Dweeeeeende!  Whatcha y’all know about this man right here, KHINGZ? Over the weekend I had the immense pleasure to chop it up with this immensely talented and thoughtful artist who’s been tearing the walls down in Seattle.  His latest album, From Slaveships To Spaceships is an absolutely breathtaking tour through the heart and soul (trust me, I been knockin it TUFF) of someone whose commitment to honesty, liberation and good fucking music is near unparalleled.  Peep the interview.

D. Scott:  So I’ve been listening to Slaveships to Spaceships non-stop, and I gotta say you’re a crazy complex artist to me.  Something you do really well is capturing transformative moments from your life and peppering the album with them, so I was hoping you could talk some  about where you grew up – like, the kinda things you saw or experience that left a lasting impression on you.

Khingz:  Yeah man, I love talkin’ about my neighborhood!

D. Scott:  That’s what’s up!

Khingz:  We’re not the bigger Seattle area – we kinda don’t exist to the rest of the city.  You know,  to most people Seattle is Nirvana, coffee shops, and white people. you know what I’m saying?  We just don’t exist to them.  And I feel like that’s a big part of how I grew up.  I grew up on the South End of Seattle,  during the 80′s/90′s, all over the place.  It was always a heavy immigrant neighborhood – Most of the people who were there were there from somewhere else, and it had a huge effect on the look, and the smell, and the taste of my neighborhood cuz everybody brings with them the idea of what home was.  We had a lotta people that’d grow mad vegetables in their back yard.  My neighbors grew rice in their backyards and had hella chickens and goats and ducks and, and then we had cabbage and apples.  Cuz most of the black people were from Louisiana, and they were farmers.  And other folks were  from Cambodia, Somalia, Vietnam, Uriechia, Ethiopia…It was all over:  Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Southern United States.  And also like Mexico, El Salvador, Columbia – just a lotta folks in this neighborhood, you know what I’m sayin?

And so like, in the 80′s with that little trickle down economics there wasn’t a lotta money going around.  So in order for us to be able to eat food on a daily basis you had to kinda make it yourself and then share it with people if you wanted to eat something that wasn’t in your back yard.  So we gave out cabbage to our neighbors so they would give us eggs from their chickens.  And so it was pretty tight knit.  I remember as a little kid, even when I lived in the projects and shit, knowing everybody.  Crack hit prolly like 82, I was really too young to really know, but as I got older i just started noticing that outside of my family there was a lotta shit going on.  My mom had to work a lot – like everybody in my family worked a lot and there was I think at one time 17 of us living in one house, and everybody – all the adults – worked all day.  And so I’d get off school, I’d be at home just chillin and I’d go outside and kick it with the kids or whatever.  And around that time (this is around, 88/89, or a couple years earlier) all the LA and Chicago gangs had come through.

So all the gangs Seattle used to have – like Hollyblock,  and the Reiner Avenue Boys, shit like that – those were like gone.  Or Hollyblock was still there, but now its Crips.  Folks, Vice Lords, Crips, Bloods and that kinda deal.  And everybody was in a gang all of a sudden; my whole neighborhood was Crip affiliated.  And all these cats from Compton had moved up – they all had like jerri-curls and shit. *laughs* It was some shit nobody had ever really seen before, like “Why is your hair hella juicy like that?”  And everybody was just enamored of them, they were like the cool cats from LA.  And they just systematically, block by block, had every kid down with their shit.  So by the time I was 11 or 12 I was deeply steeped in gang culture; but it was different, cause they were more focused on selling drugs.  They weren’t necessarily focused on like “Oh if you see a Blood shoot at him.” So even in the beginning it was hella cool:  It was my same circle of friends, and I remember going out to different community centers and there’d be like Bloods there, and we just like breakdanced against them and while we’d be breakdancing we’d be throwing up our sets and shit, know what I’m saying?

And for me, like around 92, shit started popping off and everybody was just beefing really heavy.  There might’ve been like a drought that year or something – I don’t know, I was really young.  I just know that at that point, like it was onsight if someone saw me they would try to jump me and shit and I would have to jump them back.  People started getting shot up and shit; I started losing homies and people started dying.  And like for some people they got scared and didn’t wanna fuck with it no more, but for me, Once I lost my first homebody I was just more down.  I was just like “Fuck that – you can’t just take my homeboy.”  That shit became my whole life.

