Soulstice (The Most Known Unknown)

Photo by: Glenn Wadsworth

For many years now we have followed the career of Hip Hop genius named Soulstice.  Hailing from the same Chicago streets that have brought us some of Hip-Hop's superstars like Kanye West & Common he has been plying his trade for more than a decade.  Rovi puts it best: 

"Consistently using soul-inflected hip-hop productions as his platform, alternative rapper SoulStice accumulated dozens of accolades from critics and underground hip-hop fans alike for his perceptive, highly literate, and concept-driven albums." 

Brownstone is proud to introduce you to someone you should get to know.  Here's our interview with SoulStice:

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Q. I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule.  Can you tell our readers a little about yourself and how you came into the industry?  One thing that has always struck us as interesting is that you're also an engineer.  So you're sort of like a Hip-Hop Batman doing science during the day and traveling worldwide and doing shows at night.

A. [Laughter] Yeah I do get that some time.  I get the Clark Kent / Superman reference.  Especially because I wear glasses and before I perform I take them off.  It's been an interesting journey for me, and I guess I'll start at the beginning.  I'm from the south side of Chicago.  Grew up in the south suburbs, and I got interested in Hip-Hop in the early 90's with East/West Coast Hip-Hop music.  Chicago had a burgeoning Hip-Hop scene at the time and it was a way where we could create something when we didn't have a lot of resources.  We had a little Sony boom-box and it had two tape decks and we would go to the store and get the cassette singles that had instrumentals on the b-sides.  We would record ourselves on to blank tapes and layer our vocals over them, and you could do multiple layers if you just switched out the tapes. So we managed to have a nice little makeshift recording studio.

So that was kind of my early involvement [in Hip-Hop] and at the same time as we were doing that my family got a personal computer.  Which at the time wasn't as everywhere as it is now.  So I would be messing around MS-DOS an old [not as good] version of Windows and be messing around with File Commander moving files and renaming stuff.  Which was kind of all I knew how to do, and the Internet was kind of coming around at the same time.  There were message boards like Diggity's and Davey D's, which anyone into hip hop journalism will know Davey D.  And he had a board, a rap board, where people would post lyrics.  So I was starting to get really good as a lyricist on the rap message boards, and actually made some of my early music contacts on these boards.  So there has always been sort of a marriage between not only my interest in music but in technology.

So I continued writing and posting lyrics on the Internet throughout college and things just kept ramping up until I recorded my first song in a real studio.  Eventually when I graduated from the University of Illinois with my Master's that was the same year I released my first album, North by Northwest.  I always tell the story of ordering a thousand copies (because you couldn't order any less) and having this college apartment full of boxes and boxes of CDs.  At the time I lived with my college girlfriend, my wife now, and she's just like "Man what are you going to do with all these CD's."  But, I figured out how to market them and started my own label to give me a business vehicle to put out my own music.  And that's something that I've always wanted to do for other artists but I haven't quite found the right time.  So, 2003, that was a pretty big year.  I put out my first album, graduated with my Master's, and later on that year I started my job at John Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where I still work.

So there are lots of parallels between the two.  As an engineer I'm into signal processing. Well when you sit down at a computer screen to mix a song, guess what? You're doing signal processing when you run the song through EQ and filters and stuff.  Unlike a lot folk who do that stuff I can actually devise the math behind it because that's my training.  So its been really cool to employ both sides of my brain on music and technology.

Same thing with respect to some of the travel which has led to some really cool experiences.  Going to places like Italy, Prague and France.  Literally in Prague I presented my research and then [went] back to my hotel to change and heading across town to rock a show at a bar or a local club.  So I have some really fond experiences of my travels.  And, that's a really long-winded answer to your question but it gives you some of the back story. [laughter]

Q. We seem to be moving back into an era of music where you don't need to be on a major label to put your music out and have a successful career. Have you found that the audience has grown with your ability to control your music and where it goes?

A.  Oh, yeah.  The really cool thing about my experience with music, and like anything it has its pluses and minuses, is that financially I support myself with my engineering work.  So I'm my own investor.  I'll never get dropped from the label. [Laughter]  The people who follow my music and the people that have followed me over the years appreciate that I'm doing the music purely for artistic reasons.  Not that there's any shame to be a professional musician but there's a couple of years where I'm not going to put out another album.  Because I'm doing other stuff or just don't have anything to say, and I'll be back when I'm ready with my next project.  Now that presents its own challenges because people have short attention spans.  But, I find that I get contacted more often by people who are saying they loved my last project and they'll be talking about my first album!  [Laughter] That I put out in 2003! 

As fast paced as it seems to be getting, we're in the age of the mix-tape where people are putting out music every other day.  Your music has a very long tail and can be around forever.  Take Pandora, right, where I put all of my catalog.  You might be listening to a Common joint or a Jay-Z joint and my song will come on right after.  You don't know how old it is; you're playing with your kids or doing whatever and I try and make music that's timeless.  Listening to the song shouldn't necessarily give away when it was made.  I really find that I haven't had a problem finding a core listernership.

Q.  You bring up an interesting area when you mention Pandora.  With the emergence of Spotify, iTunes Radio, Pandora, and the like do you feel like artists are getting enough income from the work that they are putting out with the unlimited music systems?

A. I think its harder and harder to make a living releasing music.  Just selling music.  It's certainly possible.  5 Years ago those were alternate revenue streams but now those ARE the revenue streams, the streaming deals like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes.  The people who are really able to make money releasing music are the tip on the iceberg. [There are a lot of] musicians most of whom can't make a living releasing music, and to a certain extent that's OK.  But one challenge with that model, where you've got a core group of folks that are going to make a living, and selling the music is hard in of itself so a lot people make money off of touring and doing shows or some combination of that.  

But the hard thing about that model where its so distributed, and they are so many people participating is quality control.  It used to be that the barrier to entry to a certain extent was quality control.  You had to have a certain level of talent and someone had to recognize that and someone had to pay a bunch of money to go into a real studio and let you record.  The barriers to entry are lower and my democratic self thinks that's a good thing.  Some A&R doesn't have to pick you out of a crowd to let your do music.  Which has its pluses, but the minus is that anyone can go to best buy and get a $40 mic and a copy of Garageband and put out music.   So with all that background noise it can be much harder to gain people's attention.

Q.  20 or 30 years ago Rap and Hip-Hop was a fad that was supposed to go away.  We are the first generation to grow with Rap as dominant art form and has moved past its early stages.  Do you feel like Rap has an age limit? A moment where you have to put the mic down and walk away?  Or is it something that will always be there for you?

A.  That is a fantastic question!  Its something that I've struggled with. When I turned 30, I really struggled with that question.  I kept asking my self: "Am I too old for this?"  "Is it a young man's game?" "When I step into my research laboratory will my colleagues look at me funny because I rap?"  But, I've really gotten comfortable with the fact that Hip-Hop will be there for me until I decide to put it down.  There's no age limit on a genre...I mean that's not a thing.  There's an age limit on the kind of things you should be saying at your age.  If I was out there rapping like I was 18 and had no sense.  Rapping like I wasn't a father and a scientist.  Not being who I am.  Then it would be embarrassing.  Artistically you may be expressing some things that if you're doing a good job you should be taking some artistic risks.  The kinds of things you're expressing may be so personal that when you let someone listen to it they go: "Oh OK, wow, I never knew that was something that was in your head. Or that you went through that experience."  That's the risk you should be taking artistically not trying to sound younger then you are or misrepresenting yourself.

So the short answer to your question is that I struggled with that for a minute, but I'm comfortable in saying that Hip Hop has grown up with me.

Indeed.

 -- KP