Three Stars: The Cornel West Theory

Find them online: http://www.thecornelwesttheory.com/

See them next: Saturday July 31st at the Black Cat.

Buy their album: At the Sockets Records website or at any local record store.

How long have you guys been around?

Rashad: As the Cornel West Theory? Since 2004. But we’ve been doing music together as a circle since 1998.

What prompted the name change, then?

Rashad: Well, we were going through many different band phases and the band before this one was called the Avant-God Mount and it was a noise/jazz/hip-hop thing. And after two years, we broke up the band and everybody in the band has their own project. So, Tim decided he wanted to name his next project the Cornel West Theory and it started from there in 2004.

Could you tell me more about Cornel West?

Rashad: He’s a professor, but he’s also an activist, a historian, a theologian; all these things in one.

I feel like your music is appropriately deep and philosophical, given your namesake. Is that intentional?

Rashad: Well, the first album we wanted to make a Dystopia. We wanted to do a 1984 but on sound. Because Cornel West was a philosopher, we definitely have intricate layers of philosophy and we made the dynamic of the album sort of like The Wire. You have to stay with the album to get where we’re going and everything we’re getting into. It requires a lot of attention but as you listen to it more and more you start loving it more and more. That’s what I hear from people.

So something that’s important to the band is giving a voice to social oppression and injustices?

Yvonne: Certainly that was something that was really important to Cornel West but I think for us, children of the late ‘70s and ‘80s and coming from D.C. and seeing the District change in profound ways and seeing the country change in profound ways and the country’s going through what I always call an identity crisis as they’re trying to figure out an economic system that will equitably take care of everybody, as we kind of figure out war and militarism. How do we actually honor our commitments abroad? How do we take care of people of color even as the city changes and goes through gentrification. As the education system changes, how do we do the public/charter, all of these things that were going on that were a big part of our own formation as young men and women that are particularly from D.C. But then the way that shadow was kind of cast, these issues are relevant for everybody. So, the music that we like, that really shaped us was stuff like John Coltrane, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or even Henry Rollins or other rock bands that were formative artistically and socially.

One thing that I have noticed to be the case with many people that have that interest in social justice is that it affects more than one aspect of their life. Do you have community involvement over and above the music you make with Cornel West Theory?

Yvonne: Definitely. My vocation beyond music is that I am a pastor of a church. So, in that role things that feed the soul and lift up social consciousness are really really important. So that leads me to continue all kinds of things but I have programs with ex-offenders that are important to me within the church community. Doing things that are anti-violence, I’ve been a big advocate in that area. Then certainly trying to call, particularly, communities safe, both in the parishioner context where I work on a daily basis and then in the context where colleagues can say we put our money where are mouth is and put our time where our professions are. I would say that on a daily basis that I seek these things out and I am a part of a variety of coalitions and more recently trying to volunteer and feed the homeless and working with ex-offenders from incarceration for folks to really be rehabilitated and to really have a changed life.

It seems like Second Rome actually has a story line.

Rashad: A long time ago before naming this city Washington, D.C., there were a lot of other names that could have been, one was city of Magnificent Distances and another one was called Second Rome. So what we did was we decided to make a nonlinear dystopia called Second Rome. And Second Rome builds from the future, past and present of how Dystopia is being built from Washington, D.C. Songs like “Knights of the East & West” are about how people in the past begin what we have now in the present. “Gentrified Chicken” talks about the placement of people that are in the city getting to a different place later. Every song has its little concept going into Second Rome. “Iron Emptiness” is about sort of the destruction of it. “An Angel For You” is that light within the dystopia. You get a spark of light that makes you think and it talks aobut how people will reflect in this dystopia and learn to keep living.

Did it occur to you that you were adding to the lineage of other great albums that made Washington, D.C. the focal point of their story lines? Was that going through your mind at all?

Rashad: No, not really. There are great albums like 13-Point Program to Destroy America by Nation of Ulysses that is naturally in us, but there’s also Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and all the dystopias and because we’re from D.C., we’re figuring it out how to do it from here. I’m a big X-Files and Millennium freak and things like that, but whenever they put D.C. in there they say crazy things like, “Meet me at 79th Street,” or things that don’t even exist. So we were thinking like, why don’t we make a dystopia but make it feel like it’s from D.C.

What was the recording and songwriting process like for Second Rome?

