Media round-up
Another batch of entertainment-y bites. Lucky you.
I interviewed rapper and former Adult Swim renaissance man MC Chris. You may know him better as MC Pee Pants, who gave us the immortal "I Want Candy". Yes, I have his cell phone number. No, you cannot have it. But if you go to his site, he lets you download his first disc for free (in the "listen" section). If you have a sense of humor and any tolerance for backpacker/suburban hip-hop, you will be hooked and want the others.
Hey, wanna buy a ProgPower ticket? Yes, I entered the world of eBay sales just to get rid of this $100 beauty. I was really looking forward to seeing Manticora and especially Orphaned Land. But as mentioned before, I will now set my sights on a much less "cheerful" mini-fest, an autumn evening in Toronto with Green Carnation and Woods of Ypres and goddamned Agalloch, those wonderfully snooty Oregon isolationists who obviously refuse to play in Chicago.
A few weeks ago, a co-worker gave me a stack of sleazy video tapes that I've been somewhat leery of viewing. The same person has funneled a number of questionable titles my way over the years, apparently the cast-off fruits of an ongoing search for the most reprehensibly anti-female film ever made. Why this cinéaste thinks I would want these is beyond me. I love gore and nudity and taboo subject matter, but as I've said to this co-worker many times, I draw the line at glorifying rape or sexual violence. This batch contained (in what I assume to be descending order of creepiness): the unrated version of the Shannon Tweed softcore romp "Sexual Response", Jose Larraz's "Violation of the Bitch", a Brazilian WIP jobber called "Bare Behind Bars", Florinda "Flavia" Bolkan in "La Settima Donna" and the loathesome-looking "Fantom Kiler 2". Whee! Think I'll shelve these with my unwatched copy of "Trilogy of Lust 2"...
I interviewed rapper and former Adult Swim renaissance man MC Chris. You may know him better as MC Pee Pants, who gave us the immortal "I Want Candy". Yes, I have his cell phone number. No, you cannot have it. But if you go to his site, he lets you download his first disc for free (in the "listen" section). If you have a sense of humor and any tolerance for backpacker/suburban hip-hop, you will be hooked and want the others.
Hey, wanna buy a ProgPower ticket? Yes, I entered the world of eBay sales just to get rid of this $100 beauty. I was really looking forward to seeing Manticora and especially Orphaned Land. But as mentioned before, I will now set my sights on a much less "cheerful" mini-fest, an autumn evening in Toronto with Green Carnation and Woods of Ypres and goddamned Agalloch, those wonderfully snooty Oregon isolationists who obviously refuse to play in Chicago.
A few weeks ago, a co-worker gave me a stack of sleazy video tapes that I've been somewhat leery of viewing. The same person has funneled a number of questionable titles my way over the years, apparently the cast-off fruits of an ongoing search for the most reprehensibly anti-female film ever made. Why this cinéaste thinks I would want these is beyond me. I love gore and nudity and taboo subject matter, but as I've said to this co-worker many times, I draw the line at glorifying rape or sexual violence. This batch contained (in what I assume to be descending order of creepiness): the unrated version of the Shannon Tweed softcore romp "Sexual Response", Jose Larraz's "Violation of the Bitch", a Brazilian WIP jobber called "Bare Behind Bars", Florinda "Flavia" Bolkan in "La Settima Donna" and the loathesome-looking "Fantom Kiler 2". Whee! Think I'll shelve these with my unwatched copy of "Trilogy of Lust 2"...
posted by SoulReaper at 7:40 PM
1 Comments:
MC Chris animates geek chic hip-hop
As hip-hop remains obsessed with thuggery and wealth, MC Chris represents for nerds.
Born Chris Ward, the Libertyville-bred rapper self-released three CDs: "Life's a Bitch and I'm Her Pimp" (a free download at his Web site), "Knowing Is Half the Hassle" and "Eating's Not Cheating." The latter earned him an alliance with the DC Flag label, owned by Good Charlotte's Joel and Benji Madden.
But MC Chris is probably better known for his work on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programs. There, he helped usher the rude, surreal humor of cut-and-paste cult hits like "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and "Sealab 2021" into homes and dorm rooms around the nation, voicing such characters as "Sealab" whipping boy Hesh and inept "Aqua Teen" villain MC Pee Pants. His music career took off after his song "Fett's Vette," an ode to "Star Wars" bounty hunter Boba Fett, was featured in a "Sealab" episode.
In anticipation of his first Chicago show (Saturday at Double Door), read on for an edited transcript of a conversation with MC Chris.
Q. Do you have any recollections about growing up in Libertyville?
A. Oh, yeah. I was born and raised there for, like, 18 years. My family didn't move around at all. We lived on Lake Street, which had a baseball park and a lake, and at the end of Lake Street there was a movie theater where it intersected with Milwaukee. I would go down to the movies all the time.
I always was a kid who loved to draw, to wander around the neighborhood and put on little shows for everybody at their house. As I got into high school, I got more into drawing and acting. Then I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied illustration, film and screenwriting there. I realized I liked screenwriting so much I transferred to NYU in Manhattan, where I became a screenwriting major, and I graduated from there.
I worked in all facets of film production after that. I worked for Michael Moore, I worked on A&E, stuff like that. I started to get involved in the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York because I was friends with some pop-punk kids who had bands, and one of the kids from the bands was an actor there. I saw him do a sketch show and I really wanted to take a jab at it because it reminded me of Second City from Chicago.