And that was my world – going to parties and shit, tryna sell my little drugs and shit.  And then I kinda got outta that and started doing other crimes just cause I didn’t like selling drugs.  Yeah man it was a trip.  And then in high school I would visit my cousin who lived in North Seattle  and it was a totally different way of life.  And when I would talk about the shit that was happening, people would act like i was lying.  They were like “Aw man there’s no gangs in Seattle!”  People would say that shit to my face and I’m wearing like grey Dickies, I have a flag hanging outta my left pocket and they told me to my face there were no gangs in Seattle.  Like, “Are you kidding? I went to a funeral yesterday.”  That shit had a huge effect on me.  Like I realized that no matter what was happening, it just didn’t count.  It didn’t matter how many of my friends were dead, didn’t matter what the fuck was going on in my neighborhood.  It just straight up didn’t count.  Lives were being lost and shit, families are getting shattered, and the shit doesn’t even exist.

D. Scott:  There’s not even like word of mouth?  Your community was that isolated?

Khingz:  Yeah!  I remember telling people I lived on Reiner Ave and them not even knowing where it was, like having no idea that the neighborhood even exists.  It was kind of a trip.  It had a huge effect on me because…I felt worthless.  I felt like my life and the things that happened to me didn’t count.  And like, it fucked me up and its a feeling that has stayed with me my entire life.  As I got older,  I got exposed to different things in high school.  I  had homies who were into the Afrocentric movement, like, breaking that shit down to me. There was a gang of Filipinos in my neighborhood, and some of the older OG dudes who were banging hella hard when i was in middle school, by the time I was in high school they were like coming outta jail and getting exposed to the movement in the Philippines toward democracy and freedom over there. And that was hitting them here like how Black Panthers did in the 60′s  and that’s how they started thinking.  So it was the older homies who would talk to us about that shit.

There’s this gang out here – 23rd [Deuce Trey] Diablos, they’re like this Filipino Crip gang – and one of the older dudes from there…one summer he started talking to me about him reading about the Black Panthers making him want to know about his history.  And he was like, “Dude you need to learn your history, that’s why you’re out here running really crazy.” And him talking to me, like, I listened to him and I started peeping shit out and I went through a lot of changes.  A lot of changes.  There’s this thing out here called Isang Mahal, and the women from that organization (its a community/arts collective) and they would just say some wild shit that would just bug me out on a daily basis and have me running home thinking about some shit.  And that just kinda sparked my difference, and I started looking at my neighborhood in a different way.  My point has always been to represent my neighborhood, but now its to do it in a way that allows the little kids who are going through  the same shit that I went through to get older.

Like, I grew up by accident, you know what I’m saying?  I got shot a couple times, stabbed a grip of times and the fact I’m still alive is kinda an accident.  And so I wanted to do something toward that so its not an accident for the kids who are coming up now.  Because the shit is getting bad.  Like, it got better for a little bit and now its getting bad again like it was like in the late 80′s, early 90′s.  So its like, what can i do to, if nothing else, have most of the kids that I work with still be alive when school rolls back around.

D. Scott:  Off top, thank you for sharing that with me and everyone.  You actually just answered like 4 of my questions without even trying.  Sooo…now I’m wondering if you could maybe give us a taste of the Seattle hip-hop scene, because its an area that’s been doing a lot of banging on people’s consciousness, slowly but surely.  I’m wondering what’s responsible for the texture out there and what about it that’s getting people to pay attention?

Khingz: My first thing I always like to say about the hip-hop scene in Seattle is that its fucking beautiful and I love it.  Even though in many ways I hate living in this city, our hip-hop scene and a couple other communities here lift my spirits up.  For one, there is a hella diverse hip-hop scene out here.  You can’t say, “Oh, Seattle is conscious rap,” – there’s hella different shit out here.  Not all of it is escaping, but there’s a whole lotta stuff going on.  I often think the skill level of cats who get on and do shows around here is really high.  I think a lot of it is that we only had 2 or 3 venues we could perform at, and really, if there’s only 2 or 3 venues the good people need to be rapping and you need to not.  *laughs*  That’s the idea.  And it strengthened a lotta people and now we have way more venues and we also have way more cats who are dope.

