Interviews from the world of music!

, , , , , ,

Pharrell Williams – Star Power

Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Pharrell Williams never sleeps. How can he? The multi-hyphenate superstar is insatiably inquisitive, his interests ranging from the mysteries of deep space to the provocative genius of artists as varied as Daniel Arsham and Marina Abramovic, his mind in a constant state of restless exploration.  That Williams can move seamlessly across the spectrum of art, fashion, film and music, all while collaborating with a Who’s Who of pop culture as only Pharrell can, proves that the man on the other end of this interview isn’t quite human but something more, Hu2.0 maybe, a Next Gen creative with alien DNA coursing through his veins. What other explanation can there be?

“No sir, there’s no truth to that rumor,” Williams says with a laugh.  And then, when pressed for a plausible explanation: “I’m indebted to God and the universe for giving me the time to do what I do, and for putting me in position to make the most of my opportunities. From there I follow my instincts.”

Williams’s creative universe is as diverse – and damn near as infinite – as the physical one in which we all exist, heavenly constellations populated with a dozen Grammy Awards (and counting), two Academy Award nominations, and an impressive dossier of hit songs, designer collections, art exhibitions, and eclectic collaborations.  Exactly where Skateboard P gets the drive is anybody’s guess. How he does it while looking younger than he did twenty years ago only fuels speculation that Williams is not of this Earth. Never mind that this hardworking N.E.R.D. was once fired from three different McDonald’s in Virginia Beach, or that he didn’t have career goals growing up. Williams plunged headlong into keyboards and drums at an early age, laid the groundwork for The Neptunes during a seventh-grade band camp, and parlayed an audience with Teddy Riley into a lucrative career as a singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, fashion designer and much, much more.

Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo: The Neptunes

So, which is it? God’s plan? The universe? Alien DNA? The only certainty is that a young Pharrell Lanscilo Williams stood out at Princess Anne High School mostly for being different. He loved music but didn’t gravitate to any particular clique. He didn’t try to fit in. He was a black kid hooked on Star Trek and hanging with white kids mostly, riding his skateboard at Mount Trashmore and listening to groups like Suicidal Tendencies and Dead Kennedys. In 1990, Williams and Chad Hugo formed The Neptunes, dissecting A Tribe Called Quest records and trying to figure out why their beats gripped them and refused to let go.  And then, as if by divine intervention or some otherworldly encounter, the duo was discovered by Riley, the Harlem-born record producer who’d had enough of New York City and decided to relocate his studio to, of all places, Virginia Beach – a five minute walk from Princess Anne.

“Who really knows why he moved into my back yard,” says Williams. “I used to think it was pure luck, but now I think there’s more to it than that. I don’t believe these things don’t happen by chance. The timing of the move lined up perfectly with where I was on my journey. A year or two later, a few years earlier, and who knows? Everything changes. We wouldn’t have had the same opportunity.”

Williams and Hugo, the shy Filipino boy who attended nearby Kempsville High School and shared Pharrell’s love for Eric B. & Rakim and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, didn’t just seize the opportunity presented by Riley. They used it as a springboard to dominate the music scene, their work earning a string of Grammys and garnering walls of gold and platinum records. Consider: The Neptunes racked up 24 Top 10 hits in the late 1990s and early 2000s, becoming one of the most successful production teams in pop. At one point in 2003, The Neptunes were responsible for a whopping 43% of the music being played on US radio, and 20% in the UK. Among the hits: Drop It Like It’s Hot, the classic 2004 production for Snoop Dogg, which sported skittering beats and swishing, pulsing synths, reminiscent of the music heard on ‘80s Atari video games.

Pharrell with Snoop Dogg

“We wanted a different sound, so we went with something that sounded like a can of spray paint,” Williams explains. “That ‘ssss’ sound is what we ended up placing on top of the song, it was different, like us.”

Different can also be applied to N.E.R.D (No-One Ever Really Dies), the band formed by Williams and Hugo, along with Tidewater-area pal Shay Haley. Flavored with funk and hip-hop, the experimental rock band released its second album in 2004, Fly or Die, which reached Number 6 on the charts and stamped Williams as a gifted singer in his own right.

The Neptunes continued its hot streak over the next several years, producing for everyone from Gwen Stefani to Kanye West to Beyoncé and Britney Spears.  And that’s just the music. Through Rizzoli, Williams released a lavish coffee-table book filled with images of the many products he has designed in collaboration with other artists and fashion designers. He hosted ARTIST TLK on YouTube’s Reserve Channel, interviewing some of the world’s most creative and interesting people (think Spike Lee, Usher and Tony Hawk, the show topped off with naked women serving drinks, and you begin to get the idea). He opened boutiques on West Broadway in New York. He co-founded apparel brands Ice Cream Clothing and Billionaire Boys Club. He’s curated art shows like This Is Not a Toy at the Toronto Design Exchange. All while pouring time, energy and money into his charity foundation, From One Hand To Another, which supports young people living in communities at risk around the country.

And all while still professing to be human, just like the rest of us.

~ ~ ~

When it comes to the music biz, 2013 was The Year of Pharrell. The hit maker figured prominently in 2013’s most massive (and seemingly unavoidable) gangbuster singles: Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, with both competing against each other for the coveted Record of the Year Grammy. (Get Lucky walked away with the hardware.) And then there was the ubiquitous cherry on top: Happy. The song, originally written for CeeLo and part of the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, blew up after Williams came up with a brilliant marketing idea – a twenty-four hour video for the song, featuring a diverse cast of characters, including the artist and some famous friends, dancing along to the track. Happy peaked at No. 1 in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and 19 other countries. It became the best-selling song of 2014 in the United States with 6.45 million copies, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. That it took Williams ten tries to get it right is lost on nearly everyone but the artist himself.

“I got in my own way,” he says. “It wasn’t until I relaxed that everything opened up and the right song presented itself. As soon as it did, I knew it was the right fit.”

Pharrell Williams accepts the award for best pop solo performance for Happy at the 57th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by John Shearer/Invision/AP)

~ ~ ~

Yes, Pharrell Williams has collaborated with music’s biggest stars – from Miley Cyrus to Mariah Carey, from Jay-Z to Justin Timberlake – while earning a reputation as a hit-making mystic, his finger fully on the pulse of a fickle music landscape, his instincts helping him stay one step ahead of stale. That he can do it while remaining disarmingly approachable and unfailingly polite is, in its own way, disorienting.

“My parents raised me to be respectful. It’s who I am.”

Southern hospitality aside, scoring an interview with Pharrell was far harder than I’d ever imagined. One minute he’s focused on Rules of the Game, his multidisciplinary stage collaboration with Arsham and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and the next he’s replacing CeeLo Green as a celebrity coach on The Voice. Blink and he’s collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the soundtrack for the film Despicable Me, or penning that monster hit, Happy, for the sequel. That the stars somehow aligned only supports the prevailing theory that Williams is not one of us. Who says aliens have to come from outer space hellbent on waging war and destroying mankind? Maybe they arrive in flat-brimmed hats, possessing the regal air of an ancient pharaoh and the vitality of a creature defying the onset of middle age. Maybe they come equipped with indefatigable drive and prodigious talent. And maybe, after two years of cancellations, postponements and reboots, they agree to sit down and tell you how it’s all done.

Thank you for this opportunity. Please tell me about your songwriting. Do you have a certain method that works best for you?

I follow something that speaks to me, something that just feels good and puts me in a creative mood. Typically, the beat comes first. As an artist, my job is just to listen to it and let it tell me what should be fed lyrically, where the drums should go, where the melodies should go, how everything fits together. The music sets the framework for the words. The feeling and the emotion directs all creativity. It’s the overarching guide. It’s all by feel.

What is your idea of creativity?

Creativity is a gift in the truest essence. It’s a gift from all that is, all that was and all that ever will be – the creator. So when we create, we’re essentially co-creators.

When you sit down to work on a song, do you sense beforehand that it’s going to be a hit?

No sir, I don’t know when a song is going to be huge, I don’t think you can ever predict or manufacture that sort of outcome. It’s really up to the people to make that decision. They do that by buying the records, streaming the music online, voting on it, generating buzz on social media. Those things are out of my control. The only thing you can do as an artist is be loyal to your creativity, and follow it wherever it takes you. If you’ve poured the very best of you into your work, and you’ve done it in a way that’s new and fresh, then you can walk away from it satisfied with the outcome.

Pharrell Williams performs at Coachella

Your 2003 debut single, Frontin’, features vocals from Jay-Z. Do you enjoy collaborating with other artists?

Collaboration has always been part of my DNA. Most of the songs that I ended up putting out by myself were actually songs that I wrote for other people. And collaboration goes beyond just music. I know you’ve interviewed Daniel Arsham and Jonah Bokaer, and my collaboration with them on Rules of the Game was a new frontier.

Was there a specific point in you career when you realized that you’d become a star?

No, I’ve never approached what I do in that way. I don’t believe you can ever assume that you’ve “made it,” because that’s too much of an arbitrary assumption. And I think that mentality has a limiting effect on your creativity – when you start buying into that mindset, you’ve instantly put a ceiling on what you create and where you can take yourself. That mindset can also chip away at your edge, the thing that drives you to create in the first place. For me, I always looked at it like, “Wow, I get to do it again.”

