West coast hip-hop’s Josh Martinez: “You can’t suck”

Interview by Blake Morneau

Josh Martinez has been making his genre-mashing, west coast-flavoured hip-hop for nearly two decades. A former fixture of Canada’s west coast music scene, Martinez has been living in Portland for eight years. We tracked Martinez down at the office of his label, Camobear Records, for a freewheeling conversation covering his music, his favourite time in Vancouver and how he got the title of “the People’s Champ.”

Does your “People’s Champ” title cross borders?
That’s tough because I gave myself that title after a fistfight off-stage in Calgary with… I guess, not a fan, but a patron of the bar I was at. He blew smoke in my face, when you could still smoke in bars and he was mumbling at me, really drunk. I leaned into him, like, “We’re good, but you need to go away from the front of the stage.” When I was talking to him from above he gave me an open hand to the chin from below and kind of popped me up. So I hit him with the microphone and then I jumped into the crowd and threw about 30 punches. He didn’t get any in from that point. I kind of beat him up and the bouncers took him outside and gave him another because they were homies of mine. It was fun. It was amazing for me because I don’t really fight. So, to fight and win in a decisive way at my own show, then jump back onstage and end up selling 80 CDs to people I don’t know, was awesome for me. The legend of the People’s Champ comes from that night. Down here there’s another People’s Champ called Paul Wall. He’s a different sort of champ; the candy-coated car and the diamond grill kind of king. My whole thing is that I liked that title and what that means is you actually care about people and their needs. You want to represent them in a positive manner. It was always in jest, that title, just to put in perspective. If you have a fighter or boxer called the People’s Champ, usually they’re in touch with the fans, with the people who support them. Outside of all the joking around, that’s essentially been my philosophy.

You strike me as a guy who would listen to Josh Martinez.
[Laughs] Unfortunately, I have to. I think that’s maybe my least favourite part of being an artist is listening to myself over and over again, and only looking for flaws. Listening to yourself that doesn’t fit a narrative, or sounds lacking, or could be said better.

Now that we’re on the subject of Josh Martinez’s music… Blotto is such a great record; it has some heavy shit going on.
The thing about Blotto was that it took a long time. It was a five-year album. At one point it was very of-the-time, but by the time it was done I was in a happy relationship and moved on from all that stuff. The record I wrote before this was very much a tongue-in-cheek pop album. I was thinking that would be the record that would open everything up for me, allow me to get out more… it would be sort of my Macklemore moment, and it didn’t work out that way for a number of reasons, including the total breakdown of the relationship I was in in Vancouver, the changing of management, the record being two years late because of hard drives getting erased… It was just a total nightmare process. I moved to Portland to wait it out and recover from the shock of all these things happening. I just got to the point where I was a bit lost and I think that happens to everyone repeatedly throughout their lives, like you get lost and found over and over.

The album almost sounds like it was a therapy session.
Blotto was created, a lot of the songs, in a darker age. It was sort of based on the tour to end all tours. The narrative on the album was: I break up with my chick, throw myself into being an artist and go on the road, then sort of go through that and realize I’m left feeling empty regardless. I felt like when I was home that was what I was missing out on, and when I’m out on the road I’m missing out on being with a friend, as opposed to a stranger who likes my music and thinks I’m a certain person. There’s a lot of that conflict in the record and it took me a really long time to find the people to finish it. Stuey Kubrick made a lot of the beats, but I needed to find someone to help me produce it. Which is a different thing; adding elements and taking away things. It’s important to have someone to edit it down. It’s obvious I’m a long-winded dude and I need somebody can help me synthesize and believe in what I do. My favourite thing about Blotto is that it’s been very well received. I think people were waiting for me to do stuff like this, more emotionally substantial. I think there was definitely a period of time in my solo career when I just wanted to write fun shit to party to, and that the girls would like to dance to. I didn’t really feel the need to stay personal or journal-y. I mean, I write about my life almost like a third person and I add details that didn’t happen because that makes a better story. That’s the blend of Josh Martinez. I can tell a story that’s partly mine, partly yours and partly made up. It feels like everyone’s story or at least something you can relate to somehow. That’s really the challenge and I think people really wanted me to get more personal in my writing. I heard a lot of the old Josh Martinez. Going back to find the old Josh Martinez is kind of hard sometimes when he was 23 and I’m 35… That’s a tricky thing with an artist. If you’re going to continue to put things out you have to find a way to continue to grow as a person, keep growing your musical stuff and not stray too far from what people liked about you originally. That’s the challenge as you change as a person.