As far as why we sound different?  Part of it is the isolation.  We’re pretty isolated up here, like our two closets cities are…well, I gotta count Tacoma (and also Tacoma is really filthy. They’re not really getting any props, they’re not really getting any love and Tacoma needs hella love.  Tacoma goes hard, their city is crazy – they’re living in some wild shit down there like consistently and they still do dope shit.  So a lotta props to Tacoma.)  Tacoma and Seattle are close like San Francisco and Oakland are (so we should have more cross-pollination but we don’t ’cause we’re trippin.)  And we also have Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Canada, cities that are also really isolated and in many ways really similar to our own.  Other than that we don’t have a lot of extra influences coming in from outside.  Like in the early 90′s there was a huge Bay Area influence, and I feel like people can still hear it when they listen to our music.  If you had to pinpoint another region we sound close to, it’d be the Bay.

But I feel like that also has to do with similar environments – like Seattle is almost a miniature version of San Francisco. From the hills, to the way things are laid out in the city; everything that we have San Francisco has it bigger, so it makes sense we’re going to be similar.  But I feel the big difference is, one, there’s that sense throughout emcees who are my age and a little younger, there is that neighborhood camaraderie that in a lot of ways is more important than your ethnic camaraderie.  Say I’m a black dude from the South End – I’ma be cool with other black people from South End, Cambodians from South End, Filipinos from South End, but if you’re from the north, I might not be cool with you even if we’re both black.  Which is unfortunate – we should be cool regardless.  But because of that you can expose a lot of people to other’s stories, and you can start equating it with your own.

Like, my family – my family’s from a lotta places and I can’t even really break it all down cause I don’t wanna get deported.  But like when I was talking to my Somalian homies and they’re talking about the situation that lead to them moving to the US, that resonates with me cause that’s a lot like my family’s situation.  That has a huge effect on how you look at the world.  You look at the world differently, where you are now dealing with a situation where you feel like you have a lotta privilege but you come from a situation where people don’t eat and life is far from guaranteed.  And when you look at the privilege that you do have, its a lot less than the rest of your city’s but you’re still thankful for it.  And that effects your whole life -how you go about everything, everything you attempt to do, even the way you get your groceries, the way you talk to your friends, the way you meet new people.  So its definitely going to affect the way that you rap.  I also look at Seattle like, we’re so isolated…I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Dragon Ball Z, but they used to have this special chamber they used to train in where the gravity was like ten times harder and time went slower so they could just train hella hard -

D. Scott:  The Room of Spirit and Time!!!

Khingz:  Yeah, yeah!  Exactly!  So they would be in there hardcore, and in many ways the city has become that.  So we have a couple of people that are breaking out.  It sounds hella different, that’s just how it is.  In our city its better for you to do your own thing.  People respect you if you do your own thing.  There’s a group out here called D-Satisfaction, and I think about how misogynistic and homophobic hip-hop as a culture is:  D-Satisfaction are an openly gay female duo.  And they’re accepted by a hip-hop community that I feel is homophobic the whole rest of the time except when they’re there cuz they’re filthy.  They can rap.  So cats that I personally thought wouldn’t accept them are like “No no no – D-Sat goes hard” and its dope cause they can use that to talk to them about the homophobia and misogyny in the rest of their lives.  And its pretty filthy so, I dunno.  Anything like that is a big deal here ’cause people respect that they’re doing their thing and not pretending to be someone they’re not.

Unfortunately, not too many of us are making any money off of it.  Fortunately because of that we’re really doing it for the love.  Even the cats who sound really commercial they’re doing the shit ’cause that’s what they love.    And  it does open the doors for you to have some ill conversations and grow up and become a whole human being

D. Scott:  Talking to you right now,  you seem to be a person who seems to hold and value a lot of different stories.   And so I’m wondering, when approaching an album like From Slaveships to Spaceships, do you plan out points you need to hit, or is just a great big-bang of whatever is inside of you at the time?

Khingz:  I feel like its a mixture of both.  In particular, for Slaveships to Spaceships, like a lotta art it started with a break up:  This girl I was dating, who lives in LA now, when me and her broke up it totally like fucked my whole mind up.  And it was one of those relationships, where there was a lotta trust.  And it was like my best friend type of deal – so I was losing my best friend.  I feel like in a lotta situations, especially when you’re younger – you’re like “fuck them.”  But instead of doing that this time, I was like “Whoa- why did I just lose my best friend?”  And on one hand I wasn’t that sad about the actual break-up.   The thing that was tearing me apart was “Are we still going to be close?”  and I was going through this whole deal; having me just looking at everything I was doing differently and questioning if you can just lose this person, who I still think is really dope, what am I doing?  I’m trying to be somebody different than I was in high school.  Am I doing that?  Is that happening, am I really any different?  I feel like on the outside I’m doing all these things, I’m doing all this community work but on the inside am I still a gangster?  And like, what is that about?  Cuz I’m still having feelings – if someone gets shot in my neighborhood, my first feeling is retaliation; I want someone to pay for that.  But my action might be different, but is that enough?  And unlike a lotta people when I critique myself, I don’t do that with a loving eye.  Especially after the breakup, saying “You fucked up here, here, here and there.”  And then being like I need to quit doing that:  She left because I’m so negative to me.  I need to quit fucking doing that.