Chad Hugo is a childhood friend and a big part of your musical past and present. How did the two of you get started writing songs?

We started breaking down Tribe [A Tribe Called Quest] records, and then we started making our own tracks. We were still in high school at the time.

The two of you formed The Neptunes, and you’ve won three Grammys producing music for some amazing artists like Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, and Jay-Z. Tell me a little about your approach.

When we work with an artist, it’s about understanding how to bring out the best in them at that particular point in time – how to draw attention to the gifts that are already there. We don’t give the artist anything, because we didn’t create the artist. The artist is co-created with God and formed by a unique set of life experiences. Our job is to do the things on the periphery that accentuate the artist’s gifts. And if we’re doing our job, we’re providing the frame to fit the artist into, then adding interesting colors and creating the backdrop. The artist is subject matter. We’re just the framers.

The legendary Teddy Riley discovered you. Tell me about that.

We were discovered at a talent show because Teddy Riley had a couple of A&Rs check us out. A&Rs are people who represent music companies, and they are always on the lookout for talent. It was one of those amazing circumstances, and a mysterious chain of events, really – Teddy Riley decides to leave New York City, and of all the places he could have built a recording studio, he decides to build in Virginia Beach, literally a five-minute walk from our high school.

Let’s go back to 2013, which was a pretty good year for you. Happy was a monster hit.

That period, 2012-2013, was a real pivot point for me. I just felt like something was happening around me that I couldn’t explain. I’ve compared it to seeing the wind blow on the trees; you see the leaves move and you know what’s causing them to move. You don’t question whether there’s a wind, even though you can’t see it. You can feel it and you know it. Back then I could feel it. There were all of these things going on in my life, and the song Happy was part of that.

What was the inspiration behind the song?

The inspiration for the song Happy came from the movie Despicable Me 2.  Gru was a character who was often seen as mean, with very dry humor, and definitely on the evil side. I was tasked with how to make a song for him that expressed his elation after meeting this woman. That was a tough thing for me, because Gru was mean and not someone who would fall in love.

You’ve been known to pen hits in minutes. I hear it took some time to come up with Happy.

I worked on song after song, but nothing was really working. I thought every song I wrote for the movie was going to it, because of reasons X-Y-Z, but then it wouldn’t work out and I’d write another, and the same thing would happen. Nothing really worked until I had exhausted all of my ideas from an egotistical standpoint. And then, I finally asked myself how do I make a song about a guy who’s just happy, and nothing can bring him down. That’s when everything clicked.

The video for Happy ran for twenty-four hours.  Twenty-four hours!  That was the genius move that put the song into a different stratosphere.

Basically, I would perform for four minutes at the top of every hour.  Then, after me, someone else would perform, and that would happen fifteen times an hour for twenty-four hours. The intention was to make the video feel as alive as possible, and the video’s imperfections, the funny bloopers and mess-ups, are what give it character. I’m not interested in perfection. It’s boring. Some of my favorite moments are accidental. There’s one where I’m underground. I was turning a corner just as a train was coming in our direction, and it stopped right on cue! It was weird. The universe gave us great moments that day.

In addition to Happy, you killed it with two collaborations that were massive successes – Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines. Did you sense how big these songs were going to be?

No sir. As an artist, you only have a sense of what feels good to you personally. The commercial success of the song is predicated on how everybody else feels when they hear it. If they feel something strongly enough to say they like it, great. If they feel something enough to say, “I like it and I want to tell somebody else about it,” then that is magical. The vote with the likes, the views, the shares. That’s where all of this comes from. It comes from the idea that people are connecting and sharing the things they feel sentiment about.

Pharrell Williams and Daft Punk

Daft Punk has a unique vibe. What’s it like working with them?

It’s always fun working with the robots. They did Hypnotize on the last N.E.R.D album and we remixed Harder Faster Stronger more than 10 years ago with them. So we always had a great relationship with the robots and all of their crew. There’s always been love there for us.

Your collaboration goes well beyond the recording studio. Tell me about your work with multidisciplinary artist Daniel Arsham.

Daniel is a genius artist across so many disciplines. We’ve worked on projects as varied as recreating the first instrument I ever made music on, the Casio MT-500, to producing the multidisciplinary performance Rules of the Game. Rules was big for me because of the talented people that I worked with on that journey – the amazing Jonah Bokaer, who provided the choreography, and the composer, David Campbell, who is an absolute music industry legend.

Let’s talk about Rules of the Game.  What led you to becoming involved and writing the original score for this amazing stage performance?

Daniel’s work is such a magnet for brilliant, interesting people. I’m lucky to call him friend, and to have worked with him on other projects. With Rules, it was a case of me being persistent, and asking him the fundamental question, “What can we do now?”  Rules was the next step in the evolution. We’d worked together on beautiful objects that didn’t move, like the Casio MT-500, but this was something completely different. This was a new frontier, a brand new medium where movement is not only an additional element, it’s absolutely essential to communicating the point. To be able to come into a project like that, and to work with such talented people, is a privilege.


Daniel Arsham, Pharrell Williams and Jonah Bokaer – The creative geniuses behind the multidisciplinary stage performance, Rules of the Game.

Tell me about the film Hidden Figures. What attracted you to this project?

You have three African-American female protagonists who were scientists, engineers, and mathematicians…technologically advanced. So that blew my mind. It involved NASA, and it involved space, which is a subject that I’ve been obsessed with since childhood. And all of this happened where I’m from – Hampton Roads, Virginia, in the 1960s. So, getting involved with this film was an easy decision to make.

You love fashion, and you have a keen fashion sense.

Fashion is great. I love the way fashion helps people express their individuality – when they take things and make it themselves. So fashion and style go hand-in-hand. It’s indicative of who you are and what you’re feeling. I’ve developed my own look by following my instincts and acting on what I feel connected to at a given point in time. There’s a certain power and excitement that comes into play when and you see people creating their own distinctive style and identity.  But do I love fashion?  I love life. I love the opportunities that I’ve been given, and the support that I’ve been getting, and the reaction that I’ve been getting to the work that produce, those are the things that I love. Those things are irreplaceable. Fashion comes and goes.

I play a lot of tennis. Several years ago you launched the adidas Tennis Collection. The collection’s roots are in the ‘70s Golden Era of tennis – Bjorn Borg, Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe, Chris Evert.

The players back then just had a great swagger, both on and off the court. They were super confident. There was a sexiness that they all carried – the men and women – because they just knew they were killing it. They knew what they were doing and what they were wearing was sick. Next level. We need that. Not that today’s players don’t have that kind of confidence, but the ‘70s was so effervescent and vivid.

Final Question: If you could share a piece of life advice with others, what would that be?

Remember to show appreciation, and to be grateful. You’ve gotta give things to something bigger than you.

, , , ,

Daniel Arsham – Ground Breaker

Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Daniel Arsham is a busy man.  The multidisciplinary artist is also prolifically multithreaded, his work ranging from his Future Relic series of mini-movies to his Rules of the Game stage collaboration with Pharrell Williams and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, to his ever-expanding universe of installations and exhibits.  His fascination with modern-day objects, specifically with how these objects might be perceived as if unearthed on some future archeological site, has captivated imaginations worldwide.  Arsham reimagines basketballs, cameras, teddy bears, and boom boxes as future relics, collapsing and expanding time by injecting decades of wear, neglect and abuse into familiar items from popular culture.  Nothing is off limits: An eroded American flag, tattered an worn; an eroded DeLorean, in the color of volcanic ash, scarred by the passage of time; Pharrell’s 1980s Casio MT-500 keyboard and drumkit, a fossilized relic of a bygone past.  Arsham explores all of it, playing with conventions of time and space in installations that infuse architecture and archeology with a surreal, paradoxical flavor.  That the items are uniformly white or grey and crumbling is in itself a paradox, given that the the man behind the art is equal parts Average Joe and Andy Warhol.

Daniel Arsham’s Crystal Toys, 2017.

“The further you get from a moment in time, the more closely things connect,” Arsham says, “so, 500 years from now, an iPhone and a phonograph will seem much closer together and relate more.  I try to think about all the objects in the show as if I could forget what they were, what they were used for, and try to imagine approaching them like an archaeologist would.”

While Arsham gets plenty of critical love for his work, he’s also developed some serious street cred.  When your films star actors like James Franco, Juliette Lewis, and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, and you’re designing shoes for adidas, there’s little doubt you’ve transcended the traditional art world and cross-pollinated with pop culture.  Not an easy ask, especially given the art world’s tendency to snub its nose at other mediums.

“Pop culture is in some ways far more egalitarian than the art world,” Arsham says.  “I’m trying to investigate our current moment in time and the big ideas within our civilization.  I’ll do that through as many mediums as I can.”

The artist Daniel Arsham (right) and actor James Franco on set Photo: courtesy James Law

The Miami-raised, New York-based artist graduated from Manhattan’s Cooper Union in 2003.  While the private college at Cooper Square helped fuel Arsham’s inquisitive nature, his fascination with time crystallized when, at the age of 12, Hurricane Andrew destroyed his house and much of the community around him.  The disaster forced him to think about impermanence, the idea that everything is transient, that we are all essentially fossils or artifacts in waiting.

