Uncommon Nasa

Listen: http://uncommonrecords.bandcamp.com/r...

The latest album from New York's Uncommon Nasa is as grimy as it is experimental and conceptual.

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FAV TRACKS: CURMUDGEON, NEW YORK TELEPHONE, THIS BODEGA, 574S, FEEDBACK LOOP, DESPERATE TIMES

LEAST FAV TRACK: PEARL STREET

UNCOMMON NASA - NEW YORK TELEPHONE / 2014 / UNCOMMON RECORDS / ABSTRACT HIP HOP, EXPERIMENTAL HIP HOP, CONSCIOUS HIP HOP

8/10 - Anthony Fantano

New York Telephone is the new album by Uncommon Nasa under his own imprint Uncommon Records. With features from Billy Woods, BMS, Elucid and more. Production from Uncommon Nasa himself, Black Tokoyo, Messiah Musik and more.

You can stream and purchase this album on his bandcamp
http://uncommonrecords.bandcamp.com/a... - Dead End Hip-Hop

Born in Staten Island but possessing stateside ambitions, Uncommon Nasa spits verses and makes beats harder than moon rocks.
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NAME: Uncommon Nasa

HOMETOWN/HOMEBASE: Staten Island, NY

THE MOST UNCOMMON THING ABOUT ME: I talk to my cats at length when I'm in private.

NY UPLIFTS ME BECAUSE: You can do anything or be anything you want to be in this city.

MY ONE PHONE CALL FROM JAIL WOULD BE: Gotta call my wife in that situation.

IF MY ALBUM WAS A MOVIE IT'D BE: Basquiat. I know, I know, the corporations have turned Basquiat’s genius into a damn logo, and that answer comes across a lot more pretentious than it should nowadays. But that movie changed me forever. It's the story of an artist fighting his way through the ranks in NYC and there's an element of New York Telephone that is all about that same story for me personally, in my experience.

NYC PIZZA IS THE BEST BECAUSE: You can trip over your feet in NYC and land on a great slice of pizza; no other city can make that claim!

LITTLE KNOWN FACT: I also like to travel outside of the five boroughs.

THE HARDEST PART ABOUT RUNNING A LABEL: Doing everything sometimes makes me very tired.

411: The profits of the New York hip-hop hustle are hard earned, but Staten Island’s own rapper/producer Uncommon Nasa doesn’t sweat the street hassle. He never dials in a verse on his newest LP, New York Telephone, which taps into wires August 26 on his own Uncommon Records imprint.

OFFICIAL // TWITTER

1. When I listen to New York Telephone, I hear a rapper/producer who is both honoring NY rap and putting a bludgeon to it with his own style. Is that what you intended to do with the record?

Nobody has my story, so that's why over time I've relied more and more on stories from my personal history in my writing. Everything about me is about this city; it was made by and inside New York City. So when I really started to dig into this record that was my intention, to portray that. Stylistically, I think if you're from here, you don't have to "sound like New York"—you just are.

2. Taking away the music you hear around you, what about New York inspires your own music style?

The unlimited possibilities. There is so much you can do here if you put in the effort, both on the 9 to 5 career side and the music side of things. The diversity in people, in food, in entertainment, in architecture—all of that drives me on some level to take varied approaches to song writing on my records. I can make a song like "Desperate Times" and a song like "Paranoia or Perception" and put them on the same album and have it make complete sense. The idea that the diversity that exists here in all manners of culture creates a certain level of opportunity for great things to take place, I think that's all over my musical output.

3. If you had to pick one line on New York Telephone that best represents the album, which one would it be and why?

Man, that's a tough one, but if I had to really boil it down, I'd go to “DestiNY.” And the line would be:

Organs breathing, wrapped in the veins of the city / peep the flow, it goes unknown / but still happily, it's happening / adding energy to everything, from every person aged three to every tree

4. As a producer, how would you describe the sonic punch that backdrop the raps?

I come from an era of energy in hip-hop. That's what's missing from a lot of modern rap. Everything is set to "chill mode" these days. You will not be able to use my music as background music, but I think it's well paced enough that you can take in the messages I'm trying to get across without the backdrop over powering that.So when I work with a producer, that’s what I'm looking for—beats that motivate me to write something captivating but still have movement.

