For a musician and turntablist often hailed as a genre-bending, cutting-edge artist, RJD2 (neé Ramble John Krohn) has some distinctly old-school cuts in his personal record collection.
“[I’m] really into 80s R&B music, like Chakha Khan and Luther Vandross, stuff that basically was at a point in history when R&B music was very synthesizer heavy,” he says, sitting in an Austin hotel coffee shop during a much-needed break from the South by Southwest festival whirlwind.
“I’m always listening to a whole lotta classic rock music, so I don’t really know where to start and stop there…I’ve been listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy lately,” he admits, also citing ELO as an old favorite.
But his record collection isn’t entirely trapped in the past. Ed Banger flagships Sebastian and Mehdi, Swedish indie-folk star José Gonzales, and Oakland’s Clipse are also in heavy rotation, and British jazz/soul ingenue Amy Winehouse is on his shopping list.
It’s the third day of the festival, but RJ has barely spent 24 hours in town, arriving just in time to play a set at this afternoon’s Pitchfork/Windish Agency showcase before leaving tomorrow morning.
“[South by Southwest] is grueling, but it’s been fun, and I’m happy with why I’m here, which is basically for the shows and to have a band and stuff,” he shrugs with the matter-of-fact tone of a man who has spent much of the last year on tour or locked in his Philadelphia studio recording one of his most original, compelling albums to date.
The Ohio native spent over a decade making a name for himself in the independent hip-hop scene, serving as a DJ, producer, and musician for a diverse range of rappers and bands including Copywrite, MF Doom, and Aceyalone. He got his first set of decks in 1993, and quickly gained a following in the Columbus scene, collaborating with local rappers MHz and Blueprint.
His 2001 mix-tape release, Your Face or Your Kneecaps, revealed RJ’s fluency in funk, soul, and classic hip hop beats, occasionally interspersed with acapella samples from the likes of Eric B and Rakim. At the same time, his increasingly beefy repertoire of production credits and solo work caught the attention of El-P, the prolific founder of Def Jux Records, who gave RJ a slot on the label’s 2001 comp.
“That’s the great thing about music – these things kind of have resurgencies and eras, and it gives me hope.” – RJD2
Def Jux Presents I also included tracks from Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox, groups who would come to define the label’s identity and dominate the indie hip hop scene. The following year, Def Jux released RJ’s debut full-length, Dead Ringer, to critical claim and fan approval. A succession of singles, white labels, and collaborations followed, each shot through with RJ’s signature, irresistible blend of hip-hop samples, soul rhythms, and funk beats carefully structured around classic pop sensibilities.
The Third Hand is a significant departure from RJ’s Def Jux releases as well as his previous collaborations and mix tapes. Critics have referred to it as his “indie rock” album, a categorization partially spurred by RJ’s decision to switch from Def Jux to XL Recordings, aknown for its eclectic roster dominated by electronica and rock acts.
The album certainly is a jarring listen at first – instead of deftly mixed samples and other artists’ rhymes, RJ is the central figure in the album, contributing a significant amount of his own vocal talents to the recording. RJ also plays most of the instruments – guitars, synths, pianos, and bass – and relies on fewer samples and loops than in previous work.
The Third Hand also defies easy categorization, and RJ seems mystified and somewhat amused by attempts to pigeonhole his work.
“I don’t listen to a whole lot of what I consider indie rock music, but it’s probably the way that I sing that makes it sound like that, I would guess. A lot of it stems from – well, I’m into a fair amount of electronic music,” he says.
The material reveals a wider circle of influence, however, with elements of prog rock, soul, R&B, and pop represented throughout and often within the same song. “You Never Had It So Good” could be a lost track from the “Nuggets” psych-rock collection, full of ’60s-era pop hooks and the occasional hint of a Jackson 5 beat, whereas “Beyond the Beyond” is blompy and beat-driven, centered around RJ’s falsetto and a persistent synth riff in line with the work of labelmates Ratatat.
“Have Mercy” is a prog-rock gospel ballad, with spacey, funky synth breakdowns, grooving along like a less rambunctious Of Montreal ballad. Crunchy keyboard riffs and space-rock interludes hail back to the golden age of the Eurythmics, with a bit of Pink Floyd and Steely Dan thrown in.
“I’ve got a band,” RJ reports. “I play guitar and keyboards and I play bass on a couple songs. There’s three of us up front, and we all play bass, guitar, and keyboards at varying points in the set is how it works. The record was done live, and I just felt that reducing those to samples and trying to do this thing by myself using electronics would have been going backwards in the way the record was made. It makes more sense to go forward and learn those songs and present them live, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The new stage arrangement has also given RJ the opportunity to revisit and reinvent some of his older work.
“We do a lot of the songs off of the new record, but we’re doing some of the songs off of Since we Last Spoke and Dead Ringer. Some of them are just totally live versions of the songs, and others are kind of hybridizations of using the samples from the songs and kind of recreating the things.”
At the very least, The Third Hand reveals RJ’s aforementioned predilection for ’70s-era classic rock and to the soul and funk that emerged during the same period. He openly acknowledges the role his personal record collection has played as well as the hesitancy that his fans might feel upon hearing the new album for the first time.
“That’s the great thing about music – these things kind of have resurgencies and eras, and it gives me hope,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like we live in a world where it’s a very trend-driven period in music, and I think that once you get past sort of an incubatory period in music or any act or even records, they take on all these different lives. And that’s why all these old records sort of have these resurgencies, or even when you get a record and you don’t like it the first time you hear it, it takes you a couple listens and then you get into it.”
– Story by Connie Hwong, photos by Noah Kalina