Interviewed by I.S. Jones @isjonespoetry

Author of two chapbooks “Wild Hundreds” and “Blood Percussion”, editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, poetry editor at Kinfolks Quarterly, Cave Canem fellow, and come this summer, Chicago-based rapper, Nate Marshall, along with his collective Daily Lyrical Product, will have put out his first album Grown. I was granted the privilege of an exclusive before his album drops.

I.S. Jones: When did you fall in love with hip-hop?

Nate Marshall: That’s a funny question. I was always listening to hip-hop as a kid, because it was the music around. It was popular. And I had an older sister who listening to a lot of stuff, so I came up listening to a lot of gangsta rap, particularly a lot of West-Coast shit. A lot of Pac, Snoop, all that. Death Row. I would say the first time that I really fell in love with it, or felt a real connection to it, was probably when I was in middle school. I heard the song “The Blast” by [Talib] Kwali and Hi-Tek and I actually started crying. What felt different about that record to me was it was one of the first times I had ever really seen or heard a hip-hop record that felt relatable to me. So after that, I wanted to rhyme and I started thinking about rapping and writing raps.

Jones: Why don’t you have a stage name?

Marshall: Oh okay. So, I kind of do. If you ever go on Twitter, my Twitter handle is @illuminatemics. It is / was my stage name / rap name. My crew DPL, Daily Lyrical Product, we did two albums when we were in high school. So in ’05, ’06, ’07, somewhere around there, when we were doing a lot of local shit in Chicago, back then I used that name regularly. People would use them almost interchangeable—Nate, Illuminate. Some people will still reference it and I’ll still reference it at times in records, but I don’t know…motherfuckers call me by my name. I like that if you search me, you can find both things. If you Google ‘Nate Marshall’, you see both names, or if people are looking for the music they find this poetry stuff and they have to reckon with me as both things.

Jones: Speaking of Google, I tried to do some research on this album “Grown” and it seems to be the best kept secret of the summer.

Marshall: That’s funny.

Jones: I couldn’t find a damn thing except for the fact that it’s coming out in the summer. Why has it been kept so secret?

Marshall: That’s a good question. It’s funny because it’s a record that’s taken us a long time to make. Like it’s been almost done for like about two years. When we started working on it, I was about 21 and I’m 25 now. So I think part of it has been that kind of process and a few months ago we decided that we were going to put this out this summer. We’re still trying to lay down the plans for that. We’re trying to release it in July / August. We’re trying to do a video, do a couple of other things, and do some shows in the city.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/users/24443632" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

Jones: Leading up to Grown, tell me about the album and how it came to fruition. Who is in your life that made this album possible?

Marshall: The Daily Lyrical Product is myself and a guy name JusLove. He’s a producer, singer, rapper. He does just about everything; he plays guitar and a bunch of instruments. And this album is coming from our early twenties—both in time span and subject matter. So we started it at about 20-21 and now we’re finishing it, I’m 25-26. When you’re a young person, like in high school, you always think “Oh I’m going to do this when I’m grown up. I’m going to be able to do that and achieve all these kinds of things”. Right? I think the record looks at that from the other side. So now that I know what it means to be “grown” or the first sort of bit of that, what’s true, what’s untrue, and what are the broken promises of that. And also what’s the hope in that.

Jones: So that explains why is it titled Grown?

Marshall: Yeah.

Jones: How does this album seek to add-on to the long tradition of hip-hop or what is Grown bringing to the table that perhaps other upcoming rappers aren’t doing right now?

Marshall: I’ll say I think the album is super honest. Not that other people are lying, but it’s very honest in a really regular way. It’s not hella outlandish, it’s not [about] a million dudes who are getting shot, like not about ‘thug tales’. It’s about what happened to us in that time. It’s about what it’s like to graduate college and be sort of like “I don’t know that the fuck I’m doing. I was supposed to be successful, and I kind of did the right things but I don’t really know what that looks like”, or on the flipside for my guy JusLove: “I dropped out of college. Now I’m kind of like “What do I do? How I do negotiate relationships?”. For me, it feels like a very, very honest record. Very down to Earth, which I think is in the tradition of so many dudes. It’s a thing that I loved about the Reflection Enternal record; it was a genesis record for me because it was so regular. In it, I remember, Hi-Tek was talking about missing his son when he goes on the road and shit. I’m like “Yeah, I feel that”. I know what it’s like to be away from my family and miss them.

