I’ve been writing about hip hop for 17 years in one form or another and during that time I’ve come across a lot of talented writers. Joseph Rathgeber is up there with the best of the best. The first time I read his work, my reaction was something akin to the first time that Jeff Beck saw Hendrix play, in that basement club in Queensgate, London. To paraphrase The Yardbirds front man, my first thought was, “Well, I used to be a writer”.
Joe is the brains behind Caltrops Press, a zine which analyses and unpacks some of the finest releases from hip hop’s current crop, as well as interviewing the artists who created them. It channels the same underground energy that the records themselves do, along with the same spirit of resistance that the historic zines that came before it did. On top of Caltrops, Joe is also a published novelist and poet, as well as being one of the most erudite people I’ve ever had the pleasure of chatting with. Over the course of the last few weeks we have exchanged sporadic DMs, via the blighted bird app, which allowed me to gain some insight into his creative process, his history with zines and writing in general, as well as his relationship with hip hop.
If you would like to support his work, I would advise you to donate some money to the Caltrops Press project and cop a few zines via his socials (details at the end of the interview). It becomes a more vital platform with each passing day, especially in the wake of the journalistic losses the culture has suffered in recent weeks.
To start I wanted to ask about your writing career beyond Caltrops, because I think the zine is where a lot of people reading this will know you from. Can you give me a rundown of what else you’ve been involved with over the years?
For better or worse, I’ve always been reflecting on the arc of my life, even when I was young and dumb and didn’t have much to look back on. But I seem to have hit an age where I can see the arc more accurately. I can see the bends and switchbacks. Two consistent passions have been hip-hop and writing. Years ago, Slug spit a lyric that has been scored into my hippocampus ever since: “As a child, hip-hop made me read books.” That’s been my path. Impossible to say if I would’ve found my way to books if it weren’t for hip-hop. For me, language play is where it’s at and always been—what those pomo motherfuckers called the ludic impulse. To paraphrase Biggie, “Gimme the ludic, gimme the ludic.” I’m drawn to the wordplay and trickster tone-shifts of hip-hop, and so I’ve always been driven to come correct with a certain white-guy-signifying in the spirit of James Joyce. Driven to show & prove & say something of value within a Black culture that has always welcomed me. So from the age of seven or eight I was writing raps, and that continued all the way through college. At the end of high school and during college I began writing bad, free-associative teenage poetry and short fiction. Around that time I also became one of the first rap-centric writers on the website Tiny Mix Tapes. I grinded away at poems and stories for the next several years and eventually found success in publishing and earned recognition in my 30s. There’s been two collections of short stories, a novel, and two books of poetry. I’ve been working on a goddamn tome the past seven years—an oral history and critical analysis of a corner of underground hip-hop at the end of the millennium. Caltrops Press began as a side-project to that, an opportunity for me to get back in the mode of writing about music. Rap music made me want to rap. Rapping made me want to write. Caltrops has become a distillation of all the shit I’ve written in the past. Everything is presently folding back in on itself. So the arc has spiraled beautifully.
Plenty of stuff to follow on with from that answer, but first I’d like to talk about the connection between hip hop and education. I know that as a white kid in 90’s England, I learned more about black history and culture from rap music, than I ever did from the national curriculum. Back then it was learning about Rosa Parks or Rodney King, nowadays it’s pausing the track so I can Google the African revolutionary that woods mentioned. It hasn’t stopped for me, even now when I’m in my 40’s. I don’t really think there’s another genre of music that gives you that sort of educational opportunity.
KRS called it “edutainment,” right? He wasn’t wrong. My experience definitely matches yours. The history curriculum in my schools favored a linear approach, which made for a rather sterile learning environment. Just some caricatured versions of historical figures and events. I don’t ever recall hearing about Rodney King in class. Ice Cube provided me with that lesson. When I did happen to find myself edified in school, it usually arrived in the form of a lunchroom cypher or a message transmitted through a yellow Sony Sports Mega Bass boombox that someone was blasting in the back of the bus.
