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Cage & DJ Mighty Mi: Spelled Out pt.1

blame it on Paul Thompson November 12, 2013
cage kill the architect

ON THE LOGISTICAL PROCESS OF MAKING SONGS

Cage: Mi will send me beats, but I’ll also throw some adjectives at him. Some stuff is kind of concept-driven. I think the whole thing was kind of…based off a few of the songs we made originally, it kind of set the tone. Kind of moody, everything has that feel to it.

Mighty Mi: In the making of the Cage beats, I’ve always just kind of looked for stuff to use that I thought would be good for him. It usually would start with a dark loop, then drums and building it from there. I would send him out the beat and he would send me back vocals and we would construct the whole song from there. So, adding on instruments with my partner out here and really making them into songs.

Cage: I think it’s just like a natural thing. We’ve always had a working relationship. We’ve known each other a long time, so that part of it was natural. If it had been something that we had to really think about, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all. I remember I used to spend a lot of time thinking about something and it would be a song that would be ‘this is going to be the deepest song I’ve ever written’, and then it ends up not even being one of the ones [you use]. cage-quote-02 I guess I’m kind of all over the place on the record, I’ll go from feeling I want to convey some truth, but then at the same time, the next day I don’t give a fuck about doing that at all. How do I put that all in the same record? You know, if you were to learn something new, if you were to find out some piece of information that you felt that your friends or family were in jeopardy and then you wanted to go warn them, but then the next day you were like ‘ah, fuck ‘em’. [Laughter]

ON HOW THAT PROCESS IS DIFFERENT NOW THAT IN THE PAST

Cage: I understand a lot more and there’s a lot more knowledge in my brain. There are a lot more thoughts going on with the subject matter. I felt like the subject matter was what kept me occupied—writing about the macabre and the strange shit in my life and the injustices and wanting revenge against the people that had wronged you—and I think there’s a lot you relate to. Now there’s just more thought behind it as far as what I want to say. Because you know how something might affect someone, whereas in the past you’re kind of just throwing it all out and whatever sticks, sticks. Now you know what sticks and what doesn’t. But I’ve always been into, you know, career suicide.

ON WORRYING ABOUT AN AUDIENCE

Cage: I mean, who am I thinking about? It’s the dumbest way to fucking make art—to be thinking about if someone’s going to fucking like it or not. The minute you start thinking about what people are going to like or what people want, it’s fucking over with. If anything, all I’ve ever wanted to do is rebel against anyone. I think it’s funny that [peoples’] opinions or thoughts are projected on me when from the beginning it was always ‘fuck you, fuck you, you shouldn’t like me, you shouldn’t listen to me’. You shouldn’t want to like me. I’m the antithesis of everything that would be loved in the pop realm. I don’t think that the pressures of making music on that type of level is anything that I ever wanted to experience in my life. But it’s funny because people will throw that onto you—that that’s what everyone wants. ‘Everyone wants to sell millions of records! Everyone wants to be the biggest artist!’ Do they? I don’t fucking want that. I didn’t think anyone was going to like this from day one. It was never ‘ah, people are going to love this shit!’

Mighty Mi: [Making this album was] total freedom. Especially him as an emcee—what he writes about, the structure of his songs are…[Laughter] We didn’t think of any [concerns] like, ‘yo, radio play’, or ‘we gotta make a single’ or ‘this beat is too slow’. None of that stuff was going in. And I guess that’s just a sign of the times and where we’re at in our lives. We’ve been through making hip-hop where we felt we had to make a single, or it had to be a certain tempo, or it had to sound a certain way. cage-quote-03 We went through all that. But we were never really about that—if you listen to the first records in our careers, they were never really commercially viable records. Like, Eon and I were always kind of making records [like those] we were influenced by growing up. Really, we had no commercial aspirations in mind and it just happened that some of the songs that we made got popular in a certain genre and we took it from there.

Cage: I don’t really think. I just kind of go into it and black out. I just go into this little world. My pen is filled with all this cool stuff—conspiracy theories, past experience, struggling with quasi-fame. You have this whole world of shit in there. The least interesting thing that would be in there would be what some random person wants. If me making a record is me being in the world with all this shit going on, then other people are just pedestrians walking by. I’m not taking strangers into consideration whatsoever. I just assume they all hate me and want me dead anyway.

How could I sell a million records? I could guarantee you there’s not a million people in the entire world that I could relate, or that I would feel comfortable having a conversation with. There are probably a hundred thousand people on the planet that I could talk to. I couldn’t imagine it could be more.

Check back Thursday to hear Cage and Mi speak more on KRS-One, Youtube monetization, and Camu Tao. 

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