Jones: Can you give me a release date?

Marshall: Not an exact one. I wish I could, but we’ll say July or August.

Jones: If you could compare yourself to any lyricist dead or alive, who you think you emulate in terms of style and craft?

Marshall: Can I give two?

Jones: Yes.

Marshall: I’ll say Gwendolyn Brooks and The Clipse. Gwendolyn Brooks because she is very much so a writer in the tradition of documentary—of that kind of honest, realist portraiture which I think that we very much gage in. And The Clipse because when I was younger, they were really the first people that I fell in love with just for like the sharpness of their flow. The way they put words together and put flows together and fit into the pocket of beats on tracks was just like beautiful to me and something I’m always thinking about when I approach a record.

Jones: So you’re from the south-side of Chicago which is usually known to be very violent and very gritty, even in terms of the music Chicago puts out, but what you’ve told me about Grown it sounds so down to earth. Do you feel as though you are going against the tradition of Chicago-style hip-hop or if anything you’re adding to or creating a new wave of hip-hop from Chi-town?

Marshall: I think that…I don’t think I’m going against it. I think we are in the tradition. The thing about Chicago is that it’s a crossroad city. It’s where the train lines converge, where if you’re going from coast to coast and you’re flying…it’s the layover which means that we get ‘everything’. So Chicago’s traditions have always been really varied. I mean now people sort of think about it as this place where gritty, sort of gansta shit happens in terms of music or whatever, but it’s also where Kanye came out of, where Pink and Louis Vuitton when no one was going those things. When it was an unimaginable posture to put in mainstream hip-hop. It’s also a place where folks like Chance the Rapper, Noname Gypsy [came out of]. Whomever. All these people come from [a place where they] aren’t necessarily posturing with ganstarism. Which is not to say there is anything wrong with that kind of music, and I have a lot of love for that kind of music, and we engage in some of those styles from time to time, but I think we just are who we are.

Jones: Do you feel satisfied with Grown? Do you feel it’s complete, that you got to do everything you wanted to do with this album?

Marshall: I hope so, because the shit took five years. I do definitely, we definitely do. It was one of the reasons why we took so long because we really wanted to do it right.  Like I said, we started making music ten years ago, and back then we were sort of a part of a crew of a cohort of artists who were all much older than us. So like my dude Sketch and his crew Tomorrow Kings and a bunch of others, they were all about five to ten years older our senior but we were peers artistically, running in the same circle. And I think we left out a little when I went to college so for us thinking about re-entering in terms of music-making, we just wanted to make sure that it felt right, that we didn’t rush it that we were on no one’s clock but our own. I feel really happy about where the project is.

Jones: So currently you are a rapper and a poet. Are you hoping that Grown will be the start of a very fruitful musical career or maybe every few year you’ll put out an album but you’ll be mostly focused on your poetry?

Marshall: For me in a lot of ways, I kind of see them as the same, or two halves of a whole, of my artistic practice. In that, as evidence like something of The BreakBeat Poets, in my written practice as a poet I’m thinking about hip-hop and hip-hop aesthetics. I’m actively engaging those things and I think the same is also true about music. I guess what I do hope for Grown is I think that I’m a better and sharper writer and artist when I’m writing and performing raps. So I like whatever puts me in a position to do those things and more. To do more hip-hop shows or even to just be in the studio more.

Jones: Is there anything else you want to add?

Marshall: Follow us on Twitter @wedlp, all one word. Our SoundCloud, which is soundcloud.com/wedlp

 Connect with Nate Marshall
Facebook.com/WeDLP | Twitter.com/illuminatemics