Fellow geeks. Relax. Chill out and do the damn puzzle!
Producer/ recording artist/ recording engineer A.D. Weighs grew up on Detroit's west side in a close family with a single mother and 2 siblings. He developed an interest in music at the age of 6.
"I remember listening to The message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and thinking they were just making up words as they went along. I didn't believe there were that many words in the English language that actually rhymed."
Weighs began writing rhymes by the age of 8. According to friends and former neighbors, It was apparent that A.D. would stand out among the elite in the Hip-Hop community. With sarcastic, introspective, controversial, abrasive and often comical lyrics, A.D. took a gutsy approach to writing that strayed away from the safe haven of popular music.
During his early teenage years, his mother, feeling pressured by the hardships of the turbulant city, moved her children to Southfield, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit north of 8 mile road which borders the two cities).
"She [mother] wanted us to see people living a different lifestlye. We witnessed the haves and the have-nots. I remember seeing 16-year olds driving brand new cars to school. That shit tripped me out. It was interesting to see people who had all these options. People whose parents actually took vacations and kids with stay-at home-moms. I thought that was just some shit you see on T.V. In the hills, you know like Southfield and Farmington hills, you saw people who actually had fathers who were still in the picture. That fucked me up. We were among the few who were still struggling, wearing the same pair of shoes for the entire school year while surrounded by kids whose parents actually bought expensive jewely and hundred dollar shoes for fuckin' high school freshman. I was impressed. I wanted to know what their parents did for a living"
A few short years later, A.D. and his family moved back into his childhood home in Detroit. There he got reaquainted with some of his childhood friends. Having been rapping for years now, he was looking to start a group with his former schoolmates. However, much to his dismay, the face of hip-hop had changed dramatically and he found himself stubbornly attemping to remain faithful to the artform as he had known it. In his surroundings, rap artists were beginning to alter their subject matter to adhere to a new set of rules in popular culture.
"I don't know man, it was quick as hell how the shit just shifted, You went from Public enemy to N.W.A. almost overnight. I personally never wanted to imitate neither of them, or anyone else for that matter.I thought the way we rapped was like a reflection of the way we see life. Not the way Easy-E or Chuck D sees it. It just took that change for me to notice that many of the kids I rapped with were chamillions. Niggas I used to fllow with had changed their flow. I didn't see it coming."
It was there on Detroit's west side where A.D. made two very important decisions, to pursue a career as a solo artist and to try making his own beats.
"My man Curt was rapping when I moved back to the D, but he rapped about gang life and I had never been in a gang. I couldn't be in a group with him 'cause it just wouldn't fit. We ain't have no hard feelings though. In fact, he put this song on called, past me the 64 [oz] so I can chug-a-lug. I thought it was hot. I asked him where the beat came from and he said he made it. I was like get the fuck outta here. See, up til that time, I was just rapping over other artists tracks if I bought the single and it contained the instrumental. It never occured to me that the average cat can just grab a beat machine and start making his own beats. I thought you had to have gone to school for music or know how to play a gang of instruments."
Weighs recalls how he started making beats.
"After talking to Curt, I started asking questions to a lot of other artists who at that time, not only rapped in crowds, but had actually been to a real studio and recorded their own tapes. I asked my man Sean, who was in this group called 31 flavas, if he could show me what equipment to buy so I could start making beats. At that time it was weird. We had a lot of hot shit coming from the west coast like Ice Cubes shit, but Sean was what you would call a back-packin rapper. His freestyle was sick as fuck and the beats sounded like something you would hear from A Tribe Called Quest or Black Sheep. I wanted to make beats that sounded like nothing. Sean suggested a sampler and a 4-track recorder. My silly as didn't listen and went out tried to reinvent the wheel".
Shortly afterwards, A.D. started making beats using a small hand held sequencer, purchased by his mother as a birthday gift. The machine was the size of a VHS cassette and was limited to 100 internal sounds with a micro-keyboard on the panel and no capability of playing sampled material.
"I think it kinda worked out it the end because I had to do the best I could with the little I did have. I learned about sequencing and midi which would come into play later when I started working as a recording engineer. But at first it was funny 'cause niggas would listen to a tape of my beats and they wouldn't feel my shit. Lookin' back, I don't feel that shit either. It was some wack shit on those tapes and I was looking for that constructive criticism. I had always been weird and the beats were weird. It felt good when I finally started making beats that niggas actually wanted to rap to."
Weighs has never taken the pack-rat approach to music. Instead, he found himself scrapping his catalog and starting over. Emptying his beat machine's internal memory and rebuildig his catalog. Inspired by the creativity in other local producers, he would constantly ask himself if what he was producing maximized his creative potential. Often times the answer, in his opinion, was NO.
