Interview: Dizasterpiece is busy spinning hardcore into the hip-hop mix

Covered in tattoos, usually sporting a band shirt from the early 2000’s hardcore scene, today’s interview subject, Dizasterpiece is a passionate, creative, realism-driven lyricist and hip-hop emcee from New Jersey, with deep roots in the punk and hardcore community. Unlike conventional hip-hop artists, who usually take the path of creating endless freestyle mixtapes, Dizasterpiece took the unconventional route, framing his Dizasterpiece project like every other punk/metal band he played with growing up. He made a record, began booking shows and touring independently, playing a not only hip-hop shows, but hardcore, metal and punk music while gaining creative momentum.

The old-school vibes found on Regression Towards the Mean, Dizasterpiece’s latest album, is a refreshing mix for hip-hop fans whose ears have tired of the ”pop” mainstream sound that is prevalent on YouTube and sponsored playlists. 

Ethan: How did you end up recording music in Austin? 

Dizasterpiece:  I had initially come to this city by chance. Though I’ve toured all over, I had never really been to Texas at all. I think once, when I had to transfer flights, and that wasn’t Texas, that was an airport haha. I had hit rock bottom with substance abuse and wound up in jail twice in a matter of three days. The cops wound up taking me to a hospital and by chance, there was a scout for a rehab located a few towns outside of Austin, with a detox program in Austin. I had no intentions of staying any longer than I needed at all. While I was in a 90 recovery program to get clean. This place was strict and militant as hell and it actually worked for me. Some buddies I made while I was there kept saying “I don’t know why you don’t just stay in Austin when you’re done here. It’s the live music capital,” Attempting to persuade me to relocate here, and it was eventually pretty convincing. A really good friend I made in rehab is from Austin and would go on about how I would like it. I trusted my gut feeling and took his word for it.

Ethan: Start telling me about the new record “Regression Towards The Mean” What inspirational moments and ideas went into making this album?

Dizasterpiece: I’m really excited about this new Record. The title is, “Regression Toward The Mean”. In statistics, regression toward mean is the phenomenon that arises if a sample point of a random variable is extreme, a future point will be closer to the mean or average on further measurements. It is a metaphor for where I am with my career and as a person right now. I’m much more confident than I was when I started, but not as caught up in ego as I was 2 years ago. Right in the middle, centered and ready to go. I really think my fans are going to like this record. The lyrical content is my best work so far, and the beats are bumpin’. 

A bunch of these songs, I started writing their lyrics 5 years ago. It was an extremely difficult 5 years and It just took me forever to properly piece them together and finish them. I figured just keep touring and build my name up anyway, that way I wouldn’t sell myself short with this release. Now my numbers have more than tripled and I am ready, my fans are ready, and the world is ready. 

 

Ethan: How is your business doing well during the pandemic, what would you recommend to others looking for capable options while surviving? 

Dizasterpiece: My business is JUST surviving, fortunately. Very grateful for that. I got really concerned when I had to cancel my tour and had to go back to the drawing board. Things seem to be moving in the right direction now, and I’m very excited to just drop this new record and perform the new songs. Society is hungry for live music. Artists are actually literally hungry from not being able to play, and the misery caused by all this horrible shit going on in the world right now is driving people nuts. They need live music. When venues open back up and things really start shifting back to normal… There is going to be a renaissance. Society will be very relieved and just much happier and unified. I’m not really sure what to recommend to artists trying to survive right now besides to keep the faith, and never give up. Believe in yourself, and believe this will all pass and that you will eventually have your time to prosper. 

Ethan: How do you mentally deal with an uncertain future in music? 

Dizasterpiece: I just constantly remind myself of my worth, my potential, and the effect that I’ve had on people that is coming back in physical evidence and rewards, and try to keep my mind on the prize. I’ve already seen where I’m supposed to be headed, and I just gotta keep it moving so I get there. 

Ethan: Which genres of music need the most help during these hard times, that need more listens? Where is the direction of music genres heading? 

