The State of the Rusty Ps
Local Music
The Rusty
Ps don’t talk much about scoring a major record deal these days. “We
gave up those pipe dreams long ago,” says Adam Haupt, who raps with the
group under the nom de plume Phantom Channel. “Once you actually start
dealing with the music industry, you see how crazy it is. So we’re not
making music to try to blow up anymore; we’re making music just for the
love of making it.”
But Haupt admits the band once had lofty
dreams of breakthrough success. “When you put your first real album out
and it gets picked up for distribution by the first label you send it
to, that gets your hopes up,” Haupt says. In 2000, during a time of
high interest in independent hip-hop—but before inexpensive software
enabled every laptop owner to cut their own rap records—the Rusty Ps
released “Tread Water,” a 12-inch featuring some fortunate friends the
band made while touring: The Pharcyde’s Imani and Minneapolis’
then-burgeoning Atmosphere. The single had reach far beyond just the
merch table. Thanks to the emergence of Napster and file sharing, any
college student hunting down Pharcyde and Atmosphere rarities
discovered the Rusty Ps.
“I think between the 12-inch and the fulllength album [Out Of Many], we
probably sold between 8,000 and 10,000 units, which are amazing numbers
for an independent release,” Haupt says. “We just kept selling them,”
he recalls. “It was like, ‘boom, another thousand; boom, another
thousand.’ We were so pumped, we started thinking, ‘Man, we’re going to
be able to quit our jobs now!’ But we were just kids at the time. We
didn’t understand how the business worked.”
By 2003, however,
the realities of being an independent rap group caught up with the
Rusty Ps. They learned that even an established name and a widespread
following couldn’t guarantee financial independence. And most
dispiritingly, something of a Rusty Ps backlash was brewing back home.
“We later learned that people began talking about us as if we’d become
too big for Milwaukee,” Haupt says. “People would just assume we
weren’t interested in playing local shows; they wouldn’t even ask us.”
In response, the group recorded The Rusty Ps vs. Milwaukee, a 2005 disc that flaunted their ties to the city by featuring a guest Milwaukeean on every track. Their newest release, The Shape of Things to Come, takes the opposite approach. It was produced almost entirely in-house without a single featured guest.
“There was some talk when we were pitching the album to labels of doing a track with Slum Village or Kool G Rap,” Haupt explains.
“Those are artists that we respect and everything, but even if we’d had
the money in our budget for that kind of collaboration, we’d prefer it
to be with someone that we know and have a connection with. We don’t
want to just slap someone else’s name to our album so we can sell it.”
Haupt describes The Shape of Things to Come as
a “state of the Rusty Ps” album, a showcase for the group and a preview
of future directions. While past Rusty Ps records have been eclectic
affairs, this one is resolutely uniform. The group sticks to what they
do best: head-nodding hip-hop with crisp funk grooves.
“It’s music for people to play while cleaning their house on Saturdays,” Haupt says.
The Rusty Ps play a 10 p.m. CD release show on Friday, Feb. 29, at Stonefly Brewery with The Crest, House of M and Kid Cut Up.
Also in Local Music:
- Sat
22 - Sun
23 - Mon
24 - Tue
25 - Wed
26 - Thu
27 - Fri
28
Sat., Nov. 22, 2008, 9 PM - Midnight. Maxies Southern Comfort, 6732 W. Fairview Ave., Milwaukee, WI. No Cover. Check out www.libertybluegrassband.com for all the lastest info.
Quantum of Solace is the future of cinema, a movie whose splashiest scenes are tailored to the dimension of big screens. It opens with the camera zooming like a cruise missile, skimming the surface of the sea as it hurtles toward the Italian coast. There,
Besotted by the cinema of silence and early talking pictures, Guy Maddin also finds humor in old movies-or perhaps the humor lies more in the distance between our experience of the world and the gestures of an antique art form. In My Winnipeg, the Canadia
For most of us, bossa nova is the distinctive sound of Brazil. The music was born in the late 1950s, conceived in large part by Antonio Carlos Jobim. From early on, American jazz musicians parked themselves within the idiom, sensing an affinity between th
California's Sound Tribe Sector 9 claims that instrumental music can reflect the tension of the times. In fact, the five-man collective considers its dense Eno-esque swirl of pulsing live and electronic sounds a means of "conversation" between band and li
The local restaurant Barossa, named after the Australian wine region of the same name, quietly closed its doors several months ago. With that closure came the loss of a very distinguished wine list and a menu that borrowed ingredients from all over the wo
The biggest local restaurant news of 2008 would have to be Adam Siegel’s James Beard Award as Best Chef of the Midwest. Siegel is chef de cuisine at Bartolotta’s Lake Park Bistro, as well as at Bacchus. Lake Park Bistro brings a very French fe
