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Wednesday, February 27,2008
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The State of the Rusty Ps
Local Music
The Rusty
Ps don’t talk much about scoring a major record deal these days. “We
gave up those pipe dreams long ago,” says Adam Haupt, who raps with the
group under the nom de plume Phantom Channel. “Once you actually start
dealing with the music industry, you see how crazy it is. So we’re not
making music to try to blow up anymore; we’re making music just for the
love of making it.”
But Haupt admits the band once had lofty
dreams of breakthrough success. “When you put your first real album out
and it gets picked up for distribution by the first label you send it
to, that gets your hopes up,” Haupt says. In 2000, during a time of
high interest in independent hip-hop—but before inexpensive software
enabled every laptop owner to cut their own rap records—the Rusty Ps
released “Tread Water,” a 12-inch featuring some fortunate friends the
band made while touring: The Pharcyde’s Imani and Minneapolis’
then-burgeoning Atmosphere. The single had reach far beyond just the
merch table. Thanks to the emergence of Napster and file sharing, any
college student hunting down Pharcyde and Atmosphere rarities
discovered the Rusty Ps.
“I think between the 12-inch and the fulllength album [Out Of Many], we
probably sold between 8,000 and 10,000 units, which are amazing numbers
for an independent release,” Haupt says. “We just kept selling them,”
he recalls. “It was like, ‘boom, another thousand; boom, another
thousand.’ We were so pumped, we started thinking, ‘Man, we’re going to
be able to quit our jobs now!’ But we were just kids at the time. We
didn’t understand how the business worked.”
By 2003, however,
the realities of being an independent rap group caught up with the
Rusty Ps. They learned that even an established name and a widespread
following couldn’t guarantee financial independence. And most
dispiritingly, something of a Rusty Ps backlash was brewing back home.
“We later learned that people began talking about us as if we’d become
too big for Milwaukee,” Haupt says. “People would just assume we
weren’t interested in playing local shows; they wouldn’t even ask us.”
In response, the group recorded The Rusty Ps vs. Milwaukee, a 2005 disc that flaunted their ties to the city by featuring a guest Milwaukeean on every track. Their newest release, The Shape of Things to Come, takes the opposite approach. It was produced almost entirely in-house without a single featured guest.
“There was some talk when we were pitching the album to labels of doing a track with Slum Village or Kool G Rap,” Haupt explains.
“Those are artists that we respect and everything, but even if we’d had
the money in our budget for that kind of collaboration, we’d prefer it
to be with someone that we know and have a connection with. We don’t
want to just slap someone else’s name to our album so we can sell it.”
Haupt describes The Shape of Things to Come as
a “state of the Rusty Ps” album, a showcase for the group and a preview
of future directions. While past Rusty Ps records have been eclectic
affairs, this one is resolutely uniform. The group sticks to what they
do best: head-nodding hip-hop with crisp funk grooves.
“It’s music for people to play while cleaning their house on Saturdays,” Haupt says.
The Rusty Ps play a 10 p.m. CD release show on Friday, Feb. 29, at Stonefly Brewery with The Crest, House of M and Kid Cut Up.
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