Sole

Sole has so much to tell you, the words can’t come out of his mouth quickly enough. He writes songs, both playful and extremely political, that are hundreds and hundreds of words long, with dense liner notes that extend the absorption process from minutes to hours. I’m not sure whether David Foster "Signifying Rappers" Wallace would love or hate this.

Sole is full of a lot of shit, but somehow none of this seems pretentious. Well, it seems pretentious to Sole, maybe, but not to me. His pitter-patter streams out at a furious pace, all the self-hatred and all-purpose cracker-crap and, yes, irony and humor. He uses vowels and consonants like McDonald’s uses special sauce. His rhymes (shtick?) remind me of silly kids who shop at Goodwill for cred, who think bizarre capitalization and spacing are significant ways of creating meaning. But there’s something much larger and more important at play in Sole’s music. He’s a 25-year-old white rapper who’s dropping a fierce album with perhaps the fiercest (re)introduction I’ve ever heard. For one thing, the balance between self-deprecation and swagger on this album leans to the former. Whether this is a sign of huge insecurity or huge self-confidence is left for you to decide. Just call Sole the Schizo-phonic Spree.

The first track on the just-released Selling Live Water (Anticon) is an epic rap folk song, with at least as much substance as all those fucking memoirs written by people close to 30, except for maybe That Really Good Famous One. The song "Da Baddest Poet" starts with a typical hiphop boast/lament: "Cops ain’t shit to me. Jobs ain’t nothing but free pens and long distance calls. Thought I had it all; the god got birth control."

Got it, man. I hear you.

Then Sole aims his spiky tongue at his own jugular. "The white man’s the fucking devil. I wanted to be black at age 14. So when they say I don’t respect the culture, truth is, I only rap ’cuz I ain’t smart enough to write a book."

I was thinking about calling Sole to discuss that song and other topics, but thing is, I spent half a day playing back certain lines, poring over his lyrics and liner notes. I just had a feeling that talking to the dude would be an equally arduous task. Just the thought of all the rewinding and fast-forwarding necessary to transcribe that tape made my head hurt. So I decided to do something that I think Sole might respect or at least be amused by, although I admit I don’t have the greatest read on this motherfucker.

The following is a conversation that never happened, based word-for-word on Sole’s liner notes.

Uh, so the white man is the fucking devil?

When my friend Peter Agoston heard the "I wanted to be black at age 14" line, he said I’d get punched for it. Since everyone in hip-hop wants to start talking about their childhood all of a sudden, I want to be cool like everyone else. I’m attempting to deal with my hip-hop identity crisis here. I never called myself a poet.

But your song is called "Da Baddest Poet."

If I am a poet, I have a very limited subject matter and an eighth-grade vocabulary. If I’m a rapper, why am I such a pussy? Being a poet always seemed pretentious to me, but my humor and general attitude is pretty pretentious anyway.

Okay. About "Salt on Everything"–you rap, "I’m a word machine without enough words to be composed, or the worms to decompose." This probably isn’t what most guys think when they’re heartsick about a girl.

I’ve only had one girlfriend prior to meeting Yasamin when she visited California last summer. When she left, I bought a computer after crying for two days. That computer, a.k.a, man’s best friend, is where I recorded this album, which I hope will at least remain relevant for a few months, or at least until I can think of something new and clever to say for our fickle-ass fans, a.k.a. the "target market."

You seem pissed off about the state of our global media industrial complex.

All this traveling downtime has gotten me hooked on Art Bell, the BBC, Howard Zinn, Adbusters and Noam Chomsky. Everywhere I go, I buy the local newspaper and try to dissect the spin they put on the news, which is dependent on the audience’s ignorance. Granted, I haven’t made any significant discoveries; I fear that the ’60s could never happen again because people depend too deeply on the comforts that have led to our downfall. I see people riding their bikes "for peace" with police through the streets of Berkeley while the cops videotape them. These days, forward-thinking people are diverted and set against each other. A lot of the incidents I refer to in [the song "Plutonium"], I learned about in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I know nothing, but at least I know.

Let’s talk about the title track, "Selling Live Water."

Not much to explain here either. The inspiration for "selling live water to out-of-towners with camera" is about these "documentarians" that had been staying with me prior to writing the song. The term also is an obvious statement about the "war on terrorism" and how it isn’t really a war. They’re just buying more people’s lives, opening new markets for Pepsi in the name of America/ Exxon/Sony or whoever. We are all victims of marketing… No matter how enlightened you think you are, someone bought your opinion somewhere along the line. We aren’t individuals; we are mammals/robots reacting to our environment. That’s not really 100 percent true, but if I knew what I was talking about, that’s probably the point I’d want to make.