[Music] welcome to here biscuits I’m Rhett and I’m link this week at the round table of dim lighting we have George Watsky AHA award-winning slam poet and rapper yeah he’s been climbing the charts both with the release of his new album all you can do and his ever-growing YouTube channel watsky exclamation point yes George’s first claim to fame was being featured on Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry on HBO this was back when he was 19 in 2006 and more recently you might have seen him featured and in one or two epic Rap Battles of History a Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe Watts Keys breakout viral video I remember seeing it at the time blew my mind it was titled then pale kid raps fast he was speed rapping over an instrumental from Busta Rhymes song breaky and neck he posted that in January of 2011 and it currently has over 25 million views so he’s pretty amazing that’s a little fast it’s just it’s a little faster than I’ve ever spoken or thought the words are subtitled on the screen and I still can’t keep up it’s it’s mesmerizing you know so one of the things we talk about is as an artist kind of dealing with the fact that being pigeon-holed is that because it went so viral right it was it was good to kind of pick his brain about some piece of viral marketing that he created himself going to well and then having to kind of spend the next year getting out from under that and he’s done that by continuing to make ways in the hip-hop industry releasing albums like his most recent all you can do released August 12th 2014 is already topped the hip hop and rap charts the first video release was whoa whoa whoa posted in June it’s got over 2.5 million views and features comedian Bo Burnham gonna be today we’re gonna beat it of a pennant in a briquette than it tougher than heated up a PETA would never approve by the way I’ve been treating the music Abba we did a bruise it I took it to the kerbin then I’m seven if I were gonna be freaking and you win extreme in a movement I’m picking apart the muscle but I think about the hustle guys [Music] so this one’s got some cool effects that we talked to watsky about we also figure out what the song says about him I I expected him to be a very honest and introspective person because that comes through and so many of his lyrics we hit on a bunch of topics authenticity a number of things you can catch the air biscuit now but I wanted to say you can catch Watsky on tour this fall starting in Europe and then making his way back to the states he may even be stopping in India yes well you told us I think he’s trying to work that Australia oh he’s going all over the place to promote this thing so you should you should go check it out so we talked to watsky about his ongoing battle with epilepsy his controversial 35 foot stage dive in London that left two fans and himself injured and we get into the mechanics of rapping as fast as he does yeah so stick around for that as well here it is a great conversation very introspective very honest your biscuit with watski your CD is 3d yeah thanks for gifting us a couple thank you for taking them and we’ll make you sign these when you sign a table as I’ve already told you yeah yeah were you like I’m gonna make a CD but it has to be 3d how did that happen well you can already see that the little corner is popping up on it so so for those of you who are listening which is everybody and can’t see the CDs that are being held right now there’s a die cut on the front my name is like cut out on the deluxe packaging but the problem is it’s not glued down so the little corners at the end of the W will pop up and make it real well that’s that makes it real it’s a nice feature yeah I guess I mean if we had you know everything at our fingertips we’d glue it down but you know budgets tight these days penny well if we I glue at our fingertips we glue it down yeah but that’s the first thing that people get stuck together that’s the first thing that people can do yeah you know just take a little dollop of Elmer’s or I like superglue cuz yeah it’s fast it’s a participatory album you have to actually finish the packaging yourself you fix it right when you get it I mean you do have to give people a sense of I’m I got this physical thing because I mean in this age you have to really justify people getting the physical thing absolutely I mean CDs are already obsolete so if people buy it at the merch table it has to feel like a special piece of art and in both of the albums that put out recently the packaging was actually an extension of the record and cardboard castles more so in terms of the that was the album I put out last March and that package actually was a three fold that if you folded it out and then you could insert one of the corners into itself and then if you turn it sideways 90 degrees it’s actually a castle with like little turrets on the side and then it had instructions in the booklet for how to build a catapult so you can buy two copies of the cardboard castles and then play knocking each other down with your friends and you get the synthesis there were a lot of people who followed through with that absolutely not no no I didn’t hear from anyone who did it to me it’s like the idea that everything that you do around a project is an extension of that project and you should take it all seriously including the booklet including the artwork it’s fun for me to figure out how cool we can make the packaging and and it’s not expensive to like die cuts and color printing isn’t any more expensive it just it takes a little creativity but it’s it’s black and white and then when you can see through to the inside it’s like the psychedelic colors just like the recent music video which track is that that’s not the title track all you can do so that was kind of yeah I’m ten shot at that the title track incorporate the visual theme of the album and the album in a lot of ways is a tribute to my parents who are on the front and back and moved to San Francisco during the summer love or around that time period and came up in the hippie era and I love my parents very much I have a really strong relationship with them and I feel very indebted to them for where I’m at in my life you know they gave me have all the tools that I needed to be able to follow my dreams and I loved them and I wanted to have an album that didn’t feel as self-indulgent as the last one even though it is self-indulgent the songs are about myself but they’re also about my folks and the way they raised me and I wanted to infuse the musical spirit of the stuff the music that they taught me to love when I was growing up which for my mom was Derek and the Dominos and the Beatles and Motown stuff and and I wanted that sound to be present on the record well I want to say that most people do not have pictures their parents who can make an album cover this cool like if you ask me you got to make an album and you got to put mom on the back of dad on the front yeah it would be careful there listening there would be a different feel it’d just be a different feel my parents haven’t taken a lot of pictures that look that badass and iconic these ones I found them in my house I hadn’t seen them until I was an adult and when I came home one Christmas or something there were these pictures that have been taken out of boxes and they were just physical prints you know back in the day people didn’t have digital cameras they would actually have to develop the photography and they would have maybe one copy of it and my dad had this picture of himself holding a black cat which was named Saruman that was from 1971 and I was like dad that is the funniest picture of you that I’ve ever seen he’s got the long hippie hair and the glasses and and looks like I didn’t even notice Saruman reaping in the corner yes it’s it’s so funny and to me those pictures are great was before my parents met each other but both of them were taken in 1971 oh wow and my mom was in her early 20s at the time my dad was 27 which is how old I am now and I thought there were such crazy compliments to each other I mean there are look like they’re thinking about the same thing not only is is your dad on the right third your mom’s on the left third your dad is right his left side of his face is lit your mom’s right side of her face is lit they have this like sadness in their eyes but this like self-awareness it’s it’s great I’m een I think that’s the reason to buy this one you can’t turn it into a castle yeah but you can look deep into my parents eyes and sense that they’re their inner humanity and you can look at both at the same time if you do that yeah it took me five minutes to realize simultaneous invite has opened up to if I want to destroy the spine of the record you could make a make out with each other to doing it it’s having man there Mouse you can flash back there he pretty grows Linda discovered that I didn’t know the door was locked when I was unlocked live and I walked into my parents bedroom and they said they were hugging No so what did your parents say when you record no when you walked in you were five I actually do have that memory that’s that’s not just a silly story that I pulled out of nowhere that’s from the deep traumatic memory thanks okay they’re gonna said wrestling no that’s what my parents what I said what did they say when they saw themselves on your cover did you tell them ahead of time oh yeah I mean every time I incorporate my family into my music whether it’s a photo or a song that’s about them I always ask permission and they were flattering him I think they’re really honored by it it’s not like I wrote an album that included them and then you know I’m not like you know I’m not trying to show them in like tell people that my parents traumatize me I want to tell them that I love them and they raised me well and that I’m proud to be part of this family and so I think they were touched by it but they were silent so there was like an awkward silence no they actually told me they were touched okay that’s good that’s good so the video for never let it die I’m working in this circus in search of learning from the Fergie’s perched on top of the church and children a sermon you want that early worm be the determined sparrow flying in loops around the sternness scarecrow great song by the way thank you you got a falcon in this one yeah is it a hawk or a falcon I’m trying to remember I believe I think it was a hawk I think it was I think was a hawk but he never he never left he never left the perch and then came back to you you just perched him there were times when he would get freaked out or she I don’t remember the species or the gender I really it’s it’s actually kind of embarrassing how little I got to know this bird didn’t ask it or Z about its story but yeah there were times when the bird got real freaked out and like fly off my arm and it was actually tethered to a little rope yeah there’s only so far that it could fly and then and