Doomtree Speaks (And Yells and Raps)

 

For Doomtree, Minneapolis’s steadfast hip-hop collective, kings and thrones give way to a powerful wall of individual voices winging rhymes and toothy lyrics. Democratically owned, manned and managed by its eight emcees and DJ’s, one of the truly exceptional things about this label is its dedication to effectively breaking ground not only in making music, but also in the business of producing it.
Each member commands his or her own individual style, discography, and fan base, but is a distinctly vital limb of Doomtree, the new model for the all-inclusive, do-it-yourself record label. While not everyone in the team comes from an expected hip-hop background, Doomtree’s dedicated fans, numbering in the tens of thousands, respect the group’s commitment to one another and to building their own house from the ground up.
With the release of Sims’ EP “Wildlife”, the rapper’s second CD this year; Dessa’s melodic, mythology-inspired new album “Castor: The Twin”; and the upcoming November release of the collaborative “No Kings”, 2011 was a flurry of creative activity for the motley group, which consists of P.O.S, Dessa, Sims, Lazerbeak, PaperTiger, Cecil Otter, Mike Mictlan, and their indispensable intern Ander Other.
Backstage at Doomtree’s CMJ show at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory, MotherThunder caught up with emcees P.O.S, Sims, and Dessa about following their own driving forces while keeping true to the success of the Doomtree crew.

P.O.S

MotherThunder: Most recording artists today have to be involved in their own label and in the process of creating their albums. What makes Doomtree successful?
P.O.S: Is it successful? (laughs)
MT: Well, what is the measure of success for a label?

P.O.S: I don’t know; I really don’t. I know that we work really hard to not have to work normal jobs, or to work normal jobs as minimally as possible. That is my personal bar of success for being a rapper: the fact that I don’t have to do anything except for make songs. I don’t make much money, and I don’t think that I have a better job, necessarily, when it comes to hours. Because in order to be self-employed, you have to work almost all the time, but I like my job. I can call it success as long as I don’t have to do anything else. I don’t know if it’s true for everyone in Doomtree.

MT: I follow Doomtree’s website, Twitter feeds, and Facebook page, and it’s obvious that you’re great at sending out your message. Do you have a team to help you with this, or do you do it all yourself? P.O.S: Everything that we do is us, pretty much. It’s seven of us and Ander and a couple other people who help with different things here and there, but no real plan. We’ve been doing this for almost 10 years now and every year we refine what we did the year before, with no map or a plan.

MT: You each have your own specific style, you all make your own records; then you have the False Hopes albums, and now, altogether, “No Kings”. How is the process different for creating each one?P.O.S: That’s really it, The False Hopes stuff (came) before mixtapes were popular. It was a short mixtape trying to figure out what we were working on while working on solo records. Doomtree’s records are all seven of us collaborating. We only do that once in a while, and all the years in between we make solo records, with each other and with each other’s help, and with each other’s personal ear and taste in mind. We all like working with each other; we’re all friends who respect each other’s musical tastes. That’s the best part about it.

MT: Do you think it’s harder to work with your friends or alone?
P.O.S: I’ve never not worked with my friends so I have nothing to measure it against. It’s always hard to work.

MT: That, everyone can understand. When you write an album, are you trying to reach a specific audience or do you write for yourself?
P.O.S: A little bit of both. If we’re talking about a P.O.S record, I write almost entirely for me. But I’m aware at this point that a lot of people are going to hear it, and that some people are going to pay attention to the stuff I say. So I have to put the way that I feel about things into it; I never liked songs that didn’t mean anything or that didn’t make sense. I want everything to resonate in some way. It’s music the way that I like to hear it.

MT: You have a huge fan base in (hometown) Minneapolis. Where do you get the best response outside of Minnesota?
P.O.S: It depends on who I’m on tour with. Pretty much every city has figured out a little bit about us at this point.

