Thursday, February 4th 2010

By Corrigan Hammond

Luke Boyd (aka Classified) isn’t your usual rap artist. Raised in a tiny rural community just north of Halifax, Boyd is better known for his work ethic and modest approachability than for carrying himself with any sort of faux-gangbanger-hip-hop swagger. Instead, the hard-working MC keeps his rhymes smart, honest and articulate, and his beats original and fresh.

“The way I started out was just doing tours and shows, and building up grassroots. And I think that’s how a lot of rock bands get their start—just people living in the van with the boys and just tour, tour, tour,” he explained to me prior to last week’s performance at McMaster.

“I don’t think my music is really underground, but I don’t think it’s commercial fucking bullshit [either],” he laughed. “It’s a good medium where someone who might not listen to hip-hop music can still feel my music and relate to it.”

“At the same time [though,] it still has a lot of substance to it, so for a hip-hop head who listens to lyrics and quality stuff like that, they can still look at it and go ‘ok, shit he’s doing some [dope] stuff,’” he continued. “It’s a good balance of being able to make good music, music that I like, and music that I can feel what it is, and you know, big top selling [tracks.]”

Boyd makes every attempt when he is composing music to try to be inventive and fresh. “Sometimes I just like to step right out of the box and go ‘ok, this song is probably not going to get any play on the radio, … let me think of a cool way to create something with music that hasn’t been done before.” His song “Beatin’ It,” is one example of this: “I rapped about making a beat. No one’s ever done anything like that before, so I always try to do stuff like that on the albums—something unconventional.”

“I didn’t think ‘Oh Canada’ would be on the radio, honestly,” he continued, considering the origins of his recent top-forty Canadian single. “Topic wise, I would, because Canadians can relate to it. But the structure in that song, the way that it’s [built,] is completely un-radio friendly. When you go to the radio, they want, twelve bars of rap, then eight bars of a catchy chorus,” he explained, laughing—“but make sure that catchy chorus keeps looping, [because] that’s what they want. In that song, it’s twenty bar verses and then the chorus just goes once. It’s not a conventional radio song. But [when] you say something that someone else can relate to, you don’t need the big catchy chorus every time. You can move in different ways.”

Indeed, Boyd took a similar approach to the creation of his most recent album, Self Explanatory—a disc as much praised for its unique structure as for the strength of its individual tracks. Self Explanatory is modeled after the children’s ‘choose your own ending’ book series.

Boyd is constantly answering interview questions regarding this unique aspect of the album: “No one’s done it in music. I don’t think anyone’s ever had an album where you start at one song and it’s a story and then you [flip way ahead] to another song and the story continues and shit. So I’m super proud of it. I like doing stuff that’s never been done before.”

Now that Self Explanatory has established Boyd as a certified, chart-topping Canadian performer, he is applying the same unconventional approach to music-making that has worked here, to various international music markets.

“We toured in Australia, we did Hill Top Woods down there in July, and that was quite [good]. We’re starting to build there. We did Europe and the UK with D12. … We’re kind of doing what we did here ten years ago [abroad],” he explained. “That’s what we’ve kind of focused on in the last couple of years … the more people you can get into the music the better, it’s just finding a way to do it. I’m not seventeen anymore. I don’t want to just load in the van and go play for fifty bucks. I’ve got a family and shit now. So it’s got to make more [financial] sense, but it’s the same as what we did here ten years ago, [we’re] just doing it again.”

Indeed, as Boyd sets to work once again building a grassroots audience abroad, the future looks promising for Nova Scotia’s favourite MC.

•Corrigan Hammond

Tags: CULTURE, Interview, music