then my hand would start moving in that direction but it was kind of scary I mean the bird could peck your eyes out or you really didn’t want to freak it out cuz it would flap its wings up and we’ve done a few shoots that have incorporated animals I did it I had a goat in one of them and we’re trying to get a zebra for the next shoot but it’s actually hard they there’s a lot of rules about what you can do with an animal on set which is which is good I think because you don’t want to be able to do anything I almost it’s a living being and so right we actually had a falcon on our live show yeah way back in the day it was we just a guy in our hometown we were in Lillington North Carolina and a friend of her friend said this so-and-so has got a falcon we’re like ooh bring him to our web show and then we were all we also did a cooking segment and where we made our own guacamole so we started feeding guacamole to the hawk called the hawk like it or this the Falcon well all the comments started saying you know guacamole will kill a hog really and knowing none of us in the room knew it right I’m Mikado’s will kill a bird that’s so specific and weird he ended up being okay and we didn’t give him anywhere near a lethal or a damaging dose but I mean recently we did a llama shoot and we had to go by the book and get a monitor like a llama monitor to from here please yeah yeah that’s that’s tragic that the bird will never know the joys of avocado my favorite food of all time really oh yeah of akkad oh yeah so so he got to taste the forbidden fruit yeah he did but I seem to be okay I’m gonna tell a little story that maybe will get me in trouble but I had a little bit part one time on Arrested Development the new season of it and there was a segment on it where they had a little dove that was supposed to like there was a magician Crick because Joe does magic on the show and that bird was supposed to look like it’s dead like he’s doing magic but he botched the trick so he opens up like the metal tray and the bird is lying there on its back dead but the it’s actually harder to get a dead bird for some reason than it is to get a live one and so they had to get a live bird that looked like it was dead so the trainer took the bird in its hand and then went oh yeah and then like rattled it around so it’s like brain was gonna and its skull and then the bird like lies flat on its back realize it’s like brain trauma and I was like that looks really good is ask the animal trainer I was like aren’t you giving it a concussion right now to make it lie on his back he’s like no no it’ll be all good yeah I do this all the time an shut up good and they got this scene they got the scene and then did he fly away I don’t think he fly oh I think she’s probably shoved into his little cage or something but so was there a monitor they are like no no no no there’s no one he wasn’t he was the monitor he was the trainer the trainer but usually a trainer and then a monitor who just stands there and you pay him just to stand there and shake their head no maybe we start shaking a bird he might have been taking bribes under the table or something I don’t know now we have been enjoying the rapid release of many music videos the whoa-whoa-whoa video we’ve got some questions about that go for it this technique that you have implemented you have to explain or is this a trade secret how is this visually done it’s not a trade secret we actually explained it the other night at a we did this screening called flux where they do a bunch of music videos and we did a little presentation on how the effect was done and well just to explain visually you’re rapping but it’s like the video keeps looping back on itself yeah it’s like a Jif or gif effect there’s a stutter effect like it keeps it shows you a few seconds back a few times in a few times in a few times but you’re wrapping keeps going forward yeah exactly so still the way we did it is we had two shots that we did the shot where I perform the action so say I’m dousing this car in gasoline and you see my hand go up and then the gasoline fly out of the end of the nozzle so I perform that action and then we go back and we find the frame and the director of photography island was dow ski who’s the one who came up with this concept lines up the frame exactly where it’s gonna be when I hit that moment of having the gasoline up in the air and it’s gonna be repeated over and over again he finds that frame on the monitor so he’s on the side well we’re still on set and we’re monitoring it live and then he positions me back again with camera and he doesn’t opacity thing where he can see my face and he can also see the flame that were using before so he makes sure that my face is lined up exactly where the other one was and then he comes in with a helmet contraption where he beats the opacity thing we can relate to that because when we did our t-shirt war stop-motion animation we had to keep lining up for every shot sure it’s exactly we changed t-shirts so yeah we did a version of that yeah well this we’re doing the poor man’s version too I mean we started out very DIY and guerrilla and have been gradually getting a little bit more professional as the years have gone by but he would line it back up we’d line it back up and he would find and he’d have to do little adjustments to my face yeah and then he would come in with this helmet and he would lock me into place and for 15 minutes I would have to stay exactly still because the whole effect was pulled off by stealing the maomao from that frame and then superimposing opposing it on that one exactly as he worked the edit but the key to making the effect sell was that the lighting remains exactly the same on that part of my face right so that he can do a little like like fade effect around the edges of it so that you don’t see that the edges of it that was the part that I didn’t have figured out was knowing while you’re shooting yeah which frames how he wanted to loop it back how could you film his mouth in so many different angles it was very composed every frame figured out the Edit ahead of time exactly we was very like shot listed and we knew we wanted this side shot and we wanted this one dead-on it was it was very in the director Jackson Adams really really reported it really well before and for every line we knew what angle we wanted your music videos have this creative component to all of them there’s always something to talk about ok this looks like a continuous shot that’s moving through framed pieces of art that actually come to life and you’re the character in each one or this is a continuously rotating 360 degree camera shot inside of a cab over time add on I guess I’m I’m curious are is this a mandate from you to directors that you’re working with or are these your concepts that you’re infusing into the music video it’s completely collaborative have a very close knit circle of filmmakers that I work with in LA most of whom I met in college and when we were going about planning the videos for this new al but we sat together and we listened to the album which was somewhat awkward for me and we said okay what are the songs that we think could best be translated into music videos so the crike that’s the criteria it’s not these are my singles you know every song in the album is one that I believe in I I made like 30 songs maybe in and they’re all songs that I love I cut the ones that I didn’t like and I don’t have singles I wouldn’t put it on the album if I didn’t truly love it I really feel like in this day and age having somebody’s attention is so much of a commodity you have to make sure that every moment of what you do is engaging and entertaining and fun and like thought is put into it and care and love and so that’s true from the tracklisting top to bottom it’s why I put effort into the packaging of the album and it and it goes for the music videos too and so it’s such a main part of marketing is having a music video that people want to talk about and and it’s so easy to fall off the map and lose people’s attention and I think that if you don’t put out material that’s consistently you know at least even if people have their favorites and they don’t like one as much as the next they can still tell that care and effort was put into all of them and and that’s what I’m going for for whoa whoa well again another great song tell us about the music video concept for that one is it ironic or is it an extension of what you what the song means anyway is the song itself ironic or does the video make it ironic this kind of ties back into just like what I’m going for is an artist in general and I think it confuses some people because when folks ask who my influences are one of the people that I throw out generally people haven’t heard of unless they’re really big fans of spoken word poetry is a guy named beau SIA and he was on this old TV show called Def Poetry Jam which I used to idolize and was on the final season of which was my first stepping stone into being an artist and I saw him perform for the first time when I was 15 years old and I stole elements of his stage persona because I was so enamored by it and one of the things that he would do is he would come out with this insane hubris and he would just he would had a poem called on Xtreme and it sounds very simple but he would talk about all of the different ways in which he was so extreme he would go extreme on a toaster he would go extreme like in ways that were so stupid about like how he would make his eggs and stuff but he did it with his gravitas and his badassness that made it totally absurd and that was it he would get people to laugh just by raising his eyebrows because of this deadpan stare that he’d give people and and what I loved about that is he was being really honest and he’s being really self-deprecating he’s being really badass at the same time and I’ve kind of used that same technique and what I like about it is that it allows you to pick apart your own flaws and foibles and be honest about who you are but at the same time like go out on stage and be a badass and I love that you know like I I like putting full confidence into my performances but also being honest and so whoa whoa some people might hear this braggadocio song and being like this dude is totally full of himself but to me it’s supposed to be taken ironically and the video the two setups are one that I’m lighting this green Lamborghini on fire like a total badass and then I’m down I’m trying to light it on fire and then I let myself on fire because I am NOT in fact a badass car arsonist well I love the fact that the visual drives that point home I mean I think without the visual I still was like it’s ironic and his comedic like the the irony in in the and the things that you’re saying in the song they’re so clever that an ironic that they become comical and then I think it’s interesting that in the video you chose to use comedy actors you know Jim Belushi and Burnham it’s supposed