I thought about a slaveship being where you’re stuck in the cargo hold and you’re on the water, but everything underneath the water like the current and the things that are happening underneath there are controlling where you go.  So you’re not in control.  And in a spaceship, when you’re in space you can see what’s going on and you would be at the controls.  And to fly through space you have to know three things – you gotta know where you’re going, where you came from, and where you’re at.  That’s how you triangulate your position.  And I was like “word” – I wanna go from a slaveship situation to a spaceship situation.  And so when that clicked in my head (and then I thought it was a good album title) I wanted to show as best as I could that progression, from a slaveship mentality into a sort of spaceship mentality.  And I wanted to express what that was like for me.  And I don’t know how good I did, but people like the album so its cool, you know?   And so that was my process, I thought about songs I wanted to do and music that I wanted to make.  I wanted it to fit into three places:  The slave section, the revolution section where I understand something is happening to me and I’m doing something about it, and the liberation section where I’m free.  And along with that, having it planned out in my head, I’m like one of those artists where certain songs just come out because of something that happened that day, its just in there.  And I’ll hear a beat and I’ll be like “Oh! This goes to this song!” and I’ll write it.  Or sometimes I’ll just write it and try to find a beat later on.  And so I feel some of the songs just don’t fit into that [the Slaveships to Spaceship theme] but they needed to come out.  For some reason I felt like they had to be on my records, and I had to address  them.  Cuz I was living in the Bay and then I moved back to Seattle and so I had to talk about moving back to Seattle.  All kinda little things like that.  When I make an album…I guess what I’m trying to explain is that theres’s a little of both.  I have an agenda, and I have an idea, a theme, a concept, and I have the shit that just happened.  And I wanna just let that happen cuz sometimes those are people’s favorite songs.  Like “Pony Boy” just kinda happened.

D. Scott:  Really?  Okay.  Man, its funny – I feel like a lesson that art shows us is that our mistakes have a lot to teach us, and then they don’t really become mistakes anymore.   So, sonically, were you going for a particular sound to really provide a landscape?  And if so, what goes into you choosing what kinda sound you want?

Khingz: In the beginning there was.  A lot of Seattle music is really laid back.  But I don’t feel like that in my heart.  A lotta time I feel like I’m on fire, and I want music that reflects that,  allows me to get that out.  The city I live in is a very chill, relaxed city.  I used to say that we’re so relaxed that during a drive by muhfuckas fall asleep…

D. Scott:  *busts the fuck up*

Khingz:   ..but to me, when I grew up, and a lot of it is my personality…and I don’t wanna make it sounds like I’m bragging cause its not a brag thing.  I’m a very passionate person – I love things, I hate things, and then I don’t care about things.  I don’t have a lot of in between.  And here, a lotta times that’s really frowned on.  A lotta people here don’t really like when you feel very strongly about something, like an”…oh, that makes me uncomfortable” type deal.  And regarding the struggle, being able to express that and get that out some kinda way.  And that’s a lotta reason why I got into hip-hop.  And so when i was looking for beats I always wanted something that had a lotta energy and you could dance to it.  And another thing is underground hip-hop has become this super cerebral thing where a lotta people don’t make music to dance to.  And I personally feel like people of color, a lot of us, come from cultures that are based around dancing, especially black folks – its kinda what we do.  So for us to take that away and still be talking about liberating myself, I feel like that’s a contradiction.  And so I was definitely always like I need some shit muhfuckas can get to.  And plus I like to dance:  I like to go out I like to club, dance and shit like that.  I’m not like the dude who goes to the club, gets a drink and chills back.  I’m not that type of cat.

