Star Persons

I have to admit something to you all: There’s just too much music out there sometimes for me to keep up with. On top of my full-time job and side-gig at Prefix, I have trouble properly digesting everything I see and hear. As such, I want to apologize to the cats behind Star Persons, as they have been steadily dropping galactic-inspired heat these past few weeks. Their latest joint, “Wordplay”, is a spaced-out banger that I hope you, too, can give a shot as you wade through the absurd amount of leaks, singles, videos, EPs, mixtapes, street albums, etc…

- Potholes in my Blog

During an exclusive listening party at The Annex, friends and family gathered to see the first ever performance of electro hip hop group Star Persons. With high energy and enthusiasm, the group unveiled a collection of intergalactic tracks from their forthcoming album, and those in attendance were among the first to witness the crash landing of a new and unique sound to Madison’s hip hop community.

Emmie: To start off with, I know you all come from various other bands and projects from Madison, and I was wondering how you all got together? Had you all known each other previously?

Deken Frost: I would say it was very calculated, because at the time me and Mic Douglas were both about to split up from our previous projects. It was pretty much the combination of two ideas: we both knew that we wanted to do some hip hop that went to a different place, something dancy, something poppy, something fresh. We weren’t really sure about the whole space vibe yet, but it’s pretty much that me and Doug knew J Kool Aid, Doug’s roommate, who was friends with both of us since high school. That’s pretty much the link from where we were going to get our original beats from. I had the idea coming from Know Boundaries that we should do a live band, and I was already contacting KONKAL about a project I wanted to do, so we pretty much blended these two ideas. We all knew each other through different avenues. And as far as the name, Doug suggested we use “Star Persons” which was my Avatar name on Xbox Live, which came from a previous song of Know Boundaries’ called “Star People”. It kind of turned into the joke “Star Persons”, but we thought it sounded hot.

Did the futuristic aesthetic of the music originate from the name? Or did the style of the music you guys originally envisioned coincide with the name choice?

Mic Douglas: Well, what kind of happened was, I’m not sure what show it was, but Deken and I were both there talking about the project, and then we ran into Mantis. We told him about it, told him we were looking for something dancy, something futuristic, something with a different vibe, and he said, “I think I’ve got exactly what you’re looking for.” So he gave us a couple tracks and we loved them.

DF: We also had concepts for songs, and we had started coming up with a story about who Star Persons was, what we wanted them to do, “the journey” so to speak, but really it just happened. You can only think of so much, and the rest will come about by nature. It’s like the X-factor. No one knows how it exactly gets there. We started picking songs that fit a similar motif, for lack of a better word. There was a “tugging” back and forth between songs that went down a real hip hop path, or cutting that completely off and going a spaced-out route with dancy, electronic music. We met in between, and we stayed true to ourselves both ways.

MD: In the end we just wanted something different. We wanted to create a sound that wasn’t like anybody else, at the very least around here, or like anybody else anywhere.

You mentioned touching on certain motifs throughout the album, and of the tracks you’ve made available on the website it seems lyrically the concept of expressing one’s “true self” comes up a lot. Do you think that’s something missing nowadays in popular music?

DF: In my own opinion, I’d say so. I mean, the greatest pop songs plug a formula. You want to make a universal message that everyone can feel, but at the same time your own creative integrity is left up to you. You can create a “universal feeling” and still say something that means something to people, that goes beyond the surface. That’s pretty much the surface of the Star Persons album. It’s about space. It’s about time travel, suns exploding, but it’s also a metaphor for our everyday lives and reaching beyond a shallow surface to a point of individual self expression.

MD: I don’t know if we even tried to make it quite like that, I guess it just happened.

It happened naturally as a result of your personalities?

MD: Well that and also, inherently without even realizing it, we knew we wanted to make something that people could have fun listening to. And how do you have the most fun? You have the most fun when you can be out and be yourself and feel comfortable. We’re rapping comfortably, so I guess it takes on that motif on its own.

