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| J-Coasta (centre) with the Anonymous DJ (rear), Pete One (left) and Mark C. Squire (right) |
To be fair, though absolutely committed to his art and intensely passionate about hip hop, J-Coasta (that west coast kid), to use his full moniker, has a good business head on his shoulders. Not only has he recently launched his first official mixtape, Coasta's Way (thank you for your patients), set up a network to try to promote aspiring young artists, but he is a regular live performer in the Bay Area and hosts his own radio station, Six50 Radio.
Appearance can be deceptive as I learned in my official interview with him conducted a few days later. Though from what many would consider a privileged church-going middle-class background, J-Coasta knows the hood, has seen the inside of jail and has earned the right to rap in as hard a core manner as he likes. The irony is that he is now moving away from gangsta and towards a new lyricism.
On the day of the interview, J-Coasta visited my 'office' - a sunny communal patio at my haute bourgeois apartment block in Los Altos. He was slightly more 'in character' - diamond-studded earrings and baseball cap (not reversed). Nevertheless, he was still the immensely linkable young man I had met a couple of days earlier. I even felt ever so slightly guilty about smoking a cigar in front of him, but puffed on nevertheless. This is health-conscious California after all and I'm damned if I won't set a bad example. 'When in Rome do as the Greeks' to borrow from St. Ambrose.
Ever courteous, Coasta took my European decadence or, possibly, old fogeyishness in his stride; it turns out that he has seen far worse. As well as his politeness, what got me was his bubbling, highly infectious enthusiasm and high-octane energy. If he doesn't make it, I found myself thinking throughout the interview, there is something very wrong with the American dream.
Coasta became a major fan of hip hop in 1999 when he was in the eighth grade and living in Beaverton, Portland Area, Oregon. School friends introduced him to Eminem, whose Slim Shady LP, had just come out. Up till then, he hadn’t shown much interest in music let alone hip hop, but something about the album struck a chord: “We all loved it because of how outrageous it was. He was on there talking shit about things - nobody had ever said before”. He liked it “a lot”.
This might have been little more than a clichéd tale of adolescent rebellion and have simply fizzled out, but for two things: first, the strength of parental opposition Coasta faced and a matching degree of recalcitrance on his part; second, the passion he felt for the music itself. His dominating father would search his room and bin any CD labelled ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics’. That just made him want to buy more. Soon he was surreptitiously devouring Ice-Cube, Nas, Bone-Thugs, Jadakiss. Snoop Dogg, D.M.X., B.i.g and Pac. The more his father destroyed, the more he bought.
Merely liking hip hop wasn't enough, of course, but Coasta was extremely talented as a lyricist and as a singer. The former came out at school where his natural abilities showed in his English compositions and creative writing classes. His performing abilities were developed through constant practice. When he wasn't listening to music, he and his long-time friend, Kyle Henson (aka Simple), were rapping and making beats.
Coasta's late adolescence and early adulthood amounted to a trial by fire. As the father of a son of Coasta's age, I found this story excruciatingly painful to listen to, but the period was a necessary one in his development as an artist and the sense of parental rejection he experienced may partly account for the 'reaching out' thematic that runs throughout the interview. He wants to reach out to the young and help them avoid what he went through. It may not be too far-fetched to see his growing network in terms of a substitute family.
Estranged from his parents, Coasta made a precarious living dealing in drugs on the street. At the comparatively tender age of 19, he dealt with the pregnancy of his then girlfriend without any parental help. Feeling abandoned, he entered a self- destructive spiral, descending deeper and deeper into the drug scene. At one point he converted to Islam while dating a Muslim girl and fellow drug dealer. The affair broke down. He spent some time in jail and then faced with a second term reinvented himself as a born again nice guy. The conversation then turned to his musical development and hip hop.
What is the state of hip hop at the moment?
Many of the more mature listeners are unhappy with it. I mean personally I can’t stand turning on the radio and hearing all the bubble gum crap that passes itself off for rap. I’ll maybe hear a couple of songs I like but mostly I’ll turn it off because I can’t stand it. They are not talking about anything that I relate to.
'Bubble-gum rap'? Could you explain what you mean?
Sure. For me, bubble-gum or popcorn rap refers to the types of songs that are getting exposure now days, in pop culture, that have no meaning behind their music. The lyrics might be catchy, but have no depth or purpose. Even gangsta rap almost always stands for something; it has a message and reflects genuine experience..
Hip hop is a culture whose roots are deeply embedded in American society and the last thirty years of history. It can be compared to a major news publication like the New York Times, while this bubble gum rap is like the bullshit tabloids.
