Casual

(September 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

As a member of Hieroglyphics, Casual is part of a sort of underground Wu-Tang, a hip-hop collective that has found success both as a group and as individuals (other members include Domino and Del tha Funkee Homosapien).  On his latest solo release, Casual takes the name Smash Rockwell, mercifully leaves the tired rap skits on the sidelines, and feeds listeners a generous helping of the old-school.

On Casual Presents Smash Rockwell, the emcee enlists the talents of longtime collaborators like A-Plus and Dan the Automator, and also takes the opportunity to offer a rousing shout-out to his hometown, featuring fellow Oaklanders Too $hort and Richie Rich.  Just coming off from a summer tour with his Hiero mates, Mr. Rockwell reflects on the new record and the still-evolving world of hip-hop.

How was “Smash Rockwell” created?  What’s he about, what does he represent to you?

He came across in so many different ways.  My friends just started calling me “Smash” after a while because, like I say all the time, it’s a term up in Oakland that means taking control, grabbing something by the handlebars, you know what I mean?  Then I went on the Handsome Boy tour and, you know, I was hanging out with Chest Rockwell and once I graduated from Handsome Boy Modeling School, he was like, “Man, you Smash Rockwell.”  (laughs)  Yeah, I am.

Wasn’t the album supposed to drop earlier originally?

I’ve been trying to get the record out for the longest, but I wanted to get the right collection of material, so I was postponing it myself.  My theory is that it dropped with God’s timing.  I wasn’t stressing anything.

Tell me how you chose your producers for this record.

Actually, I just contacted the guys whose music I enjoy – they’re all friends of friends.  The industry isn’t that big and I just put a word out with the guys I wanted to work with, and we made it happen.

But you’d worked with some of those guys before.

I work with Dan the Automator all the time.  Dante Ross, I work with him all the time.  But J-Zone and Jake One, this was my first time working with those guys, and I look forward to working with them again because they’re making the type of music I like rapping over.

You definitely take some shots on the record at the fakers and flashes in the pan in the industry, but I also read an interview from not too long ago where you said that hip-hop was in a better state now than ever.  Do you still think that’s true?

Yeah, I do think it’s still true.  I mean, if you look at hip-hop on a bar graph and just chart the best-selling albums, I’m pretty sure the bar graph would be going up for the last couple years.  That’s really the only way to judge it because it is a big business – it’s a business.  We’re not judging it as a hobby.  It’s been getting bigger and bigger.  Five or ten years ago, you’d never hear about a rapper selling diamond – ten million units.

A lot of times when I answer that question, I answer it about a business, not creatively.  Creatively, I feel like hip-hop is still growing, but I don’t feel like it’s bigger than ever.  I feel like guys are caught up in this little copycat stuff and are just trying to mimic the biggest artist, which doesn’t help hip-hop as an art.

Yeah, when you’ve got guys moving ten million units, there can be a lot of pressure from labels and everyone to follow in those footsteps.

Exactly.  That’s why I own my own company…I do have control over the way my music and presented and put out.

When you started out doing that, going into business for yourself, was it hard to balance the business and art?

To a lot of artists—they might not want to admit it—but [the business] is sort of intimidating.  I even know established artists that I’ve known for years that still don’t know the gist of what’s going on, like what a mechanical royalty is in comparison to what your publishing is, and how these funds come from different sources – you know what I’m saying, a whole bunch of stuff that I was in the dark about for the first five years of my career. 

If you were talking to an up-and-comer, would you generally tell them to stay away from the majors? 

No, I wouldn’t tell them to stay away from the major labels.  That’s about as big as you can get, as far as promoting your art to people – that’s the biggest auxiliary we have.  But try to understand the business side of things – it’s cliché, but it’s really gonna make or break you.

Yeah, and there are crooks all over – not just in the majors.

Yeah, and all the crooked people know their business, trust me.  All the crooks, they know it inside and out.  All the people getting ripped off really don’t know too much about it.

Have you kept up with Hollywood’s depiction of hip-hop and rap battles, like Hustle & Flow and 8 Mile?

No, not really.  I got a kind of an envious feeling toward that kind of shit.

But you have a book in the works.  Maybe you’ll have a movie of your own at some point?

Possibly.  I’m pretty sure if somebody from Hiero winds up in a movie, it’s probably gonna be an independent film that we wind up putting out ourselves.  That’s how things have been going.

But I wouldn’t turn down anything; I’d love to act.  I consider myself a funny dude, you feel me?  I don’t get to show enough comedy in my music.

I look forward to that.  Jumping back to your childhood – was rap something that everybody knew about, or was it something that you had to seek out?

There were like two radio stations.  My mom would really not let me go in the streets too much – she was protecting me.  But there were a couple of radio stations that I would listen to – one was KPLO, a local Bay Area station, and the other was KZSU, the Stanford college radio station.  Back then, they would always play all the hip-hop, and that was really the only way I could get hip-hop.

I had an older sister who used to buy wax vinyl, but she would never let me spin her records.  When she would leave, I would probably throw on Jimmy Spencer or some stuff like that.

Did you love it right away?  Or did it take some time to sink in because it was so different?

I was young – that was the first music I’d really heard, period.  I wasn’t into music before I was into rap.  Maybe I used to like when my father would play Stevie Wonder, but that wasn’t even because I liked music, it was because he was playing it so loud.  But when I first started paying attention to music, it was hip-hop. 

The first rhyme I ever wrote was my version of “Roxanne, Roxanne,” and then I battled somebody with it and they didn’t believe that I wrote it, so I started writing my own.

I’ve read some interviews where you expressed disappointment in your last album –

No, see, that’s funny.  I just said some things and the context was taken that I said that; that all spawned from my bio, but really what my feeling was that I vented, I was a little bit too angry, and it was all me – I produced all of it, I didn’t have no outside producers or shit.  But I’m saying, though, I’m a lyricist and my bar is always up.  Now motherfuckers are gonna get on my nut, they’re gonna listen to this new record and then they’re gonna be like, “I loved the last record, that was my favorite shit.”  (laughs)  I know how this shit works.

But when that’s what you present at the moment and people aren’t really fucking with it, then they be like, “Oh, he ain’t hot no more.”  But that ain’t my feeling about any piece that I’ve done.  I look at each album as a portrait, and I look at myself as an artist – I’m not going to be drawing the same picture over and over.

What kinds of audiences are you seeing on this Hieroglyphics tour?  Mostly loyal old fans or fresh new faces?

Younger fools who don’t even know who I am, it’s crazy.  I mean, it’s good because that’s who you want to perform for – the kids.  You want new fans as well as the old fans.  It seems like a lot of the fans at the shows now met us with Full Circle, and that was a 2003 release.  It’s kind of fun.  At the same time, it’s like, “Damn, I’m a new artist all over again.”

When you get back home to Oakland, what’s your favorite thing to do right away to celebrate being back?

Oh, I know what I do immediately:  greet my girl, kiss my daughters, and turn on my video game.  I’m online, I’m in a big ass clan, and they’re probably like, “Where the fuck has he been?”