Shawn Setaro
[Underground rap legend Beans,formerly of the innovative group Antipop Consortium, recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher” podcast. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems Beans dropped during the Q&A.]
On the 1990s East Village spoken word scene, where he got his start:
“I started to experiment, because it was a cappella. I tried to do interesting things. I wrote this piece called “The Serpent.” I had a little shaker and a sock, and I had written the words on the sock, and was performing and reading the words off the sock and miming the snake. You know, just interesting things like that. I would ride my bike on the stage and recite poems while riding my bike.”
On Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, who he toured and recorded with in the mid-1990s:
“Vernon’s my big brother. Vernon’s the one that first took me around the world, and showed me what it’s like touring and being a working musician. He gave me a lot of opportunities, and I’m very thankful to him for that. He saw something in me.”
On rhyming:
“I try to treat it playfully. I figure there’s really no rules other than the rules and parameters that you set for yourself, so for me it’s kind of anything goes. I guess I can describe it as being cryptic, yet confessional. That’s a good way to describe my style.”
On Antipop Consortium’s goals:
“We were trying to make music that was in the vein of the early, 80s pioneers, where everything was different. We came up in the era where everything was varied. Nothing sounded the same, but yet it was under the umbrella of hip-hop. So we just tried to make music in the spirit of that.”
On making Antipop Consortium and pianist Matthew Shipp’s 2003 collaboration album:
“It was kind of weird because we were breaking up. We weren’t even really speaking at the time. So a lot of the first Matthew Shipp album is very haphazard.”
