Eye on Dabrye - 6/22/2006

Detroit beat maker creates a genre-busting rap album - for a techno label

By Dennis Romero

Hip-hop is going back to its beat-centric roots. In the early '80s, as the genre first reared its head above mainstream waters, the DJ was supplanted by frontmen MCs, eager to boast and soak up the light. Now, once reclusive producers, many of whom got their starts spinning records, are elbowing for the spotlight again. Witness the rise of the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danger Mouse. The increased currency of sometimes nerdy beat makers has had a side effect of helping to raise the profile of indie hip-hop, which has always been a breeding ground for major-label rap.

The return of the mad-scientist producer also means hip-hop is not limited to the gangsta archetype, allowing more diverse characters to represent. Indie hip-hop, which has grown from a backpack-toting trickle to a marketing storm (Scion, anyone?), has seen Asian Americans (Chad Hugo, Dan Nakamura), Latinos (2 Mex), interracial crews (Spank Rock), and, of course, plenty of white folks come back to the table. Of the last group, the Detroit area's Dabrye has launched a decidedly Afro-futuristic assault on the status quo with his latest, Two/Three, released last week on techno label Ghostly International. Yes, Dabrye has not only produced a genre-busting rap album for a techno label, but he's also a techno kid of sorts. He included some of the underground's illest MCs on the project, including Vast Aire, Danger Mouse collaborator Doom, and the late Jay Dee (a.k.a. J. Dilla).

"I think hip-hop is rooted in dance music," says Dabrye, a.k.a. Tadd Mullinix, 27. "Hip-hop has been bouncing off dance music in its evolution. In a way, we're talking about black music. So they've been intertwined throughout their evolution."

But if you're expecting fast, four-on-the-floor rhythms from the man who has recorded techno under the alias James T. Cotton, you'd better step back. Two/Three is stripped-to-the-bone, down-tempo space bass that reopens the door to conscious rap. It's the kind of hip-hop album that some critics have only dreamed about - icy and composed, far-out and forward-thinking, street tough and intellectual. "Machines Pt. 1" has echoes of Schoolly D's "PSK," with its time-bomb syncopation. "Encoded Flow" rolls along on an evil, feedback-like buzz as the KRS One-like Kadence puts it down: "Can a rapper be socio-philosophical and still effect y'all/Is it possible?" The sustained Nord Lead synth line on "Jorgy" (featuring Waajeed) is a dead ringer for an ominous score movement in Scarface, every rapper's favorite movie. And if you think indie equals soft, think again. On "Special," Guilty Simpson spits that he's "Live as fuck, with a big-ass gun/Who want to size me up/I got a 40 cal chillin' right beside my nuts/Rap shit helps me monopolize my bucks."

The ominously titled "Game Over" brings Phat Kat and Jay Dee to the mike, where the latter barks, "How the fuck you sound?/Detroit make the world go round." Jay Dee, who had worked with Busta Rhymes, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest, died in Los Angeles last February from complications related to lupus. Recording "Game Over" in 2004, Jay Dee "was in the zone," Dabrye says.

Working with a legend like Jay Dee - they met through a mutual friend, and Jay Dee said he actually had purchased a Dabrye album before - is a long way from Dabrye's childhood on the Gulf of Mexico. He was born in Florida, living in a trailer in Hudson with his family until age nine, when they all moved to the Detroit area.

"My mom's records were Brian Eno and Talking Heads and Gary Numan and stuff like that," he recalls. "The first record I bought was Erik B & Rakim's 'Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em.'"

Still, he's always been moved by the synthetic emo of electronic music, from Kraftwerk to Philip Glass, kraut rock to Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1997, Dabrye began making music - techno, acid house, and hip-hop breaks, all genres circulated via Midwestern radio airwaves. In the early '00s, he started to gain fame as a multi-genre beat maker, putting out Instrmntl on Prefuse 73's label, and One/Three on Ghostly.

He doesn't necessarily think indie hip-hop is the Next Big Thing, but "at least in the mainstream, people are finally noticing," he says. Of Two/Three, he adds, "I just was trying to create the mystery record I always wanted to find."