I agree that hip-hop is unique in the educational opportunities it offers. The density of rap music—more words than any other genre; a library of records mined for samples—the references scatter in every direction without regard for space or time. The homie Elmattic calls it the “quantum language of rap.” It’s an allusive art, so you can be sent off on a terrifying number of tangents, each more wondrous than the last. The content of rap lyrics is limitless. A single verse can point you in a thousand directions. It’s typically not passive music—it calls for action, active minds, and, in rare cases, activism. But even when the rap song isn’t “Nature of the Threat,” there’s still plenty to be gained. I can engage in an alternative field of study if I listen to “Bring It On.” Technically speaking, rap music invites me to study how language works. Those infinite demonstrations of poetic and rhetorical devices on chest-out display.
So much of hip-hop is learn-as-you-go, untrained, and DIY. Or at least it used to be. Now I guess people can watch YouTube tutorials or whatever. But back when I was coming up, we depended on our peers to figure things out. Each one teach one. A pedagogy of punk kids putzing around on an ASR-10, or a Tascam 4-track, or feeling through verbalized stream-of-consciousness thoughts during a front stoop freestyle. It’s been kind of fascinating to watch anti-institutional hip-hop make its way into the academy over the past 30 years or so. Rap music, for most of us, is the academy.
Going back to what you said about the spirit of James Joyce, that is something that stood out to me the first time I read your work – and still does – that Joycean flow. A rare style in analytical rap writing. Was that something you had to work hard to perfect, or did it come fairly naturally to you?
It happens naturally, mostly. Not to say there’s anything very mystical about it. For as long as I can remember, my mind relies more on sonics and phonics than anything resembling logic. Logic comes later. When it’s going the way it should, the writing process is an unconscious one, and the acoustics of words—their cognates, their connective tissue—take the lead. Even when I’m writing a story or a poem, I allow the words to lead me in the direction of plot or point. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about play—and of course Joyce’s desk, I imagine, was a total romper room. If I’m looking at a line, or even a clause—let’s say “caught you slippin’,” which ELUCID says on “Codex Giga” which I recently wrote about—I just begin to play with the phrase—its syllables, its implications, its intertextuality. I’m saying it over and over in my head, studying it, asking myself whether it evokes anything I’ve ever known or noticed. And then I go where those evocations take me. Sometimes I’m escorted too far afield, so I’ll have to pull back. That’s when you allow some logic to enter. I snap out of the reverie or research and take a moment to make sense of what I’ve gathered. And the collaging of those pieces and parts—which at that point are strewn all over a document or piece of paper—is what makes the sentences.
I know this must sound kind of silly when you consider I’m writing music criticism or analysis or whatever and not some stream-of-consciousness poem. But it’s an exercise in excess and restraint. If I can manage to use this method and still stay centered on whatever topic I’m pursuing without giving too much power to theme or thesis, I see that as a success.
So you’ve spoken a little bit about your technique, but how does the whole process play out from inception to completion? How long do you need to spend with an album before you can begin writing?
I never go into an album or a song knowing I’ll write about it. Usually something about a song or album will reverberate within a certain chamber that sets off the synapses—a few quick thoughts inspired by a loop or a lyric. I’ll jot down a couple of notes in a document or in a notebook. When I write about an entire album, I’ll be steadfast about revisiting and expanding those notes. If it’s an individual song, those notes might linger in purgatory for months with me adding to them periodically. I’ll listen to an album or song a lot—that’s because I’m taking notes until I feel like I’ve got enough raw material to work with. You can’t notice everything on one or two listens. That’s one of the drawbacks of conventional music journalism, I think: the pressure to produce. I’m not at the mercy of deadlines. My piece is never ready until it’s ready. That said, I can sit back and benefit from reading what more mainstream publications are saying about an album. I never want to take their approach or repeat what they’ve said. Once I’m in the right frame of mind to begin my piece, I’ve typically got an overwhelming amount of notes to work from. So I organize first, and then I work from the micro to the macro. Themes reveal themselves over time. I’ll write in small chunks and then puzzle-piece things together. I usually get to a point where everything seems too dense to find a way through, but I ultimately do. And then suddenly the draft is done. I’ll let it sit for a day or two, put fresh eyes on it, edit for clarity, and then it’s pretty much ready to go. I’ll put it up on the website, post about it on social media, and hope that people give a fuck.
