In this interview spotlight, I chat with Royal Ruckus about the latest new album (World’s Okayest Rapper), as well as music consumption preferences, challenges and This White Life.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
I recently featured World’s Okayest Rapper, find that article here.
What have you guys been up to since the last release? Were you happy with the results?
Hey, thanks for the features! You guys do great work! Man, I have just been on my grind nonstop on this Royal Ruckus thing. Shows, new songs, constantly writing new songs, constantly promoting online, it’s just never ending hard work that also happens to be a lot of fun. I’m now in the process of releasing a series of 5-7 song EPs where I collaborate with other artists in the wake of our magnum opus, The Summer of the Cicadas.
For me, the “cicada summer” is a metaphor, and one of its meanings is to signify the final chapter of Royal Ruckus. So it’s like it set the tone for the rest of the story, and with each new song or album, we are writing another page of the final chapter, and at some point, like the cicada, we will return to the earth and no longer make a Ruckus.
As far as results go, I’d say it was and is a success. We had a lot of great support crowd funding the album, and a ton of people have been eating up the music. We’re still getting people discovering the cicada record after a year and a half that it’s been out! And I might even keep making videos for it, you never know.
What can listeners expect when clicking play on the new album, World’s Okayest Rapper? Were you guys trying to accomplish anything specific or different with this release?
Yeah, quite different. For starters, my partner in the group, Flatline, sat this one out. He gave feedback on the songs and such, but he didn’t actually work on any of the music or lyrics. Instead, I teamed up with CookBook of LA Symphony, who produced the record. And he didn’t just make the beats—he was in the studio directing the whole operation, producing the vocals, fine-tuning the arrangements, and so on. I’ve known him a long time and collaborated with him in the past, but never like this. It was a great experience.
We recorded the whole thing in California, which is where we are from originally, and LA Symphony has been very inspirational to us over years—hell, even the mic we used is the same one that most of the LAS records were recorded on, and even Posdanus of De La Soul and Fat Lip from Pharcyde, veritable rap legends, recorded on that mic. So it felt like a return to our roots.
I wrote most of the songs last year while I was on tour, so there is a sense in which I more consciously wrote this record for my audience, with live shows in mind. This is the first record I think we’ve ever put out that didn’t have a heart breaker song on it, but true to form there’s a whole lot of humor and comedy on this project.
What was the last song you listened to?
Dude! I’m going crazy over the new Busta Rhymes and Miss Elliott song, “Get It.” Busta is a beast of a rapper, and he’s still got it after all these years.
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
I’m a vinyl collector! And the annual Record Store Day is a High Holy Day to me. A couple years ago a friend and I took a road trip from Florida to Nashville for Record Store Day, and it was fantastic. It’s hard to argue with streaming just about anything in the world at any time while you drive down the road.
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
Strangely, I use all three. I have an Apple Music membership, and I also pay for a feature they used to call iTunes Match, which backs up and syncs your digital music library across platforms, so I tend to listen in the Apple universe. Not everything I listen to is available on Spotify or Apple Music, so it’s nice to have all of my music accessible in the cloud. That said, Bandcamp is the best. They are very artist-friendly, and whenever possible, I try to support indie music through Bandcamp.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
Man, it’s an interesting time to be in! Anyone with $35 and a laptop can put out an album and make it available online to 3 billion people. Wrap your mind around that! I don’t think we stop to reflect on how incredible that is, and how impossible that would have been to imagine just a few decades ago, and now it is standard. We take it for granted!
But, yeah, technology has been great for us. From the very beginning, even back in the dial-up internet days, we took advantage of having a digital platform, built a website, put music online for free, and so on. The internet took us from a regional act to a national act almost overnight, and here we are years later and we are still able to leverage that platform. Incredible stuff, really.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
Well the new album is conveniently accessible at http://worldsokayestrapper.com, and we have quite a bit of music on http://noisetrade.com/royalruckus and http://royalruckus.bandcamp.com. We’ve been putting out a lot of high-quality music videos, and you can see the whole shebang at http://bit.ly/RuckusVideo or on our YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/c/RoyalRuckus. And of course http://royalruckus.com.
Anything else before we sign off?
Eat more bacon. And mixed greens. Eat lots of mixed greens. And bacon.
