Interview: Lyrics Born

Indra Raj: You’re listening to KGNU FM 88.5 Boulder, KGNU 1390 Denver, and my name is Indra Raj. My guest is Lyrics Born, a trailblazing independent rapper and founding member of the Bay Area’s Soul Sides and Quantum Projects collectives after a 30 year career that includes 16 albums, festival milestones, and film and TV appearances. He released his final album, “Goodbye, Sticky Rice” last fall and is currently on his final tour with the same name. Lyrics Born will be performing a KGNU present show as a part of this tour at Ophelia’s in Denver on May 2nd. Welcome to KGNU. 

Lyrics Born: Thank you. My pleasure. 

Indra Raj: I think the thing that I’m wondering about the most, and it’s rare that we get to talk to the artists when they make this decision, your last album was your final album and this is your final tour. So can you tell me a little bit about the decision making process in all of that?

Lyrics Born: 16 albums, like you said “Goodbye, Sticky Rice.” At this point I’ve been a recording artist for longer than I haven’t been, and I just have other things in my life that are calling me. For those that have been following me online, I have a cooking show called Dinner in Place, and it recently got picked up and I can’t tell you all the details right now, but that will be made public very soon. And I just have other things that I wanted to pursue. 16 albums, I feel like I put my time in for the moment, and it doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to make music. It doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to do features or guest appearances or collabs. I’ll still continue to do concerts and performances, but as far as full on Lyrics Born albums, I don’t have any plans for that in the near future. The Goodbye, Sticky Rice tour will likely be the last tour that I do, so I’ll probably still do shows, but I don’t know that I’ll go on the road for months on end behind a particular project anymore.

Indra Raj: And just talking and hearing about that, a cooking show and then also I wanted to talk about this viral social media post that happened that Snoop Dogg picked up and all the rest. Technology and the space surrounding music are always changing and over the past three decades for sure, that’s been happening. So has that change influenced where you’re going with this decision, do you think? 

Lyrics Born: It’s actually made it harder, it’s made this decision much harder. I gotta be honest with you, six months ago when we put this album out I thought that we would put the album out, I would do my tours and that’d pretty much be it. It’d be a smooth and relatively quiet transition into my next venture or endeavor or whatever. So then one day I look at my DMs and Snoop Dogg sends me a bunch of thumbs up emojis. Thumbs up, the microphone emoji, a bunch of explosions, I’m like, what the hell? Because I don’t know Snoop. Obviously we’re all fans of Snoop, who’s not a fan of Snoop Dogg? We’re all fans. But I don’t know him personally. And then I look at my Instagram and it says, “Snoop Dogg is following you.” I’m like, “okay.” At this point, I have maybe 20,000 followers. Next thing I know, I look at another part of my page and I have about 300 reposts, and I’m like, “what the hell’s going on?” We had just dropped a video like a couple days before. And then I look and I’m like, “what is everybody reposting?” And he reposted my video for “Take It 2 Far” on his Instagram page. So long story short, I will forever be indebted and in gratitude to Snoop Dogg. That video between his page and my pages ends up doing 6 million views. Every video that we have dropped since then, talking since October, since the album came out, has done no less than 2 million views. Including the one we just dropped for “Shades of Jade.” It’s the highest viewed six months later. Now, going back to your question, no label involvement. I did no promotion whatsoever on this. I did everything I normally do. I hire a publicist, I hire a radio promoter. But the point is, there was nothing that I nor any other label could have done that could have ever matched the Snoop effect. You know what I tell people is when I was a kid, I just remember if you were on the Oprah Show and she held your book up on camera. Suddenly your book was on the New York Times bestseller list. And they called that the Oprah Effect. Well, there’s a Snoop Dogg effect. And I thought about it, and this was just before he did the Olympics. This is probably the most famous human being on the planet earth. Suddenly it made my decision to gracefully bow out, no pun intended, incredibly difficult. Incredibly difficult because here we are, six months later, I went from 20,000 followers on Instagram. I’m now at 150,000. went from 1000 or 2000 followers on TikTok. We’re basically at 40,000. So you’re talking about, I’m about to get real Asian here, we’re talking about double digit growth. In many ways, people are like, “what the hell is wrong with you? This is the best you’ve ever done. At this stage in your career, are you stupid? At this stage in your career, you’re having more exposure, more success, more levels than you know you have in the past 20.” And that’s true. Like I haven’t really seen it like this since 2007, 2008. You know what I mean? When I put out my fourth or fifth album, whenever that was. You’re right but having said that I’m a stubborn Japanese man and I’m moving forward. But sure, have I reconsidered everything considering the social media explosion? Everything that I ever tried to get out of this broken system, known as the recording industry, just totally evaporated with one co-sign and me following it up with more effort. I spent an entire career swimming upstream in a system that was really not built for me. You know what I mean? And one co-sign from a wildly famous individual just obliterated the entire model. And ever since then, it’s changed the way that I’ve looked at my relationship to other artists too. I repost people like crazy now. Now that I have that voice. I’m not in the millions of followers obviously, but now that I have, I understand that power. It’s made me feel much more optimistic about the future of this business and of artists, especially artists who have always existed on the margins, 