to be funny and then in the second set up is the bedroom scene where it’s like a sex scene and for the first time in any of my 90 music videos that I’ve shot he actually used a crew to attest sex to try and send the clicks up so I apologize fans who saw that is shameless and you know it’ll be another 90 videos again before I use a thumbnail of an half-naked woman every 90 videos yeah yeah I get one are you you’re in the thumbnail a little bit you’re like taking her ass there that’s how I got away with it right to his sexual ization of myself too if she wasn’t in the video I would have been upset for a couple of reasons what are the reason well one I would have felt manipulated into she would have been in a video yeah okay exactly she’s very beautiful she actually went to college with me and what was that phone call like you know actually it was the the sex scene itself and it wasn’t a true sex scene it was a for play scene because then I knock a candle off the shelf and the room lights on fire so that’s also an extension of the Lamborghini thing right even if I have a gertrudis sex scene it still ends abruptly but we were in a row get at the point yeah so it was a little awkward because she had like pasties on it seize this moment where she has to unclasp the front class bra and I’m like trying to not look at the breasts that I’m like I’m not not looking at you gotta have an eyeline though yeah exactly you have to have an eyeline and I’m like what to our lives exactly mono was a little but it was you know you said you said I got to have an eye light you had a conversation with her I did I talked to her about that yeah and she was like oh go for it it’s fine she knew what she was getting into was she an actress she is an actress and she and she knew exactly it was very very explicit not the sex but the like breakdown in the casting that said there’s going to be a moment where there is implied nudity and there’s gonna be a front class brother you’re gonna have to open up and wear pasties on set and they’re right you know it was it was there was no bones about it we weren’t trying to push the envelope or ever do anything that she didn’t want to so we just tried to be very upfront about it and it was a bit awkward because I’ve never done that before and and not to mention it sounds like you had to wear a helmet that kept your head in the same place while she stroud you for like an hour well she was gone by the time the helmet came on yeah we did the straddling scene and then and then she left in that helmet cable to put my helmet on no that’s just what I do in the bedroom anyway I find that it’s a it’s very very erotic to discuss strap yourself in please and let the woman take hope it’s safer that’s the ultimate safe sex absolutely wear a helmet but that wasn’t your first lovemaking scene because you made out with an older woman on your web series oh I did that’s true man you’re so familiar with my work that’s amazing I’m very honored by that yeah that was really funny cuz I have like kind of a running joke through my stuff that’s actually true that I’m really attracted to older women and have somewhat of a cougar fetish and so I’m making out with this older woman in a car in the back of my Subaru hatchback and then it turns out that I’ve like bogarted Andy Milonakis his lover and then he comes banging on the the door of my car and then kicks me out of the car and then he has sex with her in the back of my state brew while I’m like sitting forlornly on the sidewalk and then you we do the Titanic shot we’re like a hand sweeps across the steamy window and a single tear rolls down my cheek and that’s called watch he’s making an album yeah yeah I did this video narrative series that was really fun well while ago yeah we should get back to that but well going back to the whoa whoa whoa I guess my question was I understand your inspiration for the lyrics and the hubris and the humor in that but what are you saying about yourself I think what I’m saying about myself and this is true of pretty much all of my material is that you own your flaws I mean I I think that what’s really important for me is if if something is happening that I’m embarrassed about or humiliated about or could be perceived as a flaw or weakness that if I’m trying to be an honest writer I have to acknowledge that and it goes back to if you say something or if something is a potential perceived weakness of yours and you acknowledge it before anybody else does it takes away the power of the people who might be making fun of you for that thing so I’m never gonna be a pop rapper and if I am it’s gonna be in some weird left-of-centre way I’m not cut out to be a pop star I’m quirky and I’m weird and I try and own those flaws and quirks and and that’s a theme that permeates this album and cardboard castles and my first one watsky and growing up did you learn that lesson the hard way I mean as kids were you know well as people we’re all self-conscious too to a certain degree most of us to a degree more than we’re willing to admit was that something that you learned at a young age when you were trying to hide something embarrassing about yourself yeah I think it’s it’s a comedians impulse it’s like we don’t get made fun of for something and it definitely goes back to adolescence and the chips on your shoulder that you develop when you’re a kid for instance I had epilepsy when I was in middle school and I still do but the first seizure that I had was in seventh grade and I was at a big public school in San Francisco and I had a grand mal seizure on the blacktop while I was running the mile and Jim and I got back to school after coming back from the hospital and kids started calling me seizure boy there’s this one kid who just really that’s original yeah seriously I mean middle schoolers you know they’re real poets and I was getting relentlessly teased about it by a few people and and for me you know humor and deflection is the way to deal with it if you look like you’re getting beaten by those things then it can consume you and and you take away the power of your bullies by getting there first and I think that’s making fun of myself is something that was always a tool that I was able to use to you know avoid getting teased even worse there’s just you make people laugh so do you think that that was instrumental in you kind of seeking to become a performer I’ve always been an attention seeker and when I was younger that manifested itself as me being extremely obnoxious kid and being really the smart aleck in class the class clown somebody who was desperate for attention and those aren’t necessarily positives about my personality they’re also things about me that point to you know an ego that I’ve probably had since I was young and feeling like I deserved attention which I don’t believe any more than anyone deserves attention more than anybody else but when I was a kid I was always talking out of turn in class and trying to make sure I was the center of attention at all times and it wasn’t until I was in high school when I saw deaf poetry for the first time that I was able to figure out okay there are moments where it’s okay to ask for attention and you can put the spotlight on yourself and if you’re a performer it gives you this outlet to get that positive reinforcement from people and I think that gradually over the next few years I was able to learn okay I don’t need to be the center of attention all times there are moments where I can step on one stage and I can get that ego fix yeah and then you know be a reasonable person to listen to other people instead of constantly having a talk well let’s go with the poetry vein but first let’s pause and make sure we get the full epilepsy story so I mean how does that conclude well it’s open-ended I had a seizure that year in seventh grade and you’re not considered epileptic unless you have more than one seizure so they were just like we’ll monitor you and see what happens and then I had another seizure two weeks later and so I had this second one and they said okay you have epilepsy we’re gonna put you on medication so for three years I was on an anti-seizure medication called depakote and it has a lot of negative side effects that can totally change your personality and how sharp you are whether you’re able to dial into conversations and I was able to actually so I had a normal EEG sometime in the middle of high school and I weakened myself off the medication and then I didn’t have another seizure for 14 years until four months ago I was at the gym I as a Los Angeles resident now obviously started to develop you have to be I join the gym yeah and I started working out and when I was on the elliptical machine I had my first seizure since I was in Middle School and when that happened how long does it last and then you just is it’s like coming out of a blackout yeah well many people have auras what where you can kind of sense that this is coming but there’s nothing you can do about it and it’s just a general uneasy feeling and it happened that time too but because it had been so long since I’d had a seizure I wasn’t think I was just thinking that I’m lightheaded because I’m getting off the elliptical and then I blacked out and didn’t remember anything and then woke up in an ambulance and it’s I think the seizure itself only lasts for a few minutes but you’d have to ask other people because obviously I was unconscious for it and then after that it’s just like waking up from the fog and that’s the strangest experience is when you’re coming to it really is in the first moments of it you’re a human being but you have no idea what’s going on and I couldn’t tell you what decade it was it’s like coming out of a coma and well and they’re like what what decade is it right now and I have no idea I’m like and in my mind I’m saying I’m so sorry – the EMT like I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I know that I can know what decade it is but I can’t tell you right now and then you start coming out of this fog gradually gradually okay what year it is how many fingers am i holding up like I’m trying to process this information I’m so sorry I just kept saying that over and over again I’m so sorry I don’t know I don’t know and it’s a very disorienting feeling at what point did it dawn on you that you had had another one after all those years they told me and it was just like oh and epilepsy is a strange medical condition because you at you actually sleep through the most intense part of it and then you just are told about it afterwards oh you survived it’s good because the most dangerous thing about a seizure is like if you fall or if you’re operating heavy machinery if you’re doing something the seizure itself is not the dangerous part except that it can really if you have a lot of them it can mess with your brainwaves but you know many people have a lot of seizures and are able to be very functional people so are you just being monitored now are you like I had