Whoever is on the TouchTunes at the Silhouette Lounge on Tuesday, March 28th has Haasan Barclay and me in mind: mid-2000s hip-hop, death metal, Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction.” He’s one of those people I know with a music taste as erratic and unpredictable as my own. When we meet around 9PM, we’re in the mood for a chaotic playlist and a few pints. At this point, we’ve known each other for a decade, so he’s used to it when I pull out an audio recorder so we can get the interview out of the way and get to the more important task at hand: chillin’.
His new project, BELL BIV BARCLAY, is a collaboration between his production and the rapping of ET from Van Buren, the Brockton hip-hop collective that has gained a good amount of hype outside of their native Massachusetts. The duo have been on each other’s radar for over a decade. “ I was hip to Jiles and Felix from Van Buren because before they were out as a rap group, they had a publication called One Band and they did blogging,” Barclay says. “They were one of the first people to interview me as an artist back in maybe 2013. So we had that rapport from them.”
“Have you ever seen Coneheads?” he asks me, referring to the Dan Aykroyd movie that spun off from an SNL sketch about a family of aliens with – you guessed it – cone-shaped heads. While it’s not a deliberate reference to ET’s name change from Saint Lyor, it’s sort of a fitting reference. In the movie, Aykroyd’s character takes the identity of a man from Brockton, MA, the home of Van Buren. Our conversations are often filled with the referential nonsequiturs. A big chunk of the audio transcription for this interview features minutes of cut content that nothing to do with Barclay’s music, including a whole section on our mutual love of early 2000s action-adventure movies like Underworld (Barclay) and Van Helsing (me).
More on topic is our talk about New Jack Swing’s underrated influence on subsequent R&B and pop. While a short-lived period – lasting more or less from 1987 to 1993 – it was an important period for the development of contemporary R&B. At the height of its popularity, both Michael and Janet Jackson were using it as a playground on albums like Dangerous and Rhythm Nation.
From my many conversations with Barclay over the years, when I heard the title and concept of the new EP, it made sense. He refers to it as a “transitory genre,” but one that set some firm blueprints in the music industry. It’s hard to imagine the (predominantly white) boy bands of the late 90s without New Edition as the prototype. “The thing with like white takeovers of black R&B,” he says, “it’s usually like 10 years behind. So if you think about it, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys sounded exactly like [early] New Edition.”
Barclay was barely alive for the tail end of the New Jack era, but he still finds himself drawn to the sounds and personalities of the time. This is due in no small part to the fact that some of the main practitioners of this sound were from Boston. New Edition, one of the groups that helped it take off, were Roxbury natives. “That’s what I grew up with,” he says, cementing that this project is as much about legacy as it is about making tunes. “New Edition went to grade school with all of my aunts. So it was like an intimate relationship there. I also grew up with Bobby Brown Jr. So there’s another level of it there. That’s something I definitely hold with me closely… Boston was racing.”
Many of the songs that ended up on BELL BIV BARCLAY have been incubating for some time. On “Coach,” he pulls a sample from “Roni,” a track from Bobby Brown’s second album Don’t Be Cruel, which was his breakthrough as a solo artist after his departure from New Edition. Barclay first performed an early iteration of the song – or at least a track that also used a chop from “Roni” – at Motivate Mondays, an open mic hip-hop and R&B event held at the now-defunct Church in Fenway. The event was an important series for the area’s aspiring rappers and producers, providing a space to test the waters for developing material and serving as a launch pad for collaboration. Spaces like that have been hard to come by for the local scene, and seem to come and go in a mercurial way.
While Barclay has remained, he’s evolved his sound as an artist and producer over the years in a similarly mercurial fashion. “I’m sitting on gigabytes,” he says as we talk more about BELL BIV BARCLAY, referring to the vast amount of music he has cooked up over the years that he has yet to find a home for. At times, he has to decide if a song is more suited for him as a solo artist or if it will work better with him in the backseat. The latter was the case for BBB when he tapped up ET. One thing that drew the pair together was a mutual love of alternative rock band Ween. “They’re like the Lil’ B of Grateful Dead rock,” says Barclay. “I said [to ET], I have all these ideas I can send you, gigabytes of ideas. And he was into. He just rapped to it immediately.”
In the rapper-producer relationship, the rapper is generally more of the forefront. But a strong producer needs to have the taste and discernment to reel in a track’s loose ends to create something that strikes the perfect balance between appeal and edge. “There are a lot of Canva producers out there,” he says, referring to the graphic design platform that allows anyone to make simple, effective visual content. “A lot of people who would never have been making beats in the 2000s got into it, just because of the popularity of it.” And while we agree that the increased access to simple technology like DAWs, mixers, drum machines, and samplers is overall a good thing (the origins of hip-hop were built on this), Barclay stresses the importance of rappers “having a good team behind them who can do quality control.”
This lead us to the topic of Rick Rubin, who despite producing for some of the biggest artists of the last 40 years, notoriously downplays himself and claims to have no technical ability as a producer. I ask Barclay if he buys that. “He’s just kicking shit.”
BELL BIV BARCLAY is just a tease for now. With gigabytes of music at his disposal, Barclay promises that “there’s more coming very soon. I’m excited. It’s gonna be a fun year, for a lot of reasons.” I’ll update you when he takes me to see some amateur wrestling in Worcester like he promised.
Stream BELL BIV BARCLAY on Soundcloud below.