Indra Raj: Yeah, these organic platforms that are really built by real fans and listeners who appreciate the art form. You do have this platform now and we see so many of these people who build these platforms and then change it up and it still works for them. You’re shifting to this Dinner in Place show. Are you gonna use your social media to pump that up too? Are you already doing that? 

Lyrics Born: I’m pumping up everything I do now with this newfound following and platform. I’ll tell you what’s so amazing about this and what’s beautiful is that, the last five years have been difficult for me because a lot of the people that I came up with in my peer group are just for whatever reason not with us anymore. Like they’re not as active or, sadly, a lot of them passed away, and it’s not lost on me how special this opportunity is that I’ve been granted. You know what I mean? And so it’s made me be more conscientious about how I use that power, and also about the value of time, and how much time and energy and effort I can save myself and I can save others with just a good look, you know what I mean? With just a little bit of shine, just that in one single motion, what Snoop did for me, it cost him nothing. All he did was repost something that he liked. That was it. If one motion that simple can change the trajectory of somebody’s career, I have to do that for other people. I have to do that for someone else. I have to do that for myself. You know what I mean? I have to. And you just see how powerful our voices are, particularly when we get into situations and positions where we have a lot of attention, 

Indra Raj: Talking about this tour and the music, you’ve got such a unique blend of styles going on in the music that you make, how is that translating to the tour? What can people expect from the live performance? 

Lyrics Born: There’s just so much material at this point. It’s 16 albums, so when I get together with the band now for rehearsals and we’re putting shows together, it’s hard, ’cause there’s so much to choose from. What era do we represent? What would be the most appropriate for a given audience? And we do think about it like that. The focus is on “Goodbye, Sticky Rice” for sure and the cool thing about that is a lot of these songs are delivered differently and they are sonically different from my previous albums, which is very cool because it’s another dimension added to what I do or what I have done. But then you still have this other whole slew of fans that have been with me for decades, and it’s what every artist of wisdom, let’s call ’em legacy. When I say that word, I have to look up into the sky, put my hand up like this. It’s what legacy artists do, you have to be cognizant of the fact that you now have multi-generational fans, and I love it so much. I love it. Now when I do, “Goodbye, Sticky Rice” material, and you may have come to the show with your kids or whatever, and your kids know the songs, but maybe you don’t. The grown folks are like, “what are you saying? What is this? What are you doing? This my artist,” and it’s like, “well, you brought me here. It’s my artist.” You know what I mean? So it’s very cool. It’s a very interesting experience, and I think being able to weave all those songs and all those eras into a two hour show with a live band and me rapping my ass off is a lot of fun. 

Indra Raj: And as someone who, I’m Indian American, you’re Japanese American, so I have to ask about this ’cause 30 years in the hip hop space as a Japanese American, I imagine you haven’t seen a lot of people like you in these spaces. I’m always curious as someone who’s felt that way throughout my life, how you’ve navigated that and how you think it’s influenced your career as an artist. 