another one so I I went on this medication called keppra meaning you had one four months ago and then you had another one so yeah I’ve had had a fourth one so I had to when I was in seventh grade and now I had a second one after that gym one so I tried to wean myself off the keppra the doctor put me on it immediately and I said I don’t want this for my quality of life I want to try and get off the medication before I go on tour again I’m willing to forfeit my driver status in order to try and be medication free I will say off the bat I believe that everybody’s brain is different and everybody’s cure and every what’s right for everyone is is not the same but for me being on an intense pharmaceutical is really something that I don’t want like I cherish the ability to be myself and to always be able to think clearly and I value that and so I tried to get off the medication in the next day as soon as I stopped the medication had another seizure and I woke up in my apartment and my chin was cut open and I don’t know what happened I was actually alone and I just kind of like groggily came to and looked in the mirror and there’s blood coming down my face and then I had to call a lift and the lifted driver was just like what happened I was like I don’t really know just take me to a hospital so I went in and you know they I stayed and a friend came and picked me up and we just decided cuz I was about to leave on warp to her right before that and that’s a two-month tour that’s really intense that I got back from about a week ago and I decided to stay on the medication because if I had another seizure it would be catastrophic so our touring plan and that just doesn’t affect me but it affects all people like tour with my band members if I had to cancel dates you know I’ve fans we’re looking forward to this and so we made a decision okay you you I I lost my driver’s license status I’m taking lifts around and stuff and buses and rollerblading and combination of it but it’s uh it’s definitely affected my life but I haven’t had one since then I’m on a low dosage of Khepera and lamotrigine right now and I have another tour coming up to support this album so I’m just trying to play it safe I’m not drinking at all I haven’t had a beer in three months I’m not drinking caffeine just like anything that I can do to make it so that I don’t have another seizure I’m trying to I’m trying to do right now until I get done with a touring phase and then I’m gonna try and get off the medication again right do you experience a struggle with any side effects at this point there’s often an adjustment period to medication that affects your brain and I’ve definitely feel a lot better than I did when I started it the first few weeks that I was having it I would have these weird moments where like say I’m having this conversation with you right now I would just lose the ability to be present in the conversation I would hear you guys talking and it’s like being mentally underwater and I would know what you were saying but I wouldn’t be able to respond and add on if you have you ever had the feeling where you’re waking up from a dream and you want to move your arm or you want to get out of bed but you can’t do it or yeah and sleep bro so so I I have it it’s like that it’s like that but you’re awake and you’re sitting there and I had it on Mexican restaurant one time with my friends and it was like five minutes and I was just sitting there with the chips and I was like I want to eat a chip I want to be part of this conversation and then you come out of it you’re like and you tell everybody like at the table like guys like I’m back now I just wanted some of those chips guys you don’t even know how it’s going out like this dis intense struggle that’s going on your brain the like and and it was very weird but I haven’t felt like that in a while and I didn’t feel like that in Warped Tour and I’m really glad because a robic exercise seems to be my my epilepsy trigger that that that could lead to another one but fortunately it didn’t and so I’m knocking on wood and yeah I’m good for now all right so take us back to spoken word and the start of that so I started my freshman year I got really interested in hip hop when I was in middle school and I was just a kid who’d listen to whatever was on the radio when I loved Eminem and Nelly and Ludacris and I loved rapping but it wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school that I saw poetry for the first time performance poetry and it blew my mind this for those of you were unfamiliar with slam poetry feel free to type it into YouTube and spend a night in it it’s polarizing artform some people really don’t like it because it can be kind of preachy and serious and ranty but those are the reasons that I think I connected with it as a high schooler because I was really emo and I still love it I think it’s a very direct art form and can be a very honest art form and can also incorporate humor and lyricism performance and to be a really really good spoken word poet you have to be a really solid performer and a really solid writer because the work is so personal you can’t be a mediocre writer and a great performer you can’t be a mediocre performer and a great writer you have to you have to take both of those really seriously and so that’s why I really loved it and was there a specific opportunity that poetry became the outlet initially versus oh I want to be a hip-hop artist initially I did both I never I started rapping when I was around the same time it just so happened that the first breaks that I got were as a poet because there was a spoken-word scene in San Francisco for young people where I would go and do open mics and I would go to free workshops this organization called youth speaks was a non-profit literary arts organization in San Francisco that I became really involved with and it’s the first one you did publicly I had a poem called beliefs but it was like terrible you go back and listen to it it’s just cringe-worthy but but you’ve got a Tappin is something that you believe deeply to make those really work right as you’re saying so a poem about being half Jewish that I did when I was 15 about the fact that I have all these Jewish tendencies that my father was stowed on me because he comes from a Jewish family but that were not Jewish religiously at all so I felt like I’m a cultural Jew but not a religious Jew and all these like Woody Allen type neuroses I’ve been like passed on but I didn’t get any of the actual religions I had a poem called half Jewish about that and the one line from it that I still to this day I’m kind of proud of but has never made anything else was like I started doing the the prayer but ah I don’t know melancholy Chomsky Noam Jeff chaotzu Vikings Randy Moss and super bowl-like any of the actual prayer stuff and and I got a good laugh out of that but that was that was it so I I did those poetry slams for like four or five years and I got a little bit better every year and then when I was 19 I won the San Francisco City slam it was my last year of eligibility and so I went on to the national competition with the Bay Area team it’s a competition where you’re performing original work and then a random panel of judges scores your poems on a scale of one to ten so getting a 30 is getting a perfect score and I did really well when I was 19 in 2006 and my bay area team won the national competition at the Apollo Theater and there were Scouts for Def Poetry Jam there did you get a 30 I got a 30 for my my poem v4 version which was Apollo up being a virgin until until high school graduation and the Def Poetry scouts saw that poem and I got onto the show that the final season of the show on HBO I was on it when I was 19 which is I’m really proud of and I wasn’t until that poem that I think they were able to say okay we get it like this weird quirky dorky white kid now we can we can paint him in this way who’s we we is are the producers of Def Poetry okay who are selecting who is gonna be on the show and they’d seen me in the past right because how much of a minority on that show were you as the young white kid the show is pretty racially diverse but I think that like they didn’t know how to peg me at first cuz I’m not like a suave sexy guy I was all elbows as a high school kid and I was doing these like intense political poems that that they were like yeah that’s cool like you’re scoring well and stuff but like we don’t get it and and even that show as cool as it was that a poetry show was on TV they were still Hollywood producers who were trying to find types for the show oh that kids talking about being a virgin and he looks like do it right so but but it was an honest poem I mean it was in some ways typecast me as this kind of nerdy character but it was a poem it was very honest to my experience in high school and so I wasn’t embarrassed about it because it was true so I had this little appearance on HBO that allowed me to get these college gigs have you guys heard of the knack a circuit it’s called National Association of campus activities and I did this NACA showcase through youth speaks they were trying to do a college tour so there are people who are specifically College booking agents they were like you’re gonna do great in the college market and that means that you perform at these NACA conferences and then try and get bounced around college courses and so I did that for about four years and for the first two years I would take all my classes at Emerson in Boston where I went Monday Wednesday I would take really really long class days as a full-time student but then I would have Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday at a four-day weekend so I’d leave Thursday morning and then I’d come back Sunday night I’d play like three college shows in like Iowa or North Dakota or something and then I’d fly back and I and I go back to my classes and what are these crowds like we’ve talked to some people before who’ve done now that you mention it I do understand yes had some great stories yeah yeah yeah nice Peter yeah yeah we’ve actually connected I think he may have actually been on the same college booking agency as me he he was like in a McDonald’s at one point well yeah it’s the story that he tells and is that you kinda are given this crowd that isn’t out there because they know who you are and you have to convince them that you’re worth listening to no there are there kids that are in like Sioux City Iowa and they’re so bored out of their skulls that they’re just like okay we’ll watch whatever the Campus Activities Board brought in Friday night and they’ll watch it very passively so you really really have to work the metaphor that sometimes I use as a baseball fan to describe it is as a performer you’re performing for these potentially extremely in different audiences and I should say that sometimes I got great crowds and the campus activity committees were really passionate about pushing the show and people