Slap And Tickle - Spank Rock Interview

Spank Rock, or Naeem Juwan, has had a turbulent time since his groundbreaking, critically acclaimed riot of crude sex references and party time debut album Yoyoyoyoyo. It’s been six years between that release and his sophomore offering, spectacularly titled Everything Is Boring and Everyone Is a Fucking Liar. He’s a thoughtful man – obviously somewhat introspective and laughingly asks how long do I have when I ask him how things are.

It’s not just times that have changed since his first record – the whole music industry has too. “I think when I put out my first record the music industry wasn't affected by the internet.” He says. “It was really cool. Really amazing artists were getting attention and we were hearing things that we wouldn't have heard before. And now the internet is the fucking internet. It's like a monster. It's like throwing shit into this cloud. This dark cloud.”

The internet has created such a fast paced consumer appetite that a massive band now no longer lasts for a year or two on our radar. They’re lucky if they last a month. And it’s this that is concerning the slim, mop-topped MC. “I feel like artists are thinking about their image and style and YouTube hits more than they are thinking about making music.” He explains across the table to me. “I'm trying to figure out what all this means - if I have to redefine what success is for me. Now it's like you can only make money from being famous and not from being a musician. So for me to decide that I want to be a good musician, means that I might have to potentially redefine what success means to me.”

I first came across Spank Rock when working at a hip hop event in New York in 2008 – the line up was stellar and Pharrell Williams got Naeem to stay on stage after the Spank Rock set and rap with N.E.R.D. He was a bit wide-eyed “I was freaking out!” He laughs. “I didn’t know what the fuck to do with that!” But nailed the performance and obviously stuck with Williams, as he’s one of the army of producers on the album that also include Boys Noize, XXChange, Sam Spiegel and features collaborations with long-term friend Santigold, New Orleans MC Big Freeida. But it wasn’t trying to pin down each of these people that took the album so long to be completed. “A lot of fucked up shit happened actually!” The Philly MC ruefully laughs. “Everything that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. I remember starting the record in like a friend war with XXXChange and we weren't working together so I was like 'how the fuck am I gonna replace him?' To me he was like the most creative, interesting producer and we really connected.”

So, flying solo, and not entirely sure what he was doing Naeem sat in the studio haphazardly trying out different people to try out different things and a frustration of people expecting the crude party anthems from his last record. “I was having a hard time knowing where to start off because everyone was coming in with a big heavy dance beat and asking me to rap about pussy and drugs, and I love rapping about pussy and drugs, but there was so much more in the first record that people missed out on.”

A self-confessed deep-thinker, he says most people missed out on the politically driven lyrics to the songs in Yoyoyoyoyo and he wanted to bring that more to the fore in his new tracks. “Then, when I was on a roll and I was killing it, I thought I had all these great ideas, that's when my record label pulled out.” He says matter-of-factly. His label, reticent to pay the second half of his advance on a record they couldn’t guarantee to make money on in a competitive hip-hop market. But not only did they pull out, they kept the files of the work he’d been working on leaving him in a seven-month long purgatory where he couldn’t record at all. “I didn't get into this to work for a record company, I got into it to be an artist.” He bullishly muses.

This second album is less lewd – but much more frustrated. Just the title should tell you that. But the frustration doesn’t come from the creation of the record - it’s more to do with politics and the short attention span of the instant celebrity culture. “I think people don't care about the patience it takes to connect spiritually with an artist who doesn't do something you can connect to immediately. For example, I wonder how absolutely amazing GaGa would be if she was in the music industry in the '80s. I feel like all she has all these great ideas and they just fall into trance land. The song starts off so rad and cool and then the chorus hits and you realise you're just listening to a trance remix of Whitney Houston. She's a brilliant writer, but because she has to fit in these really generic situations to sell music it just crushes everything.”

The bespectacled MC openly laughs when asked if he feels he has a point to prove with this album. “I'm scared to say this because it's in an interview, but I feel like it's irrelevant. Who am I competing with? If there were actually people that I respected that I was competing with, then I might feel I had something to prove. I think the state of hip-hop is one definite fucking mess. Creativity in general exists in very small, specific spaces. The trouble with his peers he has found is the lack of competitive spirit amongst each other to make things that are creative and interesting and they mainly won’t try new things, they’re looking back – trying to recreate things. “I can't see how that has anything to do with anything I experienced in the last two months. I'd rather go and look at Animal Collective or Dan Deacon and think how I can flip that in an interesting way, instead of going back to the fucking '80s and '90s and reliving these bullshit things. So it's hard for me to say I have anything to prove. Who am I proving it to? No one cares!”

Words by Josh Jones
Photography by Pelle Crépin

This interview appears in the august issue of Clash Magazine. Find out more about the issue HERE

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