(swiped from Pitchfork Media)El-P: "When a Company Flow song comes on it's like getting shot with a fucking nail gun. Everything else is like palm trees."
For hip-hop progressives Company Flow, being "independent as fuck" was a moral code of conduct and a chest-puff boast. El-P, Bigg Jus, and Mr. Len weren't just independent...they were independent as fuck. There's a difference. With their lone LP, 1997's Funcrusher Plus, the New York crew railed against capitalism and major label rap while offering an alternative that was equal parts rebel yell, lo-fi RZA-style bap, and Orwellian paranoia. It didn't go platinum. But its sound and spirit hit the underground hard, expanding the idea of what hip-hop could sound like.
Funcrusher hasn't been in print since 2006, but the record will start recirculating in remastered form May 5 courtesy of El-P's own Definitive Jux label. (The album was originally Rawkus Records' first LP, though the relationship between Company Flow and their old label has since turned ugly.) The new Funcrusher will boast rare tracks from the group's early days ("Juvenile Techniques", "Corners 94") and late-era songs cut before their 2000 breakup ("Simple", "DPA", and "Simian Drugs").
Though the three members have worked separately this millennium, they reunited for a show in 2007. Will this reissue spark another meeting of the Company Flow minds? Based on a conference call with all three members earlier this week, nobody's ruling a reunion out-- but it would have to be on their strictly independent terms, of course.
Pitchfork: Why reissue Funcrusher Plus now, 12 years after its original release?
El-P: Because everyone wants to release a record on its 12th anniversary! Perfect timing. I don't know...why the fuck are we doing this? It hasn't been available for a while and we finally got our shit together. We had to get the rights back from Rawkus...which I don't wanna talk about at all. The album should be out there. It's not something I ever thought would just disappear.
Pitchfork: So there's no special significance to the number 12 necessarily?
El-P: I think I got my first hand job at 12.
Mr. Len: I could make something up: There's three guys in Company Flow. And four years is how long a presidency lasts. Take the four and multiply it by the three and you get 12. Now, you add the one and the two in 12 and that's three...which is how many people who were in Company Flow. Knowledge that!
Pitchfork: Listening back to Funcrusher now, it's a little creepy how the dark mood of it matches the mood of 2009.
El-P: Even I was taken back by some of what we were saying. We just saw through shit-- we never subscribed to the idea that things were great back then. Even the idea about the music industry collapsing under the weight of its frivolous products seems to have come true. But I don't think that it took geniuses to see that as being inevitable.
Bigg Jus: It just so happens that geniuses made it happen. [laughs]
Len: We tried to tell you the sky was fallin', y'all just didn't wanna listen.
Pitchfork: So you're still holding that against everybody?
Len: The whole country. [laughs]
Bigg Jus: No! We're all about change now!
El-P: [deadpans] We're all about the hope.
Jus: You sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.
Pitchfork: So uplifting! Are you guys not excited about our new president?
Len: I'm very excited about it. But it always sucks to be the first person to do something, especially at a time when everything's fucked up. We're talking about 600,000 people losing their jobs in a month, millions in a year. To fix that you're circling money through an economy that has already crumbled. But at least someone's trying to do something now.
Pitchfork: How would you compare your overall perspectives now to when this album originally came out?
El-P: That CoFlow record was us on some fuckin' angry societal perspective shit and some love-for-hip-hop shit. I haven't changed in terms of the way I look at things but I started writing more about myself, drawing from my own personal experiences-- things that sort of take precedence over just ideas.
Jus: I kinda did it in reverse. I started more introspective and then went back out to investigate what was going on in the world. Turns out things weren't too far off from where they were when we were doing Company Flow. I don't like being negative but a lot of things still look the same to me at this point. There's just a different patina on it.
El-P: I agree. For me, all the political ideas are still involved, it's just that I started writing from a different point on the graph. A lot of people thought Funcrusher was super dark and hopeless, and I don't think it was hopeless in any way. We were on some affirmation shit. We knew what we thought was right and we were fuckin' assholes about it. We were reacting to a whole bunch of bullshit, especially when it came to music. All the hip-hop shit that we grew up loving just seemed to need a fuckin' reinforcement. Now it's a whole different scenario. But a lot of those issues obviously still remain.
Jus: I'm proud of the "independent as fuck" vibe to the record, and how we stayed pure and didn't get watered down by all the crap that was in the industry. It was good to be part of a record that helped spearhead that independent movement, even though it still has taken way too long to take hold.
El-P: I remember sitting at my kitchen table, cutting up letters and pictures and trying to glue them on there so we could make artwork for our black and white promo. We were just giggling, like "This is some fucking independent as fuck ass shit right here!" We loved it. Now it's part of the collective consciousness-- it's standard practice to start a record label, put your shit out, get your own distribution deal. I wouldn't say that we made that happen, but I would say that we were one of the first, if not the first cats to really know that was what we wanted to do.