“Seeing architecture in a state of flux and movement, and in a state of decay and rebuilding after the storm, has influenced much of my practice – both in Snarkitecture and in my own work.”

Snarkitecture, a design studio co-founded in 2008 by Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen, reflects the artist’s appetite for interdisciplinary collaboration.  The name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of The Snark, a poem describing the ‘impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.’ The aim of Snarkitecture is to subvert existing materials within a space to find a new and imaginative purpose for that space.

“Snarkitecture fills a personal artistic need. There are some artists out there that can sit in a room and work and not care who ever sees it, but I am not that kind of artist,” Arsham explains. “I want to make work that people can engage with. The work is completed by people engaging with and experiencing it.”

~  ~  ~

Interrogating, disrupting, and transcending time is key to Arsham’s mission with 3018. The show’s items, each selected for its tie to a particular era or moment, have been dislodged from the past and projected into an imagined future – the eroded DeLorean from Back to the Future, the ‘60s Ferrari from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a pile of random objects which includes electric guitars, microphones, cell phones, cameras, tires, phones, and more – hallmarks that have become a defining characteristic of his practice.  For Arsham, his sculptures are ‘future artifacts,’ each appearing to be in a state of erosion, with wound-like craters disrupting their pristine facades.  A ball rack of basketballs made out of glinting crystal?  A McDonald’s sign cast in obsidian?  A pyramid of baseballs, each ball formed from a different material (volcanic ash, steel, and glacial rock dust, much of which he orders on eBay)?  It’s all part of Arsham’s authenticity.

Daniel Arsham’s Eroded Delorean, 2018.Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of Perrotin.

“It’s not a trick,” Arsham says. “Let’s say a camera gets calcified over a thousand years in crystal. It would look just like the one I made, and the materiality will be the same.”

Arsham’s fascination with time is the strand that connects his multidisciplinary art.  His production company, Film the Future, is home to a nine-part series of short films collectively titled Future Relic.  Future Relic 01 was scored by hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz and has costuming by fashion designer Richard Chai.  Future Relic 02 stars actor and director James Franco, who plays the role of a worker who spends his days underground indexing and destroying objects from past society.  Future Relic 03 premiered at the 2015 TriBeCa Film Festival with music by Alexis Georgopoulos​, and stars Juliette Lewis in costuming by Richard Chai.  Other projects include a short film for Hennessy 250, and a short film for Jefferson Hack’s MOVEment series, shot in collaboration with fashion designer Calvin Klein, choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and ballet dancer Julie Kent.

“Working with film is similar to dance in some ways,” Arsham explains, “but film is infinitely more complex because you can watch it over and over again. You can pick things apart.”

The creatives behind Rules of the Game: Pharrell Williams, Daniel Arsham, Jonah Bokaer

Arsham’s collaborative spirit is reflected in a recent project, Rules of the Game, a multidisciplinary production with Pharrell and Bokaer.  Two years in the making, Rules highlights three mediums; art, music, and dance, all of it working and interacting with one another to assault the viewer’s senses.  Painstakingly ambitious, Rules of the Game is loosely based on Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author.  It combines Arsham’s explosive visuals and design with Pharrell’s music, and dancers choreographed by Bokaer.  As grueling as it might be to get three distinct creative visions to work cohesively in one production, Rules is another example of Daniel Arsham’s cross-platform domination and resolute fearlessness.

“We worked on this project a very long time, so we had the time to experiment to see what might work and what wouldn’t,” he says.  “We all understood that this project would be a risk, but that’s part of creating art.”

~  ~  ~

Arsham’s profile leveled up with his Past, Present, Future adidas collaboration, moving him closer to pop culture icons Usher, Kanye and Swizz Beatz. The first release – a pair of trainers designed to look like they were chipped away at during an archaeological dig – were hugely successful, and coveted by collectors. The shoe features frayed sections, while the rubber sole appears to have been chipped away and left with jagged edges. Its white laces are finished with painted metal tips. The final installment in the series – the adidas Futurecraft 4D, which reveals hidden lettering under black light – generated a flurry of pre-release buzz, the hype culminating with a launch event, scavenger hunt, and the release of Arsham’s Hourglass Part III: Future short film.

The adidas Futurecraft 4D – Designed by Daniel Arsham

“Working with the adidas design team, we went back and forth on a number of iterations, slowly honing and simplifying the design,” Arsham says of the Futurecraft 4D. “My studio made a large contribution in the design of the packaging, socks and gloves as well as the sealing of the actual box.”

Now that the Past, Present, Future series with adidas is complete, will Arsham fill the hole in his busy schedule with some well-deserved R&R?

“I enjoy what I’m doing to much to take a break,” the multidisciplinary artists says with a smile. “I don’t look at what I do as work. Whether it’s sculpture, stage design, film, or footwear, I’m most content when I’m working on the next big thing.”

Good news for the rest of us. And spoken like a man who has no interest in becoming a relic himself.

You grew up in Miami.

I was born in Cleveland but moved to Miami a short time later. Miami was a great place to grow up, because I like to swim in the ocean. And to this day I really like Disney World. I try and do a regular pilgrimage to Disney World.

Who – or what – has had the greatest influence on your work?

Architecture as a general overarching theme is something that I am very interested in. Film has played a big part in my work. In terms of people I have been fortunate to work with many different talents across multiple disciplines. Choreographer Merce Cunningham is someone I worked with when I was very young. He gave me the chance to explore theatre, which is something I hadn’t worked in previously.

How did you meet Merce Cunningham?

Merce had seen an exhibition that I did at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. This was like right before I left for New York. It was an exhibition of paintings, which is why it came as a complete shock that he would ask me to do a stage design. He got my number from the museum’s director, called and said, “I’m Merce Cunningham, are you familiar with what I do?”

From a practical standpoint, how did the two of you collaborate?

Merce had this very unique way of working. He would separate each portion of a performance into their own respective parts, allowing each person to work independently. He would make his choreography, I would make the set design, an artist would make the costumes, a musician would make the score, but none of us knew what the other was doing. I never knew what the dance was going to look like before the premiere. I could basically do anything I wanted. It was amazing and sort of terrifying at the same time. Also when I first started working with him, I was 24. He was 84.

You’re a multidisciplinary artist. What’s it like to venture into areas where you might not be completely comfortable?

When Merce asked me to work on my first stage design, he kept encouraging me. It was a large scale project, the largest I had done up to that point, but Merce gave me the confidence to pursue it.  A lot of other things I’ve worked on, the creation of the films, working with architecture, all of these things, they seem difficult from the outside – and they are – but often, the things I’ve pursued outside of my own practice are in collaboration with other people. In dance, stage and film, I’ve been able to find people who really know what they’re doing, and they’ve allowed me to make these things.

You mentioned film. Let’s talk about your Future Relic films.

Film for me encompasses all the things I’m interested in – architecture, performance, sculpture, and photography. People kept asking me questions about the work I was making, and that was really the trigger point, so I wrote a treatment for a film titled Future Relic, with nine different parts. The stories are all linked, but it feels like they’re very disconnected. The story jumps around in time and spans about 500 years. Each segment takes place in a different time period. It’s intended to be disorienting, but in the end it will all make sense.

Juliette Lewis – Future Relic 03

I’ve watched the first four. These films have a big-budget feel.

People often think that if an artist is making a film that it’s going to be some sort of art film with no story or very abstract. There are elements of Future Relic that are like that, but there is a story that is closer to a Hollywood style thing.

How difficult is it to create these cinematic vignettes?

It’s definitely a learning experience. Film, more than anything, is the most difficult thing I have ever tried to accomplish. If I show work in a gallery or museum I can easily control everything from the light, the way people enter, and obviously what the work looks like. In film, you have to control everything, every last detail. Everything that you place on the screen means something.  To achieve the mood or emotion that you’re trying to create is far harder than it looks.

Give me an example.

The creating or building of light. Light, in the Future Relic films, is as much of a character as the actual characters themselves. Trying to make light work in that way is far more difficult that it appears. There’s a scene in Future Relic 04 where the characters are in an airplane cockpit. We constructed the entire cockpit, and lighting was placed on the character’s faces to make it appear as if they are moving through clouds. Pulling that off was extremely difficult.

What inspiration did you draw on in order to create the world within Future Relic 01?

The visual language draws from Lawrence of Arabia. The film was shot entirely at dawn, which is the same technique that was used in the 1962 film, which helped us achieve this day-for-night quality. So we shot everything in the day and then the color was adjusted so it appears like moonlight.

Hip-hop artist Swizz Beatz did the score for the film.

This was something that was very outside of his normal way of working, but I think he really made a beautifully subtle piece that was very much in key with what I was looking for.

Future Relic 02 stars A-List actor James Franco. How did you end up working with Mr. Franco?

I’ve been fortunate to develop some great relationships through collaborations with my work. I wrote the entire treatment with a colleague of mine named Timothy Stanley. Most of the actors so far have come through my relationship with Al Moran, who is the co-founder of the OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles. Al Moran has worked with James many times, so we were introduced. I spoke to James about our project and explained that I felt he was perfect for the role, and it turned out that he was interested. The role is challenging because there’s no dialogue at all. Everything is conveyed by the expressions on his face, and his movement.

Future Relic 03 stars the lovely Juliette Lewis.

