Interview by : Benoit Georges / Sébastien Jobart
Pictures by : Benoit Collin
on Thursday, January 05th 2006 - 15 186 views
New faces in dancehall, Mickee 3000 and Caporal decided not to wait for anyone to come and find them. With Spyda Ting, available for download on several sites, they clearly chose self-promotion. A wise choice which, given the impenetrability of the record companies, has helped to get them known. A conversation with the duo.
Reggaefrance / You are rarely seen without each other. Is it easier to break through as a duo?
Mickee 3000 & Caporal / Caporal: I don’t think so. It’s a strength but…
Mickee: In that case, how do groups of ten manage? Do they never break through?
As a duo or as a larger group, there can be emulation, mutual support…
Caporal: Me, I’d say the opposite.
Mickee: It’s easier to be on your own, because you’re presented under the name of “so-and-so”. In a group, it’s collective work. Let’s not kid ourselves, most groups split up after a while. And then you have a whole personal identity to rebuild, because people only know you as part of such and such a group. Your personal work is inevitably less highlighted.
But it can also be two solo artists who team up, who play dates together, do combinations… like you.
Caporal: Yes, that’s our case.
Mickee: We’re not a group, we each have our solo parts, each writes his own lyrics. Sometimes we have themes in common, but most often it’s Caporal who brings them. We each deal with these themes in our own way and on stage, it brings a positive diversity.
Mickee, what impressed you about Caporal, what made you want to work with him?
Mickee: He’s someone who works, who has a grafter’s temperament… Who doesn’t wait around. He isn’t here to wait, he has no time to lose. I was in a bit of the same frame of mind. I was working with other artists who weren’t as “pro”: knowing where we’re going, setting ourselves goals, achieving them… It comes off him, he’s not a “joker”. When we started hanging out, I looked around me, and I saw this soldier. The flow, the lyrics… (to Caporal) You know yourself. Efficient, basically. And when you work with someone efficient, you enjoy it. When you have a great footballer on your team, you want to play with him. It’s not the same context, but it’s the same frame of mind.
And you, Caporal?
I hadn’t planned anything, it just happened naturally. The guy is strong. Honestly, there’s no friendship in this thing. I’ve made music with friends before, it brought me nothing. In life, Mickee is my mate, but the guy had to be “tough”, and he was. We had to be pros, it has to be tight on stage and in the studio. On top of that he has a side I don’t have, the entertainment side. Left to myself, I’m not going to make a funny track. If Mickee hadn’t been there, there’s loads of stuff we wouldn’t have done.
You chose to make yourselves known through the Internet, could that count against you at some point?
Caporal: We’re trying to connect links, from anywhere. The Internet is the only thing we have for now for a guy to call me from Turkey to say he likes my tracks, for an English label to call us to say they want to produce us. We make tracks, but we don’t have Sony behind us. And after a while, if you want to put out an album…
Rather than giving CDs away for free, we make them available on the Internet. It costs us nothing, people can get hold of them easily and it lets us get known. But we’re not going to build our whole career on the Internet. We’ll always leave a few tracks online, but in the end, the aim is to get our projects into the shops. We have a whole bunch of mixtapes in the shops, and we intend to release Spyda Thing too.
Mickee: First and foremost it’s a tool for distribution. Afterwards, if you have a CD in the shops, with the structure that follows behind it, contracts include clauses for paid downloads. But we’re not there yet. We’re not at the stage of saying we’ll put tracks on sale. That will happen when the CD is in the shops, we’ll be able to offer a few tracks for purchase.
Caporal: We make music so that people hear it. You don’t see sound, you hear it. The end goal is the same. Obviously, it’s nicer when people buy the mixtape. We have stuff in the shops and other stuff on the net, just to say that we give music away for free. We know how to give. But after a while, people have to give some strength back so that we can put stuff out in the shops, if the music pleases them.
Did the downloads go well?
Caporal: Pretty well. We ran our whole promo on a first site (mickeecaporal.free.fr) which had to shut down because there were too many downloads. There were thousands of them… On our site there have been 5,000 visits. Bearing in mind you can also listen to it on the Party Time site, on reggaefrance, and there's a whole bunch of sites linking to us.
Mickee: And there are other sites that have it and offer it for download. We'd have to add up everyone's counters.
You've been through quite a few crews. Do you still have that notion of a crew today?
Caporal: I don't really like saying I'm part of this crew or that crew. I prefer to work with whoever I want.
