Beans - He Don't Use Jelly

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A cheery "G’day!" hits my ear down the phone from New York, and for a second I’m convinced the chap on the line is an out-of-town Aussie playing silly buggers. But no, it’s Beans, former Antipop Consortium rapper, known round some parts as Mr One Stripe Red on account of his crimson mohawk, and apparently partial to a chinwag – even when it’s revealed that I’m not Australian at all.

Beans’s debut solo album is called Tomorrow Right Now, and it’s as different as you could imagine from the old Antipop blueprint: dark, experimental, challenging, thought-provoking and sometimes downright scary. But I think it’s best to let Beans explain himself, since he’s so good at it – let the Q&A commence…

Antipop Consortium broke up unexpectedly after the release of 2002’s acclaimed Arrhythmia album – what happened?
They hate me, man! You get to a point…we were all individuals who worked together collectively, but as we got older, we still had individual things that you can’t say, that they needed to say on their own. That’s essentially what it boils down to. There’s always a conflict of ego when you’re dealing with humans. But at the end of the day, they [other AP MCs M.Sayyid and Priest] had a different aesthetic, and…I’m not the easiest person to work with, so I’m told. I don’t know what they’re doing now.

Can you elaborate on the idea of the "too many MCs and not enough listeners" line from Tomorrow Right Now’s centrepoint, "Crave"?
I think the statement’s kinda self-explanatory, but at the same time, just looking at the climate…not to say anything on a high horse or whatever, but I’m just coming to the realization that this [hip-hop] is not for everybody. Not everybody is an artist, we still need doctors and lawyers as well. I’m really pretty lucky to have the opportunity, the privilege to create records - a lot of people come into it and they don’t have an agenda, they just want to rhyme, or they can rhyme, but there’s more to it than just being able to rhyme and battle - "Because you built a model, doesn’t make you a mechanic" [a quote from album opener "Roar"].

You write poetry as well as performing…
The only distinction is cadence, y’know? That’s how Antipop all met, on the poetry scene. We all met under that umbrella – we came from hip-hop backgrounds and did poetry, and it opened me up to try and express myself differently.

The album strikes me as very honest, sometimes brutally so – I’m thinking of a track like "Booga Sugar" [an a capella slice of narcotic poetry].
I try to be honest. "Booga Sugar" is based on personal experiences – I wasn’t a crackhead, but I used to smoke a lot of weed, and I was working at a homeless shelter at the time, and it got to the point where people started to worry about me. So I thought, what would happen if this went to the next level? That’s one of the older pieces on the album, one I used to do in ’93.

Do you find you need the control gained by producing your own material?
Yeah, I produced most of the new album myself, working with various engineers. I never really [produced] tracks for Antipop. The only Antipop track I did, that ever came out was "Ghostlawns", where I did the drums; and even on Arrhythmia, I didn’t even do a solo track, cos I wanted to save all my solo stuff for this album!

Did the rest of Anti-Pop realize that?
Yeah, they did - I mean, that was part of the problem. Earl Blaize did a track and I just rhymed on it, and that’s how [Arrhythmia highlight] "Silver Heat" happened. I hung onto my best lyrics, cos I was more focused on my own shit.

Perhaps unusually for a hip-hop album, tracks like "Sickle Cell Hysteria" and "Rose Periwinkle Plum" are dark techno-esque instrumentals, with just you going freestyle crazy in the studio – did you agonise over including them?
Yeah, that’s just me soloing over the drums – "Rose Periwinkle Plum" was a definite [for the album], "Sickle Cell" I went back and forth with. I wasn’t sure about putting it on the album, but I liked it, so fuck it! It had a rap originally, but I thought the lyrics that I had would just be too much with the beat – they were really sparse but I just always liked the beat better without the lyrics.

Do you have a strong work ethic?
Yeah I work hard. I know what I need to do to guarantee somewhat of a success, to enable me to make music on my own terms, without concession - I know what needs to be done. But that’s the whole appeal of being on a label like this [UK-based IDM pioneers Warp – the label signed APC in 1998 as their first hip-hop act], they don’t put any constraints. They didn’t have to worry about this album, because I kinda gave it to ‘em! They’d heard the demos but they thought it was gonna be a different record than what they’d heard – they were surprised, so it was cool.

An unorthodox, non hip-hop image seems to be very important to you, from well-cut suits to outsized sunglasses - have you still got your crazy hair?
You mean the Mohawk? Yeah, I still got it – it’s a trademark now, I can’t cut it off! Trust me, it’s a conscious decision, it’s just part of my state, y’know, a placement of how I perceive myself. [Image] is definitely important, it’s the music business! That’s what people grab hold of, what they see first is your image, and decide whether or not your image is enough to buy the record.

But with the continuing rise in the popularity of filesharing, all marketing and image ideas go out of the window – where do you stand with ripping and burning?
It’s not healthy for the industry at all, not if the artist can’t make money from it. That’s where I stand - it’s just digital bootlegs. The artist may not be making money from bootlegs, unless the artist is bootlegging it, which I think probably happens. I mean c’mon now, half those major label hip-hop cats were drug dealers! And now they’re making records…I hear their records, I hear what they’re saying, you think not?

If a major label offered to double your deal with Warp, would you take it?
I don’t know if that would be in my best interests, because they wouldn’t know how to market me. I’d only do it if I did a certain amount of records on an independent label…I’d do it how Sonic Youth did it - you know how they put out a series of independent releases and then sold all their back catalogue, and they just brought their fans with them. It’s just a matter of timing really. My aspiration is more for autonomy - I just want to be famous doing what I’m doing – but fame is fleeting though, so it’s not an objective.

Thanks for your time – look after yourself…
I have no choice.

And on that sanguine note, he’s off with a click and a buzz. But never fear! Beans has left us with Tomorrow Right Now, a remarkable record and perhaps the most eloquent crystallization yet of the 2003 collective Warp Records aesthetic. And hell, he’s pleased with this genre-busting combination of glitch-laden electronics, Green Velveteen horrorcore techno and Beans’s inimitable, effortlessly poetic drawl; maybe you will be too.

BEANS’S album TOMORROW RIGHT NOW is out now through WARP RECORDS.

This Q&A was originally published in 3D World Magazine, April 2003