Divine Styler: the return of hip-hop’s radical cult figure

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/04/divine-styler-return-hip-hop-radical-cult-figure

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For a genre creeping up on its fourth decade, hip-hop is surprisingly light on cult figures. Elsewhere in music, they almost seem dime-a-dozen, those creative outliers of preternatural talent and vision – Sun Ra, Lee Scratch Perry, Joe Meek or Scott Walker – an alien presence in the culture. But in rap, where eccentricity is largely all surface and affectation, such radical artists are few and far between.

One is Divine Styler, a Brooklyn-born LA transplant, whose legend is still very much alive, yet whose renown in hip-hop – with a catalogue that amounts to just three albums and a handful of singles and guest appearances in 25 years – seems to have been defined more by his absence than his presence. So much so that in the 90s, one obsessive fan was inspired to start a zine entitled In Search of Divine Styler. But those albums – unquestionably brilliant, unclassifiable and esoteric, and revered by the cognoscenti – have marked him out as a singular talent.

DJ Shadow, who collaborated with Divine Styler on the 1999 single Divine Intervention, and describes himself as a longtime fan considers him “an anomaly within rap. He’s clearly reverential to the art form, yet he chooses to blaze his own trail rather than waste energy seeking acceptance or contextualisation.”

His fourth album, Def Mask, a tour de force of hardcore beats and futuristic electronic production wrapped around dystopian science fiction, is released next week, 14 years after his last. According to the blurb accompanying the album, the Def Mask of the title “keeps others at distance and creates a barrier between the wearer and the multiple realms of psychic pollutants”; a concept that certainly seems in keeping with Divine Styler’s reputation as rap’s recluse. However, for someone so shrouded in mystery, the figure who sits – unmasked, it should be noted – in an upstairs room of The Seventh Letter, a street art gallery and store in Hollywood, is remarkably open and gregarious, and keen to elaborate on his history and his return to hip-hop.

It turns out there is a relatively simple explanation for the long absence. He felt uncomfortable in the negative space mainstream hip-hop had carved out for itself. A music that was once as much a commentary on itself as well as the world it emerged from seemed to have become entirely lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. Divine believes part of the problem is that the chain connecting elders and youngers, although just four generations deep, has been severed so that the old school no longer informs the new. “It would be sacrilegious for Hendrix not to know who Muddy Waters is,” he says. “Why is there no relationship between Bobby Schmurda and Chuck D? Or Chief Keef and KRS-One? That’s what we’re missing.”

He returned to the genre in part because he felt a need to articulate a response to what he saw around him. Although it’s not in any way intended as such, Def Mask could be seen as a state of the nation address because, like all the best science fiction, the album is inspired by and rooted in the here and now. “It’s based on my reality,” he says, meaning the reality of living in present-day Los Angeles and the personalities and the culture he experiences and interacts with on a daily basis.

Def Mask posits a scenario similar to Philip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison, an unseen construct that “everyone dwelt in without realising it”. The way Divine sees it, the populace no longer need prisons to incarcerate and institutionalise them. Culture does the job just fine. He sees a population of Manchurian candidates brainwashed to be in thrall to a culture that is slowly killing them.

“As people, we’re not there,” he says. “We’re host to something and that something, I would say, is the group mind, the group consciousness that’s taking people out. They’re just pretty much walking zombies, minus the gore. They’re missing an arm and they’re still moving.”

Back in the day, he says, MCs weren’t admired for what they represented – their personas – as much as how they represented the culture: “Even a cat who I love, Kool G Rap, I don’t love him because he’s one of the original street gangster MCs, or a drug dealer narrator, but because he had a language, his own language. We weren’t stupid, we were educated, and the education showed. The literacy showed in the content, in what was being said. And now, not only is there no literacy in the music but in the vocal content as well, everything is pushing this death agenda. This suicidal thing. Whatever it is, it’s anti-life.”

