Lyrics Born: Feels like the first time every time
Tom Shimura, a k a hip-hop veteran Lyrics Born, feels like a new artist everytime he releases an album. He’s got a history stretching back to the early ‘90s when he was in the Northern California-based hip-hop group Latyrx and starting the Solesides label (later Quanuum), but even then the mission was the same: Don’t stand still.
“When we started we felt like the music could be taken further,” he says. “I always looked at hip-hop as the launch pad, but we felt like there were so many more places to go that hadn’t been explored. Nobody remembers this now, because we went on to have careers and make impacting albums, but we got so much pushback when we first came out. When we did Latyrx, people heard the irregular bars, the lack of R&B choruses, and they said, ‘This isn’t hip hop! What are you doing?’
“Here we were these guys just barely out of our teens, making this left-of-center experimental music. But we could rap, and we knew the music inside and out. We knew the history, we were geeks, we were crate diggers, and still are to an extent. I never deviated from that trajectory: to try to make ground-breaking, genre-defying art. So you risk failure all the time. ‘You have the most beautiful jump shot that never went in the basket.’ Maybe I don’t always nail it. But I definitely try. Everytime I walk away from an album, I think it’s a classic. I left it all out there. I could go no further with it.”
Continue reading "Lyrics Born: Feels like the first time every time " »