Interview: Adam Mansbach

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Rage Is Back

Adam Mansbach

2013 | Unabridged

I first met Adam Mansbach in college. We were DJs together, sharing a love for classic soul records which, in those pre-iPod days, were only available in dusty thrift store crates or the trash-picked piles of homeless guys who sold them on the street. Adam, like me, considered himself a writer, even starting his own magazine, Elementary, dedicated to covering what we then loftily called “Hip-Hop Culture.” Did I want to write for it? Hell yeah. That’s how Adam wound up publishing my first piece, about the sound of Philadelphia — something I’ve also written about here.

We ended up in grad school together, both writing about music and about being white people in love with sound not obviously our own. Adam was a drum tech for the legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones and traveled to Europe to interview graffiti writers. Soon enough, he published his first novel, Shackling Water (2002), about a young saxophonist.

After moving to the Bay Area, Adam had a daughter and published — a lot. In 2011, in the midst of managing the incomprehensible sleep-wake cycle of my own new baby girl, three separate friends emailed me PDFs of Go the F**k to Sleep. Once I stopped laughing, I realized it was written by Adam. By that time, it was No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and a full-blown phenomenon.

What does a writer do after becoming the voice of Generation X parents? In Adam’s case, he returned to his first love: writing about hip-hop. Rage is Back‘s protagonist is Dondi, a teenage Dante on our tour of New York City’s b-boy past. Dondi’s father, Rage, was a graffiti writer who disappeared around the same time as the city’s bombed trains. When Rage reappears, seeking revenge for the supposed police murder of a member of his crew, Dondi joins him and the ragtag survivors of hip-hop’s golden years in one last brilliant caper. The novel’s language and lore will remind old heads of the glory years, educate young seekers, and make everyone laugh. And in true DIY hip-hop fashion, the book comes with a bonus: an “official” Rage is Back mixtape produced by J.Period with contributions by Black Thought and Common, among many others.

Adam and I caught up via phone on one of the first days of New York spring.

What were you listening to while you were writing?

I listened to a lot of dub and Nuyorican salsa stuff — Ray Barretto, Eddie Palmieri. That music is in hip-hop’s DNA and in New York’s cultural DNA so heavily. Also, foundational breakbeats: “Apache,” by the Incredible Bongo Band, and “Scorpio,” by Dennis Coffey. These have become household staples, because it’s important that my daughter understand breakbeats!

Why does Dondi identify so much with the golden age of hip-hop?

Dondi makes passing references to Jay-Z, Nas, and Biggie. He mentions Jay-Z less as a musician than as a cultural icon, in the context of the kids selling drugs on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. He sees the disconnect between what they’re listening to and what they want to be.

Did writing Rage is Back make you nostalgic for New York?

It made me nostalgic for New Yorkers, especially the graffiti artists I know — their speed and wit, the way they riff and talk shit, their grasp and compression of history. New Yorkers can have this weird provincialism, where everything that happened within the five boroughs is of monumental significance. Paying tribute to graffiti writers made me miss being there, getting to hear those stories.

How did you first get interested in graffiti culture?

I was always a graffiti head, but when I moved to New York for college in ’94, I met a lot of these guys and started hearing their stories, which were inevitably about someone who had disrespected the storyteller in some way. Graffiti writers are kind of unique cases, because their entire history has been eradicated. They’ve had to be the voices of history for so long. They all have their own stories, but it’s fascinating the level of detail and memory these guys have.

Can you talk a little about the roots of the music in the book? For example, why was an artist such as Afrika Bambaataa so important to the people in the book?

New York was a compressed, seething environment where this music and culture came to life. It’s easy to forget, given hip-hop’s global dominance, that it’s only 30 years old. Most of the pioneers are still around, and so are the people who made them what they are: fans, listeners, early adopters. Bambaataa is enormously important to my characters, not just because he made Planet Rock, but because he is one of the main figures who ushered New York City out of the gang era and into the hip-hop era — and from the position of being a gang leader. He had an amazing record collection and thought about music in an incredibly democratic and free ranging way. At his parties, he would play current disco hits, the Pink Panther theme song, old vaudeville routines. If a song didn’t go over well, he would play it again and again until people understood what he was hearing. But the reason he was able to get to that level was that he was the warlord of the Black Spades from Bronx River. When he transitioned into music, he could guarantee the safety of kids from other parts of the Bronx to come and hear him play. The force of his personality and the politics of what he did were totally transformative.

I think something that people don’t get now is what it felt like to be a kid then and how if felt when new record came out.

In the novel, Dondi tries to explain to the reader things he’s unearthed, not being a part of that generation. He’s taking his cues from his parents and their friends about what was important. ’87, ’88, ’89 — he cares about that time so deeply because it was pivotal to his father’s life, and the way guys marked time was by what music came out when. For example, you waited for a new album to drop, you copped it that day, and then you went home and started to dissect it. I was buying records at that time with my allowance money. I might have $8 left over and not really be sure what to buy. I’d pick an album because the guy on the cover looked a certain way, or the Stop the Violence logo was on the cover.

In the novel, there’s that amazing scene where Kid Capri is DJing on a boat…

As someone who DJs myself, I love the idea that DJing is all about that perfect ethereal moment of song selection. In Rage is Back, when the police show up, Kid Capri throws on “Police in Helicopter” and galvanizes this moment of protest. Kid Capri was an iconic DJ. He used to personally sit up on 125th St. and sell his mixtapes, back when being a mixtape DJ did not mean having a bunch of exclusives but actually doing interesting things with blending and mixing music. He’s one of the guys who got known for putting R&B vocals over a hip-hop beat, so you could argue that he ushered in an entire new era of R&B — New Jack Swing. I don’t think you would have gotten En Vogue singing “Hold On” over a loop of James Brown’s “The Payback” if Kid Capri hadn’t been selling mixes exactly like that years earlier.

Tell me about the mixtape for the book.

I got introduced to J.Period, who’s a renowned mixtape DJ. He creates these narratives, and goes the extra mile to paint a portrait of the artist. We both realized we lived in Fort Greene at the same time back in the day, and used to be the only two guys who would go to this one record spot in a little dusty store on Fulton Street.

You never told me about that record spot!

Yeah…J’s recently been made the musical director for the Brooklyn Nets, but I think he was also looking for something totally new to do. The tape includes part of the audiobook, with Danny Hoch and GZA. J and I discussed the form the mixtape could take, and he started giving copies of the book to people like Black Thought and Common, who have tracks on the record.

Sounds like a dream.

For sure. If you’ve been in hip-hop for a certain length of time, you have common reference points; you’re geeky and nostalgic about the same things. Whether it’s with J.Period or some graffiti artist from Stockholm who I end up quoting every line from Style Wars with, that remains really fun for me. Despite all of the millions of directions hip-hop has gone in, it still provides such a clear basis for friendship.