"When the River Ghost would get together in Skillz basemet we just drank, smoked weed and freestyled for hours. One day Skillz's cousin [D.J Dez] came through in the middle of a freestlye session. I didn't know who he was at the time. We always flowed to my beats. He [Dez] came and sat down calm as hell and reached over to the boombox, calm as hell, and pressed eject, calm as hell. This nigga took my tape out and put another tape in again, calm as hell. Man I heard some of the hottest beats I ever heard in my life even to this day. I was high as fuck so when I was asking everybody what we were listening, to nobody paid me any attention. I kept askin. Niggas was too busy vibin off those beats. Finally I stood up and yelled "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS WE'RE LISTENING TO". Dez answered calm as hell, "Oh, these is just some beats I made at home" that nigga was the beat king in my eyes from that day forth. I started calling him from a payphone at my job a couple times a week. I would ask for tips on how to do drums and where to get the sounds from. He was cool as hell cause we would kick it on the phone about beat making techniques and music in general."
Weighs would continue to become inspired by artists from all genres of music. While focusing on lyrics and beats, he developed a passionate longing for a career in the music industry. Over the next few years he would accumulate equipment for music production and recording and spend countless hours experimenting and learning the ins and outs of sophisticated, professional recording gear.
Weighs and his brother and a few childhood friends started the group River Ghost. Weighs continued to record numerous tracks for solo projects whille River Ghost was in the creative processes of compiling material. Personal issues and internal confilcts would lead to an on-again-off-again relationship with the Ghost's members.
"I was a FUCKIN ASSHOLE back then. I feel it's mostly my fault because I used to constantly remind the brothers that I didn't need them. I wanted to do the group thing my way and everybody had different ideas. I had the equipment and I made the beats and I was the only one who new how to record. I used that to try to manipulate the brothers into doing shit the way I wanted. That was all bullshit on my part. We had meetings every week and they always turned into arguments and shouting matches. Now that I've grown up, I've mellowed out and we get together and record whenever we can.
Weighs recalls his earlier musical influences.
"I wanted to make an album that made people feel the same way I felt when I first heard Illmatic, Enter the Wu-Tang, Ice Cubes Death Cirtificate, L.L.'s Bigger and Deffer. The list goes on man. Over the course of the next few years I would be introduced to other works of art that changed the way I look at music."
A.D. has a list of albums that have inspired him in one way or another. Some were recorded during his lifetime while many were made popular before he was even born. Below is a list (in no particular order) of what he refers to as...
"Albums that Made me Want to go Back to the Drawing Board"
Nas - Illmatic
Common- Electric Circus
Outkast -ATLiens
Wu-Tang Clan -Enter the Wu- Tang 36 chambers
Led Zeppelin -The Early days
The Luddites (Local Detroit acoustic rock band) -There'll be Trouble Alright/ Cafe Believe/ One Hundred Years of Lunacy
Stevie Wonder - Songs in the key of life
The Mars Volta -De-Loused in the Comatorium
Radiohead - "Every fuckin album they released
The Beatles -Sgt Pepper's / Abby Road/
De La Soul - Stakes is High
Fiona Apple -Tidal/ When the Pawn
Slum Village -Fantastic vol 1
Boogie Monsters - Riders of the Storm (the underwater album)
In a recent interview, when asked, "Why no release until now", Weighs is quoted as having said;
"It wasn't about money. It was more about sentiment. See, that's when this shit stopped being fun. When it was time to start making this into a business, It became more like a chore. I stopped recording. The brothers would ask to come through and record and for at least a couple years I would hate the thought of what type of music I would have to make in order to sell a lot of records. I would've wanted to get rich by any other way except music. I wanted no part of fame. I didn't even feel the need to put my name or face out there. Just the music. Now I learned to not give a fuck thanks to other non-musical influences such as, Meditation, psychadellic drugs, being broke, being bored, my spirituality, my fuckin genius younger brother who tells me to get off that bullshit, Spirituality, man, the list goes on and on. It's like a fuckin' rebirth I had outta nowhere. Plus I gotta lot of shit to say. I got mad albums worth of material that just sitting. Luckily for me the shit is timeless. Not trendy, you feel me? My approach to lyrics is not glorifying anything. Not even myself. It's an attempt to make people think. Not just like preaching or some shit like that. It just boils down to 2 simple words, "CONSIDER THIS."
Im goin tru some old books of poetry I wrote and never posted. and turned to a page just now and this is verbatim what it says: "Mr. Weighs, the spacestarer, the silky voiced torchbearer. wow. and then. musta been a poem I was writin though I dont know why, musta been cuz i loved you(although I still do.) make of it what you will. beats me. A____ and mama, what a pair, from 2 different worlds and didn't even care. ONe white one black, one older one new yet A. saw mama, and in that second he knew. thats it. I guess I never finished it, or maybe that was it. cool eh? I think there might be unfinished bizness btwn us Mr Weighs. xoxox sally
Im doing well. Ive been in Toronto for a few weeks now, helping my cuz relocate and trying to find some clean fun to get into... lol. What have you been up too??
Online Now!
Your pretty awesome yourself.
