Photo by Monika Mogi
Jerry Paper
Stones Throw Records Showcase Tuesday, Oct. 23, 8 p.m., $12-$14, Kings, Raleigh www.kingsraleigh.com
In a rare 2004 interview with Wax Poetics, the enigmatic producer and rapper Madlib offered a
choice bit of advice on the subject of sample selection: “Take shit off cassette, VCR, iTunes, anything. Some water dripping, it don’t matter.”
Instead of fiendishly sticking to dusty crates of records or one particular era of music for nuggets, he endorses carving your own instinctual pathway through sound, whatever the source may be. Either Madlib picked an excellent label to support his efforts, or the Los Angeles label Stones Throw Records gleaned advice early on from him, as that quote echoes the precise inventive spirit that has kept Stones Throw relevant in the indie label mix for over twenty years. Since 1996, the venerable Los Angeles institution has survived more industry shakeups and dead trends than you could rattle off, and Stones Throw remains a haven for a certain enduring strain of neo-West Coast eclecticism and cool.
Two particularly well-known titles demonstrate as much. There’s the freewheeling 2004 collaboration between Madlib and MF Doom, Madvillain, which became a defining cult rap release of the Adult Swim generation. A barrage of leftfield, often cartoonish sampled beats and lyricism dripping with inscrutable, deeply woven jokes and allusions, it works as a humorous, possibly ironic record. On the flip side, it functions as a substantial, meaningful album that teenagers can emotionally invest in, a duality that feels like a defining theme of millennial art.
The other is J. Dilla’s endlessly influential 2006 classic, Donuts, which dropped three days before his untimely death. Donuts minted Dilla, a distinguished producer for years before that final release, into an all-time production deity. His name instantaneously became the gold standard for a sort of chopped-beats wunderkind producer, and his soul-soaked beat-making style bled into both the underground and the mainstream. Together, Madvillain and Donuts exist in a sort of rarified air of legend and rumor and debate that few records reach anymore.
In an autobiographical label history on the Stones Throw website, founder Peanut Butter Wolf, aka Chris Manak, provides some context about what propelled the label to such highs relatively early on. He grew up in San Jose, California, a military brat who voraciously consumed records and the emanations of eighties West Coast radio. In fact, the story goes that later, in 1998, he originally heard Madlib’s first group, Lootpack, on an area college radio station. According to an interview with Mixmag, he feverishly obtained the number on the group’s obscure twelve-inch record by calling the on-air deejay, which led him to their manager, Madlib’s father. Thus began Manak’s relationship with the reclusive producer that would endure for the next two decades.
Mercifully, the label didn’t die on the hill of turntablism or backpack rap, like their peers at esteemed but shuttered rap emporiums like Rawkus or Def Jux. To this day, Stones Throw continue to shun all obvious expectations about the product they should release. The label has served up new records and reissues from Pasadena R&B king Dam-Funk, electronic pioneer Bruce Haack, violinist Sudan Archives, and Omar Rodriguez-López of the Mars Volta, to name a few. They specialize in the exact sort of diffuse material that dudes like Dilla loved and burned through for source material.
This week, a Stones Throw-branded tour rolls through Kings in Raleigh, highlighting several of the label’s recent offbeat alliances. It’s quite the ragtag collection of lovable weirdos. Among them is Virginia’s Stimulator Jones, who channels grown-and-sexy Oran Juice Jones affectations into a striking, pitch-perfect throwback R&B style that avoids sounding like another sterile by-the-numbers Ableton approximation, by no means an easy feat.
Jerry Paper, who has strong roots in the outré music sphere of the last decade, specializes in a sort of shattered conception of pop music. His mythology runs deep, as he routinely promotes a number of strange concepts involving fuzzy logic, techno spiritualism, and the like, that make reading his interviews highly entertaining and psychedelic. Kiefer might approximate a bit more of the standard neo-soul approach, boasting loose, lush keys and unremitting boom-bap percussion. Finally, there’s Prophet, described by Manak as one of his “holy grails,” an eighties private-press funk legend who was unearthed by crate-diggers like Manak decades later.
In the Stones Throw documentary, Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, one of the most entertaining segments features rapper Tyler, the Creator. An avowed Stones Throw fan and reportedly a former prolific poster on the 2009-era Stones Throw message board, he rhapsodizes about hearing a song by The Stepkids on the radio at McDonalds. He zealously ran home and tried to Google the lyrics to find it, ending up on a Japanese message board that dialed him into the world of the label. On a macro level, a number of mainstream rappers of the day, including Tyler, Danny Brown, Kendrick Lamar, and even Kanye West, clearly owe something of a debt to the label’s eclecticism, whether through their own admission or the sonic touchstones of their records.
It’s refreshing to see a label as established as Stones Throw still taking chances on unconventional new artists, especially characters like these who don’t have obvious commercial appeal. Music trends live and die with increasing speed in 2018, and it looks easier than ever for significant labels to wave-ride these trends straight into the ground. If the history of Stones Throw is any indication, music selected out of genuine love tends to fare better.
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