So I start there, and with this particular album, I knew I wanted a couple landscapes, beats that sounded like I was surrounded by something.  I watch a lotta anime and there’s an anime called MacCross, and Robotech, and growing up I watched that, I watched all the series that came up later on.  And they always have a scene where a person is chilling in space and they’re having a thought.  And like its a stylistic thing where the Mechs will disappear and it looks like they’re floating in space.

And I was like, I need a beat that sounds like that – that encompasses that feeling – and I got the beat that ended up becoming “Heaven Made This.” And man, some of the other beats just kinda happened.  I heard them and was like, that’s dope.  I want certain things and then I just let the feeling happen.  Like if it feels good then I’m fucking with it.  Like Bladed Poems, when I first heard it, I just thought of…it made me think of people marching.  But not like, soldiers marching – PEOPLE marching, you know what I’m saying?  And I was like, the feeling it evoked for me was cats going out to get what they deserve.  And that’s why I did that track.

D.Scott:  Man, you so almost too much dope stuff cause now I have all these questions that go in completely different directions.  Let’s talk about things that influence you, as a person and a writer.  Like, you talking about anime being really influential, and you got like a Kurosawa reference in there, somewhere, like…

Khingz:   Yeah yeah, haha.

D. Scott:  …Ha, so maybe we could talk about those things that influence your imagery and the person you are.

Khingz: Well starting with anime… anime was a big deal.  Growing up in a city like Seattle where everyone is white – except for your neighborhood which everyone ignores – as a kid, I was searching for something non-white that I could like. Like, I had rap music as a kid, that’s one thing, but all these other parts of my life, all these other areas of living seems to be all white dominated, particularly in movies.  So I got really into Hong Kong movies, for the simple fact I wanted to see a movie where the main character, the hero, was a person of color.  And on top of that they were dope.  And so I went from like Chinese movies, of course into action movies, started getting into more drama, and then I got into Japanese movies  And one of the big dudes of course is Akira Kurosawa who dropped Seven Samurai on me.  And that movie just…I remember just watching it and it was so grimey!!  Like Seven Samurai could’ve took place in any project anywhere.   I mean I could’ve…you know how when you’re a kid you have make believe gangs…and it would be like this group of gangsters or police sometimes are harassing the projects and taking all their money and shit.  And so the people are hiring other gangsters to defend them against the police or the other gangsters, whichever one it was that day.  And so I would play this game…and that had a big influence.  And I think one of the main ways that these kinda movies influenced me was  in a lotta anime, the idea of loyalty to your friends, and to the things that they believe in and being willing to die for that is like CRUCIAL.  And that is the cool guy who dies close to the end of the series, that’s why he dies.  Its like you could leave, and live, but what kinda man would I be?  What kinda friend would I be?  that’s not human to be a coward all the time.  and so then they die but they’re DOPE!  And I looked at that, and I was like that’s filthy.  And then just connected that with the situation where we’re in a gang situation and the whole point of that is to be loyal to each other, you know? And it just had a huge effect just on the way I thought about shit.

As I got older, I was always into science fiction, like reading and stuff.  My mom is an avid reader of everything, and she always wanted her own library but we always lived in apartments and shit, so she’d always take a corner of my room and that would be her library.  She’d put all her books in there, so a lot of times when I was in trouble she made me sit in my room.   And I started reading her books – and it started with me being mad at her and like throwing her books around and then being like “what does this mean, Children Of a Lesser God?  What’s Kurt Vonnegut?  What are these books?”  and wanting to get into them and like reading them.  And being exposed to Orson Scott Card, like Ender’s Game, Isaac Asimov, just all this wild ass shit – and these concepts matched the cartoons I was watching.  And so I was like, that’s tight!  This is like my comic books but without pictures and without pictures I’m able to make them up.  And I got hella into those.  Like, Dune?  Frank Herbert?  That was ill cuz the way that Frank Herbert writes, he breaks down not just what people are doing but what they’re thinking and I realized there was a way that [his characters] thought that was conducive to their survival in an environment that was trying to kill them.  Like they were in this desert and they were surrounded by enemies and ts not just that they were thinking a certain way but they were PURPOSEFLY thinking a certain way -  they’re fine turning their thought process consciously in order to survive and triumph.  And I related that to, well, here I am, out there man and every time I go outside my house I know that I might not come home.  If I don’t put my mindstate in the proper angle and I’m just out there, I’m a casualty.  And if I’m really thinking about it – where I go, what I do, what’s happening – then I can come home again.  So science fiction, fantasy novels, obviously game culture has been a big influence on me and now the sacrifice I’m willing to put into something.  If you’re willing to die for a color, in a street you don’t own, when you find out some shit about people really struggling to make their lives better it almost feels like a privilege – it does feel like a privilege – to be able to give yourself to that.  To be like, my life – my life is cool, you can HAVE IT to help make things better.  Because I was willing to go for a lot less shit.  So its almost like someone opened the door and said here is a place where you can be a G and make something better.  And like that’s perfect for me.

