“Artsy Feature”

I took a profile writing course during my sixth semester at UConn. My professor, a very encouraging sports nut named Terese Karmel, was constantly supportive of both my insights and prose. She could be a harsh critic as well, but awarded this profile of my friend O’Connor’s unsigned hip-hop group, Quandry [sic], an A. Their debut (and only) full length album, Good Times with Shitty People, wasn’t released until 2006; I remain proud that my suggestion of sampling Steely Dan’s “Night By Night” was put to use on one of the (indisputably finest) tracks. Here is the impartial-as-possible depiction of the band I wrote in the spring of 2004, oddly untitled but submitted as the semester’s “artsy feature” we were required to pen.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

In Brian O’Connor’s basement is an AKAI portable studio—the “ultimate all-in-one hip-hop making tool” as he calls it—and an AKAI sampler/sequencer. On the floor to the left of the two long tables housing the equipment lie crates full of records—some well-known (Jimi Hendrix, tons of Beatles) and some unexpected (Tchaikovsky, early Ray Charles). 

He plays “Long as I Can See the Light” by Creedence Clearwater Revival on his turntable but only lets the track run for a few seconds. With headphones that cover his ears he listens and presses a button to turn up the volume on the sampler and play only the intro of the song, where he drops out the music and keeps only the thumping drums. He says he’s wanted to use this sample for a while now.

He then takes the intro of The Band’s cover of “I Shall Be Released,” a chiming piano chord, and runs that through the sampler, mixing it with the drums. He uses a metronome to synchronize the drum beat with the end of the piano loop and matches the number of beats per minute. He then equalizes the sound so that it sounds sharper, the equalizer sounding like a loud knock on the upstairs door. O’Connor describes this process as “mathematical.”

“Now we can have fun,” O’Connor says, as if this track is nowhere near completion. He immediately goes for his prized collection of children’s records—cartoon soundtracks in bright sleeves—and adds a buzzing, two-step horn to the mix. “You just need to place a sound well,” he says while philosophizing about how elements cohere as a good beat. He adds his own bass line. As the finished product plays, he smiles and declares, “That's hot!”

“I prefer the gritty, living sound,” O’Connor says about vinyl. Sampling from CD, he believes, creates a tinny, unwanted effect. “Vinyl is living. You can physically touch the music.” He has gotten the rounded quality he loves by throwing together a few different sources.

“I'd rather sample something obscure,” he says, complaining that someone like P. Diddy is lazily content to re-work previous hits. “Taking a ‘30s country song and making something out of it…that’s work.”

Complaints from hip-hop haters tend to focus on the idea of the genre not being real “music,” or that producers just steal elements from other records. As he picks up a dog-eared, faded old sleeve O’Connor comments that he can’t understand this.

“Sampling is borrowing the soul of another artist and putting your own soul on top of it by rapping,” he laments. “I see broken dreams in a lot of these records. Now people who are forgotten are in my basement.” He sees his job as making them matter again.

O’Connor, also known as MC Backwordz, is an aspiring rapper in what he finds to be a local scene full of people willing to pander to the “processed, impure sound” he associates with Top 40 hip-hop currently dominating airwaves. 

“I make the music for myself,” O’Connor says. “When I finish a song, I think it’s the dopest shit, ever. I play it over and over.” He also must do this to memorize the lyrics. He admits that he knows there is room for improvement as he struggles to try to find a wider audience without compromising his ideas. 

But in trying to help himself, O’Connor also must deal with four other “ineffective human beings,” as he calls them, referring to the band. O'Connor, six-foot-one, is the towering but soft-spoken lead man in the five piece hip-hop band Quandry, spelled wrong purposely to preserve some kind of irreverence.

O’Connor relates a story of how the band’s multi-instrumentalist, Adam Glockenberg, blamed a cancelled practice on him. Glock, as he’s nicknamed, then called other band members and made up stories questioning O'Connor’s financing his new home and suggesting he was forced to marry his fiancé Melanie.

“If I didn't have ties to him, it'd be over,” O’Connor says. He values the band because he’s played with everyone long enough to feel he can’t find much better, even if personalities often get in the way. He’s a very forgiving man.

O’Connor and Aaron Goldberg (MC Intalek, the other rapper in Quandry) lived together in Enfield for over a year, which put a severe strain on their chemistry and the group’s future for a time.

“He wouldn’t pay for toilet paper because he said he shit at work,” O'Connor comments, still unable to comprehend Goldberg’s motivations.

Goldberg’s “frat” mentality, marijuana use, and general sloppiness annoyed him, yet he also says he hasn’t been able to find an emcee more compatible with his style, so he’s still with him after a short split. Currently, he only wants their friendship to be musical.

While group members agree that O’Connor is lazy and tied down by Melanie—Goldberg busts him when he can’t go out for the night to freestyle rap at a club—he makes music alone for himself. When the band gets together on Sundays to improvise—recording bass, drum, guitar, and other parts separately before editing them into one track that will eventually be used in their live set—O'Connor is also home making his own music to rap over and provide central ideas. He’s always working to improve his flow, rhymes, and skills as a producer.

O’Connor says he writes to the beat, though he waits for inspiration. He says the beat and vocals are equals: if the beat is introspective then that needs to be reflected in the song’s subject matter.