MT: How about internationally?
P.O.S: I’ve done a couple tours through the UK, Australia, and Europe.
MT: Tell me a little bit about The Four Fists. P.O.S: The Four Fists is me with Astronautalis, and it’s one of those things where we’ve known each other since 2004 and always wanted to work together, and gotten to be really good friends over time. We really wanted to work, and we were trying to figure out something that would be unique from what we normally do, not just blending our stuff together, so we picked themes and we started reading short stories. The first batch of stories was written by a St. Paul writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s coming out sometime next year.

MT: “No Kings” is coming out after the release of Kanye and Jay-Z’s latest album, “Watch the Throne”, we’re now in the throes of Occupy Wall Street, and The Four Fists is based off the work of a very iconic American writer. Is there a theme to this record, or did it come together this way by accident?
P.O.S: I don’t know if it is by accident, or according to a specific theme. We’ve been talking down to people trying to rule us since the beginning of our crew; it’s been almost 10 years that we’ve been making little references to kings dying. And Occupy Wall Street; that was only a matter of time too, because due to the nature of money, it’s just bound to pile on top of itself until everyone feels broken by it.

SIMS

M.T: Does the release of “No Kings” have anything to do with the coinciding release of “Watch the Throne” and the momentum of Occupy Wall Street? Is there a purpose to the title?
Sims: There is, but it has nothing to do with neither Occupy Wall Street nor Watch the Throne. If you go back through the catalogue of Doomtree songs, the idea of “no kings” or the actual words “no kings”, or a similar amalgamation of these words appears all the way back to 2004.
So this is something that’s been ingrained in our belief system as people, and who we are as people comes through our music naturally. I appreciate both those movements, but not enough to speak on them. I’ll leave those topics to people who know enough to speak about them, and I will continue to speak about what I know.

M.T: When you came together as Doomtree, did you start out as a unit or as separate artists?
Sims: We were all solo artists, and we were all struggling. In many ways, we’re still struggling. But in many ways, it’s a different struggle, a different set of dues entirely. So we were all sort of struggling along and decided to band together to accomplish the goals that we could, whether something as simple as “I can give a show and you can give a show”, and “if we put all of our money together, we could get a record out and you can get your record out”.
The idea was to form a sort of artist co-op, primarily because no one would deal with us. No one would give us shows and no one would certainly put out our records at the time. We are a label by choice, because we don’t want to put records out with anyone else. Because we’re doing fine.

MT: Do you ever want to expand Doomtree, or do you feel that you’re working with the people you want to be working with?
Sims: We want to expand, but it’s all about sustainable growth. So if we got a loan for a million dollars, we’re not sure we’d know what to do with that money. We’ve never taken a loan throughout our entire history. We’ve done everything we wanted to do by the revenue generated by the music that we create. Growth is good.

MT: In an age when many artists work off independent labels or create their own music, do you feel like there is a certain metric of success that other labels don’t have, or haven’t figured out yet?
Sims: I mean, I feel like we’re a good model for the idea that you can do it. I think there are people who do it better than us, and I think there are people who do it worse than us, but I don’t care to even think about who’s doing better or worse, because it’s all irrelevant; it’s luck and it’s the people that you reach with song. All that (other) stuff is sort of superfluous parts of the music industry.
I think the idea that you can create your own destiny is the idea. We’re going to work hard on both making good songs and working hard on how we put those songs out, and work hard once those songs are out to continue to let people know that they are out, and to continue touring; we’re going to do all this stuff on a shoestring budget, and I think that the only model that we’re good for is that you have the ability to do it if you’ve got the chops.

MT: That’s a very inspiring message! Sims: But if you’ve got the chops, so don’t just “do it” (laughs).

MT: What now? Now you’re trying to discourage your fan base? Sims: Yeah! I am trying to discourage people. I’m trying to say get your fucking music right before you try to present it to the world. Spend some time with your craft; really work on your music. I think that’s the biggest part of what we did. We’re ten years deep in owning this label, and we’re now starting to come onto the national scene. Because we fucking sucked when we started, straight up! And now we’re starting to get better at what we’re doing, because we work really hard at creating better music every time.