I already mentioned with her books, my mom’s been a huge influence…My mom is brilliant.  And the one thing she always wanted to be able to give me was an education – and not necessarily me going to a good school and me going to college or grad school.  But she sees education, not so much as memorizing a bunch of shit, but learning how to think.  So she was constantly playing little games with me to get me to learn how to think critically on my own.  Like I would try to ask her for the definition of a word and she’d go, “I don’t know, what does it mean?”  “…I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you!”  “Well, how can you find out? “ “By asking you!”  “But I’m not telling you so what’s another way you can find out?”  And I would get so frustrated, but I would find out what the word meant and I would have to figure out how I’m going to know something that I don’t know and no one will tell me.  And o this day I’m one of like eight people who know that – they don’t teach you that shit at school, really.  You can look in one or two places for an answer and the answer will be there, and if its not there then its unanswerable.  That has served me a lot, and there’s a lot of things I think, too, that lead to my trying to live a positive lifestyle, a more positive lifestyle, cause being able to think critically about my situation and who I am, where I’m living and what am I doing to the neighborhood that I profess to love so much.  Am I really helping it or not?  Skateboarding was big to me…I do a lotta BMXing and shit now.  I feel like everything kinda influences me.  History – I got really into reading history at one point.  And like right now, Wikipedia is like my shit, I could be on Wikipedia for hours, even though I realize not all the information is accurate but its also dope to see like what people think about different things and check where they’re getting their sources from.  I dunno – I like learning.

So music wise, my biggest influence about how I rap, which will probably bug people out is Brotha Lynch.

D.Scott:  Waaaaaaa! *loses it*

Khingz:   I mean like, especially you know, he’s a Crip dude and Brotha Lynch is so filthy to me!  Like the way he did his syllables when he was almost double-timing and then he wouldn’t.   He has his own style, but he doesn’t stick to it on every single song.  And I’m peeping that so while he’s eating babies and shit, I’m just like this guy can fucking rap” and that was a huge influence; style-wise that was probably my biggest influence.  There’s a lotta really dope ones:  I’ve mentioned Isang Mahal.  I can’t give Isang Mahal enough props.  I tell people my process to learn how to be a black man started by listening to Filipino women, who are talking about their process – what does it mean to be me?  And me before that not having any concept of really thinking about what it means to be you. And they bugged me out!  The conversations we would have, and I’m just sitting there quiet, just listening, getting fucking freaked out, like what the fuck, bugging out and having to go home and having to do some real thought.  So I can’t even begin to say how much the Isang Mahal arts collective has influenced me as a person.

They’re just filthy, man.  They just bug me out.  Just every week I would go to their shit, and I would just leave there like “WHAT THE FUCK!”

And yeah man, those are a lot of like my main influences, and just the neighborhood in general.

D. Scott:  Man, so, I really wanna know the answer to this question: When it comes to a song like Eletric Tantra…

Khingz: *starts laughing*

D. Scott:  …and like,  at first I had like a typical dude response:  “Yeah, that shit is…cool.  I guess.”  But, like, I felt there was something really to this.  Hearing you say “I don’t really put myself out here like that” – on the track – I feel like you’re braving a kind of uncomfortable, personal and vulnerable space.  Cause its on some sexy, romance shit, but you’re also real-talk speaking TO this person.  And a lotta artists aren’t comfortable being uncomfortable like that.  And so I’m wondering what made you wanna put this on the album?

Khingz:   I actually really did not want to put that on the album.  I got that beat and the beat was just dope to me.   And it was supposed to be me and my homeboy, this guy Nam, and we got a crew together called Balance Brothers.  And we had got a bunch  of beats to do Balance Brothers music to and that was on there.  And he was like, “I have no idea what to rap to this about” but the second I heard it I was like “I know what to rap about in this song, like there’s nothing else to rap over this beat.”  And I was kinda shook like, I don’t do songs like that.  Mainly because…I don’t really like R&B, cause I feel a lotta times when people talk about love or sexual situations its in a really fake way like – I didn’t even write this song, somebody else wrote this, its not about anybody in particular, its just some shit that I know could be a hit.  And so I really don’t listen to that stuff, and I don’t miss that kinda music for the most part.