I’m friends with her brother, who convinced her to see the film with James. She liked it a lot, and agreed to sign on. Having those connections helps, but there are still challenges that come with putting a film together. Being sensitive of their time was a prime driver; it was much easier to shoot these as vignettes because all the actors and talent are friends and are donating their time. I’m working around their schedules. And having the films made in short bursts is easier than dedicating months to work on it.

Let’s talk about your art. When did you become interested in the concept of being an “archeologist from the future?”

The summer of 2011. I was in Easter Island, which is a very small island in the South Pacific, and I was there making paintings that were later made into a book published by Louis Vuitton. There were also some archeologists working there at the same time.  They were excavating some of these famous statues and found objects left behind by previous archeologists that had excavated the site about 100 yeas ago. Looking at this gave me the idea of collapsing time within those two separate objects—the sculpture from 1,000 years ago and the more contemporary pool of artifacts. When I returned from Easter Island, I started making fictional archeology objects from our present – cameras, phones and things like that – that looked as if they had been reformed with geological material and uncovered at some point in the distant future. The decision was made to use geological materials, like volcanic ash, crystal, to convey this sense of time.

The Future Was Written falls into the categories of sculpture, architecture and performance. Photography courtesy of Daniel Arsham

What does the idea of “fictional archeology” means for you?

When I take a simple object – a Walkman, for example – that we all have, or used to have, and make it look like a fossil or an artifact, this makes us rethink our inscription in time. It challenges the ideas we have we constructed about time. To what extent do we believe, unconsciously, in progress, and linear development? It’s towards these kinds of questions that I want to lead my viewers. In placing them in the future, where the familiar objects of their everyday lives appear to them as though from an ancient moment. I want them to experience what Freud called the Uncanny.

Give me an example of your work that reflects this.

My 3018 exhibition at the Perrotin Gallery in Paris is based on a notion of fictional, archeological objects – objects more or less directly related to music. These are familiar objects presented as though they’ve come from another era, in the past. Although they would normally pass by unnoticed, they take on a new consistency. It’s the idea of the flow of time that is being called into question, because most of the objects I’m using are things that don’t exist in our everyday lives. They are things that are just slightly past, yet they already feel like they are from the past. That bridge in time is important in order to imagine these things as relics.  This archeology is based on a simple principle: Take a familiar object and make it undergo a treatment, and then finish the object so that it appears as something strange, something surprising.

Tell me about your treatment of these objects.

When I started these works, I could have taken a camera and painted it to look old, but something about this kind of alchemy—this shift of material—gives a greater weight to the objects, and gives a kind of truth to them that is more powerful. It was the only way to achieve a true authenticity.

Do you have a favorite material to work with?

Materials are always as important to the concept as the visuals they create. When you look at the car and it’s made of crystal, it isn’t as if I painted it to look degraded. Its material is something we associate with a geological time frame.

3018 has some very recognizable pieces.

Two of the pieces are cars. I always look for multiple entrance points so viewers can recognize them, and these two happen to be props from films: The DeLorean from Back to the Future and the Ferrari from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Pharrell Williams is a friend. How did you meet?

Emmanuelle Perrotin, who represents me in Paris, invited me to dinner at Pharrell’s house a number of years ago. There was a lot of conversation, and at some point he had someone from his team pull up my website. We were in his kitchen at the time.

Daniel Arsham unveils a full body cast of Pharrell for the G I R L exhibition at the Galerie Perrotin

It seems like the two of you hit it off.

Pharrell’s an amazing person on so many levels. I see someone who is engaged in so many disciplines, so there are some direct parallels with what I’ve pursued in my own practice. I would see him at Art Basel in Miami, and I would immediately notice that he wasn’t just content to be there. He was engaged. He would talk to the artists and designers, and not at a superficial level He would intently listen and ask questions, so that he understood what they were doing.

Daniel Arsham unveils a full body cast of Pharrell for the G I R L exhibition at the Galerie Perrotin

What’s the first thing your worked on together?

I asked him to tell me about something that was really important at the beginning of his music career – something that he made music on but didn’t have or use anymore. He then described his first keyboard that had these drum pads on it. I did a bunch of research and found out it that it was a Cassio MT NT500. That became the first piece, a relic of the original machine he made music on, and then I was fortunate enough to bring him into my world to create music for Rules of the Game.

How did you approach the stage design for Rules of the Game?

As an artist, if there are rules, I’m going to figure out how to break them. This project was heavy on the idea of mythology and legend, and so much of my work relates to archeology and history, so I set out to integrate those two things. Having objects shatter and then come back together is a play on the stretching out of time, and doing it with Greek and Roman masks and busts helped to heighten the effect. That’s what I was trying to get to with the scenography.

On Rules, you collaborated with Pharrell and the incomparable Jonah Bokaer. Did you work together, or independently from one another?

Both. With Jonah, I would usually present him with an idea: “There’s going to be thousands of balls, or a giant roll of paper, and I want it to form these giant icebergs on stage.” Then he develops the choreography and he uses the material as a way to motivate movement. The rolling of the balls, the masks, the shattering of these things as content in the work. So I’d throw out an idea and he’d come back and say, “I like these things,” or “Maybe this would work better if we did this.”

Let’s talk Snarkitecture. How did your partnership with Alex Mustonen come about?

Snarkitecture started when I was making pieces in public space that manipulated architecture. In a museum or gallery, I usually have carte blanche but my gestures are temporary. Public space requires a different knowledge base, so I hired Alex to help realize my pieces on a larger scale. We discovered an area closer to architecture than my own practice, so Snarkitecture emerged from that. It ultimately became its own entity with its own language.

Snarkitecture – Light-filled cave

Your latest exhibition, Moonstone, wrestles with concepts of space, exoplanets and time, all of it woven into Japanese gardens.

I was invited to spend some time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I was allowed into a creative studio whose mission it is to communicate to the public some of the more complex discoveries they make. That could be anything from ice on Mars to exoplanets with multiple moons. So I started to integrate some of the forms I saw there, one of those being these exoplanet moons, which are kind of like invented planets.

You’ve spent some time in Japan. How did this inspire your exhibition?

I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan over the last decade, and this repetitive act of raking the sand has always fascinated me. These gardens are fixed in time, in that they have been generally unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet they are remade every day. As I approached the exhibit from an early conceptual position, I envisioned the moons like some distant solar system or collection of planets, and the sand representing space-time or a ripple in a plane of space.

Japanese architecture has a certain timeless quality to it.

There are many buildings and temples that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tea houses or temples look the same now as they did five hundred years ago, and maybe will five hundred years from now.

You recently released a monograph through Rizzoli.

My Rizzoli book reflects on the last 20 years of my work, all the way back to my thesis exhibition at Cooper Union. It’s one of the earliest things I created using architecture as a medium to play with –manipulating and creating a disconcerting, uncanny architecture.

Tell me a little about your Futurecraft collaboration with adidas.

When I approached the design of the Futurecraft sneaker, I was thinking more about the tools and materials that we use within the studio. The outfits we wear and the equipment that is related to the production of artwork. The tonality of the shoe is based on the green color that is used in the branding of the studio. This color is derived from many of the works that I was making, which use crushed, broken glass that becomes green – if you look at the edge of a sheet of glass, and you’re staring across it, you can see this greenish color. This comes from iron impurities in the actual glass, but if you look at the glass straight on it is completely clear.

Daniel Arsham

Final Question: If you had one piece of advice for other artists, what would that be? There are no shortcuts. Following your passion means doing the hard work and seeing your art through to its inevitable conclusion.

, , ,

Big Daddy Kane – BDK Style

By:  Michael D. McClellan | Spending time with Grammy-winning rapper Big Daddy Kane is to spend time at the feet of hip-hop royalty.  He’s recorded with Tupac, posed nude with Madonna and Naomi Campbell, and mentored a gifted young rapper named Jay-Z.  His breakout hit, Ain’t No Half Steppin, ranks No. 24 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 50 greatest hip-hop songs of all time.  Cited by many as one of the greatest lyricists ever, respect for Kane is everywhere:  Eminem raps on Yellow Brick Road that “we was on the same shit, that Big Daddy Kane shit, where compound syllables sound combined,” while Ice-T flatly declares that he would pit Big Daddy Kane against any rapper in a battle.  Legend has it that the ‘80s greatest rapper, Rakim, turned down a challenge to go mic-to-mic with Kane.  So when the opportunity to interview Kane presents itself, you jump at the chance – and you do your homework.  There are the obvious nuggets – his tight friendship with fellow rapper Biz Markie, the velour suits punctuated by his iconic high-top fade and those four-finger rings, and that racy photo shoot for Madonna’s controversial Sex book – but to climb into the ring without fully immersing yourself in all things Kane is to do so at your own peril.  BDK doesn’t do fakers.

“I like working with people who are committed to their craft,” Kane says, the words delivered with the same richness that fuels his records.  “Everything else is a waste of time.”

Born in Brooklyn, Kane’s fierce presence behind the microphone was honed during his early years as a battle rapper.  His reputation as an MC later opened doors, while his nonpareil lyrical ingenuity set the bar for others who followed, including Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar (whose earliest exposure to hip-hop was listening to Big Daddy Kane as a newborn on his way home from the hospital).  Kane’s tight friendship with Biz later led to a stint in the Queens-based Juice Crew, a collective headed by renowned producer Marley Marl.  It turned out to be his big break.