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How does MC Hammer come into it? If memory serves, he was the first rapper we heard in the UK.
Well, he was really an example of what I mean by bubble gum rap. Easy enough to listen to, but empty of meaning.
Aside from hip hop, what kind of music do you listen to?
I like classic rock. I also listen to classical music sometimes to get an orchestral inspiration for instrumentals. I like my instrumental beats to very expansive musically and harmonically. I don’t like the simple loops that a lot of people are doing.
I get a lot of inspiration from classical rock too because in the era of rock and roll you couldn’t just flat out say these things about women. They are very subtle in their lyrics and unless you were really listening you didn’t know that [the singer] was saying that he wants to have sex with this woman. He expressed it in such a subtle and humble way that anyone could like it. They could take it however they want. I adapt this in my lyrics too. I don’t have to be overtly sexual about the women I am rapping about; I can be more subtle. That’s ear catching to people; they like that.
I’m showing my age a bit here, but, when I was growing up, punk was the thing. What is your take on groups like the Sex Pistols?
Never a big fan of it, but I liked the way it was a wave that people consumed themselves in. Dressing like that – the way it turned into the goth-punk thing. I respect that. I like the type of fan who loves their music so much that they are going to change their whole image or persona.
Apart from entertaining them, what do you want people to get out of your music?
I want to show people that we can take the current state of hip hop and turn it back to the roots. I want to give people what they really want to hear and a better idea of the foundation of what hip hop is all about.
I also want to change the perception of the underground of hip hop. An artist can only be underground for so long before he is mainstream. There was a huge underground movement in the Bay Area in the early 2000s; those artists now, they are not Top 40 artists that get played on the radio but they are widely recognized in more places than just the Bay Area and more places than just California. So it’s almost like they are not underground anymore because of their huge recognition.
My feeling about the fate of underground is that you’ve got to dig for it. Because of the oversaturation of the market, it is hard to find the really good artists. For example, a kid might have talent, but he has no idea what to do because he is following the examples of people around him who ain’t doing it right. So what I want to do is to find artists like him and pull them up to the level at which they need to be in order to be at least recognized.
That’s impressively altruistic. You are taking practical steps to help people?
When I started Six50 Radio, I kind of just stumbled upon the idea. I saw other people doing similar shows online. They called it underground music, but they weren’t reaching out to the true underground, the talented people at the bottom level who nobody knows about.
That’s why I started the radio show. I want to find those artists. I want to raise their game even if it means just Tweeting about them to my followers. Little things like that can help people tremendously.
What is your audience size?
Well, I have a thousand followers on Twitter. This has grown so rapidly over the last six months. When I first started really focusing my promotional efforts on Twitter in September I only had 70 followers. I have built a recipe for success with that and its through repetition and personalized contact.
People on Twitter and Facebook and other social networking sites are mainly in it for vanity. That’s not what I am doing. I want to connect with people on a personal level and dialogue about their music so that I can inspire them or give them ideas. I also help them out with promotional flyers or send them some instrumentals for them to do some new songs on or do collaborations. This is something not enough people out there are doing.
It seems as though you’ve tied your flag to hip hop. Is it a religion to you?
It’s a lifestyle. It’s more than something you hear on the radio or put on your CD player. It stands for something. It stands for people who recognize the struggles of daily life and have something to say about it. I take it as an alternative versus an outlet. In the beginning, hip hop was about street type artists who lived this hard life and who used their music as an outlet. It gets the inside out; it is therapeutic.
That is how it was for me at the beginning as well, but now I am changing as an artist and it is more of an alternative to the life style.
Do you see yourself still doing rap in ten years?
Yes, definitely. It is such a passion for me that I can never stop and I don’t care if I never make it. I don’t care if I never make a dollar out of it. I am still going to do it. I’ll quote my own lyrics:
It’s real, really real
Tell me how you feel.
I’m trying to get signed to a deal
I’m eating hip hop diet
Give me a meal
I’m trying to make a mil, but if I don’t make it, I’ m a going to rap still.
You have just brought out your first official mixtape. Coming to it new, what should people listen to first?
Track number 1, ‘Costa is on One’. The typical structure of a hip hop song is usually a sixteen bar verse, a four to eight bar chorus, another sixteen bar verse and so on and so forth. In my first song, I have a 44 bar verse, straight through and no hook. Then there are another 12 bars after that as a kind of altro. That is really where I flex my lyrical talent. I have a lot to say in song, so that’s definitely what I want people to hear. It’s to a very popular instrumental; it is almost a cover song. My point of doing stuff like that is to show that I can do it better than those guys who are on the radio. It is a Drake beat – over the last three years he has been one of the most popular hip hop artists. I like to take recognized music and do it better.