I like that method of piecing things together after they’ve been written. Reminds me of Burroughs, although nowhere near as chaotic.
So you’ve got Caltrops plus these other areas of focus for your writing, but are there any other avenues you’d still like to explore? Or any form of creativity beyond writing?
I’m nestled comfortably where I’m presently at, but who knows what the future holds? If you had told me three years ago I would be doing Caltrops and not writing short stories, I would’ve dismissed the notion immediately. I dabble in actual paper-based collage and sound collage. Those are egoless activities that help me channel creative energy when the words aren’t singing the way they should. I can grab a stack of old magazines and textbooks and a pair of scissors and go nuts. I can fire up my premillennial cracked version of Cool Edit Pro and move wav. files around, feeling free and unfettered knowing they’re for me and nobody else. Important to have that balance.
Definitely. I think balance is something I’ve struggled with in general in my life, but now I’m older I’ve at least worked out what the more important factors are in the equation, even if it’s still tricky to keep on an even keel a lot of the time. I also think it’s cool to revisit hobbies you might have left in your childhood simply because somebody once told you that ‘grownups shouldn’t do that’. I think the world would be a happier place if more people rediscovered those outlets. Collaging isn’t a childhood pursuit per se, but it shares some of the same elements.
Absolutely. And I keep coming back to something Robert Frost said about balancing mental labor with manual labor. He’d painstakingly arrange words in order to draft a poem, and so he knew afterwards it would be time to go outside and dig a hole in the dirt, mend a fence, or climb a ladder to pick some apples. That, like collaging or whatever, lets you get outside yourself, outside your head. I think you’re right: no coincidence the activities that allow us to recharge are childhood pastimes. Basketball has always been a significant part of my life. I’m playing more now than I have in years—it’s beneficial to the writing. As much as I’d like to think 24-hours straight of writing would help me complete a piece, or research a new one, or edit a draft, it’s best to take a break from that, even if it’s just shooting around for an hour or doing a prison workout in your living room.
This might be linked to the previous question, but do you ever suffer from writer’s block and if so, how do you move past it?
“Block” would be a strong word. Sometimes you’re just not feeling it, right? Those aforementioned physical activities help, for sure. But there’s really no sense in forcing anything. If I sit down to write and it’s more toil and torture than usual, I’ll just turn to the more menial aspects of the process: research, organizing notes, checking the accuracy of quotes. These are things that need to get done at some point anyway, so if the words aren’t working in my favor, I’ll give myself over to the grunt work. And let’s say I happen upon a window of time that is particularly conducive to getting actual writing done, but I’m not feeling it, or I’m distracted. There might be a bit of pressure to be productive during those precious couple of hours. I’ll turn to something that’s sure to get the motor running. That could be reading the work of other writers I admire, or—even more specifically—reading interviews of writers or artists I admire. I’ll head over to the Bomb Magazine website. That’s a snobby-as-fuck publication, but the conversations are often dope. Another sure bet is if I put on some artsy-fartsy movie on Criterion. I’m indebted to a good friend who shares his account with me, so I can always count on a twenty-minute binge of cinema to spark shit.
You spoke a bit about writing being a consistent passion in your life, so I was wondering if there were any direct influences in your childhood? Were your parents creative in that sense?