“Before I had a record deal I was going from project to project, block party to block party, battling other rappers,” Kane says, “and I’d perform at parties in Brooklyn as well, so I was already quite experienced by the point I got involved with Juice Crew.  Marley Marl, Roxanne Shante, MC Shan, TJ Swan, Kool G Rap, Biz…Juice Crew was groundbreaking, ahead of its time.”

Kane would soon break off on his own, signing with Len Fichtelberg’s Cold Chillin’ Records label in 1987.  The 12” underground hit single Raw was released a few months later, followed by his debut album, Long Live the Kane, in 1988.  The video for Ain’t No Half Steppin introduced the world to the Kane high-top fade and helped propel Yo! MTV Raps into the mainstream.

A year later, Kane released his most critically-acclaimed album, It’s a Daddy Thing, which included 1970s sample throwbacks like Smooth Operator and the Teddy Riley-produced track I Get the Job Done.  A red-hot Kane was also sought out by Prince, who asked him to guest rap a verse on the Batdance remix for the ’89 blockbuster movie Batman.

“Prince loved it, Warner Bros. shelved it,” Kane says.  “They thought it was too different, and not commercial enough at the time.”

In 1991, Kane won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for his performance on the Quincy Jones collaborative track Back on the Block.  He also posed for Playgirl and appeared in Madonna’s Sex book during the ‘90s (we’ll get to that in a bit), and hired an unknown rapper named Jay-Z to tour with him.  Those crowd-pleasing freestyle raps during costume changes sold Kane on Hova’s vast potential.

“By that point, we were trying to shop Jay-Z to get him a record deal,” says Kane.  “In the middle of my show I would leave stage and have Jay-Z and Positive K come out.  They would rap on stage while I was changing clothes.  He wasn’t a hype man; he was part of the show.  It was clear back then that he was going to be a star.”

Tight: Big Daddy Kane and Jay-Z worked together in the early days, and remain friends to this day.

In ‘95, Kane recorded with MC Hammer and Tupac Shakur on the rap song Too Late Playa.  In 1998, he released his final solo album Veteran’z Day, before turning his attention to live performances and collaborative efforts with artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, and Busta Rhymes.  He’s also appeared in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party and acted in several films, including Posse, The Meteor Man, Just Another Day, and Exposed.

Kane’s legacy – and his place in the pantheon of hip-hop royalty – is secure.  The high-top fade and eyebrow cuts have long-since been retired but he continues to tour, both domestically and overseas, and the next generation of rappers continue to sing his praises.  He does the occasional feature for artists like Joell Ortiz and The Game, and he’s set to be an executive producer on a Netflix biopic of the Juice Crew (release date TBD).

All part of the mosaic.

A Big Daddy thing.

I’m geeked right now.  I’m sitting here with a legend, an icon, Brooklyn’s own Big Daddy Kane.  How are you?

I’m great, man.  Wonderful.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover – Tupac, Madonna, Jay-Z, those limited edition BDK British Walkers.

Let’s cover it all.  I’m in a mood to go.

You got your start in your Brooklyn neighborhood.  Tell me about that.

I’m what you call a lyricist, but I started off as a battle rapper.  At an early age I wanted to get down with a cousin of mine – he was around 17, and I might have been 12 or 13 at the time.  He was telling me that I was too young, and he was rhyming with these other two guys.  I felt if I became nice enough to beat his friends, then he would have to put me down for a battle.  That’s how I started writing battle rhymes.

Who were some of the guys you battled in the early ‘80s?

Hardly any of the ones that I battled were known at that time.  There were a few artists that had records out – Mike Ski of Dismasters Crew and Disco Ritchie from Divine Sounds are a couple that come to mind – but the majority of them were just regular cats on the street.  Once I started making music and the world had a chance to hear me, nobody wanted to battle then.

One of those who did battle you was Biz Markie.  Tell me about that.

We had a mutual friend in Long Island, and this friend used to always come around telling me about his man Biz Markie D – he was Biz Markie back then, he was Biz Markie D.  He wouldn’t stop talking about him.  He’d say, “Biz said this funny rhyme about such and such,” or “Oh, he rocked this party here,” or “He did the human beatbox.”  One day he said, “My man Biz Markie D is at Albee Square Mall right now,” and I said, “Look, let’s go find him and we battling.  Then, you go tell this Biz dude about me from now on, because I’m going to eat his ass up.”  So we went over to the mall and battled.

Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane: A rap battle blossomed into a brotherhood.

Who won?

[Laughs]  We were doing serious rhymes at first, and he saw that he didn’t stand a chance so he tried to do a funny rhyme about a girl.  And then I did a funny rhyme about a girl.  He started laughing, and he was like, “Okay, that was dope.  Yo man, you got a lot of different styles, you’re bad, you’re dope.”  And then he started telling me about parties that he was doing in Long Island and in the Bronx.  He was telling me that he should get down with me and do some of these parties together and make some money.  He said that we were going to get a record deal, and that we were going to be famous.  And he kept his word.

The start of a beautiful friendship.

Biz was that dude that believed in me.  After he signed his deal with Cold Chillin’ Records he brought me in to write the majority of his first album.  Then he got me a deal with the same label, so he’s responsible for me having a music career.

And it started from a battle.

[Laughs]  A lot of people that I’ve beaten in battles have never spoken to me again.  This cat got me a record deal.  I have the utmost respect for him, and anything that I can do for him I would be more than happy to do.  I owe so much to that brother.

MTV ranks you at No. 7 in its Greatest MCs Of All Time list.  What’s the difference between a rapper and an MC?

A rapper is someone who makes words rhyme.  You can consider Dr. Seuss a rapper, because he’s just putting words together and making them rhyme.  The biggest difference between an MC and a rapper is that the MC is the crowd controller.  When I say crowd controller, I mean the MC gets on the mic and demands the crowd’s attention, and he is able to have the crowd do whatever he wants them to do – throw your hands in the air, slide from side to side, or ream something out.  That’s what the MC does.  A lyrical MC is an MC that puts together complex lyrics that the average human being ain’t going to think to do, and probably can’t do.

Biz Markie, LL Cool J, Guru, and Big Daddy Kane.

Let’s talk hip-hop lineage.  Give me the Big Three the era preceding you, the era you came up in, and the era immediately after you.

It started off in the early ‘80s with Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee.  Then it became about myself, Rakim, and KRS-One.  And then after us it became about Biggie, Nas, and Tupac.  That takes you up the new millennium.

There is no Big Daddy Kane without…?

Everybody in hip-hop always refers to my family tree, and me being a student of Grandmaster Caz.  Once I heard Grandmaster Caz from the Cold Crush Brothers, I was blown away.  Not only is he a great lyricist, he sounded like that dude that would come in the barbershop or into the pool hall talking shit, the dude that the kids wanted to stick around and listen to.  So I’ve always had respect for Grandmaster Caz.  I learned a lot from him when it came to writing rhymes.

Without Big Daddy Kane, there is no…?

I think Biggie and Jay-Z took what I was doing lyrically to the next level.

How did you and Jay-Z hook up?

They were trying to get Jaz-O a record deal, and a producer named Fresh Gordon asked me to come in and make a tape.  We were at his crib, and Jaz-O asked me if his man could rhyme on the tape.  I was cool with that.  It turns out that his man was Jay-Z.  After we made the tape, Gordy asked me if I could work with Jaz-O, but I told him that I liked the other kid better.  That’s how me and Jay first connected.

Was Jay-Z your hype man?

Jay was never my hype man.  I went on tour with Patty LaBelle, and I saw something new that I hadn’t seen before – I saw people onstage doing outfit changes.  I was like, “I’ve got to do this in hip-hop.”  So when I came back off tour with Patty, I asked Jay-Z and Positive K to come on the road with me.  I would do half the show and then I would leave the stage to do an outfit change.  That’s when I would call out Jay-Z and Positive K, and just let them spit for about 10 minutes while I was changing clothes.  Then I would come back onstage in a different outfit and finish the show.  This was all during my Chocolate City Tour.

Sounds like a win-win for both you and Jay-Z.

His relationship with me was very similar to my relationship with Biz in the beginning. When Biz had the Make The Music Tour, he would call me onstage and I would just spit a rhyme to the crowd in the middle of his show.  It was the same type of thing with Jay.

Did you have any idea that Jay-Z would blow up like he did?

At the time, I had no idea of the impact that Jay-Z would make.  In my mind, I always thought of Jay-Z as a dope MC, and I thought that people would really love his skills.  But Jay is a really quiet and shy type of dude, so I never envisioned him becoming the megastar that he became.  I’m so happy for him because he really deserves it.

Are you and Jay-Z still tight?

We’re still tight.  Jay had me come and do Summer Jam with him one year, which was the time he mentioned me in his song and rapped about the cuts in my eyebrows.  And I performed with him at the Barclays Center when they opened it up.  So we are cool.

All artists have their negotiables and their non-negotiables.  What are your non-negotiables?