Another song on the album is ‘Seriously Lit Up’. On that I do two 32 bar verses with just a small chorus in between featuring Lil Swamp. So, it also expands beyond the standard sixteen bar verse frame.
Then there is the last track, ‘Let Me Go Now’. I did that with a close friend of mine, another Caucasian rapper - he’s from San Jose. His name is Pody Mouth [chuckles]. I like his name because it’s kinda striking. Maybe I want to listen to potty mouth every now and then! I was pretty excited that I got to do that collaboration. That song is about the streets and I want people to know that’s where I come from. I want people to see that side of me so they can see how I’ve changed. That is something a lot of fans can relate to: the artist who reinvents himself and shows that he is a different person from what is portrayed in his music.
To use the marketing jargon, what are your unique selling points?
Well, people tell me I have a very distinctive sound. They are always asking how I hit the tones I do in my vocals. I think that is what is unique about me. It is different from the Drake sound that everyone is familiar with and that everyone liked at first because it was very novel – no one else had a sound like that. I think I have taken it to a higher level than that. Modesty aside, I’ve had a lot of people whose opinions I trust tell me that I sound better than him. He's been doing the same thing for a number of years now and it's starting to get tiresome and even annoying. People don’t want to hear the same tone in every single song.
How will you stop people getting bored with you?
By always striving to reinvent myself. So if I make a hot song that has a new sound, my next song needs to be ten times as hot and different. Every single project that I do needs to take a step forward; never stand still.
What is your next step after the mixtape?
I have about twelve songs that are in the process of being written or have been written and I just need to take to my professional studio. These songs are more related to everyday life rather than the street so the person who doesn’t necessarily listen to rap and hip hop that much can still appreciate them. In my next project I want to portray my personality, myself as a person – who I am now compared to who I was.
Tell me about your live performances.
I got my very first live performance over here in a small, hole-in-the-wall bar in Mountain View called Fred’s Place. A good friend of mine, Pete One, who I started rapping with when I met him at Foothill College, set up the deal to do a song with him. We had made it together and he wanted me to do that song there. It was my first performance and I was nervous, but it actually turned out very well and I got a pretty good response - partly because I bribed certain groups in the audience with buckets of beer [grins]. I learnt a lot from that one.
My next big one – this was huge for me – I got introduced to the owner of a small record company. He was the type of person who spent a lot of money to boost his image on limos and party busses with his record label on the side, studios, big parties and things like that – he was that type of guy. But he did have some connections in the hip hop industry in the Bay Area and he plugged me a two-concert deal. For the first concert I was just selling tickets and promoting for a guy who goes by name of The Jacka. He is one of the top three Bay Artists, maybe the top. That got me some notoriety.
About a month later I got the opportunity to be one of the opening artists for a guy called Andre Nickatina. He was part of the huge early 2000 Bay Area underground rapper thing and attracted a pretty big audience. He is more lyrical rather than street, which is why, I’d say, most of his fan base are white. Anyway, it was at Toons Nightclub in San Jose. It was a very famous club and had been open for a long time. Santana Band played there when they were up and coming so it was pretty impressive that I was able to get in there at such an early stage in my career. That opened up a lot of doors for me.
Do you regularly perform live now?
I usually do from two to eight concerts every year. I did three last year; two were down in Santa Cruz at The Blue Lagoon then I did another one at The Coyote Club in South San Jose. The way that I got those concerts was through a booking agency – they called it a co-promotion, which meant that I had to do all the promotion and all the ticket sales myself. For the very first concert, I was able to sell a lot of tickets and bring my own crowd to turn out to that. For the second one I was just an artist performing with a friend of mine who I plugged into the same booking agency. The third one was my concert. I was working at the time and going to school so I had no time to promote it and hardly sold any tickets. That’s why I stepped away from that booking agency because the amount of effort and time I had to put into making a successful concert turnout wasn’t worth it. I mean they sent me a check for $13 for my weeks and weeks of work. It doesn’t calculate.
You have a day job, don’t you?
I do. I do a bit of landscaping; I’m an auto mechanic as a side job; I also manage one of my grandfather’s properties for him. I’m a web designer and a handyman. I’ve been in construction for about four years. I pick up side jobs all the time. I don’t have a nine-to-five job though.
When do you see yourself as being able to dedicate all your time to music?
I want to boost my network of producers, videographers, photographers, sound engineers, promoters and artists to the point where it is big enough for me to be able to focus on production management. That’s going to involve a lot of time spent with the radio station.