So I started doing that and I basically got discovered at the watering hole where all the actors from that theater would hang out. I got discovered by the "Aqua Teen" and "Sealab" guys (Dave Willis and Adam Reed). They gave me their cards and offered me jobs that night. Then "Sealab" moved down to Atlanta, where Cartoon Network is located, so that's where I worked on "Aqua Teen" and "The Brak Show," made commercials and did all sorts of different things for Adult Swim.
Q. How did you get started in hip-hop?
A. Well, I was always a fan. I always just kind of liked it and always rapped, but I was rapping other people's songs. One summer my parents went to Philly and all my brothers had moved away, and I kind of had the house to myself. So I hung out with my friends a lot, and one day I just started writing stuff and rapping all the time. When I got back to NYU I did it more and recorded with a punk band that I was friends with. Then I started recording a lot more, just doing it for fun, basically playing it at parties or playing it for friends.
Eventually, I met a kid (John Fewell) who was on the same label as the punk band I lived with. He would come to our parties, and I really liked his style because it involved drum and bass, lots of chopping up of all different styles of music. I asked him to make some beats for me, and that's the DJ I have now. We basically started a business together and while the cartoons were on we started selling CDs on a Web site. It's just kind of blown up since then.
We got approached by Good Charlotte, who are a Sony act and they were given their own label. We're the third act on the DC Flag label; they hooked us up with a manager and a booking agent and we hooked them up with a bunch of requests for shows. Now we're just touring nonstop. We've been touring since January.
Q. Are you mainly playing to punk rock audiences?
A. No, it's mainly nerds and geeks and losers and people who don't go out to bars to see live musical acts. It's every kind of person, it's punks, it's normal you-can't-describe-them people, it's older people, way younger people, girls, guys.
We get a lot of fans from the cartoons on Adult Swim, we get a lot of fans in our own right and we just try to put on the best show that we possibly can for them. It's a rap show, but it's also like a comedy show, like a one-man show. There's lots of breaks, lots of talking, lots of screwing around and having fun. It's a very light-hearted take on a rap show.
Q. Do you think kids who are into 50 Cent and Ludacris and stuff like that would get into it?
A. I doubt it. I mean, I don't know. It seems like it's kind of a counterculture style of hip-hop. It plays against the pop that's really popular right now, so it's kind of an alternative to that, I think. I would consider that real hip-hop, whereas what I do is more kind of crap-hop, or like just a joke (laughs).
Q. What inspires your lyrics?
A. I write about stuff that I'm interested in, I write about stuff that I think my fans would enjoy. The "Star Wars" thing was just me writing what I liked about, but I saw how many people liked it so I wrote a song called "Geek," about who I thought the people who liked "Fett's Vette" were. I'll take any variety of inspiration, from college life to Internet romance to romance in general to unrequited love to whatever I can think of. It always helps if it has a slightly pathetic tilt to it.
Q. There's guys like Atmosphere who are doing a sort of emo-rap thing, but you seem less self-important than those.
A. Well, I think my thing is kind of old-school entertainment. You're just supposed to go and laugh and not take any of it too seriously, just forget about your problems for a second. We're not trying to blow anyone's mind or anything.
Q. Have you ever run into any legal trouble with sampling?
A. No. The only time we sampled was on the first album, and that's never been sold.
Q. Did you release "Fett's Vette" on the Internet before it was on "Sealab"?
A. It was always on there, and they did that as a favor to me. They're really cool guys. They put my Web site up in the credits, and that basically started the whole thing.
Q. You don't work at Adult Swim anymore?
A. I left Turner Entertainment around Thanksgiving of last year. The last thing I did there was I was the associate producer of the on-air department for the comedy portion of Adult Swim, where I made commercials for all the comedy shows. Before that I worked on "The Brak Show" as a sound editor, I drew for them and wrote some episodes, did some voices, did their finances. Before that I did "Aqua Teen" and I was mainly an illustrator on that one, but I have a character that I play on that a couple of times.
Then before that, I did "Sealab." I was an artist for that, basically PhotoShop work they call rotoscoping where you cut out pictures from old Hanna-Barbera stills, cut up all the pieces like a paper doll and label it all so an animator can move it around. We dealt with, like, eye positions and mouths. It's like animation but a very streamlined version. We only had to do it six times versus 106 times. And I worked on "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" a little bit, too, when I was at Williams Street. I worked on their last episode, I just did a bunch of illustration for that. I did pretty much anything you can think of involved with cartoons.
Q. You said you drew and acted when you were younger. Is your music career a culmination of all that?
A. I feel like it makes sense. I think back to what kind of child I was. I was the person who was like, "Everyone put your chairs on this side, I'm gonna do a show." I wouldn't have an idea of what the show was, I just liked being in front of people and trying to entertain them. It was a very natural thing for me to do as a youngster.
When I look at what I do now, and when people that know me see me do the show, they're like, "This is what you were meant to do." I still want to make movies, I still want to make a cartoon and write books and act and paint and draw and still do all those things. But right now I'm going to focus on this for a little bit because it's really profitable. I'm just going to stick with it, and as soon as the money starts to go away I'll probably move on to something new.
MC Chris with Tha 446 and The Former Fat Boys
Where: Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago
When: 10 p.m. Saturday
Tickets: $10 in advance, $12 at the door
Phone: (312) 559-1212
Post a Comment
<< Home