrill Talk. Truthfully I think it’s good enough to be a full retail album, but we’re going to give it to the fans for free to further motivate and awkwardly pressure them to cop Skrill Talk.
How is the vibe going to be different on Skrill Walton from Skrill Talk?
With Skrill Walton, you can tell where I was at when I was making it. I was frustrated with a lot of things. It has the kind of has the vibe of the training, the calm before the storm, the lead up, the prequel, or the appetizer to the entrée. I feel like it serves as a good teaser in a way.
Skrill Talk in one work is momentous. Everything about it sounds big. It’s a huge production. I put everything into it—the last six years of my life. I really used all of the resources I had. I called in a lot of favors, collaborated with a lot of musicians, and went back and doctored a lot of different things to make it a full cohesive project. Where the EP has great songs and everything, putting it together was more just picking the songs and putting them in an order. Skrill Talk is something I put a lot of obsession into. I have full notebooks in my drawer that are just Skrill Talk track listings.
Do you have similar producers on the EP and the album?
Yeah, they have similar producers, and as far as I can see in my career it will be a recurring theme. You have Chase Moore, Trox on both of them. G Force is of course on both of them, but I really feel like in the Northwest we have a lot of talent production wise. We’re kind of spoiled with it, and that’s not just on an independent level. I feel like a lot of the producer’s we know like Chase Moore, Trox, Sapient and G Force are some of the best in the game. Why go outside of that when I have access to such amazing talent and good people right here?
I think G Force (aka Calvin Valentine) is still one of the most underrated in the area. Do you know what he’s working on right now?
That fool is working on ten projects always. He’s one of the hardest working, if not the hardest working producer out here right now. He’s already put out like six albums out this year or some shit. I really do feel that he is slept on. You can make an argument that other producers having better slaps, but I told him that I really want my next album to be entirely produced by him. What I really want to do is seclude myself in a house just with him for like a month and make an album just with him, and invite different artists and musicians over to collab with, but I really want to do my next album with him. I feel like we have the most chemistry together.
He’s definitely a super diverse producer.
Yeah, it’s ridiculous.
How was the trip you took to Europe?
It’s a whole different world. The reception out there is crazy. It’s refreshing to get out there. It kind of reassured me again that this shit that I’m doing really does have an impact. Sometimes I start feeling like I’m running in place a little bit and start wondering if this shit is all in vain. To be able to go visit foreign soil because of music, because of battling or just because of hip hop in general definitely recharged my battery. It reminded me that this shit is progressing.
Why do you thing the reception is so much different in Europe than it is in the Northwest or even just in North America in general?
I think there are a lot of different factors. I think one of the reasons, and it’s going to happen everywhere but being the place of hip hop’s origin it happened here first, is that everybody raps here. You can’t talk to one person within a reasonable age group of us that doesn’t know somebody who raps, produces or records. It causes rap fans to be desensitized, so you have to work even harder to stand out. I’m sure it’s like that in other countries as well, but I feel like trends with hip hop all start here, and one of those trends is the desensitization of hip hop fans.
Once you see something everywhere it’s not as special anymore.
That’s interesting. I never thought about everyone being a rapper being a trend spreading like cancer. Have you ever thought about moving to Europe?
Honestly, no. I wouldn’t mind going out there and staying for a while, but just the mentality of moving to success or moving somewhere to increase my status. Earlier that would have been something that I would have been outwardly against, like, ‘That’s wack. You can’t move to success. You gotta bring it here.’ Now, I still kind of feel that way, but I’m not going to hate on someone for moving. I feel like in Portland we have tons more talent, and that’s just production. I’ve been to other cities and I’ve seen their beat battles, and honestly nobody is seeing our producers. The same goes for our rappers as well.
I think it would be a disservice for me to move to success, and for me to still sleep at night thinking that I’m being loyal to my soil. Not saying that I owe anybody anything or that I owe the town, but I think for me it’s just more of a personal preference where I want to be the representative who can bring the trophy back to Portland.