We were talking before the interview about our current society’s fascination with “YouTube” and “MySpace” culture and how technology has made it easier for people to create and share music. However, certain people argue this also has lead to a massive circulation of lower quality material, for the simple reason that all it takes is a mouse click to post songs on a website. Do you think this a significant challenge that new artists have to face, distinguishing themselves in a cluttered digital environment?

MD: Well I don’t think people want to hear crap. People aren’t going to listen to it if it’s bad anyways, so it’s not a matter of a whole group of people flooding a system or anything like that. I mean, there is something to be said for that, as in I don’t think technology is necessarily what allows somebody to create music. It’s just a tool. I mean, guitars have been invented for a long time. Anybody can pick up a guitar and learn how to play. But it’s not easy to get something significant out of it. Technology doesn’t make things easier.

DF: The way I look at something like “YouTube” is that it provides a space for comedy. A lot of the stuff on there is just entertaining, and as an entertainer, as much as I might think that something someone else wrote is ridiculous, at the end of the day that person saw something I couldn’t see, so I shouldn’t have a negative attitude toward them for capitalizing on a niche that was already there. But at the end of the day it’s still a niche. In my humble opinion these aren’t people who were born to be musicians, they are just capitalizing off the silly craze of videos. The craze will die and so will their hits, that’s just the reality of it. Me and Mic Douglas are going to be doing this forever, and that’s the difference. Without technology I’d still rap.


So you think that a high quality of art will find its place no matter what, even in a digital environment?

DF: There are certain levels to “quality”. There is the quality of the sound and the quality of the content. Nowadays, you can record something very cheaply, send it off to be mixed and mastered and have it sound pristine when it gets done. That’s what a lot of people do; they just spend the money where it is necessary. But the layman ear doesn’t really hear sound quality. Things have come out in so many different qualities over the last sixty years. I mean, the stuff in Motown era can still hold up to what’s made today, and it was made with equipment of ten times less quality, but the musicians were a hundred times more talented then these people are. So talent will make up for bad technology, and good technology will sometimes give way to talentless hacks.

Here’s a hypothetical situation: Star Persons have bent the fabric of time and traveled fifty years in the future. In what kind of state will music be in then?

MD: I have no idea. I don’t even know what the world is going to look like in fifty years.

DF: That’s pretty much it right there. Music is not defined by the world around it. If the world is in a terrible, fractured place, music will go back to the way it used to be. It’ll be personal. People will start banging on a table, someone else will start humming a song, someone will be snapping their fingers while another stomps their feet. We’ll never forget that. It’s inside our DNA. Somehow if no one taught you how to sing you’d just start doing it. Someone would start rapping, someone would play drums. Music will be here as long as we are here.

For more on Star Person’s, visit: http://starpersons.net/
- Emmie Magazine

This new hip-hop and electronica outfit is a veritable supergroup of Madison musicians, featuring members of Know Boundaries, Foundation, dumate, Stink Tank, Natty Nation and Blackout Jack. Steeped in influences from Mars Volta and Lupe Fiasco, the group spins a dance party groove of slick keyboard lines and athletic raps. - The Capital Times

Madison's Star Persons play their first public show here, but will probably enjoy some grandfathered-in popularity from the get-go: Members include Deken Frost of recently broken-up hip-hop/rock hybrid Know Boundaries, keyboardist Aaron Konkol of reggae band Natty Nation, and producer Man Mantis of excellent local rap act Dumate. So far, the actual music consists of electro-pumped party jams, with a little of Know Boundaries' dark streak mixed in. The brooding chorus and nimble raps of free web single "Supernova" might trick some KB fans into lightening up a bit, and "Banana Bang" is one swollen dicks-and-booties joke ("I called her Chiquita, the way she handled my banana," and so on), though with a bit of a Neptunes flavor. This show also boasts a performance from UW's resident breakdancing crew. - The Onion's A.V. Club