For one, no one is writing lyrics for me. That is a non-negotiable.  There are people out there who write songs for some of the greatest singers ever, they write for legends like Marvin Gaye and Luther Vandross.  Luther’s whole career was pretty much remakes.  Willie Nelson is a great singer, incredible, but a lot of the stuff that he recorded was Kris Kristofferson’s stuff.  Nobody is writing for me.  I don’t mind if somebody writes the hook on a song, but as far as my lyrics that I’m saying for my verse, no.  I feel that that goes against the code of a real MC.

You mentioned Tupac.  How did you meet?

In 1990, I took Digital Underground with me on my Chocolate City Tour.  They were actually the opening act, and Tupac was one of the dancers there at the time.  He used to hang with two of my dancers, Scoob and Scrap, all of the time.  So I would see him every day.

Big Daddy Kane and Tupac Shakur

Tupac wasn’t Tupac yet.

Not at all.  He would sometimes ride on our tour bus, and he was always talking.  I remember him telling me that he was getting ready to do his own solo stuff.  He said it wasn’t going to be like this funny stuff with Digital Underground, because he was a serious rapper and he was going to be doing some hard stuff.

Did he rhyme for you?

Yeah.  I felt like his flow was amazing.

Could you tell that he was going to be a star?

Yeah.  He was just a cool dude, very bright.  We would talk about hip-hop, how I got my start, things like that.  He was always asking questions – questions about the stage show, about why you do this and why you do that, how you handle your business in the rap game.  When he made his impact and became a superstar I was so proud of him.

You and Tupac have a Suge Knight connection.

The year before Tupac passed, Suge Knight was trying to start a Death Row East label and he wanted me to be on it.  We all met up out in L.A., and then we went to Vegas for a Tyson fight.  Then we came back to L.A. and recorded a song, so I have all kinds of crazy memories about that.  Tupac was a great guy.  It was sad to see what happened to him.

Do you think Tupac’s fate would have been different with different people around him?

If Pac had the right mentors, I think that a lot of the stuff that was going on could have been controlled.  He needed encouragement, and it needed to be reinforced.  I remember the trip back from Vegas, and he almost got into it with some drunk dude on the plane.  I got in front of him and told him to chill.  We talked about the situation and I explained to him why you don’t want to do stuff like that.  And he was like, “You’re right.  My bad.  I didn’t know what I was thinking.”

Madonna asked you to pose with her and Naomi Campbell in her Sex book.  How did that happen?

Warner Brothers had sent me, Madonna, and Color Me Bad out to do walkthroughs at three Manhattan hospitals.  We talked to kids in intensive care, took pictures with them, stuff like that to cheer them up.  Unfortunately for me, all of these hospitals were in upper class neighborhoods.  None of these young white kids knew who the hell I was.  At one particular hospital, Madonna was pointing to me and telling the kids that I was a famous rapper.  She was showing the kids how to sing Ain’t No Half Steppin’, and I’m just sitting there amazed.  It was like, “Wow, Madonna knows my shit.”  We talked afterward, and I thanked her for that, and that’s when she said that she was doing a book.  She wanted to know if I’d be interested posing in her book, which was all photos.  And I was like, “With you?  Hell yeah.  I would love to.  I would be honored.”  And she was like, “Well, it’s going to be a book of nude photos.”  And I was like, “Shit, even better.”  That’s how it happened.

Did you know that the photo would depict a Big Daddy Kane, Madonna, and Naomi Campbell threesome?

I knew there were going to be nude shots, but I didn’t know it was going to be a sexual thing.  I didn’t learn the title of the book until later.

What was the reaction when the book came out?

There were a lot of mixed feelings.  There were people who thought I shouldn’t be naked in pictures with a pop star.  And with my Islamic background, there were a lot of people who really had a problem with me being in those photos with a white girl.

What was your take?

Madonna is a great person, and a great artist.  She showed me a lot of respect, so I enjoyed being there.  She’s a multi-talented megastar, so I was also honored that she chose me to be a part of the book.

Let’s switch gears.  You’re still one of the most fashionable hip-hop artists in the game today.  Is there an NBA player, past or present, that reminds you of you?

Clyde Frazier all day.  If you didn’t know him, your first assumption is that this dude is a pimp.  He rolls in with the big brim hat, and the long, leather quarter field jacket with the fur collar.  His hat has got that lean to it, tilted to the side.  Oh man…

When did style become important to you?

Early in the game.  I just felt like, as an artist, you should never be onstage, look out in the crowd, and see somebody dressed like you.  You need to look unique.  Prince was Prince.  Michael Jackson had the glove, Cyndi Lauper came at you with that crazy colored hair, and Isaac Hayes had the bald head.  That stuff that was always important to me.

BDK Style

You recently helped design those BDK limited edition British Walkers.

It brought back a lot of memories.  We were rocking those British Walkers in the ‘70s, so I think bringing them back was a brilliant idea.  British Walkers were the official dress shoes for hip-hop.  You’re going to a party, you want that b-boy style, you want to be dressed up, you got your British Walkers on.  You put your British walkers and a double knit sweater on, and that was pretty much the equivalent of a three-piece suit for the adults.  You know what I’m saying?

What other shoes did you wear back in the day?

In the ‘70s it was either Clyde Pumas or the Pro-Keds 69ers.  In the early ‘80s I rocked those shell toe Adidas for a while, before switching over to Fila in the mid-80s and stayed with them until the late ‘90s.

Were sneakers a territorial thing in the New York hip-hop world?

Yeah.  You could look at someone’s feet and know where they were from.  You see someone in a pair of shell toes and you immediately know that they were from Queens.  You’d see those Air Force 1s and you knew that they were from Harlem.  If you saw the Filas, you knew they were from Brooklyn.  You saw Pumas, you knew they were from the Bronx.

BIG DADDY KANE, RECORD PUBLICITY PORTRAIT, 1989. (C)REPRISE RECORDS. COURTESY:

You’ve been performing for a long time.  What’s the secret to your success?

One record can make you successful, just that one song.  It can make you successful enough to go down in history books.  Toni Basil has Mickey.  That’s all she needed.  She’s set for life.  You know what I’m saying?  So, one song can make you successful.  But if you are really a student of this craft, and you really respect what you are doing as an art form, you are going to be so deep into it that the song doesn’t even matter.  In the hip-hop world, it’s about rocking the mic and making other MCs  fear you.  It’s about making the crowd love you.  I’ve been doing that for 30 years.

If you had one piece of advice for other aspiring artists, what would that be?

Be yourself.  Don’t try to follow the trend and be like whatever is popping at the time, at the moment.  Be yourself.  Give your fans you.  If you follow what is trendy, once that trend is gone, you will be gone.  If you share what you’re really all about, they will ride with you until the end.



,

Danny Rubin – Groundhog Day

By:  Michael D. McClellan |  Danny Rubin is jazzed, and for good reason.  The laid back screenwriter who, in 1993, broke it big with the existential Hollywood hit Groundhog Day, is basking in the success of his critically-acclaimed Groundhog Day The Musical, which, in 2017, garnered seven Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical.  Throw in eight Olivier nominations (and two wins) following a well-received run at London’s iconic Old Vic, and Rubin’s 24-year odyssey from film to stage not only proves the staying power of his beloved collaboration with Harold Ramis, it validates his longstanding belief that Groundhog Day always had the chops to charm live audiences.

“Originally, I thought it was such a strong and original way of telling a story, that it would deserve retelling in a variety of media,” Rubin explains.  “I’d been working on it for several years when I got British theatre director Matthew Warchus’ call.  Dozens of people had contacted me over the years, but this time it was a wonderful confluence of timing, taste and perception.”

Nearly everyone has seen the 1993 Bill Murray film on which this show is based, the story of a cynical weatherman trapped in a single repeating day.  When it was released on Feb. 12, 1993, Groundhog Day was considered little more than a better-than-average comedy.  Since then, the film has earned critical respect for its originality, while being regarded as a deceptively deep philosophical meditation on the meaning of life – a high-brow statement concealed in a low-brow wrapper.

“The movie was never intended, by me or by Harold, to be anything more than a good, heartfelt, entertaining story,” Rubin says.  “He and I had terrific conversations about Buddhism and reincarnation, about Superman and the ethics of not saving everybody constantly, and other philosophical ideas stimulated by the story.  Still, we never anticipated the impact the film would have. I did, however, feel from the very beginning that I’d stumbled upon a story with all the makings of a classic, so simple and true that it could be retold many different ways by many different storytellers.”

Rubin, in his own way, has been living and reliving Groundhog Day every day since the movie first hit the big screen.  With only four film credits to his name, Groundhog Day is by far the most successful.

“I’ve been called a one-hit wonder, but it’s not something that I view negatively,” he says.  “Groundhog Day is something I get asked about every day, whether that’s through interviews, fan email, or meetings with studio execs.  It’s a blessing, not a curse.  Doors open because of Groundhog Day.”

Following the surprising success of the Punxsutawney-based romantic comedy – which was made for $14.6 million and raked in a tidy $70.9 million – Rubin disappeared into the ether.  He moved his family to New Mexico, eschewing the glitz of Hollywood in favor of the serenity of Santa Fe.  He kept writing scripts for his own ideas, and he kept optioning them, steadily, over the years – to Universal, to Amblin, to Castle Rock, to Miramax – although none were ever produced.  And he continued to believe in the power of Groundhog Day as a musical.