showed up who wanted to be there or poetry kids but I would say the vast majority of them were performing for a small group of kids in a cafeteria or a basement or a little cafe or something on campus and maybe 20 40 kids that are sitting cross-armed like entertain me go and it can be very demoralizing when the shows go badly and I did that probably 200 gigs and you drive in your rental car to your cafeteria and you perform your show alone and you go back to your motel 6 and and then you eat your your Stouffer’s mac and cheese you bought at Walmart and watch the daily show and then call your mom and tell her that you don’t think you can do it anymore you just can’t take the abuse and you’ve done it for four years and you’re making the same amount of money that you were when you started and you were in college and what was the hope at that time because what is the realization of success as a slam poet well it there is nowhere to go really and and I think that this is the advice that I would give to anyone who wants to be an artist which is there’s no such thing as a realization of success there’s only enjoying doing it and obviously there’s milestones that you can hit you can set goals for yourself and try to achieve them but it’s also possible to set goals for yourself achieve them and still not be happy and the vast majority of people are like that because a lot of the people that get successful as artists got that way because they’re extremely driven people with a plan for themselves and they cannot turn an off switch so you’re constantly moving forward and having trouble taking stock of the small moments of happiness along the way and when you’re performing alone you have no one to talk to when it goes badly and that’s when it’s really hard but when it’s going great is is very satisfying so I’ll say that that even though I’m saying that lesson I oftentimes don’t take my own advice and get really bummed out and depressed and sad about it and thinking like I’m not where I want to be but I was working towards trying to have people take my music seriously the whole time so even as I was doing the spoken-word stuff I was still releasing independent music and I used that money that I made touring colleges after school to fund my first few music videos and around the time that I graduated I’d gone home for Christmas break and I came out to LA I studied acting in college and I was auditioning for commercials and I wasn’t getting anything and I was really depressed and I felt like I wasn’t gonna make it in LA and I went home and I remember just lying on my bedroom floor feeling sorry for myself looking up at the ceiling feeling like man what am i doing I should have gone into a career that helped other people instead of being a failed egomaniac and so I kind of tried to say okay you have this skill set that’s kind of strange if you were to boil down what you’re good at and put it into a 90 second video what would that 90 seconds of entertainment look like and so I set out to create a video that was like a commercial for myself that people would want to share and I said okay I’ve got this skill at rapping pretty fast but it has to incorporate my sense of humor it has to have wordplay in it it has to be entertaining and it has to be a live performance thing so people can see I’m in fact doing it at a time so I did this fast right video over the Busta Rhymes break your neck which is like music that I started listening to when I was a freshman high schools that era of music something else that I really loved and it was a success I mean and it seems like you had more you had more than the obvious skill that was on display in the video you had the idea to call it pale kid raps fast which is exactly the kind of things that shameless clickbait but it works it worked and it did work and it worked almost too well I mean it was it was instant success it was just an overnight boom and it was like within 20 minutes this thing had been shared like ten thousand times and the next morning it had like four million hits on it and we were getting calls from The Ellen Show and stuff how long did you sit on it before you upload it it was it like I have this idea twelve hours later it was up on the internet or was it a couple of weeks or I don’t mean waited a week or something in fact before that video went out I’d shot a music video called an MC name for one of the songs off my first album and the idea was okay we’re gonna shoot this viral video but we need to have an instant follow-up to it that showcases what I my real songs so that I’m not a flash in the pan if this succeeds and it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams tell us more than details about what happened because it it was crazy well I remember we went out and got drinks that night cuz we were like Jesus Christ like we made something of people watch like it was so it was exciting for us and I’ve been putting out spoken word poems and traveling the country and playing for like 20 30 people and having no one there and being demoralized night after night and not that there were as all demoralizing you know I was making money as an artist yeah I have to be grateful and pinch myself even to perform for that many people and get it checked to come to a college but but I was feeling like I was totally at a dead-end and so then this video came and we’re like oh my god like we might be able to parlay this into something else and so then the the battle became okay we have people’s attention right now how can I translate this into the career I want to have and I think that there was an opportunity for me to maybe go in a different direction and and do pail kid raps faster and PillCam raps even faster than that and going back to the animal conversation we had actually I had this idea cuz I was thinking that was what I had to do I got to incorporate crazier animals into it and I was like okay pail kid raps fastest with the slowest loris I got the fastest rapper in the slowest one and then I looked into renting a slow loris and I realized that these slow lorises men are actually poisonous and also it’s very bad for them to be exposed to light the reason they’re so cute and they lie on the back is because they’re nocturnal and being traumatized by the light so we scrapped the idea we realised how inhumane it was but but we have walked across the intersection at the speed of a slow loris oh that was very experimental recent that’s how I know that they’re toxic I also wouldn’t recommend that yeah no it’s all bad just stay away from lorises in general but you get a call from Ellen yeah is that an automatic yes no it was a think for a second and then yeah okay of course but at first I mean immediately within a day of having this video come out I was worried about getting pigeon holed in this way and it is something that I’ve had to battle for a few years is like the stigma of being a gimmicky fast rapper and and I’m not ashamed I still if I had to do it all again I would absolutely do that video again because it’s giving me so many amazing opportunities and so many genuine fans one of the things that you that I see that you have done is that video is no longer called pail kid raps fest it’s called Watsky raps unlisted people still find it and we we were actually looking just a second ago was up to like 25 million views in like every few hours somebody’s like I found it yeah because and and I think that it kind of ties in with something else we were talking about respect is so important as an artist in general but I feel like in hip-hop respect is more important yeah and so it seems like you immediately started seeing that like this could be too good in the wrong way right and I’ve got to counteract that it’s my perception of it is that you’ve more than counteracted it but you’re saying that this is something that you struggle with since the initial success it took a year after that video came out for me to actually get bookings at real venues at real clubs as an artist and I had a first cold call places I couldn’t get a booking agent who would book me in clubs and I had to do it myself I was trying to convince people like I love YouTube I’m gonna continue to exist and be a part of the YouTube community but there’s more that I want to do I want to be a live performer and I want people to take my work somewhat seriously and so I started just emailing the venue’s I would look through dates of the artists whose careers I admired and who were at where I was sort of in terms of the size of their audience and I looked through the listings of the venue’s they were playing in different cities and I was like okay the drunken unicorn in Atlanta and I would email their Booker and I would email the person in Minneapolis who did triple triple rock or whatever venue was the size that I thought I could play and I would say here’s my elevator pitch for why you should book me and the vast majority of them ignored my emails there may be four cities in the country that we’re like okay we’ll book a show with you and so I booked the shows independently and then at that same time I found a booking agent who because I established these cornerstone gigs were like okay we’ll route the rest of the tour around them for you and we’ll see what happens we’ll roll the dice and that’s when we went out in 2012 on the nothing like the first times were and it’s taken a long time and were you were you with anybody at that point or was it just you solo show actually went out with a guy named dumbfounded who’s also had like YouTube following first it was a battle wraparound grind time and he came out and did the tour with us but you know it’s still taken a while and last night I played a gig called low-end theory in LA which is a really small venue that is kind of like the hipster tastemaker gig where like flying Lotus and all the people who are like hip beat makers go and I bombed last night and it was the first time since the college gigs where it was demoralizing it’s like holy Sh like like half the audience left during my show and it wasn’t because I was performing badly because I played on Warped Tour all summer for 50 shows and the audience was going nuts and I had like thousands of people at some of the shows and it just goes to show that you can’t appeal to everybody as much as I’m gonna change some people’s minds there’s always gonna be pockets in communities who don’t what you do because music is so subjective and you bring your story into it and if someone decides not to like you you know it could be as much about their perception of who you are is what you’re actually doing and and hip-hop especially it’s important what you do but also the perception of authenticity is really important for some people the way the music that I present they perceive it as very authentic but for some hip-hop heads they perceive it as very much not hip-hop what they come to the genre to expect for me when I listen to eggie azalea I hear her music and I think she’s