Every Sunday, an assemblage of MCs and DJs convenes in the Third Ward living room of 29-year-old DJ/producer Cipher. To the uninitiated, Cipher’s den may look like a mess. But to record junkies, it’s a treasure trove. Some 2,000 records are shelved and stacked and scattered around various playback and recording contraptions. But this is much more than a listening room, and the aforementioned dudes are not here to blow the dust off LPs.
“We actually do preproduction here,” says Cipher, who is best known as the spinning half of the MC-and-DJ duo Example, along with Kevin “Kay” Jackson. “We get it right, you know. Get the vocals recorded, get the sequence and everything. So basically, we get to the studio, everybody’s comfortable, everybody knows what they’re supposed to do.” While they may adjourn to a studio to officially record, everything from the conceptualization of a song to its actual composition begins in Cipher’s record-racked drawing room. “We come in here Sunday, we do our thing,” says Beat Farm MC Keith “Minus” Renaud. “We [may] bullshit, but we still get product done.”
Beat Farm is less a stodgy, all-work-and-no-play record label than it is a collective of diligent yet mischievous MCs and producers who all happen to be experienced performers. There isn’t a member of the group who hasn’t been a part of at least two rap crews. Although Cipher claims the Beat Farm name comes from the stereotypical belief that Dixie rappers are “country,” the title could also refer to the way these Southern gentlemen nurture their music by assisting, consulting and advising each other. It takes more than one pair of hands to reap a harvest.
The Beat Farm seeds began to grow last year when Example got the Massachusetts-based Landspeed Records to distribute two 12-inch singles, “We Write the Songs” and “The Price You Gotta Payย (Part 2).” (The latter single, featuring guest vocals from K-Otix, can be heard at www.beatfarm.net.) They immediately invited colleagues, including MC Donald “D-Rose” Rose and former Ex-Min mike checkers Renaud, Davin “Rukus” Wilburn and Mavrek, to join in the fun and lay down tracks for future singles.
“Everybody’s known each other for a long time,” says Cipher. “Me and Kay just sat down and we were like, man, we’re basically doing everything ourselves and we need to bring more people into the clique, you know, to spread love, to make sure everybody who needs to shine can shine.”
The comic book-loving Ex-Min were happy to record with Cipher and Kay. Wilburn believes there’s an honor in the Beat Farm clique that they’ve rarely run across in this business. “Honestly, Cipher and Kay were the first cats we messed with that didn’t bullshit us — sell our beats and shit like that, talk about us over the Internet,” says Rukus. “Cipher and Kay are real serious about what they do. They don’t make a lot of empty promises.”
The music of Beat Farm is not the bling-blinging, booty-bass, jiggalicious rap that we’ve come to expect from locals. The Beat Farmers are smart, introspective rappers with a versatile sound. “I guess we have a different take, different views in our music,” says Kay. “They sound different from the ‘local sound.’ But it’s really our representation of Houston.”
When there is a collective of local hip-hop performers that goes against the grain, the slog to get attention and sales is long and uphill all the way. Cipher attributes this prejudice to people’s tendency to (to coin a word) “overgenrify.” East Coast, West Coast, Dirty South, Screw — it’s all the same and it’s all good to Cipher. As he puts it, “Hip-hop isn’t a [different] type of rap music. Big Moe, to me, that’s hip-hop. Lil’ O, to me, that’s hip-hop. And K-Otix, that’s hip-hop. Everything is under the same umbrella; it’s just that you have different styles, you know? The same cats that go around saying, ‘I don’t listen to East Coast stuff’ [will] still pick up Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full, BDP’s Criminal Minded, EPMD’s ‘You’re a Customer.’
“I listen to Big Moe, but at the same time, I listen to K-Otix, which is how it’s supposed to be,” says Cipher. “You supposed to like music for it being good music, not for where it’s from and who produced it. But a lot of people, no matter how good it sounds, they don’t even give it a chance ‘cuz they say, well, they ain’t down with screw or they ain’t doing nothing screwedย That’s where a whole lot of things are kinda messed up now. Hopefully, what we’re doing and who we do it with will begin to change things.”
The label’s other major obstacle to gaining a local fan base is that so far they’ve distributed their music only on vinyl. Needless to say, there aren’t many Houston rap fans left who are willing or able to slap platters on a turntable. “I think our biggest markets are, you know, everywhere else,” jokes Cipher. That may change when Example’s long-awaited follow-up EP, Progressions, which will be distributed also on CD, is released sometime at the beginning of next year. Singles from as-yet-undisclosed Beat Farm MCs may grace record stores next summer.
Farmers who rely too long on one crop soon wear out their soil. Crop rotation is the key. Grow cotton one year, corn the next, and your fields will stay fertile for decades. That’s the essence of Beat Farm’s produce: hip-hop rotation, if you will. They’re just hoping that the folks who jam screw or listen religiously to Lil’ Flip’s “I Can Do Dat” will have minds as open as their own.
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2001.