Nasty P - Self-Made Mack (ONLINE VERSION)

Nasty P is the resident DJ at Edinburgh's Soulbiscuits, and the producer of one album, 2005's When The Smoke Clears. His forthcoming artist album on KFM will feature guests like Skinnyman, Roots Manuva and Oddisee, but to whet your appetite, he has released a bootleg compilation: It Sounds Nicer When It's Nasty. Cheekily pairing Nas with Bob Marley, Mos Def with Aretha Franklin, and Kanye with Nina Simone, It Sounds Nicer… is conceptually light-hearted, but flawlessly produced (unlike most bootlegs). Chilling in Edinburgh's Dragonfly, Nasty P gave us the lowdown on It's Nicer..., his forthcoming LP, and the Edinburgh hip-hop scene.

Why did you record a bootleg album?

With my first album (When The Smoke Clears), I garnered a lot of interest in Europe, which is essential if I ever want to tour. I did this album because I thought there would be a lot of people out there who might not know who I am, but they know who Jay-Z is, and they know who Jimi Hendrix is, so it was definitely a promotional thing. I guess it's kinda like with Dangermouse's LP (The Grey Album, a mixture of Jay-Z's The Black Album and The Beatles The White Album). With the exception of Dangermouse, a lot of mashup stuff is literally this instrumental with that accapella, whereas I've done it along the lines of a theme that suits a particular vibe, which I have chopped into little pieces that actually fit. If a guy's rapping and he pauses in the original song, I can strip the beats down at that point. It was good in a sense – it made me make beats differently, because the way someone raps determines how the beat goes. I would consider it one of the better kinds of mashup.

Was there a novelty element?

Some of the tunes, there was a tiny bit of novelty. Like Dead Big, it just came to me that there's three rappers that are really good, they're all dead – I probably shouldn't laugh at that – and they all had Big in their names... a lot of it was trial and error. The Nas tune, One Love, was easy – Bob Marley's One Love is in a similar vein. There are 13 tracks on the album, but I've done about 25. I'm just throwing them out there! It's kinda good that way.

How are you approaching distribution and licensing?

The one problem I ran into was, when we spoke to the label and the distributors, their estimate was that it would push a few thousand. The learning experience for me was that, with things like that [the bootleg craze of the last few years], you have to do it when it's bubbling. For example, Dangermouse had already brought his out. His timing was perfect. I mean his was novelty in a sense – the fusion of a black guy and a white band, and that makes The Grey Album, so there's novelty in the same sense as in my track Dead Big. So the time came to come out with it, and I thought, 'Right, let's go,' but the Standards Agency started cracking down hard. Like what happened with DJ Drama. Because he was selling all these bootlegs, it was essentially the same thing. There are huge amount of copyright issues with it. If they can prove you're making money out of it... I mean, DJ Drama went to jail! They found him with like, 800,000 CDs. They done him as if he'd been doing racketeering. So what happened with me was that the Standards Agency had clamped down on the distributors to say: 'I wouldn't advise it; it's not a good idea.' But me being me, I just thought, 'Fuck it, let's do it anyway.' Websites and certain stores will take it on. So rather than just selling it, it's promotional. It's been played on Radio 1 three times. With someone who is already on a label, or someone in Dangermouse's position, by the time they pull it it's cool, because your own album is coming out anyway.

How do you see It's Nicer... in comparison with your first album, and your forthcoming one?

I'd be lying if I didn't say that I did this album to make my stuff a little bit more accessible. You know when you're plugging something and you say, 'I would buy it.' You think I'd say that because I'm selling it, but I actually would buy it! Hopefully this will plug on, along with my night Soulbiscuits, and then I can drop my new album. I've got quite a few guests: Skinnyman, a guy called Oddisee (of the Rhymesayers), a few skits with Roots Manuva and Mad Skillz. My first album was really well received in Japan of all places. The funny thing for me is that when you do things for the first time round, you don't think quite as much about building it up. So this time round I've got some excellent guests on it. The first one was much more instrumental, so the next album is going to be a lot more vocal.

Have you ever considered working with the other artists on KFM, like Penpushers?

It's not that I wouldn't use them on a track, it's just that there's never been a situation to use them, if you know what I mean. Essentially, I would say I'm a producer. I make music. I would quite happily so stuff for most people – especially if they want to pay me! As far as my own stuff goes, I get a lot more anal. Even with Skinnyman, I actually almost considered not doing it. But I convinced myself, 'Nah that would be silly.' Also with Soulbiscuits, if I put on a guest at the club, I can sometimes arrange a little deal where we can do this or that, so even through those lines, you build up a rapport. Skinnyman knows Blak Twang, and so on. I've met Roots Manuva a bunch of times, I wanted to get him on the album, but he's a busy man.

So what are the challenges in promoting yourself as an independent producer?

