Gilead 7 (2005)

Nach einigen Anlaufschwierigkeiten haben wir es nun endlich geschafft, uns einmal in aller Ruhe mit Gilead7 zu unterhalten. Der Rapper und Produzent aus Chicago entpuppte sich als äußerst interessanter Interviewpartner mit vielen guten Gedanken – sein aktuelles Werk trägt dementsprechend auch den bedeutungsschweren Titel “The Darkroom: The Abandonment of Christendom”. Ein Einblick.

 

It might be interesting to get an explanation of your stage name ‘Gilead 7′ first.

Gilead7 comes from two sources. One being my last name, which is “Gill.” The other being the Bible lessons that I studied in grade school chapel classes. These two sources converge. In our Old Testament Scripture readings, we would come across the name “Gilead,” which happened to be the name of a city in Israel, as well as the name of various people. Since “Gill” was my last name, along with the frequency of the name “Gilead” in our school lessons, the name “Gilead” was ascribed to me as a nickname by a childhood friend Jerome Thigpen (RIP). As I searched for a rap alias, this name naturally came to mind. The Gilead represents the two natures of me and of all people, good and evil, for which the city of Gilead was known. The “7” represents spiritual completion, and spirituality in general, an element that greatly colors my Emceeing.

You’re music is charaterized by a wide spectrum of different musical styles – please name the different pieces of the puzzle that set up your style.

As far as styles of music: man, that could take half a century to list! Everything I listen to or have listened to has a point of culmination in my hip-hop. As a child, I was exposed to jazz, gospel and opera. My teen years saw me listening to classic and some modern rock, and later on I began to enjoy Celtic such as Susan McKeown, Gypsy Soul, Cherish the Ladies, and Iona, and electronica in its various forms (techno, drum and bass, trip-hop, etc). I see myself as one who reinterprets these genres through hip-hop. The music I’m doing now consists of drum and bass, Celtic, classic rock, and folk all articulated through the tongue and ear of a seasoned hip-hop MC. My CD consists of all of these things, and you’re liable to attend a Gilead7 show and hear soundclips of R.E.M. or Plumb before I go into drum and bass chants over old school Metalheadz tracks followed by an original chopped up composition of Celtic abstracts over a break I created myself. This is a melting pot, and I ensure that the listener burns along with the audio presented.

Your new album “The Darkroom” is due to be released in a few weeks. What do you want to express with the subtitle “The abandonement of christendom”?

“The Darkroom: The Abandonment of Christendom” deals a lot with who I am musically and personally. All of the hip-hop that I have done has in some form or fashion been connected with Christianity. I began emceeing with the desire to be a Christian rapper of sorts, and have always had my feet halfway in that realm. My music was not intended to be Bible thumping, but was supposed to exemplify good hip-hop that came from a person of Christian faith. Through years of conflict with being a Christian and wanting to do hip-hop that was not necessarily trying to convert the world as well as wanting to touch on subjects that many “Christian hip-hoppers” viewed as non-Christian, I chose to leave that realm alone for the most part, and got some acceptance from the underground community of Chicago and abroad. The subtitle: “The Abandonment of Christendom” is a by product of the bad experiences I’ve had in the world of Christian music, if there even is a such thing as “Christian music.” I wrote this album from the perspective of a person that had fath but has lost it, now indulging in a life off limits to him when bound by his Christianity. He does whatever the hell he wants to do in this state. You will find hot sex, jealousy, fierce badmouthing of substandard emcees, middle fingers to my former god, the god of Scripture, pain, fantasy, reminiscing, and other things. I do what I will in this “darkroom,” for no deity will tell me how to conduct my life, which automatically frees my artistic licence, a thing that was restrained to me while in my phaze of “Christian music.” In this album, I am in a state of “darkroom,” rapidly and slowly “developing into something that I was not before.

What will you offer to the audience musically?

Musically, I offer a different approach to all that you have ever heard before. The sound of the album took a while to craft, because I wanted to make sure it was what I needed to convey my thoughts. I think one thing that I give to the listeners is a blatant appreciation of the genres that have influenced me. The first track has a Scottish feel with the bagpipes and Scottish vocals that producer GWillakuz crafted for it. Flower Child Neo-Hippie, a track produced by me, is an ode to classic rock and the 60s music movements that inspired me to be an artist. While many artists conceal their influences that show up in their music and claim that it’s all hip-hop, I appreciate every genre and attempt to represent it for what it is while borrowing it for hip-hop and using it in the context of urban music. I’m not gonna just rhyme over a Peter, Paul and Mary guitar loop and act like it’s originated from the South Side of Chicago. No, I will accentuate the basis of the loop, talk about it in a rhyme, celebrate it in its own context, and then translate it to the world of electronic, sampled music. For me it doesn’t start at the sample. It starts at the origin of the sound.