“By the time Matthew Warchus called, I already had an outline, a rough draft of the book, about 30 song ideas I had winnowed down to 12, and a ream of scenes, themes, bits, gags, progressions, dialogue snippets and even some melodies.  But as someone from outside of the theatre community, I had no idea how to find a partner.  Fortunately, Matthew found me.”

Warchus introduced Rubin to Tim Minchin, the composer and lyricist for the Tony-winning smash Matilda The Musical.  The project gained momentum from there, and soon the charismatic Andy Karl was cast in the lead role.  Following its run at the Old Vic, Rubin’s brainchild premiered on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater on April 17, 2017.  During its five month run, Groundhog Day The Musical mesmerized audiences and critics alike, eventually garnering Rubin a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical.

Not bad for a guy who’s been living the same day since February 12, 1993.

 

Groundhog Day was your idea and your story, but it took collaboration to make it to the big screen.  What was it like working with the late, great Harold Ramis?

Danny Rubin:  I think that we were both just nice guys and we wanted to make a good movie.  We were also professionals who did what needed to be done.  We sat down and talked about interesting things, which made it fun.  I would go off and write, and he would react to that.

 

Was it hard to make creative concessions when editing Groundhog Day?

Danny Rubin:  ​It was challenging because I really liked the original script.  I was willing to make changes, but we both understood that you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, so there was a lot of back and forth.

 

Give me an example.

Danny Rubin:  For example, you don’t throw away the first act the way that I had it.  You start in the middle, which Harold had said that he loved.  You don’t create a reason for Phil Connors being stuck in the same day if you want to make an existentially flavored movie; you create a reason for the thing if you want to make a Saturday afternoon popcorn chopper.

 

Given your laid back personalities, I can’t imagine the two of you getting into heated arguments over the direction of the script.

Danny Rubin:  It was a more of an intellectual argument in that I was being protective of my material.  I wanted to let go early on, but I wasn’t getting a lot of assurances that this wasn’t going to become the stupidest movie ever.  Harold wanted to work with me because he was a decent guy.  He gave me plenty of room to work, rather than grabbing the script and making changes.  Ultimately, he felt that he needed to take it away and reshape it.

 

Harold Ramis knew what it took to make something funny.

 

Bill Murray was cast as weatherman Phil Connors.  Did he have any influence over the script?

Danny Rubin:  Bill actually liked the original draft more than what Harold had come up with, but the studio had already agreed to Harold’s draft.  That’s when they rehired me to work directly with Bill to get the script into a sort of intermediary place.  We did that, and then Bill had to start learning his lines and getting into character, leaving Harold and I to resolve some issues.  We ultimately hammered out a smooth draft that was all in his voice.  It came out pretty well.

 

Groundhog Day was your big break, but you earned your BA as a biology major at Brown University.  How did the creative side win out?

Danny Rubin:  I thought that they would be combined in some way.  There was a time when I thought the only job I could do was Ira Flatow’s job.  Ira Flatow is the guy that you hear on NPR on Fridays doing the science report.  He was and is absolutely wonderful at creating an entertaining production that teaches something that is fundamental and interesting that most people don’t know about in science.  I thought that could be me.  When I was in college, I had a radio show along those lines.  I would research a topic and produce a public affairs segment that taught somebody something about science.  I thought that was a great way to have a life of learning that did not include going to graduate school or being in academia.

 

Did you ever second-guess your decision to go away from your field of study?

Danny Rubin:  That never really crossed my mind, although journey was both exciting and hellish.  I was searching for something but I wasn’t completely focused.  I had recalibrated from being a science-oriented person to being someone interested in the arts and media, which opened up a lot of possibilities, but also introduced a lot of unknowns.  I always felt confident that I could do something creative, but I didn’t really know what.  I was living in Chicago and doing everything that came along – music, acting, comedy, writing.  When you’re going in a lot of different directions at once it becomes quite exhausting.

 

Rejection is a part of the entertainment business.  What was that like for you?

Danny Rubin:  When I was first looking to establish myself, I started a folder that I called “Independent Producer Correspondence.”  One day I was looking through it, and I realized that it was pretty much all rejection letters.  I was in my mid-twenties.  I was young, so rejection didn’t really bother me.

 

Did you ever get discouraged?

Danny Rubin:  The rejection letters usually came on letterhead from NBC Studios, or Columbia Pictures, or wherever, so they actually had the opposite effect.  It made me feel like I was in the business!  It’s these little psychological boosts that keep you going.  You have to have the right attitude to survive, and a lot of people who are very talented and creative don’t have the right temperament to struggle against a beast that’s impossible to truly understand.  I somehow had the right combination of timely luck, which kept me from total despair, and the right attitude to keep going.  You have to take the long view if you’re going to make it in this business.

 

Groundhog Day: The Musical garnered 7 Tony Award Nominations

 

Did you grow up dreaming of becoming a screenwriter?

Danny Rubin:  The dream wasn’t to become a great screenwriter.  At one point I figured I’d wind up on public television doing one of those fund drives or something like that [laughs].  I imagined them saying, “Danny, you are really good at this.”  And that would be that.  My dream was to have a satisfying life, whatever that meant.  I didn’t go into it thinking that I had to make a lot of money, that I needed to be important, or that I needed to work in a specific job.  It was just me pursuing things as they came along.  I got a lot of pleasure out of entertaining, and being creative.  I felt that if I pursued that, even if I failed, it would at least be an interesting, fun life, because I was doing something that I was interested in.

 

How did you break into the business?

Danny Rubin:  I just kept at it.  I was living in Chicago at the time, and while I didn’t know anybody in the industry, I knew people who knew people in the industry.  I’m not a shy person, so I approached a lot of these people at parties and other events, and asked for help in trying to find anybody who might want to read a screenplay.  Strangely, people want to help.  Someone would say, “My cousin drives a car in Hollywood, sometimes for famous people,” and I would pursue that lead.  There were a bunch of these.  One of them was a guy who had recently become an agent and had started representing somebody who I knew, so I sent him the script for a movie that eventually became Hear No Evil, starring Marlee Matlin.  That’s how I sold my first screenplay and wound up in the business.

 

Your next move is to Los Angeles.  Your agent wants another screenplay – a “calling-card script” – something fresh that would open doors and get you into the room with studio execs.  What happened next?

Danny Rubin:  I went to see a movie at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Los Angeles.  My wife was at home with our baby, so my companion that afternoon was a book about vampires, which I was reading while waiting for the lights to go down.  In was in this strange, cinematic netherworld that I started thinking about the concept of somebody living forever, and the potential for a person to change over the course of an eternal life, but I wasn’t sure how to set it up. My character would have to interact with history and then keep going into the future.  There would be worlds I would need to invent.  Such an interesting premise, but a very cumbersome movie to set up – and very expensive.  And then I remembered something that happened to be on my list of screenplay ideas, which happened to be about a guy repeating the same day over and over again.  That idea suddenly became very useful in the service of this first idea, about a young man’s very long journey through life.  I could put it all in the same day, and that made it doable.  That’s how I ended up writing Groundhog Day.

 

Urban legend has it that you hammered out the draft of Groundhog Day over a four day stretch.

Danny Rubin:  It’s an exaggeration to say that I wrote it all in four days.  It makes for a good story, but the four days was just the scripting part.  I had already spent almost two months coming up with all of the creative ideas and ironing out the structure.

 

Tell me about the process.

Danny Rubin:  I brainstormed a lot.  It was a stream of consciousness, page-after-page-after-page of what it would be like to be in that situation – what it would be fun to see, how the character would feel, the changes that would occur over time.  I would write out little dialogue sketches, trying to figure out who my characters were, what the rules were, things like that.  I finally felt like I had enough there, and that’s when I started focusing on the structure.  The rest came later as we developed it in the studio with Harold Ramis, which turned it into the movie that you saw.

 

How hard is it to sell a movie idea?

Danny Rubin:  I felt that I understood what would make an entertaining movie.  I didn’t really make any distinctions between whether that movie came from Ealing Studios in London, or from Hollywood.  Everywhere I took it, people said, “We love it, but we can’t make it.”  I didn’t want to appear like a guy from out of town, which I was, so I said, “Of course you can’t make it.”

 

How long did it take to get the green light?

Danny Rubin:  It took about six months.  My agent had quit and left the business, so I had to find a new agent and I was using Groundhog Day as a calling card.  I had gotten plenty of meetings with people and had actually gotten some work off of it, which was great.  And then, I got a call from this agent at Creative Artists Agency who said, “I read Groundhog Day and I loved it.  We can’t represent you, but do you mind if I send your script to some of our people?”  So, he wound up giving it to Trevor Alpert, who was a producing partner for Harold Ramis.  Trevor really loved it, so he gave it to Harold, and it took off from there.  Suddenly, I really was a Hollywood writer!

 

 

What was the negotiation like?

Danny Rubin:  Trevor wanted to do business with Harold, and I’m sure he said, “Do you think you can handle this script?  Can you turn Groundhog Day into a Harold Ramis script?” And the response was, “Hey, I’m Harold Ramis.”  I assume it happened something like that [laughs].

 

Groundhog Day never explains the thing that keeps Phil looped in that single, repeating day.