Lyrics Born: That’s a great question and that’s a question that I love answering and frankly, the more I get asked that question, the more life I live and the more information I have and I can turn around. So it was very difficult. It continues to be very difficult because I think, just going back to the top of this conversation, I came up in an industry that was just not built for us. You know what I mean? There were no label heads that were Asian. There was nobody there. If you look at the board members of these corporations that were signing all these bands in the 90’s and the 2000’s, I tell this story all the time and I don’t tell it from a place of bitterness, although I did feel that way at one time. I tell it more of a place of triumph because when I was coming up, literally every single one of my peers that was doing it at the level that I was, got signed to a major label, some of them got signed, got dropped, and resigned. What I was told every single time when I looked at my entire peer group, when we were all independent artists, I had the same or better numbers. I had the same or better record sales, I had the same or better ticket sales, I had the same or more radio play. I had the same or better, the same or better, the same or better. But what I was told repeatedly by the labels was you’re too hard to market. And I’m like, buddy, the marketing’s already been done. All you need to do is put out my fifth album. I’ve already done four albums worth of marketing for you. And it suddenly became clear to me that this playing field is wildly uneven. And then I would recall all my experiences going into these agencies, going into these label offices, going into these marketing agencies and ad agencies, going into these booking agencies, meeting all the festival and club promoters. No Asians whatsoever. So that told me two things. A, I have no cultural leverage within this system. If I’m gonna bump myself up, it’s gonna be because somehow the system changed or because I just created such a ground swell. The overwhelming cultural pressure on these institutions, they were gonna have to force me to give me opportunities. What ultimately happened was it forced me to start my own label. It forced me to put out my own records, it forced me to self-distribute. And thankfully the internet, digital distribution was on the come up so that I wasn’t reliant upon this machine. It’s like all these artists would funnel into a label, and then very few would come out the other side and make it into the general public’s consciousness. Obviously now we know that’s not true. Anybody can make records, anybody can make music, upload it and have it be available. That was not the case for the first 15 years of my career. You had to have some sort of apparatus to get yourself in front of people and be seen and be exposed. Thankfully technology changed, all those closed doors forced me to create my own company, my own records, my own label, my own staff, my own infrastructure, my own system. I can say honestly, 30 years later, I’m probably the only artist regardless of complexion or ethnic background, I’m probably the only artist in any genre of my age that’s been putting out records for as long. Maybe a handful that still owns his entire catalog. And that’s almost 30 titles at this point. 30 full length titles which I see now that the universe had a larger plan for me, and to have that all culminate with the biggest album of my career at this moment, it’s almost like a case study in a lot of ways. How do you succeed as an Asian American in the entertainment business? Because think about it, for you and I, there was no roadmap. Like when I was starting, there were zero people that I could point to and say, “oh, that’s how you have a 32 year career in hip hop as an Asian American artist. Let me just follow those footsteps.” There was nobody, like literally zero. And I don’t take any of that lightly. I realize that I do occupy this special piece in this special space in history, and I was telling a friend of mine who’s a prominent Asian American actor, and I’m just like, I’m so glad I stuck it out just so that now I can participate in what I helped to build and create. And for me, that’s particularly fulfilling. It’s this kind of bigger plan also that sort of DIY spirit kind of pulls into this whole Snoop Dogg effect thing. Like it’s really just happening because you did it and because people are paying attention, which is awesome.

Indra Raj: So you’re gonna be at Ophelia’s in Denver on May 2nd. Lyrics Born KGNU present show. More information at kgu.org, but how can our listeners follow you and what you’re doing, all the viral sensations on TikTok and Instagram? 

Lyrics Born: Yeah, so my Instagram handle and TikTok is @lyricsborn. That’s where all the action is. And I’ll be on the road on the Goodbye, Sticky Rice tour until it ends. I’ll be out there with the whole band. The album is out now. The album is almost at 2 million streams, so we’re on fire like a rice cooker. 

Indra Raj: Love to hear it. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

Lyrics Born: Absolutely. My pleasure.