 

Is there a certain message that you want to conduct to your listeners?

Yes, there is a definate message that I intend to give the listeners. The message is me. At one time, I tried to hide who I was behind a microphone and a pen and pad, but I want this artform to be a total expose’ of who I am. The saint, the virgin freak, the snob, the poet, the theologian, the procrastinator, the fool, etc. can all be observed through my present work. The simple message is myself, a complex message with several layers. Gotta grab the album to find out what the complex message is…

Along with your crew Transparent Frequency you released the EP “Reflections” back in 2001. In comparison with your solo efforts: did you experience the work as a part of a group rather a benefit than a restriction?

Man. Reflections! That was a long time ago. I think a few stores in Chicago may still have that one. Those tracks were pretty fun. It was great to compile a CD of work by those who were close to me as well as those were close to those who were close to me. One of the MCs on that CD, JSmoove, was a friend of Transparent Frequency member Henchman (formerly known as SB93). The rest was just Transparent Frequency, which was Henchman, J.J., and myself at the time. As far as restrictions, not really any artistically. There were restrictions as far as coordination and productivity though. Both J.J. and Hench were busy people. Henchman was a youth ministry and adolescent studies major and had a girlfriend, a thermal detonating combination. J.J. was an overworked art student (dang good at his craft too). I seemed to give up a lot for hip-hop at that time, including study time and academic dillegence. However, they were not as involved in creating of the music as I was. That’s no one’s fault, just the way it was. That EP was really the only thing we ever did together as far as a record due to our time. Many shows though.

Furthermore you’ve released a couple of records on your own so far – how do you describe the peculiarities of the single records?

The first record was called “Explosions,” and was a 7-song cassette tape just had battle songs and a few concept oriented ones. The Calm EP was another cassette release that had myself on the production and had battle songs, a song on interracial dating, and a track on what I felt was my purpose in underground culture. After that came “Reflections,” a disk that showed a drastic increase in writing and delivery for me with songs such Henchman’s and my “Us,” a spiritual introspective song. After that, I did a single for an album that never got finished with an even more polished delivery entitled “Invincible.” It had a second track called “Stylistic Expression” with singer Jenny Thornton, a elementry and high school friend. Something happenned between these releases and the next one, the “Stories of Sorcery EP.” With this CD, I departed from my normal boom-bap oriented ethos and pursued an obscure story style of rhyming. That EP was “a hip-hop response to fantasy and role playing games,” as I adaquately (so I think) called it. “The Darkroom” features the standard MC side of me as well as the abstract shaman, combining clever language, gloomy thoughts, and mysticism. Sometimes, both faces of my persona come out on the same track.

Can you discern a musical and/or personal change you made in the course of time?

Man, what did happen to me between the other projects and “Stories of Sorcery?” It’s tough to say. I began to hear different things in music. I got into other genres heavily. I always was, but I think this increased around that time, which was the end of 2002. I began to open mind. I involved myself with Jewish mysticism. *smiles* Seriously, I met a Jewish mystic though. That was my drum and bass DJ, Grand Marquee. We met at a live instrument deep house night that a DJ friend, Shannon Chambers (you’ll know who he is soon), was spinning at, and just hit it off from there. He was looking for a hip-hop MC who could capture the emceeing essence of drum and bass that had been lost. I was looking to try something new. A different type of high in my beloved psychadelic language. We started doing hip-hop/drum and bass sets with me emceeing over both. I grew much from this. When I did some of the beats for “Stories of Sorcery” (available at www.reservedrecords.com/store), I drew from this rhythmic pool and used its influence to make bastard hip-hop. In my personal life and writing, I began to not care about previous boundaries set up by my former disciplinarian, the Christian Church. “The Darkroom” shows perfectly what I mean.

According to the biography on your website, your life has always been biassed by music. Could you imagine an existence with out any kind of music? What does music mean to you?

You think George Bush is bad….

You’re resting in Chicago right now, with regard to the rapmusic the city is divided in a sense. Please describe the scene you move in and the name the people you deal with.