Pitchfork: You mentioned how you guys did some asshole things back in the day. Would you do anything differently if you had the chance?
El-P: Maybe we wouldn't have broken up. [laughs]
Jus: That would be it for me. Now that everybody is older you kind of understand that people go through phases, and it's about keeping a continuity. I'm glad we're at least talking about it now. El-P: Ultimately, I think we always did it the right way. Even when we broke up it was like, "Let's not do this on bad terms." We always held ourselves to some sort of code that we weren't gonna fall into all the same traps that everyone else falls into.
Len: There were no diss records, no silliness. El-P: I never released my diss record: "Hey Len and Jus, I Hate You Fucking Guys". I recorded that shit, but I just felt it was a little harsh. [laughs]
Pitchfork: Do you think that Funcrusher is easier for the uninitiated to compute now?
Len: You have to be a special kind of teenager to dig it-- that's not a slight to a lot of teenagers out there, but they don't know how to absorb music. It takes a special kind of person to get into anything from that era, where it's a little more thought-provoking. It's not straight shoot-you music. If we're gonna shoot you, it's gonna be pretty damn entertaining.
El-P: When we came out there were motherfuckers who were like, "What is this crazy space rap from the future?" And at the same time I started seeing people refer to it as "old school" or "classic." We always thought that we were ahead of our time but maybe we weren't or maybe that time has caught up or maybe it's passed. It's hard to front on this shit though. When we made Funcrusher we thought it was the hottest shit on the planet, and when people didn't get it we were kind of like, "Well fuck you then!"
Pitchfork: Did you actually say that to people?
El-P: No, we said it in a mirror. [laughs] Actually, we probably did say that shit in interviews.
Len: We were on some arrogant-ass shit.
El-P: You couldn't tell us shit because we all knew how much we lived hip-hop culture. I reveled in the fact that when a Company Flow song comes on it's like getting shot with a fucking nail gun. Everything else is like palm trees. Pitchfork: A lot of people say Funcrusher was ahead of its time, but it's not like there's tons of stuff like that out now. I look at it as something that's more unique to its time.
Jus: I thought the album was following a logical step for the culture, which was basically about doing new shit and being original. Somehow along the way that totally got lost. I don't think other people could kind of keep up with where it was going. Besides the fact that we also didn't really make dance music.
El-P: Not just "didn't really make" dance music...I guess we made shit that people could uprock to on occasion. [laughter] At this point, I don't think it would sound jarring to anybody who kept their ear open to underground hip-hop in the last decade. If you were to play it to someone who only listens to the shit that's on the radio, they're probably going to have the same fucking response as they did when we dropped this shit, which is 50 percent saying "What the fuck is this garbage?!" and 50 percent saying "Holy shit, I haven't heard hip-hop like this." We always drew people down the middle-- there were never people who were like "Eh, it's all right." It was either "I wanna find those guys and beat them senseless because their crazy noise is hurting me" or "This is fucking incredible."
Pitchfork: Have you ever been surprised by someone who you wouldn't think would like the album?
El-P: My mom likes it. [laughter] It was different back then: We were in The Source, DJ Premier was rocking our shit on his mixtapes, KRS-One was rapping above our instrumentals. We kind of came out at the perfect time because people hadn't yet created subgenres so we were thrown into the pantheon of rap music in general. There wasn't a lot of people being like "Wow, they listen to this kind of rap." But when I was a kid I just assumed everyone should like this shit because I felt like I was the ultimate hip-hop fan. Like: "Yo, this adheres to my very fucking strict standards of what a dope record should be." I was 21 so I was pretty fucking high on myself.
Pitchfork: Do you worry about falling back into a sense of nostalgia with this reissue? I feel like when bands start re-releasing old material it might suggest their current work is less valuable.
El-P: I'm not gonna front-- that was something that may have held me back from getting into it for a while. At the end of the day, it's about the fact that we made this record and we're getting a chance to put it back out there. It's like a catalog piece. None of us are fucking washed up old dudes. It's not like, "Hey, let's take this to Vegas!"
Jus: I thought the best way to go about things would be to do a couple of new songs. I think the validity of what we've done is already secured. People already know what we're doing separately, but I'm personally throwing it out there to the guys that I'd love to do new material. I still have the same love in my heart for cats.
El-P: I hate you. [laughter]
Jus: I figure people would be cringing on that one.
El-P: You dropped the love bomb.
Pitchfork: Do you guys have any formal plans to record new stuff together?
El-P: Nah. We've always said that one day we'll get together to do some new songs but it's just dirty to think of it in any other way. I don't feel like planning to do it and being like, "We're releasing a record!" is the way to go. I love how we came in and fucking destroyed shit and then dipped. It was painful at the time but I don't regret it. As far as music and art goes, motherfuckers are dope artists, so you can never close that door.
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