putting on a voice like you hear her in interviews and I apologize to eggie Azalea fans out there but but there’s certain artists that I listened to him like man you you don’t sound in your music like you sound like when you’re having a conversation with me and that’s the opposite of what I’m going for when I want people to listen to my records I want them to say this is the same dude I’m sitting across from the table from there’s no air being put on he he is himself on his music and when some people listen to my music they think oh man he sounds like a corny white dude he sounds like a nerd well guess what that’s kind of Who I am so right you know I’m gonna do that and bring it to the table and be unashamed about it but I’m also gonna try and be a good rapper like it’s not a gimmick that I want to lean on as a crutch it’s just to say I’m gonna be myself and bring it to the table and take it or leave it and some people leave it in retrospect having done the lots Keys making an album narrative series does your do you think that at times your comedy works against you in terms of being as legitimate and specifically for that project I’m curious why you decided to do that and was it effective for what you wanted to do was it a marketing tool was it a passion project it was a passion project and I don’t think that it hurt me or helped me in any way it was just something fun that I got to do and I don’t think that hurts you because you look at a lot of rappers they act and have been in funny projects I think that it’s it’s accepted and it’s okay for you to exist across multiple platforms and have a sense of humor and be self-deprecating especially if that’s what you do in your music so yeah I don’t think it’s helped or hurt me it’s not like it’s skyrocketed me to fame or it got me a bunch of Hollywood parts but what I want and there’s gonna be a time that comes when my knees give out and I’m no longer able to tour 90% of the year and be a rapper when I’m gonna have to find something else to do and I hope I have a long career as a writer and performer and I want to get into narrative and maybe someday I’ll be a screenwriter and one of the reasons that I wanted to get out of this constant college touring because I figured out a formula that worked and I did the same show and for like the last two years I was just on autopilot and I knew how to do it and I knew what it how to succeed and do the right pop cultural references that would make the college kids laugh wherever and and it felt lazy to me and I wanted to do something that scared me again and that’s how I felt about getting into the club touring and before I was able to actually do it I had no idea if I could actually put on a show as a headlining rapper in there entertain people I didn’t know what it took to make that show successful and I was deathly nervous I I was vomiting the first night where I played my first club gig as a headliner at a certain point I’ll probably feel that way about music and I’ll want to do something else again and and that’s what I viewed that narrative project as like flex your muscles try something that scares you and and have fun with it well I do definitely get the impression that authenticity is very important to you that you’re not a fan of hypocrisy and in your recent song ink don’t bleed you-you-you start off the first first talking about some people who are who are hypocrites some guy hits about the rack something burning see there’s Benjamin’s and Jackson’s in the pockets of burn but when they shoot the video producers pass around a book and full of rented jewelry for them to rock and return then you start talking about yourself and you address the event that happened on the Warped Tour in November 2013 last year I mean for those of you who haven’t seen it I took the extremely stupid decision to and I should preface it by saying that that my stage show at that point I was taking increasingly big risks on stage and I would jump off speaker stacks and there was a moment at a show that I played in Wisconsin for a Halloween outdoor party where I jumped off like the roof of a frat house and a crowd of people who like crowd surfed me to the front of the stage and I was starting to feel like I’m this I can get away with stuff and I started to feel invincible which clearly is not the case nobody’s invincible bones break and and they did in this scenario I was playing a show in London at the Warped Tour in the one of the biggest venues I’ve ever played Alexandra Palace in London where the stones have played and and you know I started to believe my own hype and I climbed up a 35-foot lighting rig and jumped off of it and now let’s pause for a second yeah 35 feet very high I’m not good with visualizing numbers but I saw the clip a nose oh that’s 35 feet it’s I mean it’s crazy people watch the video and they’re like that guy’s a idiot like how could I ever be a fan of his work it’s it’s really like one of those things where you can point to a couple other people who have done something that stupid but those people had much bigger fan bases than me and audiences who really really liked them and wanted to catch them and I was performing a Warped Tour which wasn’t my crowd and I don’t know why I believe that this would be successful and you know I did believe I would get caught by them as ludicrous as it sounds when you watch the video I didn’t do it because I was trying to be a human missile and injure people I did it because I got up my own and I thought that I could get away with something that I clearly couldn’t and there’s something in my brain that’s so weird because I’m a very organized person and I’m a planner in my career like I’m thinking many steps ahead but the minute I step on stage that part of me melts away and I’m trying in every moment to put on the best most entertaining show I can for the audience and you know it got away from me and I made an extremely irresponsible decision and it yeah it was like in the heat of the moment but I thought about it maybe like a song beforehand and I was thinking like oh man maybe when the big climax comes I can climb up that thing and they’ll catch me and it’ll be awesome and I’ll be legendary and it’ll be this great thing where I’ll be hailed as like the most brave like awesome performer and that’s what I was thinking and I got up there and then I looked down and I was like holy what are you doing like you might die right now and and and all these thoughts are happening in the split second and I could realized it was way too high for me to climb down and I could have but I decided to just jump off it and it was mitigated by some factors that made it even more dangerous that he didn’t realize at the time like for instance I was backlit by the lights that were in back of me so the audience below couldn’t actually even see me because they were seeing shining lights coming right in back of me and then I also threw my hat off because often when I go crowd surfing I take my hat off so the audience can snatch it off my head so so that I’ll throw it back to stage I threw my hat off but I threw it into the crowd and so people were looking down at the Hat when I was coming at them and I hit these people and I broke a girl’s arm and a guy’s back was injured and both of them went to the hospital and what happened to you I was a dentist I also went to the hospital I was put in a neck brace I was in the ambulance with the girl whose arm was broken and I didn’t know how badly I was hurt but it was all bangs and bruises and I cut my lip open with my tooth but it I had a few stitches on my lip but it he up I was not badly hurt and the wind knocked out of me and was deeply humiliated and felt horrible for the people who I injured and I’ve done my best to try and make it right with them and I haven’t heard anything from the girl you know I’m assuming for legal reasons they’re not allowed to get in touch with me so I haven’t been in touch with her I was in touch with the guy for a while I don’t want to go into extreme detail about it because there is some legal stuff going on but for the people just so it doesn’t seem like I’m trying to obfuscate anything you know I’ve done everything that I could to try and make sure that they’re better and that I’ve done everything I can to reach out to the best of my knowledge they’re all right but I can’t say that with absolute certainty because I don’t have him on the phone saying you know I’ve healed up I’ve tried to do everything I can and just address the situation and be honest about it it was tough like you know at that point I was thinking oh is it is it insensitive for me to go on with a career and just sweep this incident under the rug and pretend like it didn’t happen and keep releasing albums and playing shows and stuff when I’ve altered the course of several people’s lives but even before you got to considering those things was there a moment of fear that I may have just really damaged my career absolutely it was it was a combination of that and fear that I’d really ruined people’s lives and you know they may still have fallout from this I’m not sure if you’re listening to this all I could say is I hope that you’re 100% back to normal in your daily life and to the best of my knowledge you are but I’m not sure and then you say you wrap up that verse bandage the wound and vanish blanka’s the newest of canvases when they zoom in the cameras give up the truth what’s the truth about you that maybe you discovered in this that I can’t hear in those lyrics I think the truth that I discovered is that my egos bigger than I thought it was and that there was a desire to be a rock star that I was playing into and that I need to examine and address and and really try and work on because that didn’t just happen for no reason it happened as a manifestation of something that’s inside of me which which i think is is partly my desire to put on a good show and to be entertaining and to always give 110% at every single show that I put on but that doesn’t have to come at the expense and the health and the safety of your audience there’s a line between putting on a great energetic show and damaging equipment and people and that’s something that I really needed to work on and have tried to I had a PR person at the time who’s a great person but we didn’t completely see eye to eye on how to handle the situation and they were suggesting you know maybe wait about this and and don’t address it and wait for it to blow over and I just the guilt was eating at me and so the next night at the hotel or that night at the hotel and in London I fits just feeling totally gutted just like I’m gonna just post up my feelings I’m not gonna let this fester I’m gonna I’m gonna own this and then I’m gonna let whatever happens happen and that was your fate it was a Facebook post that I made him hours afterwards and you know I’m not gonna have a PR person vet it I’m just I’m gonna write it and you know let people take it or leave it and a lot of