But I was like, in the beginning I wanna challenge myself to do some shit that I don’t know if I can do with rap music.  Like, I feel for the most part I’m a pretty confident MC and I feel like whatever it is I wanna do with word in the rap context, I can do.  Whether its written, freestyle – I can get it.  I can get in.  But those kinds songs of course, are difficult, so I wanted that challenge.  Two, at the end of my last relationship, I met somebody and our relationship for the last two years has like steadily just grown exponentially and has just gotten deeper and deeper and deeper.  And then, a huge tool in my growth, in both of our growths as people…there are things that she does and things that she thinks and a lifestyle that she lives that just blows my mind on a daily basis.  And I’m just like “Yo! I wanna express that in song.” So I wanted to do a song for the girl I was with, express where I was at, and that beat was so….”AAAGH~!” like Blaq Han Solo is pretty sober, but the way the Electric Tantra beat went it was just like, there has to be that extra element to this.  And so, I wrote it.  It took me a minute to get down to actually writing it.  I knew what I wanted to do, but I can’t just rap on here, I can’t just like do my rapid-fire battle-verse type shit, like what’s the cadence gonna be?  And just kinda let it happen.  I ended up writing it one night and it was pretty hard.  I tried to come up with a hook a couple times, just it was nothing that really accomplished what I’m tryna do.  And someone was like “you should get my homeboy to sing” and I was like, nah – I’m tryna talk to my girlfriend:  If she’s listening to this I want her to be thinking about me, and not the R&B dude.  *laughs*  And that’s what it was – I was gonna do it just for her.

And you know, I sent it to her, and she was like “Oh that’s really dope – is this gonna go on the album?”  And I was like hell no, I am not putting that shit on the album.  I gave it to my manager cause she was over and was like “Oh what’d you do at Aaron’s house the other day”, well I did a bunch of songs, I did like 8 songs that day.  She’s going over the CD and she’s like “What the fuck is THIS?”  I was like “Oh, that’s this cut that I just did, I know its weird” and she goes, “No – the shit is dope”.  And I’m like, really?  There’s not even a hook on there, I’m just talking!  “Nah, nah, that shit is filthy – This is gonna be one of the dopest cuts on the album.”  And I’m like, “I’m not putting that shit on the album.”

The other reason I was hesitant to put it on the album, is…you know, I do a lotta shows.  I be traveling.  And whenever you do anything that’s public you get a certain level of attention from women in the crowd; doesn’t matter if you’re making money, doesn’t matter if you’re famous, you get attention.  If you’re a poet, you get attention.  And I don’t like all that attention.  I feel like…to a certain extent, people, a lot of the times, when women at a show see me perform and go “Oh, I wanna get with him” – they actually didn’t listen to anything I said.  Its not like I said something that sparked something in them and they wanna talk to me more and they wanna learn about it.  Its more “I think he’s cute on stage and it would be cool if we kicked it tonight.”  And for me I always feel like it cheapened the experience and I don’t wanna get into that.  I take myself, my body, very seriously.  I never really been a dude that like, tried to go out and like get my Bobby Brown on so to speak.  And so for a long time, I shied away from doing those kinda songs cuz I didn’t want to get that kind of attention.  And that was a huge deal when it came to whether to put the song on or not.  I don’t wanna be in  aweird situation.  More to the point, I don’t wanna be in a situation with someone that I like, someone I think is really dope and I’ve known for a minute and then they hear that song and it changes something.  So, there’s a buncha shit that went into that, and eventually I went with putting it on there for the challenge to myself.  I perform it as a challenge, like, “Get out of where you’re comfortable and DO that shit.”  That’s really like the story of that whole song.  The name, “Electric Tantra” came from “Electric Relaxation”, the Tribe Called Quest song, but being a little more sexual than that song…although that song is pretty sexual.

D. Scott:  I gotta say, thank you for really challenging yourself that way.  Cause a lot of artists don’t, and end up selling their audiences and themselves short.  So, last question:  I’m thinking about a song like “Bladed Poems” which posses a lot of take-the-offensive type energy.  You saying that ‘I pray to Nat Turner’s Jesus Christ” and you talking about Fanon.  So I’m wondering, what do you want to see from the people in your community, and the larger international community, too.  What needs to happen, and what role do you feel like you’ll be playing in that?