I love when you hit a nice harmony right in the middle of a violent-sounding rap or beat. Not that there’s violence in the music, but that aggression…
Harmony has always been the drug of choice for me in music. It’s not something I know a ton about, but it’s something that has always drawn me to other people’s music. I think I’m probably one of the very few admitted Beach Boy junkies among rappers. My influences are rarely hip-hop when it comes to what I’m trying to learn and add to the music that I make. That being said, I’m still checking out the current rappers who are making noise because I want to understand the flow and I want to bite flows that I like and alter them for my own purposes. The harder stuff for me is to bring in elements of indie rock or rocksteady or ‘50s doo-wop into a hip-hop context because it’s more challenging to do it well. My melody lines and harmony lines are usually just taken from stuff I hear. I hear it and I pervert it to whatever situation it is. I try to do the thing where I don’t wash out all my vocals by harmonizing or making a melody over everything so it’s more of a contrast to a certain point. The parts are differentiated. There was a period of time where I was adding harmony background vocals over everything and it was a bit much. Like you said, now those elements are more in place to be juxtaposed, where maybe the beat is violent and there’s something beautiful going on. Using contrast is something I’ve learned to do over time and being spare with it. Not overloading or adding too much. Or adding a ton then cutting things back. I call it “pruning.” It’s probably the essential part of my editing process. I just double everything and I put harmonies where there shouldn’t be, then I step back and look at everything and say, “Oh man, that’s just pure awful.” I start pruning back and taking layers off. That’s my process. I’m not a freestyler. I’m not Moka Only; I don’t make six songs a day. I’m working on the same seven songs I started last summer and I’m on maybe 200 hours with them and there’s a good 100 hours of editing and altering. It’s a long process to me. I’m very slow and diligent about trying to pick what I want to say out and have it be something I haven’t already said. That being said, I’ve got 10-plus albums in my discography so the choices that I have for song structure or song ideas or even word choice, it’s such that I have this discography I’m aware of and don’t want to repeat myself, so that makes the process longer. When I was younger I was just getting drunk and having fun and there wasn’t expectationsThings scale differently as you have success. You end up with a new bar that you’ve raised and you can’t really go under that bar. The expectations are good because they force you to keep growing but you can’t suck, so that’s frustrating sometimes.

You can’t suck. That’s a good rule to live by.
You can’t suck. That’s harder. Imagine an athlete in their twenties whose body is always just going, naturally tuned to what they’re doing, and then as they get older the injuries start piling up, fatigue and doubt creeps in all these other things, but you still have to perform at that same level as if there’s no conflict, that you’re just able to perform at your peak forever. That’s just not the case, athletically or culturally. Now I’m playing shows where no one I know is there because they’re at home with kids or jobs or whatever. Originally you’re writing songs for your friends and peers to party to, but then you’re no longer around peers or you’re among a much smaller group of peers. Your influences start to fan out and you start to have less to offer from a brand new point of view, unless you work at it. You have to be diligent with trying to bring in new things or you’ll just end up doing the same shit over again. Some people are cool with that and sometimes I wish I was, too, because it would be easier.

I found out about the Chicarones last summer when I saw y’all at Shambhala. Tell me about the Chicarones.
It is a funny partnership. It’s very much its own thing and it’s always very funny to me because people either know Josh Martinez, or they know Sleep, or they know the Chicarones, and they don’t know that all three of those things are basically the same thing. It’s great in some ways but it would be more awesome if everyone understood them to be synchronistic; if you like one, you’ll like the others. The Chicarones is definitely more playful hip-hop, although it does delve into more emo stuff because Sleep is super emo. [Laughs] I always tell him, “Bro, stop writing sad songs.” The combination is very much based on a live show energy. Our live show is easy. It’s not a lot of work. The songs are fun. There’s a DJ in a pig mask. It’s been the vessel by which we’ve had the greatest overall success, as far as amount of people we’ve played for, the kinds of shows we get offered, the opportunities with the songs. We got all of these weird opportunities that were bigger than we had ever anticipated. It’s awesome.

You’ve clearly done a lot and been through a lot. Have you accumulated any advice or general wisdom you can pass on to our readers?
Well, the main the thing would be to be open to everything. The options in life are varied and you never know what you’re going to end up liking. When you’re a youngin’, take everything you possibly can in. I think if you’re going to follow your dreams, as they say, do so with a grain of salt, for the fact that if you’re going to go a road less traveled, the reason that it’s less traveled is because it’s harder. You have to work harder and expect to be lonelier while you do it. If you do go that way there are rewards that are so great as to be immeasurable, but there are also challenges that are really of this world and difficult to deal with. There’s a lot of loneliness and financial instability, but the payoff is so great. There have been times that I would have turned back, but I’m so deep into that choice that I can’t go back.

Josh Martinez’s Blotto is available now via Camobear Records on Bandcamp.