That’s what the Skrill Walton alter ego is all about. The slogan is ‘We’re bringing the trophy back to the town like its 1977.’ I don’t want to move the Blazers to Seattle to get a championship. What good does that do for Portland? If the Blazer’s move to fucking Casper, Wyoming and get a championship, do you think that’s going to make Portland proud? That mentality just doesn’t equate with my personal goals.
“St. Johns.”
You know.
Shout out to Casper, Wyoming also.
Haha.
You’ve been a big part of the battle scene’s progression–being a Scribble Jam Champion and now one of the leaders in the Grindtime Movement. How has it been watching the scene change from the freestyle format to the written battles.
At this point I feel like the change is full. It’s happened, and now it’s even changing within the written realm, but watching the progression has been crazy. To watch it evolve from freestyling, getting up there and all you can do is clown on the person for what you get at face value so you’d get a lot of disses about someone’s shoes or what they were wearing, to now with the written format you can Google a mother fucker and talk about how at his job he got a write up for whatever. It’s a whole different game.
A lot of people have preferences, where they’ll say it takes more talent to freestyle, but that’s kind of a double edged sword. With freestyle, what was so tight about that was that was a separator. That was what made someone a real emcee. You’d go to a battle and not everyone in the crowd was a rapper, because not everyone could get up there and think of something hella quick off the top. With freestyling there was a lot more pressure so it kind of separated the field. There were the cats who could really battle and were emcees with sharp swords, and then there were the fans and the other written rappers.
With the written format you have a lot more people who are more comfortable. Even cats that didn’t rap before started watching battles like ‘I understand the format he’s using with the rhyming words and the types of jokes he’s using, and I’m a fan so watching all these battles I can absorb all this inspiration and all I have to do is write it, memorize it, move my arms like they do, pause like they do, and I’m going to be a battle rapper.’
I’m sure there are literally thousands of rappers out there who share this story, between GrindTime and all the different leagues. I understand the side that freestyling is tougher, but on the other side when you look at the people who are great at this format, you can get more creative writing. You don’t just have to clown everything at face value. You can use themes and concepts. It allows the creative mind to be a lot more creative and have time to put an idea together. Some people might use the same freestyle type of formula and you are wasting the ability to explore more complex concepts.
So it’s a double edged sword, but I think it all comes down to preference. Me personally, I hope there will be more of a resurgence of freestyle and it will be more of a coexisting kind of entity.
How do you think that format would work at this point?
I think everyone’s been sleeping and scared to really go out on the limb to make it happen, but it can be the same that it always has. You have a fan base that has expanded because of the written format, if you follow that up with freestyle, with a high-quality production value, I think it will blow a lot of these young fans out of the water. A lot of them don’t even realize that this is rooted out of freestyle battles.
That’s the thing about battles, you don’t have to be a fan of hip hop to like battling. You can just be a fan of conflict.
What are some of your favorite battles that you weren’t a part of?
I don’t know man. That’s a hard one. There are a lot of different one’s for different reasons. The one that pops in my head is Lil 8th Ave vs Revanon. Lil 8th Ave is maybe the best battler on the planet, and I think he only has one battle. (laughs)
A gun gets pulled in the battled, and there’s all sorts of debauchery. It’s definitely my favorite battle.
I didn’t remember that battle until you talked about the gun getting pulled.
Yeah Lil 8th Ave is probably my favorite battler probably. He doesn’t say yo, he doesn’t say anything. He just automatically jumps into his rap, like he’s trying to scare you.
And what’s up with the Sandpeople album? I remember hearing you guys were working on a new project.
Yeah, we have two albums in the works—one that’s exclusively produced in house and another one that’s just miscellaneous producers. We’re pretty far along in both actually. We have in between 20 and 30 songs ready. I think at the end of this year, we’ll kind of transition into becoming a working label again and start functioning as a machine again.
(Read more about the upcoming Sandpeople project in Part 2 of the interview coming tomorrow, Nov. 7th)