Mickee: It's a working dynamic. Tomorrow some label or other will offer us a riddim, and we'll work with them for a while. But even if it all goes well, that doesn't mean we'll become part of their crew. We don't belong to anyone. There are friends, meetings, working relationships…
Caporal: People like Little Francky, Little Freddy, Maeva, Manitou, Alien D… And the sounds Back to Zion, Soul Stereo, Party Time… Quite a few sound systems book us here and there, like Unity Promotion from Bordeaux.
Which of you is in more demand for dubplates?
Mickee: The same, I'd say.
Caporal: Yeah, equal. Sometimes it's me, sometimes it's him, it balances out. It's not false solidarity: we're in demand as much as each other. Most of the time, whoever knows one of us knows the other.
Mickee: And if that's not the case, say I'm doing a session and the guys don't know Caporal, I suggest him and let them hear him.
Are you more Bounty Killer or Beenie Man?
Caporal: Bounty Killer. For his delivery, his style…
Mickee: You picked the two I didn't want to choose between! (laughs) You should have picked someone else… I'd say Bounty too, even though I've always liked Beenie Man. He's the only one I remember an anecdote about: at 6, his parents would come to fetch him from the studio, and the studio guys would tell them to leave him a bit longer! It's hard to choose…
Vybz Kartel or Elephant Man?
Mickee: Elephant Man, for the entertainment side.
Caporal: Elephant Man, straight away, for the same reasons.
I thought you'd answer Vybz Kartel, for his flow…
Caporal: I knew it! Because of my flow and my lyrics, people think I'm this or that, but actually no!
There are others who are supposed to work together: Villepin or Sarkozy?
Caporal: I faya the one as much as the other!
Mickee: Neither of them…
Caporal, you made a track about Sarkozy, but it isn't very critical in the end, you just insult him…
Caporal: It's clear that it's the easy route. Other people have told me the same thing. How can I put it? I didn't describe the situation enough, explain things. But everybody knows the situation. It's a track where I let off steam. For me, music is my therapy. I can sing my hatred, my pain, my love… This time I felt like letting off steam. I stand by this title.
You've voiced on lots of mixtapes. Are there limits? In the long run, there's a risk of being labelled a mixtape artist, who voices for free… You even let rip about it on your site…
Caporal: My aim is to get my sound out as widely as possible. If you offer me a spot on a compilation from a big major, there's no problem. But if you come with a more modest, more limited project, I'll accept that too. There are loads of mixtapes on the net, and I'm not knocking them. But still… the internet is great fun, but after a while you have to get the thing into the racks. It's more accomplished. My aim isn't to be on mixtapes only. But on the big compilations, there's a boycott. It has to be said. There are people who hold dancehall in their hands and who've decided that it's so-and-so who'll get played and nobody else. Even if the artist is more couchal than you, it won't change anything. That's the point of the outburst on my site: it's against the big compilations, not against mixtapes.
What are your projects?
Mickee: I'm preparing my solo album, I've been on it for quite a while now, I've reworked everything.
I'm working with different composers, so part of it is done at Manitou's ??? and the other part at DK Mastering. There will only be original compositions, we want it to be a calling card to show what we're capable of.
It'll be very ragga / hip hop, with some bogle. There'll be some wild fictional characters, each with a different take on things, which lets me turn them into satires. There's Duppy, for example, a kind of pimp who arrives in the business out of nowhere. He looks imposing on the surface, but he's actually a bit stupid. I've also got Grizzla Jumanji, who made his first appearance on "Roots du Sound", by Manitou and Tarzan. He's a satire of Sizzla Kalonji, as his name suggests: it's very loud, very wild…
It's my playful side, being able to change facets and make a game out of everything… It's simpler, maybe it's the easy way out, but I like making satires of things I love. There might be one about sound systems… For the moment, there are a dozen tracks in the works, we're in the mix stage. I hope everything will be ready by the end of February.
Caporal: As for me, I've got a solo maxi, "Malade mental", which should be out in February. It should be around 10 tracks. There are two soca tunes, including Jamadom with Papa Tank. There are other features with Maeva, Mickee 3000 and Dragon Davy. We're working flat out on it to do things properly. We're trying to correct all the mistakes we made before, to end up with a clean mix.
Mickee: When you want to do something solid, by the book, it's like signing a contract: it doesn't happen in five minutes. Everything that has to be done well takes time.
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