I feel that as soon as I’ve got such a large fan base that I am recognized by advertising agencies, not only will that bring in serious advertising revenue but I’ll be able to land projects with artists who are up and coming but need a production manager to manage a mixtape or videotape project.
I am not going to be producing all that stuff myself, but I am going to reach out through my network of people so that I can help these artists get their projects done. At that point I’m going to be able to make some serious money. I’ll have different levels of quality: I’ll have this guy who does videos for $500, this guy who does them at $900 and this gut who does his for $1,200. I’ll have examples of their work so the artist can decide what to go for.
Now for the obligatory personal stuff. Are you in a relationship now?
I don’t have a current girlfriend. I was dating a girl for a little while. I thought she was a great girl and she supported my music; she liked the person that I was and loved my personality; but it turns out that she wasn't that deep. She didn’t give me a fair chance. We were only dating for about a month and she decided “Hey, you know what? I like you; I really like spending time with you and think you’re a great guy. It’s just that you don’t have any money and you haven’t made it yet.”
So I thought “OK, great. A shallow one”. So, no, I don’t have a current girlfriend. I’ve been hurt a lot by my girlfriends. I am the type of guy who puts a lot of effort and love and care into a relationship to the point where women take my kindness as weakness. They walk all over me; cheat on me, lie to me and do bad things to me.
What are you looking for in a girl?
More important than anything is that she should support what I am trying to do. I don’t need them to do anything for me; I just need them to say that they believe in me.
Is musical taste important? Could you date a Coldplay fan, for instance?
Yeah, definitely. Actually a girl I am talking to right now just told me that that she hadn’t heard my tape and that she isn’t really a rap fan. She likes oldies, jazz, blues etc. I’m alright with that. I don’t need her to be my biggest fan; I just need her to give her honest opinion about my talent and support.
You are moving out of gansta style into something more lyrical. Do you think you can take your audience with you?
That’s going to be tough. Street rap fans don’t really gravitate towards artists who are not in relation to them.
A lot of the street stuff is a youth against age rebellion. You are now aiming at a slightly more mature audience?
Maybe. Although, along with aiming for the older audience I still want to target the younger crowds, the teenagers who listen to the pop-corn rap, bubble-gum hip hop on the radio. I want to show them something better, something less trivial, less evanescent. The big names, who have established huge fan bases, hate all this type of stuff because it doesn’t stand for anything and they do. It’s like throwing salt on all the hard work they have put in to getting their message across.
What about the race issue? Surely hip hop is seen as black music and people like Eminem are anomalous.
I’ve gotten that before. I’ve heard people nickname me ‘Eminem’ because I’m a white boy that raps, but people who don’t know me and just hear my songs ... they sometimes think I am black. It’s the tone and my language and the accent I carry in some of my songs. They can hear that I do have exposure to the streets; I am not just a white boy from the suburbs. I’ve actually been associated with people who are doing stuff street rap fans like to hear.
You clearly have a huge amount of energy. What gets you through your day?
It can be very overwhelming. Sometimes my email in-box is flooded with songs people want played on the radio station or that they want me to help them promote. Sometimes I feel that I just want to be able to help everybody. I can’t realistically do that so I take one step at a time. I take one person and send them a message telling them what I liked and didn’t like and where they could do better. I give them some ideas they can try. That really inspires me.
For example, there is this eighteen-year-old kid named D-Lay who lives on an Indian reservation near Buffalo, New York. He sent me some of his music when I first started the radio station and I suggested he didn’t put that type of music out yet. It was freestyle, or unrehearsed; it is getting on there and just speaking your mind. This is something I did for a long time. But I see free styling as practice. But I want to get away from that because you don’t have a chance to develop a story. Anyway, I told him not to put stuff out like that till he was ready to contend with the top freestylers that are in the game right now. I mean not necessarily radio-type guys, but people who are in the ‘battle rap scene’ – hugely popular on the East Coast right now, where guys get up and talk shit to each other back and forth. I told this young guy to develop his talent, develop his lyrics and write his raps down. That will start to develop you as an artist and then, once you have got more experience, it comes out in your freestyles and it sounds a lot better.
What exactly is the process through which you compose a lyric and what inspires you?
Sometimes it is the instrumental beat. Once I hear it, I know I have to make a song to that. I hear the hook in my head already. The starting point of a lot of my music is that I make the hook and the chorus first.
The sound comes first?
Yeah. First the music, then the hook, which is kinda going to be the topic, and then the lyrics follow.
Eminem has Elton John as a kind of Angel; have you approached anyone?