Yvonne: So process-wise, for the most part, Tim Hicks would kind of come up with the beats in terms of the musical palette. The sound for the most part is Tim. So he would kind of send out tracks and we talked about Second Rome and kind of the thematic issues of the record and then folks just kind of write whatever tracks they feel. Having six people in a band, it can be tough, but we honor each person’s artistic commitments and directions and sense of identity. I live in Columbus, Ohio for the most part, so I came down for a couple of days and knew, “I’m gonna lay down these tracks on this day.” Some of the writing would be together. If we needed to edit it, we’ll say “I don’t like this. Let’s change that.” It can be kind of chaotic. It’s not the most uniform kind of thing. People choose which tracks they want to be on, knowing the theme and then we edit or change it as necessary. So, it was definitely a year to a year and a half in the making. It wasn’t a real quick turnaround process. I think the show on the 31st for me will be a unique show because we are a complex personality in some ways with a variety of artistic commitments and in some ways an anti-brand so that we don’t have any specific genre. But the show on the 31st will definitely be highlighting the hip-hop side of the Cornel West Theory and no doubt hip-hop has influenced us in many core ways. And with the mixtape that we’re releasing, I think you’ll see another core side.

You seem to have a wide variety of influences. Which ones do you think are the most prevalent?

Rashad: Well, we call the music that we do Type 1, which basically for us means, something that is a fusion. Like our root is hip-hop, go-go, poetry and soul but we fuse rock, noise, industrial, anything that’s innovative. But of course the most prevalent thing is hip-hop, go-go and soul and spoken word. We love rock and we love punk and we love jazz. Those are the hugest influences right there. But everyone in the band loves different stuff. I love The Mars Volta, we all love Jimi Hendrix.

You’re one of the first acts that was affiliated with Sockets, if I remember correctly from when I talked to Sean. How did that meeting come about?

Rashad: Me and Sean used to go to American University together and we were just talking about music we love and telling him that we were in bands also and when his label started awhile back he said that anytime we were ready, he’d put it out. Second Rome is our debut because we recorded two albums before that but they never managed to see the light of day on hard copy. He was like, “When you’re ready, let me have it,” and we were ready with Second Rome.

A couple questions about things I noticed from your live setup. Why does one of your vocalists wear a ski mask?

Rashad: That’s Tim. He always references a certain inspiration that he draws from and the ski mask is from Subcomandante Marco which the song “Durito’s Revenge,” that’s what it’s about; about the Zapatista uprising in ’94 in Chiapas.

Also, why is there a boot sitting on your keyboard?

Rashad: Tony is Tim’s brother and his stage name is N’Digo Rose and as long as I’ve known him he’s always put his boot on the keyboard and we went to American University around ’98, so it’s been since ’98 that he’s been doing that. That’s just his thing. Kind of like how Steven Tyler puts scarves around the microphone, he puts up his boot.

What do you think of music in Washington, D.C. right now?

Rashad: I haven’t paid attention to the rock scene recently. I love Noon:30 who is also a label mate. I love the underground hip-hop scene always. It’s really awesome, it’s been in D.C. since the ‘90s. I’ve always loved the underground music in D.C. I loved the rock bands in the ‘90s and some of the bands I’ve heard now are great. Recently, I’ve been so busy with my own stuff and writing that I’ve mostly been listening to the underground hip-hop.

You feel that it’s really thriving right now?

Rashad: I think it’s starting to build up after about fifteen years of working on it. All these groups that were a part of this thing called the Freestyle Union in the ‘90s that started to branch off into other things and started to bubble up and I think it’s about to reach a head really soon.

What’s next for you?

Rashad: We have a mixtape coming out called In Her Hands: The Embryo Capital and we’ll be releasing another album right around September, also. So, there’s some beautiful things coming up for the Cornel West Theory that I want people to check out.

Is the mixtape also thematic?

Yvonne: It is but in a different way. Second Rome was thematic in a very tight, intense way. This is an extension of the conversation of how we are Washingtonians and whatever that legacy might mean. Thomas More had this poem in 1804 called “The City of Washington,” where he refers to it as the “embryo capital,” this kind of baby capital at the beginning of its formation. The mixtape is a lot more personal in some ways. So that each of us have a track where we call, “Tim’s Nostalgia,” “Rashad’s Nostalgia,” and there’s a more personal piece of us in terms of what this composition. But then there’s a lot of stuff on the other tracks, like “Prophetic Suicide,” one of the tracks deals with social consciousness and how we can live together and there’s a song called “Nigga Breath” that deals with language and what it means when you define in your own terms and your own reality which can be easier said than done. So, it’s thematic but definitely a lot more personal.