Topic: Sound Priorities
- Sep 4, 2005 12:28am by NRG - livin the art that is life !
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Miles Bonny and Joe Good quit their day jobs and they're ready to take SoundsGood on the road
By JJ Duncan
RockKansas.com
[img:e9d114ea30]http://www.rockkansas.com/news/images/2005/soundsgood-lead.jpg[/img:e9d114ea30]
SoundsGood is beat-maker Miles Bonny (left) and rapper Joe Good.
It's hard to give up 14 years of work and a management position. Even to go on tour to spread your music.
Joe Good, the emcee side of SoundsGood, just quit his job as a manager at Kansas City, Mo. restaurant Fric & Frac to head out on the road in support of the new SoundsGood album "Biscuits and Gravy." But before you dismiss that as an easy decision for the locally-known hip-hop artist, you have to know a little of the background.
"I've worked there for 14 years, since I was 11 years old," he said. "I started out as a bus boy and I worked my way up to management. It was real hard to quit because that's my second family. And I was even to a point where I was comfortable because the amount of money I was making was enough to get by, but creatively the place was kind of draining me. I do this music and it fulfills me more than making enough money to pay my bills and get by."
This comes after a tumultuous three-year period. When SoundsGood released its regionally-acclaimed self-titled album in 2002 Good was living in the dorms, attending classes at the University of Kansas shortly before dropping out, moving back to Kansas City and eventually settling into work weeks with so many hours that his music was nearly pushed completely out of his life.
It got to the point that Good began to question what he was doing rapping at all.
"I almost talked myself out of it," he said. "For a while there I was wakin' up every day like 'man I need to stop this. This is not productive. I'm a loser, I ain't got no money, I should've graduated from college.'
Friday, Sept. 2
SoundsGood/ Approach/ DJ Sku @ Lucky Brewgrille (Mission, KS) :: 10:30 p, 21+, $5
Wednesday, Sept. 7
SoundsGood/ Little Brother/ more @ The Bottleneck (Lawrence) :: 9 p, all-ages
Friday, Oct. 7
SoundsGood @ KU Kansas Union Cafe (Lawrence) :: 8 p, all-ages, free
Online
www.myspace.com/soundsgood.
MP3 from SoundsGood's new full-length, "Biscuits and Gravy" ::
Basic
When Good refocused on the music, he did so with an intensity that produced the tracks on "Biscuits and Gravy." Good said through it all, his beat-making counterpart Miles Bonny was always supportive, picking up the slack wherever it was needed.
"I've never worked with anyone like that. Me and him are truly a team. He supports me and I support him. That dude works three days a week now and that's by choice. That's because he wants to give most of his time to this SoundsGood project."
Given the context of what SoundsGood has been going through, the title of the first break-out track from "Biscuits and Gravy" becomes completely understandable. It's the thing that's been on the duo's mind for the past three years: "Money."
The first verse of the single is laced with autobiographical rhymes delivered in Good's quick baritone flow.
"Man I work for a livin' / Nine to five to survive / Then I grind to the rhythm with a gift / Let it rip / 'Til I, get my percentage I'ma serve'em till I die / With the words from a verse / Not a plate of extra fries."
The rhymes are backed by Bonny's newly bass-heavy beats still garnished with a jazz guitar sample indicative of his more experimental side.
Bonny, SoundsGood's more avant-garde half, is constantly delving into territories alien to hip-hop to make his beats come at audiences from unexpected angles. It doesn't seem intuitive that an electronic artist who imagines somehow presenting his beats in a gallery show as the art itself would make a successful match with a rapper who grew up in a tough Kansas City neighborhood where he cultivated a straight-forward rhyme style. But that turns out to be what works best for the two.
SoundsGood's new album, "Biscuits and Gravy" will be available at its shows.
"As a beat-maker, I don't want to just make a bunch of beats that sound similar and are easy to mix for DJs and always make you dance in a way that you're accustomed to in a club or anywhere else," Bonny said. "I'm more inerested in my beats being compositions that can be considered works of art. Not in a snooty way, but in that each one can be different.
"Like if you're sitting around a bunch of art you can look around and each one is different even though there are similarities. I like my beats to be like new compositions and each one can be viewed like a different painting with different colors and different textures and subject matter."
Bonny said he brings his beats to Good and what he likes, he uses. Fortunately the two share a fundamental love for jazz music and its connections to Kansas City. Bonny said they would like to use live musicians sometime in the future, but for now they just wouldn't be able to pay them what they deserve. That matters to two lovers of jazz music.
Good said his background in blues and jazz has given him perspective on the life of hip-hop.
"I study jazz and I'm really into the music and it allows me to see where hip-hop is going," he said. "In other areas of black music with blues and jazz and even rock 'n' roll before it became popularized, you get to see exactly what happens when it gets to the point of popularity, or before it gets to the point of popularity.
"I think me relating myself to a jazz musician or a blues artist in some way gives me an advantage because I've seen all this go down before hip-hop was ever big. Now the other side of it is that I was more into jazz than I was hip-hop when it was gettin' big, so I didn't really get into hip-hop until I was 11 or 12 years old. I missed out on the first decade of hip-hop."
But it was another kind of jazz, or rather Jaz that helped make "Biscuits and Gravy" all it could be.
Good and Bonny are both generous with praise for Kansas City engineer and producer Jaz of 64111 Studio who, in the past three years, has upgraded his equipment and his abilities, Bonny said. On the 2002 album, Bonny and company were getting their feet wet with the production process and produced a more raw album, but Bonny said everyone's abilities have grown noticeably since that first outing.
"A lot of people love the first album, but it's a little more organic, a little more raw," he said. "So compared to the first ablum, we wanted to make cleaner just to prove to ourselves and others that we didn't need a major label and we didn't need a lot of money to make an album that sounded like it was professionally made."
That doesn't mean DIY is always cheap. It costs money to print flyers and make CDs. And with the cost of gas it costs more than ever to get from point A to point B when artists go on tour, to say nothing of food and shelter.
So is SoundsGood thinking about money? Yeah. And Good says pretending like that money doesn't matter is just as false as the rappers covered in bling. For their part, Good and Bonny have set a goal to make enough as musicians to be musicians full-time. While that is a feat in itself these days, Good feels like it's still a modest aspiration.
"I'm not trying to be the richest man in the world," he said. "I'm not even trying to have a rap video or even necessarily get my songs on the radio. I'm just tryin' to sell enough albums to where I can do this full time and really immerse myself in my music and it takes money to do that. And for me to be like 'well I don't need that money' or 'I'ma keep it real' is bullshit."
JJ Duncan can be reached at (785) 295-1100 or at [email protected]