Music that chooses to promote the opposite has been all but excommunicated from the broad church of hip-hop, he says. “And that’s by design. It’s not out there. The companies, they’ll reject it. They want the bullshit for a reason. To keep people super-stupid and ignorant. There’s no attention being given [to this], no questions being asked, no one having these conversations. It’s just a bunch of bad kids being allowed to tear the house down. I just refuse to adhere to any of that.”

His passion for the state of hip-hop is understandable. Divine was there from its birth. He grew up with the culture. His father, Rick Richardson, was a New York club DJ in the 1970s who, although unheralded, was a major tastemaker on the downtown music scene. Richardson spun on WBLS – the influential black-owned New York City radio station, founded by Malcolm X’s lawyer, Percy Sutton – and was the resident DJ at downtown clubs, Melon and Pippins, and roomed with his friend, Larry Levan. He was also instrumental in helping to break Kurtis Blow’s Christmas Rappin’ in New York, which lead to a record deal that would make Blow the first rap MC signed to a major label; a significant early success for his manager, an up-and-coming music impresario, Russell Simmons.

Divine’s earliest memories were of sitting up in the booth or at block parties in the park as his father spun records. “He was part of a sound system, and they had built a big-ass crate that would hold the gear – turntables and amps and all that stuff – and would roll it out of the apartment, downstairs and into the park. I didn’t know it was called a sound system until I was much older. He always stored his records in my room, so I had crates and crates and crates of records. I’d be in my room and I’d just be looking at the album covers of everything from Average White Band to Parliament. Records that were out, that were hot, I’d have ’em, like Cerrone and Blondie, stuff like that.”

His first active participation in hip-hop culture was out on the streets, as a graffiti artist. “You never told anybody if you did that – it wasn’t a rebellious thing but an outlaw thing.” His tag was RAID, because he and his friends would steal the caps off insecticides to use on their spray cans. “That was before rapping and before B-boying and all that,” he says, but when that came he had a head start on all the other kids, because he had access to all his father’s records. “At some point, all these things started to come together, the writing, the graf – [the 1983 film] Wild Style was the first depiction of that, where they showed everything and it was from right then they was calling it hip-hop.”

His first disenchantment with hip-hop was soon after the release of his debut in 1989, coinciding with his introduction to the guitar, which he picked up and taught himself to play after becoming obsessed with Jimi Hendrix. As he became more interested in using the guitar, his listening progressed from Hendrix and Zeppelin to King Crimson and Nick Drake. “One of my favourites – I’m drawn to melancholy,” he laughs.

That much can be gleaned from his second album, 1991’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light, which two decades on is still by far the most avant garde hip-hop record ever made; although it feels more correct to describe it as an avant garde album made by a hip-hop MC. There’s little that connects it to rap. The music, played live by a four-piece band Divine formed around himself, is more out there than most experimental rock, he doesn’t rhyme so much as sing, scream, whisper, howl and implore.

Divine implies that it was partially recorded as a middle-finger salute to being told he owed his label another album and then discovering that his contract had been sold on by Epic Records to Irving Azoff’s Giant Records without his knowledge. But it’s so much more than just the Metal Machine Music of hip-hop. The simplest way to describe it is “soul-baring” – as if you’re bearing witness to the unmasking of a psyche as it plays out in real time – the only comparable listening experience is Skip Spence’s Oar.

He returned in 1999 with Word Power 2: Directrix, released independently on his own DTX Recordings, then picked up by James Lavelle’s Mo Wax label. A masterclass in minimalist hip-hop production and allusive lyrics that were, according to Divine, “a combination of scripture, street slang and psychology”, the album picked up from where he left off on his debut, adding in the science fiction elements that he would further explore on Def Mask.

From melancholy to dystopias, there’s a common theme in his work, sparse though it may be: the sense of a musician taking his own path, and growing as an artist and an individual. It’s almost like a hip-hop equivalent of the path Scott Walker took after the dissolution of the Walker Brothers. Walker, of course, was another musician whose releases were for many years infrequent, with decades between releases. Like Walker, though, Divine Styler maintains the fallow years are over, that we will be hearing from him soon.

• Def Mask is released on 8 December on Gamma Proforma, gammaproforma.com