Eazy-E's Ghost Directs Apostle Of Hustle

05/22/09 12:24pm

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

The promotional material for Apostle Of Hustle's Eats Darkness flaunts a William Blake quote that aptly describes where frontman Andrew Whiteman found his inspiration: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

For this third full-length, the Toronto/Montreal trio — rounded out by bassist Julian Brown and drummer Dean Stone — returned to the eclectic, groovy, frenetic folk that punctuated their 2004 Folkloric Feel debut. Whiteman then began adding audio clips as introductions and between-song filler, often mixing what might be dozens of different sound bites into a single minute-long tangent.

The idea for the project, Whiteman explains, was whispered to him by the ghost of a gangsta rapper.

CHARTattack: You've said that with previous Apostle Of Hustle albums, it was difficult to work straight through their creation because of your work with Broken Social Scene. Was it the same this time around?
Andrew Whiteman: It always is. This one — in a way it was done faster, but it was still broken up. That's the way it works. I suppose one day, when we kind of get to Bob Dylan's level, we'll just go in and record an album. It hasn't worked out that way yet.

How did you arrive at the notion of eating darkness as a theme?
The songs and the words come first. I often finish all of the words while we're recording. At one point, the idea started to hit me — that this record was going to be a concept.

The idea was pretty much whispered to me by a vision, or an appearance of some sort of psychic, visionary, luminous Eazy-E — floating, right near me... resting himself on my shoulder... putting his little arm around my neck... with his 40 and his blunt and his Jheri curl. He just said, "You gotta get in touch, my man."

I have no problem with conciliation. It's one of our national treasures, as far as you can group countries together by how people act: Arrogant French people; stiff upper lip British people; conciliatory Canadians. At that point, Eazy was urging me to balance out a bit — to not turn the other cheek so much.

There are a lot of samples and sound bites on this disc. Why did you decide to include them?
I was having fun with it... I was like, "Oh yeah, I get it, I get it — this is a serial poem. I understand."

Because Eazy was a major visionary thing for me — Eazy came to be a metaphor for all of this stuff — I thought, what about all of those tapes I used to get on the streets in Toronto, with gun shots and stuff?

At first, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be funny." I listen to a lot of podcasts and poetry things and lectures on my iPod, so I couldn't help it... I just started adding that in and adding that in. It just became a really fun thing to do.

There's another version of the record that might come out some day, in some form, where there are two more of those segues. They're about 30 or 40 seconds longer because I got really excited. I got really into it.

So that became the thing. I started building these sequences. Each sequence has clues and hints about the song that's going to follow it.

Aside from pre-existing Apostle fans, did you have any sort of target audience in mind when you were making this disc?
Shit, no. You can't think about that stuff when you're trying to make some art. That's for marketing people to deal with.