people you know they did not forgive me at that time and I got trolled really really badly and then no we went on with our tour I had like five more shows six more shows at what point did you write Inc don’t believe we write this verse kind of unpacking it it took a while I finished the tour and I kind of limped through the last five date shows of it and I was co-headlining with a rapper named wack so I did warp to her with ya and we flipped around normally I was the closer and wax with the guy who would open but for the last five shows I opened and he closed because I just wanted to get it over with I was having trouble eating I was very depressed about it and I didn’t want to cancel the shows because I had fans that maybe were waiting for months to see it and I felt like it was a disservice to them and that not going on with my career was not the brave move to make either that that that there had to be a fine line that the only way that I could do this and continue to be an artist in somebody that I felt like was putting it was creating a good example for my fans in the midst of a bad example that I set was by being a good example of how to deal with a terrible miscalculation and so that’s what I’ve tried to do and it took like four months to write that song and it sounds like there’s specific lessons learned but I hear in the song that there’s also a larger point that maybe you’re making you say I’m a complicated guy but then used you talk about megachurch leader sleeping with male hookers Mayer’s hitting crack pipes with their cookers is it I mean are you complicated are you a hypocrite I mean what do you what are you saying what I’m saying in that song is that what I bring to the table as an artist for those people who continue to want to listen to my music is that I will always be trying to be truthful about my experience and so much of this industry that that we work in is about artifice and about presenting an artificial image I and I believe that Iggy Azalea is presenting a very artificial image to people she’s not the only one and and there’s it’s not a terrible thing you know they figured out a way to make a lot of money and to appeal to lots and lots of people but I think there’s something more powerful about telling a story in a real way and people can follow me and if I lost a bunch of fans through that at least the people who stuck around are gonna know how I really felt about it I don’t have a major label telling me I can’t do something and that permeates politics and every every walk of public life people doing crisis management and stuff like that all the stories that I told at the beginning and the first verse of that song that sets up the second verse about myself are true stories that I’ve heard in the industry of you know the fact that there’s a huge pop star who will shall remain nameless right now that I’ve heard actually not only doesn’t write her own material but actually has session singers that come in and record all of her vocal parts has no part in the making of her album whatsoever except the fact that she goes into a studio one day they take her picture and put it on the cover and use her name and that’s crazy and people idolized that person and they’re their favorite artists and people are impressionable and sometimes it’s really hard to distinguish between what’s both what’s not and all I can say is I’m trying my best to not put out both it’s funny even in my first stalker you’re kind of dealing with the same thing you’re talking about your stalker but you’re dealing with her expectations right [Music] and fill it in it’s kind of that same message I’m trying the best I can to be honest but actually not being a hypocrite means saying that I’m a hypocrite right it’s like you had to apologize to your stalker I in fact stalked that stalkers Twitter account because I was so curious to see how they would react to that song and my hope was that they would view it as a tribute and as an as a fan they’d be like wow like there’s a song on his album about me that’s amazing and and I don’t say anything disparaging about the person but then I found out I read the Twitter account that they were no longer a fan of mine and they didn’t like my album they didn’t like my cardboard castles album anymore either that that this album they loved so much they now decided that they’d grown out of and didn’t like it and so you were disappointed that I was really disappointed actually a stalker had lost interest two stalkers no longer even a fan of mine anymore but the song itself is about Kate this person’s looking like waiting for me outside my house waiting for me to leave wondering what I might do what’s the difference between what they think I’m doing inside and what I’m actually doing which is in fact extremely unglamorous stuff so well that this recurring theme of authenticity and a problem with hypocrisy do you think that that spills over into your you seem to kind of have a beef with organized religion that comes through most clearly in your drunk text message to God spoken word for those of us who grew up wishing we believed in an afterlife and for those of us who were so close to God we could practically lean over and make out with her tell us about your relationship to that I should say those those two things that I believe in are a little bit separate in that the specific religious line in Inked don’t bleed is about Ted Haggard the pastor for the New Life Church who was an anti-gay Crusader who was then caught smoking meth with a male prostitute and that hypocrisy spills you know John Edwards who’s like this family man who’s then exposed as a cheater with an outside family and and this thing this this narrative that we hear over and over and over again this idea that like we expect our politicians to disgrace themselves that was what that line was about that guy and so my beef or is with religion that masquerades as something it’s not so churches that are profiting off their congregation huge mega churches that are eat reeling in tons of bucks are propagating this message you know often at the expense of other marginalized groups and then making millions of dollars for their rich pastors who are driving around in Mercedes and and that I have a beef with I’m not a religious person but I don’t have a beef with people who are passionately religious because I don’t know I can’t tell you if there’s a God or not I think there’s probably not based on what I believe objectively that I’ve seen of the world but I didn’t I don’t know you know like I can’t tell you with absolute certainty there’s not a God but what I can say is I feel like sometimes I can smell a rat and when I see some super rich pastor who’s leading a giant congregation that looks like a rock concert I don’t feel like they’re even following the teaches of teachings of Jesus Christ which are you know about loving people and supporting those in need and I think there’s tons of very empathetic religious people who got into it for all the right reasons and who for all I know may may hold the key to getting into heaven and they’re gonna be laughing at me from the pearly gates I don’t know but you know I my beef is more with with the fake elements of large organized religion than with actually religion itself right and how does that theme of authenticity how does that fit you into the landscape landscape of hip-hop in general which is about a lot of pop in circumstance and image there’s a definitely always examples of rappers who break that mold but in some ways I think that maybe it limits my growth and if I fit a more poppy image that maybe I would earn a lot more fans and be able to be on the radio and if I had a look you know I don’t have that I’m gonna wear what I feel comfortable in and act how I feel comfortable and and that might mean that I am relegated the more niche fandom for the rest of my career but I guess only time will tell but I would rather have the industry and success come to me where I’m at then try and fit myself to something that feels very in genuine and then in a best-case scenario having to live with a bunch of success that I feel like I earned falsely or in a worst case scenario they killing and then having to deal with being a faker who is unsuccessful and a fraud so I feel like at this point I could close things down by asking can you teach me how to rap fast I’m not gonna I’m not gonna ask that question I don’t mind how do you feel about that question I don’t mind and I should say like the fast rap stuff even though the fact that I was associated with it I’m still I still do it at my shows I’m still proud that I’m able to do that but that’s technique and skill to me but that’s not how you move people and tell a story but with that being said I’m proud of being a technician and I can tell you exactly what I think the building blocks to being a good fast rapper are well but before you do that so let me get it straight it it seems like you called it the gravy you called it not an essential part well it isn’t it’s an essential part of what you do that probably varies from person to person depending on what well for you as an artist in terms of when you approach a song are you like I’m going for it here yeah yeah and that’s how I approached whoa whoa whoa yeah and and in some ways that was the attention-getter song that I was trying to get people to listen to the rest of the album I’ve kind of viewed my material in in subversive ways of you know I I believe that that there’s nothing wrong with being an entertainer that’s not a dirty word to me for a lot of poets and a lot of writers they view entertainment as a cheap form of art or not even art at all I love entertaining people and entertain people you have to acknowledge your audience’s expectations and try and meet them halfway with something I’m not a therapeutic writer who says I’m writing only for myself and I don’t acknowledge my audience I think acknowledging your audience is a respectful thing because being a writer is a conversation between you and another person you need to be able to communicate to that person and communicating to them in some ways requires acknowledging what do I need to do to get this person to want to listen to me and so you so you engage speed in order to entertain an audience but not because you want to do it no I don’t have any I do like doing it I was a drummer the reason and that’s gonna be part of how I explained how to do it I think it’s awesome I love rhythm I love playing with rhythm I love playing with rhymes it’s not the fact that it’s fast that’s awesome it’s the fact that it’s precise and that the rhyme schemes are cool and in fact you can rap really really fast and still sound like ass if you don’t like if you’re not precise with it and your rhyme schemes aren’t interesting right and in fact that you can still discern what you’re saying is pretty yes it’s about it’s about being being like really clear with it which is diction which is so rhythm and diction are