I’ve approached a few Bay Area artists who have some recognition, but I feel that guys who are already big in the hip hop industry don’t want to reach out and help anybody down at the bottom.
It’s different on the East Coast. Through my internet promotion I got in contact with a production manager, Trump, who works with a very popular DJ on the East Coast called DJ Thoro (he is one of the main DJs who spins on Eminem’s radio station Shade 45). Trump was representing two amazingly versatile young street artists from the projects called Beenhad and Geno, whose group name is Dutch Gang. We started talking and as a result, I’m promoting his band out here on the West Coast and he’s doing the same for me out on the East. Trump considers me like family because of the help I’m giving him. I feel that staying in contact and being on good terms is going to be very beneficial for me because of the connection with DJ Thoro. If I am able to have some of my productions handled by him, I’m on my way to the top.
I gather that one way hip hop is raising itself in the public eye is through rappers moving into other media, like TV and movies.
Yeah. A lot of that has happened. Certain artists who used to be hip hop have established themselves in the movie industry and that’s given them a bigger crowd. Take Common, for example. He’s an East Coast artist with very hip hop, lyrical-type raps – an excellent, very talented artist. He got into movies and acting. Because he is a good-looking guy and appeals to the ladies as well as to male audiences because of his acting, people are checking out his music.
Then I suppose there is Ice-T as well?
Yeah ... doing the Law and Order thing. So I see that correlation between movies and the music expanding hip hop into a broader mainstream light. But I think the media is a bit hesitant because of people like Kanye West who, if he gets up on stage in a word show, makes a fool of himself, talks shit and has to be censored. That’s what is holding us back: certain artists that don’t account of the fact that the media is on the lookout to say only negative things.
It’s hard to talk about a mainstream future. Being a white rapper, I could take Eminem as an example. He has passed the Beatles in terms of units sold, which is amazing. But he’s not the same artist anymore. I really respect the way that Eminem is now. He went through a lot of hard shit – rehab and drug abuse and stuff like that – and he changed his content. He’s more of an inspiration to kids now trying to get them to stay in school, keep off drugs and to stay off the streets.
But in the process Eminem lost his edge?
There was a point when Eminem was huge and there were certain artists - Black artists - who had a beef with him. Eminem wanted to make songs as a rebuttal to come back at them. But the industry wouldn’t allow him to attack these artists until he got some credibility with the Black American market. So that’s when Dr Dre and Aftermath signed the artist 50 Cents from New York (a Black street rapper from South Jamaica, Queens) and gave him some street, Black American credibility. At that point Eminem was allowed to make those disk tracks against those Black artists. What the industry was trying to avoid was a black versus white type thing.
After that the focus changed from the Eminem look to the Justin Timberlake look. Justin Timberlake was the in thing. He started doing a lot of collaborations with hip hop artists so the spotlight moved from the gangsta-thug white guy to the pretty-boy white guy with a great voice. He’s not really a rapper.
I think the spotlight shifted again with Drake, a Canadian as it happens, who started out as a star on a Nickelodeon kids’ show. That’s where he got his money from to invest in the collaborations that got him credit at the beginning. His first mixtape album sold a lot of units – it was big. Then he got signed by YMCMB, which stands for Young Money & Cash Money Billionaires. They’ve been in the hip hop industry for a long time and are one of the biggest labels out there. He really brought a lot of different fans into the hip hope world because he was doing soft-hearted singing songs. He’s not a great singer, but with the technology in the studios you can make a bad singer sound pretty good. However, he is very lyrical and had that unique vocal sound in his raps.
I liked Drake a lot at first but over the last couple of years he’s been ruining his own reputation. He’s a public relations nightmare. He starts problems with other R&B or other rap artists, who have a lot of notoriety. I mean we just don’t want to see the problems he is having with Chris Brown or with Common. I think he is his own worst enemy. He is ruining his own reputation because in his newer music he is trying to present himself as a hardcore gangsta because of the record label and the people that he runs with from there. But that’s not his roots; that’s not where he is from. He’s from Nickelodeon and trying to become gangsta; so, like I said, I’m the opposite of that. I’m from the streets and trying to become more Nickelodeon. [Chuckles]
Where can we can we see you next?
I’m trying to set up a deal with a DJ Hell in San Francisco. He DJs a lot of strip clubs and nightclubs up there. I’m working on getting him to set me up with a mini tour of San Francisco clubs. I haven’t solidified that yet, but hopefully you guys will be able to see me in San Francisco soon.
Postscriptum
Coasta's website is currently being built. For now, details and sample songs can be found on his FaceBook page
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