MT: But you didn’t believe that you sucked at the beginning, did you?
Sims: No, but it’s pretty obvious to know when you suck. It really is.

MT: Not if you’re doing work that is, without lying to yourself, to the best of your ability.
Sims: Yeah, but your ability may just be shitty. That’s the bottom line. Your ability might not be there, you might not be talented, or you might be talented, but you might not be living up to your potential. You might be giving it your all, but your all may is just not there yet. What I’m saying is to be critical of your own music, and work really hard at making that music as good as it can be.
And don’t spend all of your time worrying about where you’re at as far as numbers go: record sales, attendance, money generated, all that stuff doesn’t f*cking matter. Make your music perfect, and then put it out to the world. Don’t be afraid to fall on your face a bunch of times. None of us have lived up to our potential yet, that’s all I’m saying.

DESSA

 

MT: Do you feel like you work better as a team, or that at times you need to break off into your own music projects?
Dessa: Doomtree has been really good about providing each artist room to be a solo recording artist and to be a member of Doomtree. On the whole, we’ve done a good job of making it an “and” scenario instead of an “either/or” scenario.

MT: Each Doomtree member has an individual style: you and Cecil Otter are very literary; POS has that spark, etc. Do you think that this variety of feeling and nuance speaks to your fans? Dessa: I think that people who aren’t members of Doomtree are better commentators on that. It’s like trying to guess how you’re perceived when you walk into a room. I can make some guesses about the assumptions that people make, rightly or wrongly, but as a member of the collective I think my primary concern is making good stuff, working hard to promote the music that the guys make, and worrying less about exactly why it would appeal to fans, instead trusting that our art will find a place in the wider world.

MT: When writing together, do you ever have a sense of yourself trying to guard your own voice- you’re the only woman in the group, for example, somebody else is coming from a rap background, and someone else has been doing this for a very long time- or do you forget all this and write in a collective voice?
Dessa: I couldn’t speak for all the guys, but I think we worry more about trying to make fresh and authentic stuff, and if we’re at all aware of the caricature that we fill in DT, we’d be more interested in expanding out of that role than making sure that we fit into it. So if somebody says, “Oh, she’s that chick that writes soft, introspective stuff”, I’d be tempted to write a song to prove that I’m more than that.

MT: Did you siphon different inspiration into “Castor” than you did into “No Kings”?
Dessa: Yeah. My most recent record, “Castor: The Twin”, is 11 songs long, and 10 of them are ambitious musical rearrangements of songs that had been released earlier. That album was actually born out of a West Coast tour that we did with a live band, and when we came back, we found that the live songs we did were really different from the ones that had been recorded.
So we found that for the stand-up bass, the guitar, for grand piano and strings and a live drummer, we’d rearranged a lot of the production than we were initially interpreting. So we made that record because in part, showgoers said “Hey, I really like this version; do you have this anywhere?” And it’s happened enough times that I said, “We should go make that”. So the band and I visited the studio for a week and recorded those new versions.

MT: Do you want to spend more time in the future pursuing that kind of musicality, or now have the urge to make something more forceful?
Dessa: I don’t know that they’re diametrically opposed, but soft, organic stuff tends to lead to mellow, melodic lyrics, and hard, banging production leads to edgier rap. But I don’t think that the two need be mutually exclusive, so for my next record, instead of choosing a direction to go towards, I just like to consider my palate expanded.
When sitting down to write any one song, I can say, “Would an 808 be good on this song? Would a double snare be good on this song? Would a clarinet, or a field snare, or orchestral drum or vibraphone be good on this song?” From the past year of working with live instrumentalists, I now know what those sounds can do.

MT: You are the latest member of Doomtree, correct?
Dessa: Yes, Sims and I joined the latest; six years ago.

MT: And do you ever feel like things fall into place the way the way they are supposed to?
Dessa: Let’s just say, I thought I would be a professor.