Fatlip seems confused.
On the eve of his inaugural solo tour, the California rapper who co-founded the seminal hip-hop group the Pharcyde, decides that talking to reporters is no longer his bag.
“I’m done with all of them,” says the man who co-wrote such rap-music gems as “Passin’ Me By” and “Runnin’.”
On this day, one week before Fatlip’s longtime label, Delicious Vinyl, has set his Denver appearance, it makes little difference to this artist that news coverage equals more fans at upcoming shows and more sales once his CD, “The Loneliest Punk,” drops on Oct. 25.
Entertainers are eccentrics, after all. Occasionally they decide that dealing with the media is a distraction. Problem is, roughly a decade after Fatlip left the Pharcyde and pronounced the dawn of his solo career, only a handful of singles have followed. And now, as he readies himself for the long-awaited release of his solo CD, Fatlip’s handlers seem equally confused about how to engineer his return.
Fatlip plays Durango’s Abbey Theatre tonight before moving on to the Gaslight Tavern in Lawrence, Kan., on Saturday.
There are red flags: Earlier this week, Fatlip’s people realized contracts were never signed for the Mile High City date publicized for weeks on the Delicious Vinyl website. Boulder, arguably the region’s most rabid hip-hop market and home to the area’s most progressive hip-hop radio coverage, is nowhere on Fatlip’s tour schedule.
And the artist himself has reservations about the new album.
“My CD is, like, not really finished,” Fatlip says from the road after Delicious Vinyl executives reacquaint him with the value of doing interviews.
“When I first got out of the (Pharcyde), I was trying to produce things myself,” he says. “I wanted to be the writer and the producer and the arranger, but I wasn’t ready to do that. I was in the studio not knowing what I was doing and not coming out with the product I wanted. All of those songs (on The Loneliest Punk) are from that period.”
Few hip-hop heads would argue the impact of the jazz-influence Pharcyde, a group that popularized comedic, folksy urban narratives in an era when gangsta rap dominated the market. The Pharcyde is also credited with kicking open the market to today’s flourishing alternative rap groups.
But going solo was unchartered territory. Fatlip dissects his long absence from music on the new album:
“I could have been a legend like Big and ‘Pac but I caught a bad case of writer’s block … often compared to a tree that bears no fruit, a bank account with no loot. … ”
This open-book approach to his craft characterized Fatlip’s contribution to hip-hop in the mid-1990s, and the subsequent single, “What’s Up Fatlip?,” for which Hollywood luminary Spike Jonze created a rare documentary. The short film is available as part of “Director’s Series, Vol. 1,” dedicated to Jonze’s groundbreaking, pre-“Adaptation” music videos. The film also is being rereleased as part of a new Fatlip DVD. It reveals its subject to be one of rap’s sad clowns, a creative personality who lost himself in music’s distorted image of stardom.
The film offers one of the more honest rap-music character portraits around. And it’s a fitting tribute to Fatlip, who defies typecasting.
“When you’re trying to be artistic and creative, there are so many paths you can go down,” he says of the career detour fans have watched and dissected. “You can end up being too obscure or too abstract or just lost. The best thing you can do is just work. That cancels out all the other distractions.”
Staff writer Elana Ashanti Jefferson can be reached at 303-820-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com.
Fatlip
HIP-HOP|Abbey Theatre, 128 E. College Drive, Durango; 970-385-1711; 10 tonight|$8-$10