Khingz: From my community, on an individual basis, I would like people to recognize there is a balance between what an individual needs and what the community needs and they are completely intertwined.  You cannot be an individual without a community – you would be dead.  And there cannot be a community without individuals.  In the US, I feel like there’s this huge battle between, like, community vs. individualism.  And what I would like people to recognize is that is not a battle – that is an artificially created struggle.  You and your community are separate and the exact same thing at the same time.  And I would like us to recognize that.  I would like those of us who live on the US, the power that we have on a domestic and an international level, as people who live in a somewhat democracy we can march in the streets without getting shot.  And we can make change in our country without having to worry about a mass grave being buried somewhere with all of our friends and family in it.  So, that being the case, we need to recognize why our lives here suck and do something about it.  And recognize how the foreign policy of the country we live in is making lives suck in other places.  And recognizing that our liberation and our struggle here is infinitely and completely wrapped up in every single other struggle to be free everywhere else  Its the same one.  We’re fighting the same system.  And we’re being used in the same way.  There’s different levels of visibility and harshness in order to create this illusion that “my life is better than so and so’s, so maybe I shouldn’t rock the boat.”  But its not.  Its not.  So I would like us to recognize that.

For the larger, third-world, international community, I wouldn’t ask them to do shit.  They are already the vanguard of struggle against oppression..  As hard as muhfuckas go – and I know some cats in the US and Canada who go HARD.  Cats in Haiti, kids in Palestine, BABIES in Palestine, folks out in the Philippines, all over this world, folks are going ten times harder, and they’re doing it without any food in their stomach, they’re doing it at the same time with a baby on their back.  So really, I wouldn’t tell them shit, other than “I got your back and I’m gonna make sure that what we’re doing here backs you up.”  ‘Cuz it seems like “Oh, they’re just fighting for their homeland”…even if they feel like that, the oppression they’re fighting against is going to benefit us all.

Like looking back at the 60′s, with the Black Liberation Movement – there is no one in the US who did not benefit from that movement.  There were also very few definite groups in the US who also weren’t a part of that movement, everybody was in that shit, and we all have benefited from that shit, whether it was free lunch, desegregation of schools (which is really a double-edged sword), there are all these different things that benefited everybody.  But if people wanna think about it as “Oh Martin Luther King, did this for black people”  – we all benefited.  Whenever you fight oppression, its better for everybody.  So I thin its best for us to really support those struggles for liberation that are going on around the world, is kinda what I’m saying in that song – know what’s going on, train your mind to think critically so you can decide for yourself what you really think is going on in the world and what you wanna do about it.  And as far as my role…My role will be whatever it has to be to promote and grasp freedom for everybody.  Whatever that is, and it might change on a daily basis.  One day it might mean feeding some kids, another day i might have to fight somebody, another day i might have to teach something.  Whatever it is, I don’t care:  We gotta get it done cause we’re the ones who are dying.  One other thing, is I want people to recognize that they are the gold that everyone is fighting for – all this shit that’s going on.  All this wealth that this 1 percent or 2 percent of this planet is trying to accumulate, that shit is them.  They are the things that these people are trying to win.  And those people, we as a whole, as a human race, are what we’re fighting over.  And just recognize like the different importance of every last one of us:  Cause we’re the prize.  Yeah, that would be what I want to say.

D. Scott:  Thaaaaat’s what’s up.  So, man, I wanna thank you for spending so much time with us this afternoon.  And to put an official close to the interview, do you have any folks you wanna shout out real quick?

Khingz: I wanna thank Fresh Shop Beats, I wanna think Mad K,  I wanna thank Devastator, I wanna thank the whole 206…I wanna thank the entire South End – I gotta separate those cause they South End has to get love twice.  I wanna thank my man Gabe…there are like too many people to mention that have helped make this possible.  Without the help of like a hundred or so dedicated people who kept me alive, kept me nourished, and helped me put this record out it never would’ve happened.  I really wanna thank everybody who listens to this shit and really listens to it, cause I guess that as an emcee I’m always worried that people are listening to it without really listening to it…its a crazy feeling, its almost impossible to explain.  So I just wanna thank all the listeners man, just wanna thank everybody.

Chuuch.

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