the two things that I’m gonna explain in a second but but it’s like saying to a singer like being is being on pitch important to you like that’s maybe it’s it’s impossible to separate technique from the meat and potatoes well and before you you give link is lesson which I will I will also listen to so we can apply it to our next rap battle here’s a sports analogy for you my perception of it is that fast rapping to you is like the fadeaway de Jordan the fadeaway didn’t make Jordan Jordan but it’s like it’s kind of the go-to thing that is kind of like he does that better than anybody and if I’m gonna have a poster in my room is gonna be of him doing that right there’s actually fans who come to the concert for different things and I try and always vary it so that everybody who likes different facets of my work got what they came for and the majority I’d say more people definitely the fast rapping stuff hits them there’s a bigger audience for it but there is still that contingent of people who say wow he’s a rapper but he’s the guy who also does some spoken word so that might be a minority but yeah I I’m not ashamed if you want to call me a fast rapper that’s fine you know if that gets you to buy my album and be curious about it and listen to it and piques your interest you say I was actually pretty good then I’m willing to I’m willing to do a little a little dance for you if that gets you to listen to my stuff okay I’m gonna keep myself as suspense even more with a follow-up question here if faced with the choice which would you choose if had you had to sing karaoke either one of your own songs amongst friends and strangers or an Eminem song which would you choose Oh Eminem every time and and if faced with another choice I would pick a lanús more set instead of either it’s self-indulgent like I don’t I I get my fix of my attention I’m not the guy who’s gonna show up to the party with a guitar trying to play my own songs like that’s just douchey so yeah definitely an Eminem song and and and I even think that as a rapper going up and doing rap at karaoke like why would you do that get up and sing sing build me a Buttercup or something so tell me how to do it yeah I mean it’s two things its its rhythm and in some ways rhyme scheme is built into rhythm and then clarity so I would say because I have a background as a drummer when I’m writing a fast rap verse before I even do anything I’m listening to the beat and I’m trying to figure out what cadence and tempo are right for it and then beyond that you have to know that how how your rhythm is going to be broken up but what the stress patterns of it are so it’s not just thinking okay there’s a rhythm in drumming called second line which comes out of New Orleans like jazz music and it’s a syncopated thing syncopated means you’re putting the stress and emphasis on a note that’s off of the downbeat so you’re creating forward momentum by basically switching up the rhythm and second line is a syncopated rhythm that goes suck at the cat the cat the cat the cat the cat ducka ducka ducka ducka ducka ducka thick and a lot of the fast drive stuff is a variation on that you’re creating this really interesting pattern by by figuring out what you’re stressed syllables are so now you have your sort of rhythmic structural pattern and then you have to figure out what your end rhymes are so a Multi rhyme you know cat hat bat mat all round with each other but the multi rhyme is when more than one syllables rhyme with each other at the end of a phrase let’s see dog would be like what I look like log hit it’s in the bog pit and frog quit you know there’s obviously what you want to do with your good if you’re creating a great word group of multi rhymes it’s have ones that are related to each other so that you can start to see the subject matter link between those end runs and then once you have a bunch of multi rhyme groups that like stack up on the paper you start to figure out okay what are the associations between these phrases how can I fill in the gap because I have to get with the like filler note they’re gonna go Digga Digga Digga Digga bog wit they get to get digga digga digga tagalog and then you’re figuring out in the in the filler words what is gonna get you from point A to point B so that your verse makes sense and so once you have your kind of rough outline of your verse you’re then you have to figure out what are the trouble spots and a lot of those fast syllable stuff comes from making sure that you’re not sticking too many cluttering it up with consonants so if you want that really like machine-gun rhythm like buddy got abide together got nobody I got about the god damn I got about like you want percussive consonants in there gah buh duh kheh are more percussive than mah nuh nuh nuh so if you have a word that ends with a vowel and the next word starts with a consonant you don’t want to end your word with a consonant and then start the next word with another consonant that means that your mouth has to change positions to get to the next thing because then in the space of a nanosecond you have to get your mouth from an R sound to a st you know sh t sound that it’s a lot to clutter it up with you want to go consonant vowel consonant vowel consonant vowel so you can get this really like machine-gun pattern you could have charged a lot of money there’s a lot of inside baseball to this and I’m gonna say it because I think you know if you want to go for it and practice it it just takes a lot of time so more power to you yeah step one is understanding which could take listening to that a number of times and then so then it’s addiction I was very lucky to be a theatre student and to figure out you know red leather yellow leather red leather yellow leather unique New York unique New York you know clarity is so important making sure that if you have trouble spots in your verse that you’re addressing them you get in the shower you just do your thirty times in a row and you need to be so confident be able to nail it every time that your mom could be like showing naked pictures of you as a baby to like you’re your biggest crush in the background you’re so focused you could do it a million times in a row so so that’s pretty much it it’s as easy as that that’s what I will close with this so thanks for humoring us I really really legitimately don’t mind talking about it and I’m I get to decide what songs I put on my album you know and you guys are helping me slang that to the masses so you know that’s what people are gonna see my new stuff as and and I’m not ashamed when fans come up to me after a show and ask me to do the fast route for that might gladly do it if you like that and you love it then I’m proud because I’m I’m proud that song that that video was successful mm I’m just not gonna let it define me for the rest of my life yeah well listen man thanks for spending this time this is a very enjoyable it was fun for me to do yeah I really appreciate it who doesn’t like getting to talk about themselves for long time [Music] and there was our ear biscuit with George Watsky at what point link did you lose track of his explanation about how to rap fest yeah at some point in there I was like okay so what you’re saying is you either got it or you don’t it made sense I always appreciate it when someone is willing to pull back the curtain so I’m glad he did that it was fascinating I it was it did make me think about our process for writing songs and especially writing raps I mean it’s I wanted to ask him we didn’t quite get to it but the starting point for us we’ve learned more and more needs to be the jokes right what we’ll actually write out concepts and jokes before we have any idea of how they rhyme so then it’s just a question of how do we make it fit I imagine he has reams of notebook paper where he’s creating stacked rhymes but he obviously starts with a message – it’s not like he’s yeah yeah it’s not like he’s stacking rhymes of all these words sound good together let me find a way to make a meaning but I think the fact is that you can make if you have an underlying message you can make a lot of different words get that message across you know and I think it’s interesting because you get the idea that he’s a technician in the way that he goes about this and that’s how it sounds when you listen to it whereas I think that I don’t think anybody would never be fooled into thinking and listening to us rap that these guys are rappers they would say these guys are comedians roaring and it’s funny it’s because it is very much based in the approach well and there’s the skill let’s go level there’s a I mean his there’s a lot of comedy and Watts he’s music were funny but I I’m trying to figure out what the difference is there’s a different type of comedic timing that we try to employ that our songs are tooled around lines being jokes whereas with him his his lines are tooled around being more of a technical constraint and I think that he has funny concepts but I don’t know if he sets it up like a punch line like when you have to set up a set up in a punch line there’s a certain amount of comedic timing literal timing associated with that that you can’t really invert as well I mean so he doesn’t do jokes he does conceptually comedic ironic I mean all different types of ways he’s being funny but it’s not it’s a different type of constraint and the ones we have that are more joke oriented well it’s obviously working and I think that you know like we talked about there’s this idea of continuing to gain respect and to separate himself from that perception of it just a guy who had an internet video that was titled well and did something and demonstrated some amazing skill I mean he is a legitimate artist without question I mean that’s there’s there is no question and from our perspective but I like the fact that his story does have an important YouTube element and and you know we don’t think there’s anything to be ashamed about I do understand that in in the musical world there might be people who are like oh yeah the guy who had that YouTube video that would get under your skin after a while but he’s more than overcome that still overcoming sudden you know lots of things like the the incident that he’s apologizing for on his latest album and the Epilepsy that he’s struggling with now and how he’s bringing those into his lyrics you know I’m excited about this album hopefully we’ll get to see him when he performs in town yeah we’re appreciative to George let him know what you think show your appreciation by tweeting at him gee watski follow him on Twitter check out his tour dates on his website George Watsky dot-com see him in person we do appreciate the time that he spent with us hashtag your biscuits let us know what you think as well you can count on us to be back here next week with another one we’ll be talking at the same pace that we talked this week may be slowly getting a little bit faster thanks to the influence of George [Music] [Music]