No, they weren’t. My mother was a nurse and my father was a car mechanic. They were both forced into retirement by the pandemic. My mother began her career in pediatrics and ended it in geriatrics with dementia patients punching her in the chest as she clipped their toenails. My father successfully unionized his place of work and became the shop steward, a position he held until his departure. They encouraged anything creative I wanted to do but didn’t model any of it. They read to me at night as a child, but the house wasn’t one that was full of books. I remember my father reading manuals and softcover textbooks about electronics from time to time. My mom would check out Danielle Steel novels from the library. We were essentially a standard blue-collar family with little time for the arts, I guess. But my interests were never dismissed. I remember when I was maybe five or six I was heavy into drawing zoo animals for what was probably no more than a week. I asked my dad if he ever liked to draw. He answered by saying he used to like to draw whatever he saw in front of him—a door, a wall, a window. I think he was bullshitting me.
Sticking with the early memories, obviously hip hop has been in your life since those days, so I was wondering which artists were your entry point back then?
Well, though my parents were by no means excessively alarmed, they did fall under the sway of the Satanic panic current and PMRC posturings of the ’80s. I think they automatically assumed I shouldn’t be exposed to whatever the media was hyperventilating about as they called for the censorship of rap music. So when I began to ask for them to bring me to Sam Goody to purchase tapes, they were unwilling to allow anything with Tipper Gore’s dreaded PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT CONTENT sticker on it. Of course, that basically ruled out every possible tape I wanted to buy. My purchasing power was limited. I would listen to Hot 97 religiously, recording songs off the radio to make mixtapes for my Walkman, praying for the DJ not to talk over the start or end of the song. My cousins’ parents bought them whatever tapes they wanted, so I dubbed a lot of West Coast shit from them. I bought a lot of cassingles, which would have the radio edit versions of songs. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. I think the first tapes I owned were DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s And In This Corner…, He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper, and Rock the House. I got that trifecta for Christmas in ’89 or ’90 because my parents ruled them “safe.” In hindsight, I appreciate them making the effort. Then I remember the pop-rap moment of Hammer and Vanilla Ice, followed by the juvenile ecstasy of Kris Kross, and by the end of elementary school we were in the cafeteria trying to master the lyrics to “C.R.E.A.M.” The pace was exponential.
And what about zines, was that a scene you were into before Caltrops? If so, were there any in particular that inspired you to start your own?
There’s an even hazier path to explain how I arrived at zines. My first exposure, if I had to guess, was through learning about punk history. I probably saw images of zine spreads in documentaries or something. I read Girls to the Front, and I think that book had Riot Grrrl zine images in there—or at least they were talking about that aspect of the scene. Hip-hop, somewhat strangely, has had a more formally produced magazine presence, I think—mass-produced and widely distributed. Whether it was an obligatory subscription to The Source, or exposure to a smaller, more independent-minded publication like Ego Trip or Kevin Beacham’s Caught in the Middle. Or graffiti magazines like Life Sucks Die. There have been hip-hop zines, though—Fritz the Cat’s In Search of…Divine Styler and Mystik Journeymen’s Unsigned and Hella Broke come to mind. But these were definitely not my introduction to zines. I learned of these much later.
Much of my zine discovery was removed from the original, physical sources. I found databases online of endless zines—PDF scans of issues from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. But I can’t neglect to mention a friend of mine—Brandi Perri. She’s a sociology professor now, but she’s always made zines about her life and interests, and seeing her put these little books together, autonomously and passionately, was a big inspiration. She was the first person I knew who actually did the damn thing.
Another avenue was about 10-15 years ago when I was showing up to a lot of demonstrations in NYC, and there would often be activists distributing zines about radical politics—anarchism, how to make a silencer with household goods, animal liberation guides…shit like that. I’d grab ’em all because they were free, of course, and I couldn’t help myself. I’m just a sucker for folded and stapled paper.
And then my experience dipping in and out of poetry communities has also played a part. What they call the Mimeograph Revolution took place in the second-half of last century, and poets have yet to abandon the immediate, intimate, and insurgent method of making cheap copies of their work in the form of chapbooks and broadsides. These were, essentially, zines by another name. I’d consider this revolution in thought and production as akin to how 4-tracks made home recording possible for underground MCs. It’s nothing less than a liberatory practice. Before Caltrops, I began to spread a lot of my poetry that way, having grown weary and disillusioned with the standard means of publishing work. I’ve kept that going. Anybody that’s ever received a zine from me has also probably received a broadside as a little something extra.