5. Finally, whom would you like to shout-out for helping you make the record?

First off I need to shout out my wife. She was more involved with this album than any other I've made in the past. In being around me for so long she really knows how to tell me what she thinks honestly and constructively without overstepping that. I don't share my music with many people before its completion; she is one of the few. I'd also have to shout out Black-Tokyo, he produced "This Bodega (Is Trying to Kill Me)," but there was a point when New York Telephone was only going to be an EP and a follow up to my last album. - Alex Koenig / Myspace.com

New York underground mainstay and prog rap pioneer Uncommon NASA returned to many of the areas of New York where he came of age for his new video "574s." Not your average song about sneakers, the track from his new album New York Telephone covers the cross-section of lifelong brand loyalty and how a passionate appreciation can lead to a lifetime of setting goals. We spoke to NASA about his new video and how these locations of many of his memories lead to his life finding a "new balance" during his formative years.

A line that stands out is in the second verse when you refer to your affinity for the 574s as "consumerism in its best form." Is that said with your tongue-in-cheek?

I guess it's a little tongue-in-cheek, but it's real. I've said it for years, you can't have culture without commerce. I'm very quick to question people who feel they can't get anything out of having some money to buy something. And, the point of this song is not to say "look at me, I got all these sneakers," it's to say, for me, when I was a young man, I discovered these sneakers and they meant a lot to me. I was never into sneaker and never sought to own something that materialistic when I was 18 or 19, but seeing them I was really interested in what they were and how to get them. The point of the song is that simple little materialistic goals like that can, over time, be crafted into real life quality of life goals. Things that have deeper meaning that just owning a pair of shoes, as far as like completing school or getting a different job for buying a home or just being happy in life or being a stronger artist. Those thing can kind of come through some sort of consumerism if you take the right steps towards it.

Given what a presence they've been in your life, had you ever tried to make a song about 574s before?

I've always kind of thought about it, because those samples are out there. The Phife Dog sample and the Big Juss line about 580s is out there. Those things have always played in my head, whenever a rapper mentioned New Balances I'd get excited because I'd been into these sneakers for years. I never really thought about it until last year I was on the road and went to the New Balance store in Boston and I saw they were selling t-shirts with just the 574 logo design. I had the beat and it just fit perfect with what I wanted to do and the imagery I wanted to put out there. I was finally at the point where I was skillful enough to do that type of song and have a deeper meaning without falling flat about it.

The song mentions doing temp work around Wall Street, where you shot a lot of the video. Did returning to this area give you any flashbacks?

Yeah, absolutely. I hadn't been to some areas in that video in a long time and Mike Petrow, who directed that video, kept making fun of me because I kept trying to lead him to places that didn't exist anymore. "We gotta shoot in front of this! Oh fuck, that's gone." That happened constantly throughout the shoot. It's an interesting thing, I kept getting flashbacks. The George Washington statue is where I used to get punch all the time from the gyro carts. Right in front of the stock exchange, I used to walk through that door. That's really where that was. That was my everyday for a good number of years, even during my first studio job at Ozone, that was on Pearl Street and not too far from the stock exchange so even years later after my first internship I wound up back downtown. As a Staten Islander, downtown Manhattan is a very familiar place because you just hop off the Ferry and you're at work. Although, I haven't worked in that area for a long time now.

Being you're a Staten Islander and there's a lot of shots in the video on the Ferry, what's the most wild thing you've witnessed on the Ferry?

I know exactly what to tell you. The most wild thing I saw was, I had gotten a phone call from my Godmother who I don't talk to on the phone all that much. We happened to be talking on the phone for whatever reason, and I look up, and I see feet over the side, and I hear a splash. I thought "Holy shit, somebody's just jumped off the fucking Ferry." All these people are stamping around, and I'm at a point where I'm pretty cynical and pretty paranoid and I knew I had seen somebody jump off a Ferry [so] A) I didn't want to see somebody's corpse in the water and B) didn't want to risk the fact that couples were sneaking up and tossing fuckers off the Ferry. You don't know what people are up to these days. So, I just walked away, hung up and waited to see what happened. They pulled this fool out of the water, he's perfectly alive and well, and he's going by on the Coast Guard raft and he's in the boat giving the Ferry the thumbs-up and waving. I'm out there booing this motherfucker because, that's like the most selfish thing you could possibly do. I was on that boat for an hour because we couldn't dock, they were doing an investigation and all this shit. I've heard of people doing stuff like that, I guess this guy was a thrill-seeker, but it's pretty stupid to jump off of a boat. It was one of the taller ones, so I guess he was jumping off the third or forth floor. So, you can get yourself killed doing shit like that, especially if you get sucked up under the boat. But, yeah, that was the strangest thing I've seen on the Ferry. That's the weirdest thing I've seen. - Chaz Kangas / Village Voice