An Interview with TopR
Under The Indfluence
Bay Area MC TopR on How Music Mirrors Life
By Max Sidman
“I think I was always the kid in my crew who was most known for sleeping on couches, the one who was known as the biggest partier and the biggest misanthrope with the biggest not-givin’-a-fuck attitude. Now I’m growing up. I’m almost 30. I live with my girlfriend. I’m not drinking or doing graffiti as much as I used to. I have a dog for Christ sake,” confesses veteran Bay Area battle rapper TopR a.k.a. Topper Holiday a.k.a. Top Ramen. The slightly more domesticated MC is reminiscing over his years in the rap game with a surprisingly zen outlook.
“In life, everyone goes through phases and hopefully people grow and mature, and if you’re a musician, then whatever you do is gonna reflect that, and the music is going to mature along with life. I know some people are gonna want me to keep making the same music that I’ve always made, but it’s always gonna change and evolve with the way I change and evolve, and that’s not a necessarily a bad thing. That’s just the way it needs to be.”
“When you’re 15 or 16 you can get obsessed with anything, and that’s kinda what you stick with,” waxes Topper, going back to the beginning, to what might be described as a troubled adolescence, when he turned to writing raps and doing graffiti as an outlet. “I had a lot of problems at home, so I couldn’t be at home, I was kinda forced out. Most kids at that age who start doing graffiti are lucky to be able to go out bombing at all. They have to sneak out and shit. But I was out on the streets, and when I was out, I was doing graf, and I had no money so I was boosting everything anyway. I spent most of my time writing rhymes and doing graffiti. The reason I think I focused so hard on it was because it was an act of necessity more than anything else.”
Though he was living on streets, Topper began to make a name for himself as a Bay Area graffiti artist and a freestyle MC. He eventually made appearances on Santa Cruz and Stanford college radio stations and played at shows all over the Bay. After hooking up with Marin crew the Earthlings, Topper started working at the now-defunct Maritime Hall, which helped him get off the street and put him onstage as a member of the Earthings at just about every hip-hop show that landed at the venue. They toured the nation with the likes of Hieroglyphics and Living Legends, and Topper released a solo album called Doughnut Hustlers, as well as a 12-inch. At that point, his view of things changed.
“I wasn’t really happy about how shit was going with my music and I wasn’t really focused on it. I felt like I had to start doing stuff on my own, not leave the Earthings crew, but just become more self-sufficient, get my own equipment, stuff like that. So I moved back out to New York,” recalls Topper, who worked construction on the East Coast and saved money for a year, intent on returning to the Bay with enough capital to put out a record and jump start a rap career.
“After I came back from New York, and I had all this money I had saved up, one of my best friends passed away and I just flipped out, and spent all the money—got an apartment and drank all day and did graffiti all night until I ran outta money and lost the apartment. During that year, I had 12 friends die in 12 months. After I lost that apartment, I stopped even bothering to crash on people’s couches, and I went back to squatting. I was sleeping in the park. I was fucking with a lot of blow. It was a pretty major down point in my life. But that was during the period when I was writing Burning The Candle At Both Ends, which turned out to be an in-your-face, punchline, battle style album mixed with a lot of deep emotional musings.”
“Right now we’re in this era of music that’s full of whiney, emo, pseudo-introspective, cliché depth, that I think a lot of people think they relate to, but a real cat is gonna say, ‘Blood, this shit is for pussies.’ Everyone goes through struggles and goes through pain and if you’re not some pussy emo bitch and you’re not on some Tupac Thug Life kinda shit, there’s not much out there for you. I talk about the reality of what people go through, and if I’m gonna write about shit that affects me, there’s gotta be people out there who are affected by it too. No man is an island, as they say.”
“After I put out Burning The Candle, I didn’t really have the means of making another album,” Topper continues, tracing the influential lineage of his discography. He had been touring regularly on the East Coast, and he found the fans at his shows extremely receptive to his music and merchandise. “Basically, the fan base out there is this hip-hop hippie set who will buy whatever you have—they’re like locusts, man, they swarm and the shit is just gone.” He ran out of CDs in a hurry. Topper’s flippant and ironic response to the overwhelming demand for his merch on the East Coast was Legalize Murder.
“Legalize Murder was all about me selling this whole hatred vibe to East Coast hippie college kids, and I’m being a total dick about it, not trying to cater to them or be cool in any way,” laughs Top. “I’m a pretty angry guy to begin with, and a lot of those songs are me trying to be as offensive as possible to peace-loving, ‘60s worshipping, hippie, dreadlocked college kids, who I can in no way relate to or care about, but who were buying my music, so I wanted to see how far I could push it. At first I thought, ‘I’m such an idiot, I’m out there trying to sell this thing called Legalize Murder to hippies.’ But it turned out that all the hippie fans I have out there fucking loved that shit, despite the fact that it was directly about how much I hate hippies.”
Unlike Burning The Candle At Both Ends, which is laced with the rawness of tragedy and anger and the grit of street life; and unlike Legalize Murder, which was largely an antagonistic response, TopR’s latest release, Cheap Laughs For Dead Comedians, is the result of a recently developed obsession with deceased comedian Bill Hicks.
“When I started writing the album, I had some funny lines that referenced dead comedians, stuff like, ‘I’ll probably die like Chris Farley off coke and pill poppin’/or get shot in the head by my old lady like Phil Hartman,’” says the season battle rapper. “I kinda wanted to dedicate the whole album to Bill Hicks, but that seemed too specific. When it finally came together, I decided to do it as a broad dedication to all dead comedians, and not dead comedians who died of natural causes, but the dead comedians who died from fucked up circumstances like drug overdoses or cancer or violent death. I see a lot of comparisons between comedians and punchline rappers, and as a rapper and a big fan of standup comedy, I really relate the craft of it.” Rappers, like stand up comedians, have long, rough roads to success, and though Topper’s been buzzing in the Bay for over a decade, big money fame has eluded him. Not that he’s too worried about that.
“I’m happy that I think I’ve finally found my following in The Bay. Hopefully I can just keep grinding and payin’ bills with music until I get noticed by a label and get put on. See, I don’t have any business sense, or management, distribution, secretaries, a label, a Web site—some how I’ve made it this far into the music game with absolutely none of the stuff you’re supposed to have. In some ways I’m proud of that, but it can be a pretty harrowing experience all in all. I’d love to graduate to the next level, but if I do, I want to do it on my terms. I’m not gonna dick ride some network of people just for some more fame. I’m almost 30. I’m gonna retire soon anyway.”
Visit www.myspace.com/topr for more info.
