Hump Jones: The Lost Interview
Posted Aug 22, 2011
So I did this centuries ago and never worried much about it...until I realized it had been many months and the interview still wasn’t published. I contacted The Blogger In Question and got stonewalled for a few weeks, then told flat-out I was being disrespectful and it would never be posted. I’m okay with that and I won’t even name who it was: we all have our own parameters for personal space and basic respect and I’ve offended a lot of people. I’ve had bad days, too: no harm, no foul.
Just the same, though? I do have a problem with the reason it’s not being run: hip hop blogs cater to a bored and boring demographic with no background knowledge about anything outside of pop culture. So yeah, I get it, but I ain’t cool with it—therefore, I’m gonna run the interview here.
Was Humpasaur Jones a release from the conscious rap of Wombaticus Rex?
Well, it’s a bummer that you’d think of Wombaticus Rex as conscious rap. We were hippies and all but we were also very stupid, and on a tremendous amount of interesting drugs. Social causes had nothing to do with our music, we were jamming with a live band for most of the shows and we aimed to entertain. Me and Chris Dizzy were blacked out for years at a stretch, so calling us “conscious rap” is pretty funny, you know?
What are your goals for Breakup Music?
I want to be taken seriously. Specifically, I want to be taken seriously as Hump Jones, which is a ridiculous sex rap bullshit side project. So we’ve made this huge cinematic and brutal album and wasted three years obsessing over every second of it. We want to make tons of money off this so we can stop going broke every time we tour, and we want it to stand as one of the best sex rap albums ever...or at least, one of the most ambitious.
Why do you use so many names for your work?
I was fascinated with Kool Keith as a kid, but really, the answer traces back to the circumstances of my birth. In the United States that day, there was a rash of bizarre abduction attempts where clowns in white vans tried to “kidnap” children, but in such an overtly threatening and non-committal way that the kids were terrified and ran away to promptly report this. There’s been a lot of urban legends and hysteria around the Kidnapper Van concept, but it traces to this actual event, which is even stranger because it happened in multiple cities on the East Coast. Why was there a coordinated attempt like this? It was ritual theater, an occult celebration of the fact that meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the IRA activist Bobby Sands was finally dying of his hunger strike at Long Kesh prison. Sands was promptly reincarnated as yours truly, and I’ve grown up with constant background paranoia and a keen awareness of how eager most of humanity is to burn new ideas to death rather than think too hard about anything. Those are the basic factors that inform my approach to marketing hip hop music.
Do you think the music business is different now than it was 5 years ago?
Maybe a little bit, probably. I don’t really keep up with that stuff too much, I’m too busy smoking blunts and doing cocaine with Jimmy Iovine, you know? As a music recording artist, I’m fortunate enough to be insulated from the grim realities that independent artists might be facing. World Around is obviously a multinational operation so my life is one big expense account.
Who are your biggest influences?
Thanks for not asking who my favorite rappers are! I’d say Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Jacques Vallee, Grace “Detroit” Boggs, Doug Henwood, Henry Okah, Lee Atwater, Timothy Leary, Jeff Vail, Grant Morrison, Hakim Bey, John Tayler Gatto, Oliver Reiser, Willis Harman, Marvin Minsky, Jeff Wells, and definitely, Marshall McLuhan. That guy has probably shaped me far too much for my own good. I am also indebted to Robert Anton Wilson for completely ruining my life by enlightening me before I was even done with adolescence, sending me into a decade-long God-Child downward spiral of LULZ and pain.
What do you think of renegade rappers Odd Future?
Nothing expresses the sheer potential of the human species quite like rapping about “raping pregnant bitches” over fruity loops masterpieces. I’m really glad I didn’t blow up when I was 18 because I was dumb and I didn’t have shit to say.
What do you think of V-Nasty?
Whatever it is, that shit sounds painful.
So you don’t like much new hip hop?
Quite the contrary, daug. My “2011 ill shit” folder, which is where I throw a copy of every single track I’ve liked this year, has 121 files in it. That’s a lot of new hip hop that I like, enjoy, bump on a regular basis. I’d say there is more good hip hop coming out, right now, than there ever has been. People are quick to mix up What Corporate America is Promoting with the actual culture and music of hip hop. They are utterly different concepts.
We’re living right now in the harvest of Reaganomics, with a completely hollowed out economic system, a dying military empire, and an education system that’s designed to fail us. That’s why Waka Flocka Flame happens: we’ve got a generation that doesn’t know shit about shit and they’re proud of that. I’m not talking about race or class here, I’m just talking about national demographics in the United States. Reach into the hat full of 300+ million names and grab yourself an Average American...no matter what color their skin is, no matter what God they worship, odds are very strong that they’re going to be a fucking idiot, by any objective standard. That’s the problem. Ignorance is an existential threat to our species.
So I’m not one of these cats who will sit around asking rhetorical questions. I know why rap sucks in 2011, just like I know why our political process is broken and our currency is taking a beating, too. If you pay attention to reality it gets a lot less mysterious.
What is it like to work with World Around Records?
Unfortunately, I’m one of the people in charge, so I’m really only on the label because I’ve got the hook up. It’s shameful, really, that they’d allow such low-grade crap to sully their back catalog just because they’re too nice to say anything about my quality control problems. Fucking hippies are all the same: cowards and stoners, right down to the last girly-man.
So what’s it like to work with them? Basically, imagine a part-time job that pays $0 an hour, but you can’t quit because you’re friends with everyone there and worse yet, you actually drank the Kool Aid and believe in the whole doomed vanity project. In other words, it’s a mental illness and until my family and friends intervene, this is only going to get worse from here.
What touring artist would like to get on the road with in 2012?
Probably Witness or That Handsome Devil. In 2012, I’d like to see a World Around package tour going by then, but it’s weird to say you only want to play with yourself, isn’t it? I like acts with live bands, I like artists who approach hip hop from a personal angle. For sheer comedy value, though, I’d never turn down a totally inappropriate and doomed opportunity like opening for Skid Row or M.O.P. or whoever that V-Nasty guy is.
What producer would you most like to work with?
Dr. Dre, becuase I want my career to end as soon as possible. For the most part, I’m done with producers. I already work with a crew of prolific and talented cats with similar aesthetic taste, so why fuck around with “networking” for it’s own sake? 2011 has been all about un-learning pretty much everything I talked about on Audible Hype. I take the music business way less seriously—not coincidentally, I get a shitload more work done now, too.
Any shout outs?
Yes, definitely. Jiddu Krishnamurti, Willie Green, and Owsley Stanley. Louis Mackey is the reason the phrase “criminally slept on” exists, but nobody realizes that yet. Man Mantis is gonna be on tour all Fall and you have gotta go see that shit. Also, catch Witness if he comes through your town: he’s got a live band that melts faces and the best hour set you’ll see from a rapper this year.
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