Danny Rubin:  I thought that it was boring and unnecessary.  I hated having to come up with an explanation for the event because I loved the mystery of it.  It felt arbitrary.  To me, the interesting thing is the character’s response to being stuck in this repeating situation.  It didn’t matter to me what it was, and I certainly didn’t want the story to be about Phil undoing the curse or fixing the time machine.  I wanted to start after the repetition.

 

How did you envision this repetition changing Phil Connors?

Danny Rubin:  I felt like Phil’s eternity would go in stages.  I imagined an adolescent stage, where he realizes that he can get away with anything.  When that becomes boring, he becomes more debauched and tries darker things.  And then, when he becomes so self-hating, he commits suicide – which he tries several times, unsuccessfully, in a lightly dark but funny way.  And then, once he’s completely empty, and he’s unsuccessfully killed himself, then what does he do?  Whether or not you’re a God for having all of these supernatural powers, you are still stuck in that day.  I imagined there would be a stage where he starts to fill the vessel, ultimately becoming a lovable person – and that’s when Rita falls in love with him.  We know that he’s changed, and that’s what gets him out of the thing, whatever that thing is.

 

Does the repetition change Phil, or does Rita change Phil?

Danny Rubin:  In my opinion, it was the repetition that changed Phil.  That’s what makes it a beautiful, pure, and unique experiment.  I think we all understand that we move through life and mature emotionally in part by how long we’ve lived.  Yet, I think this shows pretty clearly that we have this other experience, the day-to-day activities that we have, that plays a part in driving us to the next stage.  We all experience a certain kind of repetition, and that has a usefulness.

 

Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell

 

Does this mean that Phil’s repetition is circular and linear at the same time?

Danny Rubin:  Exactly.  A young man in his twenties might think of dating a new woman every night and figuring out how to get her in bed as a challenge, and quite possibly the best life ever.  And yet, by the time he’s in his thirties it starts to get tedious and boring.  It’s no longer fulfilling.  But you have to go through it.  You just can’t skip a step and say that I’m going to go one to the next step.  Even though it was the same repeating day, Phil had to grow through his experiences.

 

Groundhog Day opens in the TV studio, but the original idea was to start in the middle of the story.

Danny Rubin:  None of us were sure exactly what would make it all work.  In the drafts that Harold and I did together, we backed it up as far as the van moving into town, going from Pittsburgh, which gave us plenty of opportunities to set up the characters in the journey.  But we changed our minds after the audience screen test.  That’s when we made changes, did the re-shoots, and added the opening bit at the TV station.  If you think about it, the thing really does have two openings. There’s the opening, and then there’s the music, which is when the movie starts again.

 

How did tweaking the beginning of the film change character development?

Danny Rubin:  As far as the impact, it emphasized Rita a little bit more.  Rita was an element of the whole story, but Groundhog Day was very much Phil’s story in the original version.  The changes made the film more of a traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, and it wasn’t originally written that way.  That was part of what helped it fall together for Harold.  It helped him understand it, and in turn helped him explain it to an audience.  I’m glad that it worked, and it worked really, really well.

 

Tell me about Bill Murray’s character.

Danny Rubin:  It was a shared responsibility, and sometimes these things either magically come together or they don’t. I had originally imagined Phil as more of an average guy, not a particularly nasty guy.  He was young, in his mid-twenties, and sort of looked at things, like, “Well, if you were put in this situation you would do it, too.”  And that premise worked for my original concept.  And then they cast Bill Murray and decided to make the film more of a romantic comedy.  Bill’s sense of humor being what it is, he had his own take on Phil Connors, which was a guy working through middle-age issues and trying to escape the rut in his life.  Bill saw a struggling character, one that was maybe a little disillusioned with where the journey had taken him.  He decided to make Phil Connors a little bit more of an unsympathetic character, who was also an egotist and into only himself.  I didn’t disagree with those things, but I didn’t think they were necessary to tell the story.  You have to remember, I wasn’t writing a comedy when I sat down and came up with the concept.  I was writing Siddhartha.  It wasn’t supposed to feel like a sitcom.

 

Did Bill’s interpretation of Phil Connors ever become a point of contention?

Danny Rubin:  Harold gently walked me away from the ledge [laughs].  Actually, Harold reassured me that it would be okay.  Sometimes I was assured and sometimes I wasn’t, but we had what I think was a genial, friendly, but professional relationship.  This provided a cushion.  Through the years we spoke to each other every Groundhog Day.  Sometimes we’d make it a point to see each other and have a meal.

 

It sounds like the movie created a bond between writer and director.

Danny Rubin:  Over the years, as the film became more and more important in people’s minds and imaginations, there was more distance behind the process that made it, and more shared experience of the afterlife.  We met each other’s families, and talked about our kids and how things were going.  It was a very lovely, friendly relationship in the years that followed.

 

Did you write Ned Ryerson over-the-top, or did the actor bring that to the smarmy insurance salesman?

Danny Rubin:  It was on the page exactly as he said it, but nobody else brought that level of “scrape him off the pavement” that Stephen Tobolowsky did.  When discussing the role, he said something like, “You’re going to have to take me off pavement with a spatula.”  I never imagined it happening like it did, but in some ways he’s the most memorable character that I’ve ever created.

 

Stephen Tobolowsky as insurance salesmen Ned Reyerson

 

Phil Connors seemed to relish punching Ned.

Danny Rubin:  What a cliché that the most obnoxious guy in town would be an insurance salesman.  And yet, I met several insurance salesmen in my early twenties who were exactly like that.  Someone like Ned Ryerson is the last person that I would ever want to be stuck anywhere with, so Phil slugging the guy would have been a perfectly reasonable way to deal with this eternity…well-deserved and, somehow, morally defensible.

 

Tell me about Rita, played by Andie MacDowell.

Danny Rubin:  I think Rita was a change agent for Phil.  She took him from his lowest point and set him on the right course for that one beat.  Until then, Phil’s mindset was “I am a god.”  After that point he suddenly contemplated what he wanted to do with his life.  To some extent, that sounds like a dishonest alteration from the experiment, but on the other hand, that was one of the conceits that Harold came up with that made the film feel like a romantic comedy.

 

After that scene, Phil stops looking at his predicament as a curse.

Danny Rubin:  It felt natural to go in that direction.  He could fill his days figuring out new ways to torture people, or new ways to create mayhem.  I think it felt more natural that he would have already done that and gotten over it.  We don’t see everything that happened to the character in the movie, but we understand that Phil had torn down every bit of who he was, and then started to fill himself up with something new.  I always imagined Phil as a vessel that gets emptied and refilled.

 

Refilled in a good way.

Danny Rubin:  Torture and mayhem doesn’t feel like a Harold Ramis movie [laughs].  Redemption was the only direction it could go.  We open our ears to civilization and we learn to develop skills and sensitivities, and we listen to the world and we pay attention to other people, and realize that we aren’t the only thing going.  We learn that being generous to other people can bring its own kind of satisfaction, which is arguably even more fulfilling than trying to satisfy yourself.  And that was Phil’s ultimate realization.

 

Let’s talk about Groundhog Day: The Musical.  What was it like taking the film to the stage?

Danny Rubin:  I always had it in my mind that Groundhog Day would make a great musical.  I just kind of kept that in the back of my head, because I figured I had a long career ahead of me and I wasn’t about to just start making more Groundhog stuff.  Eventually it bubbled up to the top of my pile, and I realized that it was now or never.

 

Old friends: Danny Rubin and Bill Murray at the Broadway premiere of Groundhog Day: The Musical

 

You needed the theatre equivalent of Harold Ramis to pull it off.

Danny Rubin:  It was at this same time that I found my partners, Tim Minchin and Matthew Warchus.  I loved their work on Matilda.  Both of them were people that I felt almost immediately that I could trust. They seemed to value my work and my input and wanted to create something really special as opposed to something that they could just capitalize on.

 

Was it important for them to stay true to the movie?

Danny Rubin:  They had their hearts in the right place.  Because Groundhog Day had become so huge in the public imagination, I felt like we had a responsibility to do something at least as good as the movie.  We were able to pull it off because we were all on the same page.

 

Did you write any of the songs?

Danny Rubin:  I didn’t try to write any songs.  I told Tim all of my song ideas, and we talked about where the songs would go, but I left that up to him.  I was able to help him evaluate where the play was emotionally before, during, and after a song. It was a great, great collaboration.

 

Groundhog Day has had incredible staying power.  How does it feel to be a part of something so beloved?

Danny Rubin:  Lucky.  Just incredibly fortunate.  I guess there are a couple of things that you could hope for in a life, or in a career, and doing something that actually affects other people in a way and becomes part of the conversation, it’s just an honor to be associated with a film like that.

 

If you had one piece of advice for others what would that be?

Danny Rubin:  I don’t think I’m supposed to do that.  People will figure that out for themselves.  I only do what I like or what I’m proud of, and I try to like what I do when I can’t control what I’m stuck doing.  And no matter what those big goal values are, you try to stick to them.  You’ve got to bend a little bit here and there.  I guess if I had one piece of advice is to remember that it’s life, and you’ve only got one of them.  Appreciate the miraculous nature of that in as many ways as you can, and as often as you can.  And don’t focus on all of those rejection letters.