El-P: The ISWYD Outtakes

After finishing my most recent piece on El-P for Remix, I had a few extra quotes left over. I thought they might of interest to his fans. Take it away, sir...

“I certainly don’t carry the mantle for justice in hip-hop, but I do feel like there’s a lot of bullshit out there. For what it’s worth, I bust my ass to try and make sure I’m coming up with something tangible that people can connect to. With (I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead), I tried to dig in a little further to capture a moment. Music, the whole entertainment industry in general, really is just not important enough in and of itself. It’s been kind of shocking to me just how much we pretend that shit is going according to plan, when it’s obviously not. I’m not here to bring gloom and doom to the world, but at the same time, I’m just trying to be honest about what I see around me. As a fan, I’m always craving for someone to stick his or her necks out as an artist. If I can do that to some degree I will, but I really want to hear it from other people.”

About the song "Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)":
That was something that came together with (Definitive Jux rapper) Cage. I forget what we were talking about, but I wanted to write a song that was incredibly dark and kind of humorous at the same time. We were just fucking around and for no reason at all I started singing the line “I found love on a prison ship.” That’s what sparked it off. We put ourselves in the perspective of a firing squad guy, and since everything already thinks I’m a sci-fi geek, which I am, we set the whole thing in the near future. For me, it was a way to make a political commentary without just saying ‘Look – the government is bad! George Bush hates you!’ He does hate you, but nobody needs me to tell them that. So we came up with this demented idea that in ten years, if there was marshal law and people were being rounded up, as there very well could be in my opinion, the good jobs would be the cop jobs. It’s kind of inspired by the movie Brazil. The idea that being an executioner in that world would be a job that a lot of people would want, the kind with insurance and benefits. Cage took the perspective of a guy that would enjoy the job, while I took the character of a guy that was involved in it, but started to feel bad because he felt some emotion towards one of the prisoners. I wrote the music to reflect those sorts of conflicting moods.”