Do you think zines and, on a broader scale, blogs and other solo journalistic ventures, might see something of a renaissance / resurgence in the midst of the layoffs we’ve witnessed recently?
Perhaps, but it ultimately comes down to money, right? I moonlight as a writer, essentially. I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills if writing was my full-time job. Damn near nobody can. I’m not really equipped to talk about the financial plight of music journalists, seeing as how I’m not of that world. But, from what I hear, they’re barely scraping by as is. I think it’s always a good time for a DIY resurgence, but we exist within an economic system that doesn’t value such things. DIY zines—or any non-institution-backed artistic output for that matter—are basically the result of time stolen from the capitalist mode of things. Revolution at your own risk.
I guess I meant maybe more as a response to and a result of the situation, not necessarily as a means of income. Wouldn’t you say that DIY movements often form as part of a wider resistance movement? Like an attempt to take back control of something meaningful that’s been lost to something more soulless. I dunno maybe it’s too romantic – or I’m too naive – to think that it’s still a viable response.
Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. DIY writing is part of that movement—samizdat, if we’re feeling ambitious. Definitely DIY writing/publishing as a deliberate alternative to the soul-smothering enterprise of mainstream publishing. I think it’s a viable response. I can be a romantic, too. I’m just saying if there’s music journalists being laid off from Okayplayer or wherever, those people are still gonna need to make ends meet. They can go the DIY route as a resounding “fuck you” to the system—and we’ll likely love them for it—but a zine isn’t going to get them health insurance. (Well, being a freelancer isn’t either, I suppose.)
I’ve actually had a couple of zine ideas floating around my head for a while now. Have you got any tips or general advice for anyone thinking of putting one together?
I would encourage anyone and everyone to make a zine. They don’t have to include these massive essayistic pieces like mine tend to. You can take everything you would normally send out in a tweet about your favorite rappers, and that would be just fine. Couple those random thoughts with some collaged images, come up with a quirky title, fold and staple some paper together, and you’re suddenly well on your way. Part of the beauty of zines is that they are what you make them, warts and all. With zines, the flaws are endearing. Zines aren’t meant to be polished, and they’re a direct line of communication between you and your community. Tip number one would be: do it. I know I often add undue weight and pressure to monumental writing projects. Zines are low-stakes. Don’t dawdle; you could be making a valued and appreciated contribution. The rest of my tips would be about planning—laying out pages, knowing how much content you have, understanding how many pages your zine will be, making sure you don’t use a Sharpie that bleeds through to the other side. But, that said, another great thing about zines is that all mistakes are fixable. If you do so happen to miscount your pages or run out of room, there’s always a workaround. You can cut, paste, tape, and photocopy your way out of any zine mishap.
Well that feels like a good place to draw things to a close, but before we do is there anything you want to shout about, or anybody you want to shout out?
Shout-out to you for having me. Shout-out to everybody who has been supporting this Caltrops undertaking. I came into it with zero expectations, and it’s been a thrill to hear such positive responses to what I do and the words I write. Peace to the artists who are making music worth writing about. Peace to like-minded peers who’ve gone out of their way to signal boost Caltrops—Secret House Against podcast, the Sonic Cloth podcast, The Underground Vault, The Next Movement podcast, the Fly Fidelity podcast, Humthrush, among others. Caltrops remains fun and fulfilling for me to do, so stay tuned for new issues. I originally conceived Caltrops with a radical bent, and that mission continues. I view and explore these rap texts through a political lens and with an insurgent agenda. It’s a humble zine, but it’s something. I know it’s easy to become complacent and convenient to separate music from politics, but I refuse that inclination. I would ask the audience refuse it as well. That said, the last word today goes to the hope for the full liberation of Palestine.
gingerslim 