Separating the Fake from the Authentic

The conversation then turned to Kanye’s leaked single, Power, acting as natural prelude to a conversation about what’s organic and the nature of authenticity. It began with Genesis asking, “Have you heard that new Kanye song, Power? It leaked.”

Then Kush replied, “Leaked?! He leaked that himself.” Then Kush proceeded to recount when he first heard the single.

“I heard that joint the morning it was leaked on the Internet,” Kush said. “For real,” Kush said with a note of seriousness. “It was on the internet 10 o’clock that morning. I went to pick up lunch for the shoot I was working on and it was playing on the radio already. I was like, ‘awww that ain’t no leak.’ They do stuff like that. They throw stuff out and see if it’ll stick and see what the people want to hear from them.”

“If the public were like, ‘Alright, back to sampling again. That was some bullshit,” Kush said in another one of those voices, but only less raspy. “You would not have heard the rest of that album. They test the waters. For real, that’s how it goes down.”

This interview took place June 4 and Kanye’s single was already getting regular radio play. Though the album, Good Ass Job, was scheduled for release June 8, the album has yet to be released.

Kush noted that people are feeling the single for its “organic feel.” “So now everybody is saying go back to organic. Now watch everybody follow that,” Kush explained.

These days, words like organic and authenticity thrown about carelessly as people try to distinguish what is real and authentic from what is fake and manufactured. Increasingly, that line appears blurred with the advent of Lady Gaga where the image she projects becomes the reality. Kush explains this paradigm from hip hop’s perspective.

“I’ll say this… there’s a place in real hip hop… in the beginning when we were sampling to get the authentic elements from certain records,” Kush explained. “You couldn’t get it by calling your ma and having your man play it because he wasn’t going to sound the same. But its organic though because it is still the guitar and the real life strings and the real drums as oppose to the synthetic, which is the synthetic drum sounds or keyboard sounds… you know those certain sounds where you could tell it came from a Triton (keyboard) or some shit like that.”

Kush recounted his time as an assistant engineer for Raphael Sadique, noting that when his albums have string arrangements, that mofo really goes out and gets an orchestra and mics everybody up and has a string section play because it feels better.

“I was like, ‘You can play the same sounds on a Triton and be done with it in 20 minutes.’ And he did what you’re doing right now… Laughing at me. ‘Yeah right, No I can’t.’ So I had to mic up all of that shit, mad as a mug. I had a concert orchestra in the studio for four days. He would sit there and have all his songs done to where he would call the orchestra in to add the strings to everything. That’s how you make a record and that’s not synthetic. That’s organic,” Kush explained.

Genesis likens what he sees as synthetic to eating McDonald’s happy meals. “The industry gets so saturated that you have to say that’s enough,” Genesis explained. Let’s gets some instruments. Kush wrapping the conversation back to Karnivore, explained, “This album could be considered an international pop album but when you get on stage, it is translated live through live instruments. It is translated through that digital shit.”

“All that shit you hear on the radio is like that Mickey D’s stuff. If you listen too much of that, you’re going to get fat,” Genesis explained.