“I’ll be in a meeting at work and find my mind wandering,” he says about slow moments at The Hartford, where he handles insurance claims. “The guy next to me is talking about annuities and I’m freestyling to myself,” or coming up with lines to use the next time he's recording. He despises comparisons he gets, though, especially how he was once told he wasn’t too far from 2Pac. 

“My focus is wordplay,” he says. “I focus on making the words interesting, not boasting” is his way of saying he’s avoiding hip-hop’s current trends. While O’Connor now focuses primarily on making hip-hop, his love of music has taken him through many bands. He’s been a drummer and guitarist since seventh grade, dabbling in grunge, hardcore punk, ska, and rock prior to his current love. He knows his drummer Eric, bassist Chris, and Glock via these bands. About five years ago he began listening to KRS-One and fell in love with hip-hop. He became interested in making the music and becoming an emcee. While Quandry only started a year ago, he likes the live sound now more than previous beat-driven work, which he calls “the dark days of the past.”

He says he’s never dealt with such “stupid drama” as he has with this collection of guys, and the inability for them all to rehearse frequently has left the music too often stagnant. He now produces and writes for himself to get better. O’Connor tries to produce a song every two days, working on his solo album currently.

“It's hard work dealing with the band dynamic,” he says describing the challenge of hearing one thing in his head and reconciling this with what four other guys think should be done. His shaky friendship with Goldberg also prevents them from writing together, so verses in the same song often aren’t cohesive.

While the band is rehearsing in the darkened basement—a disco ball the only light source—O’Connor yells over the bass, “I hate this song, let's cut it.” “You liked it last time,” Goldberg replies. "You fuck!” They seem to feed off antagonizing one another, as Goldberg keeps trying to get O’Connor to battle former band DJ Coco. O’Connor won’t do it and everyone in the band busts on him.

“I don't need to prove anything,” O'Connor says later, though he insists Coco was cut for being a poor deejay—he used a cover of “Please Mr. Postman” on a Beatles mixtape, a grave error—and never had anything positive to say.

“It’s in good fun,” Goldberg says about picking on one another, taking things a bit less seriously than O’Connor. Without Goldberg the band would lack a sense of humor—his interludes at a concert get the crowd laughing—and at times not taking things too seriously seems to inspire the band’s loose approach to making music. Goldberg’s love of the music is evident as everything he says seems to somehow relate to hip-hop.  Despite his separation from O’Connor, Goldberg claims he’s “always thinking stuff up.” But he typically resorts to endless scatological humor after practice and makes a joke of everything his bandmates say. While he says he values writing and performing, he seems less focused than everyone else. He and O’Connor value working together, though both seem to harbor contempt for one another, which may explain the minor squabbles that often arise. Goldberg says he’s committed, though on the night of a show he’s called one hour before it begins because he has forgotten they were playing.

O’Connor likes the fact that most of his band members don’t listen to hip-hop, so they bring fresh ideas to the music, which he hopes can help make Quandry unique. He also believes the idea of a band helps attract more locals who wouldn’t come out just to hear one guy rap.

O’Connor knows his limitations, specifically the disadvantage of having a “white voice.” But he constantly tries to express himself as honestly as he can. While he wears baggy jeans, there are no signs of tattoos, jewelry, almost no slang, and only a little profanity in his songs. He grew up middle class, suburban, and white, but he feels this shouldn’t prevent him from making hip-hop, nor pretending to be something he isn’t. His hatred of rappers modeling themselves on the film Scarface couldn’t be clearer. “It's about losing everything,” he says.

“People act weird when I say I’m an emcee. They make assumptions, they laugh.” The only thing he’s out to prove, he explains, is how much he loves the music and to be given a chance to have more people hear it, even if the demographic tends to be indie rock rather than Top 40 fans.

“There have been bad moments,” he says. “At one show I saw only my friends in the crowd and thought we were going nowhere.” But he has made connections with Mudbone, a radio personality, and has done shows with nationally established rappers Killah Priest, Blueprint, Illogic, and others.

The band performs at the Webster Underground, a place they all hate because the promoter takes all the money and the building itself isn’t much wider than a lane in a bowling alley. An idea to do the song “Fuck Ben Wu,” about the building’s promoter, is scrapped because O’Connor fears it will give the band a bad reputation. They run through a quick set that has all twenty people in the crowd standing.  Chris wears a wig under a snowcap and seems half-asleep while playing bass, though his stage presence is undeniable. Eric plays the drums heavily but can barely be seen in the back of the stage.  Glock’s repetitive riffs and keyboard melodies are what make the music exciting.

After performing a song about lost love, O’Connor feels disturbed because the crowd is full of only men. Once the set is done the group leaves, but not before getting a possible promotional contact.   

“Contacts are at every show,” O’Connor says. “It’s always the same song and dance.” This is not how the band is going to get any recognition.

At this point the plan is to record an album as a group in May, though five thousand dollars must be saved first, and only five hundred are saved now. Studio time is precious so the execution must be perfect. “Right now, we just put a mic in the middle of the room and record,” O’Connor says about the lackluster audio quality of the music being made. While there is time to keep working, the main goal now is to make the band matter to everyone.

“The band requires infinite patience,” he says, much more understanding than his peers. What if it all falls apart? “I don't see myself ever stopping,” O’Connor says about making music. “And I don’t expect a return. I’ve never written with the audience in mind. I do it for myself.”