One Billy Goat Gruff 24/7
It's early December, and I'm sitting on the front porch of Cafe Coco. There's a nip in the air and the frat kids are having their winter formals, which means that you can hear the sounds of Southern belles screaming obscenities from limousines. Sitting across from me is a young rapper who goes by the stage name of Kommander X. He's a baby-faced braggart, loquacious almost to the point of lying—but that's what you look for in an MC. He's giving me a rundown of the nascent hip-hop scene that's been fermenting in the back room of this all-night coffee shop.
He lists the rappers and producers that have carved out an artistic fort amid the hustle and bustle of caffeinated commerce—24/7, Spoken Nerd, Quiet Entertainer, Bobby Exodus—but I have the sneaking suspicion that he's more familiar with their recorded output than their actual persons. He might even be recounting memorized data from their MySpace pages—you never know with kids these days—but he also seems interested while we extol the virtues of Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount Jr.'s recent book about words.
Despite what you may see on TV, there's usually more motivating rappers than just guns, bitches and bling. And for underground rappers especially, a healthy interest in the versatility of language and the thrill of telling stories tends to make for better music in the long run anyway.
Beyond a shared love for ill linguistics, the kids that grab the mic at Cafe Coco are pretty tough to peg. They're an interesting bunch of outsider's outsiders thriving on equal parts handmade excitement and D.I.Y. hustle, creating a culture apart but entirely familiar—it is hip-hop, after all. You could call it post-backpacker: a combination of underground hip-hop forms and post-punk self-reliance. The rap scene at Coco is a blend of insolence, introspection, conversation and philosophy that, frankly, isn't going to happen just anywhere. Where the hip-hop concert industry and its subgenre cottage industries are stratified in a some pretty odd permutations, the Cafe Coco scene is a complex clique that doesn't run up and scream, "We're gonna bring in a gazillion people and make you a shit ton of money." But that doesn't mean you should underestimate them.
Take rapper, producer and instrumentalist 24/7. He's a humble humanist with a wry wit and a razor-sharp eye, like Toshiro Mifune in an oversized hoodie. He's generally credited with booking the open mics that were the jump-off point for this whole mini-boom of left field hip-hop. The nights started in the cloudy confines of Murfreesboro's criminally under-acknowledged cultural incubator, Liquid Smoke, and then opened a franchise up the highway, behind the Exit/In and a world apart from the rock enclaves less than a block away. What made 24/7's nights stand out from your typical, short-lived ciphers is that he set rules for decorum. No demeaning women, or men for that matter. Cursing is cool but you should be more clever than vulgar. Don't just talk shit and get pissed when someone zings the bejeezus out of you. Don't be mean, don't be a dick. Don't use the n-word and don't be surprised if 7 cuts off your mic.
Needless to say, the house rules flustered a lot of rappers who came with inflated senses of self-importance and the limited repertoires to match. But the kids who could hang benefited greatly from a regular environment where art trumped artifice and adventurous attitudes were the currency of choice. The "Backwards Battles" organized by Spoken Nerd and Me a.k.a. I are a great example of the paradigm-shifting inherent in the Cafe Coco aesthetic. Taking the entire concept of battle rap—where two MCs go head to head in a contest of insult one-upmanship—and flipping it on its head, the Backwards Battle requires that you can only say nice things about the other person or insult yourself. It's a Bizarro World mash-up of Don Rickles and I'm OK—You're OK—not something that you're likely to hear popping up on the Dolewhite & Scooby Show or see onstage at the Sommet any time soon. (Absurdist deconstructions of genre tropes aren't exactly burnin' up the charts these days.)
These kids aren't flossin' to the top, and your swagger is likely to be laughed at. There's no future in frontin' with these kids.
This is not some hipper-than-thou indie clique, though. They're an inclusive crew, a heterogeneous mix of backgrounds and politics. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, value respect for all people and expect the same from the people they're performing with. It's an attitude that is as different from mainstream rap music as each artist's music is from the others'.
Post-Backpackers James Fate
24/7's latest album, A Death on the City Pavements, is the kind of jazz-fueled moodscape that recalls the more brooding end of '90s crate-diggin' New York hardcore, like the more self-reflexive moments on Nas' early records, but heavy on the Steve Martin samples. Spoken Nerd's latest, 24 Carrot Dreams, self-produced and recorded with live instrumentation, is equal parts Dr. Octagon and Larry Norman—an ambitious genre-bending record that has spirituality at its center but isn't about to drink Michael W. Smith's Kool-Aid.
On the other hand, you have the producer and performer known as Quiet Entertainer—he doesn't have a lot say, but his instrumentals have an ambience and beauty that is simultaneously ethereal and corporeal. Bobby Exodus raps with everybody, making his MySpace page the place to find the newest, hottest tracks. E.T. writes strong hooks with a tangible dancehall influence that sets him apart from his true-school and experimentalist brethren. And then there's The Billy Goats.
While every performer in the room will cite engaging the audience as a priority, sometimes they can spoil the fun with maybe a little too much philosophy for a Saturday night on the town. Not so with The Billy Goats. DJ Eticut, MC Iller and 24/7 bump party rap for people that own Scrabble dictionaries and crates of dollar-bin vinyl: wordy, nerdy and rowdy. Iller is the most ribald rapper on the scene, never getting too blue but certainly saying some things that would make your mama blush—with his tongue planted firmly in cheek. Humor and satire play a large role in the flows that fly around Coco, to the point where The Tennessean's Mark Mays sorta questioned Nerd's sincerity, but The Goats are the champions of fun. They're more like the kids wildin' out in the back of science class, Bunsen-burning back issues of Mad magazine.
Post-Backpackers W.T. the Musical Mastermind
The pace of artist development within this microcosm of a music scene is incredibly swift. Someone is always writing new songs and releasing new records, and new artists filter in and out every week, but there are things on the horizon that will make it difficult to ignore these cats. I'm willing to bet that the next Quiet Entertainer album, slated to hit the streets this spring, will be one of the happenings that make the teeming masses perk up and take notice. With his steady hand behind the mixing board and the fiery enthusiasm of the scene's best wordsmiths, that record has the potential to step beyond Louise Avenue and take its collaborators onto a bigger stage.
In the meantime, you can catch Spoken Nerd curating The Holla on the first and third Saturdays of every month, while E.T. keeps it classy with the Soul Factory parties and Quiet Entertainer hosts the Blogworthy showcase series. Keep your eyes open. These kids are always getting into something.
As I leave Cafe Coco, basking in the warm buzz of coffee and beer, I notice Kommander X trying to have a conversation with artists he clearly respects too much to feel comfortable around. When he excitedly finds a point in the conversation where he can jump in, I notice the motto on his mall-embroidered hat: "Sanity Destroys Humanity." So there just might be hope for him yet.