The problem with me is my consistency. It's always been there to a certain extent – rather than say, finishing this line or that line, or sending the demo to some guy in Japan tomorrow instead of sometime in the next three months, I can lose focus. I should have been and played in Germany, in Portugal. These were emails I'd been sent where I was like, 'Cool, I'll get back to you...' and I just forget about it. In terms of the future beyond the next LP, I think up to now I have been quite selfish. In future, I'd like to be doing this with more people. To actually have a movement. Before, I'd have looked at it like: 'Gimme the tour, and we'll sort it out after that. It's my tour.' But my attitude's changed. Now I figure you sort it out, then get the tour. But that will come, definitely.

You have been part of the Edinburgh hip-hop scene for some time – what's your take on how it has progressed over the years?

Edinburgh's culture is different to Glasgow. In Glasgow, there's loads of Glasweigans. In Edinburgh, there are people from all over the place. Not that that causes a segregation, but people do work more individually. That's what I've noticed. I think it would be a stronger force if someone were to group it together – then it would start getting taken a bit more seriously. For people to get inspired, they need to see the inspiration around them. I'm not saying, like, 'Check me, I've done this, and this, and that,' but I've done a lot. I would be more than happy for people to look at what I've done and take it to the next level. It gets stagnant when people don't work with each other, but you do tend to find that in smaller cities. Music is changing. People are more accepting of diversity in a band's sound. Four years ago, I was like, 'It's gotta be Premier or Pete Rock.' Everything else was just gay. How immature, I suppose. But things change. I just try to think of it as music, and if it's good it's good. Take hip-hop in general – it was New York for ages, then it was the West Coast, now it's all over the place – deep South, Baltimore. There's quite a large percentage it which is just talking about nonsense, but the actual music – the cadences, the flows and the dances – you can take a lot from that.

What other projects are you involved in right now?

Profisee [of Great Ezcape / ex-Scotland Yard] and I have done an EP together, featuring tracks like Roslin – that's a whole tune about the Roslin Chapel thing that we were trying to bring out around the time of The Da Vinci Code. We've also recently done a mixtape, which is available form both of our Myspace pages – about 80 percent of the mixtape is my beats, with Profisee rhyming. That's really worth checking. There's definitely a chemistry.

Tell us a bit about the kit you used to make It's Nicer... Did you use any modern software, like Ableton Live?

Being a purist when you're making stuff, the problem you have is an age old one – when you have equipment, as opposed to software like Ableton Live (which kids can get really easily these days), you can do things really easily; but it's only through having limitations that you become more creative. It's necessary. You have to say, 'Okay, I'm gonna plug this into that, and re-sample this, then it will sound like so.' Take 2 Many DJs for example. I mean, it's great, but I see it as similar to people just throwing things in Ableton. The process I use is that I always start with a vibe, never anything technical. It has to be a vibe – everything technical flows from that. I used to have an MPC 2000, but I recently sold that. Now I've got an MPC 1000. What I will usually do is chop up the samples and put them on the pads, so I've got the actual sounds I'm going to use. I'll be playing the accapella vocal through a sampler, and then chopping and cutting the pads until it fits. Then I put both tracks onto Cubase, and anything that doesn't quite fit, I can change there. At the end of the day, One Love by Bob Marley is like 70bpm, and the Nas accapella is 95bpm, so that requires a bit of stretching. But with the MPC, every pad is a different sample from the Marley track, and when I push one key after another, the first key cuts out. So it's actually like I'm playing a piano, and therefore it's a bit easier to make a slow song go a bit faster. With this bootleg project, it helped because there's a gameplan. When you just make a song from scratch, it can be difficult to know where to start. With the Kanye West vs. Nina Simone tune, it was the bassline that held it together. I tried to keep it simple. Take Dre or Timbaland for example. When you hear a Dre beat, sometimes the samples just sound so sonically crisp. When you have too many samples, they start sounding like a sloppy mess really. I had to chop the Nina Simone sample into bits as well, because the original tune isn't in 4/4 time. I thinned the main sound out as well.

Are you a hip-hop purist?

It's not so much that I'm a hip-hop purist. Back in the days of Master P, we used to see adverts for Master P projects in the back of The Source, and it'd be like, the worst cover you'd ever seen, with cheesy bling and so on. Basically what happened for those guys is that inevitably, they broke through – because they just kept on working at it. But by the time anyone heard of them, they were like, five albums deep. People got used to fleeting events, they lost their connection with what hip-hop means. Personally, I don't need to get involved in grime or whatever just because it's happening now. I'd rather take an element, and then give you my stuff, and then hopefully my stuff will be what's happening now. It's good to listen and spark ideas.

Where do you see yourself in ten years time?

In ten years time, I'll be in the Dragonfly, drinking a pint... No, I don't know. I'll certainly be investing in certain things. Possibly, I'd have a studio. I'll still be involved in music as a producer. I'm wanting to move towards a more collective approach, so I'd be handling the business side of things. I'd like to say that I'll still be self-made. Since I was about 23, pretty much all my income has been through myself, as Nasty P. I haven't worked for the man. I'd like to keep it that way.