The Chicago scene is quite diverse. It ranges from boom-bap, to abstract, to gangsta, to bling. The cyphers I have stood in here have contained some of the best thoughts and lines never heard this side of Middle Earth. MCs of all types are very good here. And don’t come here with conquest on your mind because we will crush you! The problem with hip-hop in Chicago is the problem of corporate America: selfishness. Hip-hop here is not done for hip-hop’s sake. It is done to feed personal egos and establish certain independent labels and crews as the “kings of the city.” Independents here put all of their resources into a select few MCs, never trying to broaden their roster. What they fail to realize is that these people will not be able to perform the art forever, and they are KILLING CHICAGO by continuing to support only a select few. When they’re gone, there is no scene because no time has been taken to cultivate the next generation. Because Chicago is the city of cliques, you have to play a good game of politics to advance here. You may want to have producer so and so do a track and MC so and so spit a quick 16 so that people in Chicago will buy a CD not really to hear you, but to hear their favorite Windy City underground hero. The people that are important to my Chicago circle are Nizm (www.visualrecordings.com), Play Cousins (DJ Crew), Camogurl, Lyric District (ya’ll betta get their EP, it’s free!! www.myspace.com/lyricdistrict), Adad, Kenny Keys, Thaione Davis (the master, supplied a track for “The Darkroom”). Maker (also supplied a track for me), Wordz, etc.

Are you content with the promotion you get in your hometown?

Yes and no. The radio stations such as WHPK, WNUR, and WLUW with their respective programs have done much to support what I am doing by playing songs, doing announcements, providing freestlye spots, etc. These have been very effective foundational tools. Here’s the no. Chicago hip-hop people don’t support their home, but steadily complain about the state of midwest hip-hop. If you don’t like the status of shows, contatct the promoters and help us to change it! I’m not setting my sights on doing to many shows here for now. I’ll be out of town at least once a month after the physical copies of “The Darkroom” are available. I’ll be knocking at your door pretty soon also Benjamino!

What are the interests you have besides making music?

Reading (theology, science, science fiction, fantasy), video games from time to time, silence, sleeping (leave me be!), debates, behaving outrageously, talking to my girlfriend Tanera (the love my life) *laughs*

I read that you’re into collecting hip-hop CDs – what are the prized possessions of your collection?

Tunnel Rats: Experience, Organized Konfusion: Stress: The Extinction Agenda, Labklik: Perez Prado and Friends, Boogiemonsters: Riders of the Storm: The Underwater Album, Listener: Whispermoon, Eric B and Rakim: Don’t Sweat the Technique, Thawfor: Where Thawght is Worshipped 2.0, The Opus: The River single, feat. Slug (killer B side), Sonic Sum: Plasterman, Tactics (from Sweeden): Untitled, etc.

If you had to die tommorrow and could write one more song – what would be your last impartation to the people of planet
earth?

I think I would record a song on how to work out of the box creatively as hip-hop artists. A lot of us talk about it, and a lot of us think we do it, but we really don’t have a clue as to what that means. My last impartation would deal with finding out what that means.

Thank you very much for your endeavours to answer these questions. Time to give some shoutouts or thank-you’s…

Much respect to Deftone for overseeing my album and telling me certain stuff was good and certain stuff was stupid, and helping me to change all of it. Wordz, LexNation., Listener, Spoken Nerd, Seth Moore, Robust, Glue, Nizm (the man who ya’ll need to duck in a ravine for), Lyric (give us free…good work on the “Fly on the Wall” beat), Grand Marquee, Bass by the Pound, Galapagos 4, Qwel, etc. Tanera, thank you for being a wonderful girlfriend. I love you with all of my heart and then some!!! “The Darkroom: The Abandonment of Christendom” will be available here soon!The album will be released by ReServed Records. You can get a version of it now at ITunes, Napster, Wal-mart, and altnet.com right now. It will be available at MSN, Yahoo, Sony, and other overseas liquid audio stores soon. The album features Listener of Mush Records, Lord 360 (featured on several release by the Opus), Malakh, and Evan G. Production handled by Thaione Davis (Hong Kong Recordings/Birthwrite Records), Maker (Galapagos4, Glue), 5th Element of Wu-Tang, Deftone, Dr Strangelove of Filthy Habits U.K., Two 1, and others. Some tracks, such as the Maker track and a few others, did not make the liquid audio albums due to sample clearances, but will be on the actual CDs available here soon. www.reservedrecords.com, www.gilead7.com, www.myspace.com/gilead7, www.sonicbids.com/gilead7. Thanks for taking a look at what I’m doing Benjamin. Continue to progress. Ugrap.de out!