Dizasterpiece: Hip-Hop music needs help. It is extremely over saturated with unoriginal shit right now and just has mad pyramid schemes disguised as record labels and PR. And everyone seems okay with all this. Instagram culture enables this lazy, dishonest approach. It’s hard to find new Hip-hop that has craft and passion behind it, and when I do, It’s sad that it’s some kid that doesn’t have a fraction of plays or views as the general unoriginal stuff flooding my feed that has hundreds and thousands of paid-for, fake streams and views. It is so backward. Rock music needs help. I would like to and see and in my opinion, we need to see more young kids getting into rock and starting bands. Rock is the gateway to Punk, Hardcore, and Metal. Some of these young kids get spoon-fed mumble rap to autotune trap bullshit from a very young age and it programs them to think and do on a lower frequency. Not to mention the lyric choice in these big radio rap songs are toxic to the youth. I think Rock needs to go back all over mainstream radio like when I was a kid. I think MTV should rotate Rock videos again. 8 years of this, and I guarantee you, you’d see a change for the better with the youth, and the music business would have more money to go around again. There would be more artists with substance, more labels signing talented people, more kids going to shows and buying merch, and so on and so forth. You just don’t get any of that with this whole wave of Instagram boi rap. And now Punk, Hardcore, and Metal scenes are dying due to the demographic being so small and off to the side again. There was a time when that stuff was so popular and kids from my high school who you would never expect to see at a hardcore show were. Aside from saying Rock needs to become more mainstream again, and that Hip-Hop needs to focus more on actual talent, craft, and passion… To simplify it, I think that in 2021 and on people should try to be more authentic and original if they wanna be artists, regardless of what the genre they are doing is labeled as. Whether people think my opinion

here is out there, or on-point… One absolutely undeniable thing is that music is oversaturated with non-authentic and lazy stuff, and it is a double negative with it that there are no concerts and venues are closing left and right, right now. On top of that, it’s all streaming now, and barely anyone buys CDs anymore, and streaming services do not pay out artists well. Music will fall on its face and get buried unless some things change up. 

Ethan: Tell me about your story about Nazis and how you dealt with that. That story is kind of crazy.

Dizasterpiece: So yeah, on Halloween of 2017 I wound up at a house party in New Jersey that I was brought to by some mutual friends of the guy who owned the house. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a framed poster of a Screwdriver record. Screwdriver is a Nazi white supremacist band with extremely racist lyrics. NOBODY I know fucks with that band, a huge no-no. So I was a little fucked up when I first walked in and saw this. I didn’t believe it was real lol. Or I thought it was some type of bad joke. I was like okay that’s weird and distasteful, whatever let me see If there’s anyone I vibe herewith and move on. I wind up in the basement and there, I see a giant red Swastika banner, looking like it came straight from Germany in 1938. I was like Woah okay what the fuck, gotta go ask someone why all the shit is up on the walls. I walked up to some of the people upstairs who had been pretty friendly to me, and just comfortably saidsomething like, “Yo… This Nazi stuff… You guys are serious with all this shit right?” They looked me in the eye and said very. It turns out I was at a full-blown white supremacist party at a Nazi house.

I am Jewish. My grandparents were Holocaust survivors. They came to the U.S. after being released from Nazi death camps when the war was finished and had most of their relatives killed off. My father never knew any of his grandparents and most of his aunts or uncles because they were murdered by Nazis in Poland. It’s sickening that people in this day and age are wannabe Nazis, or that some people really believe that the Holocaust never happened when my grandfather literally had the numbers tattooed on his arm that they gave him in Auschwitz as his identity. Sickening. Anyway… Something that also made no sense to me, was how and why they had this corny little Nazi house right in between a heavily populated Hispanic town and an extremely Jewish populated town. We are talking about North Jersey. Tons of Jewish people. All types of nice mixes, we have lots of Asians, black and Puerto Ricans… I love Jersey for that, I grew up so accepting and cultured by being around such a diverse mix of people.

So what I’m saying is, what a moronic kinda spot to have this thing in. So anyway, once they told me they were dead ass serious about all that stuff, the vibes changed up real quick, I was so fucked up at that point and I just looked them in the eye and said “I’m Jewish.” They were really thrown off and didn’t know how to handle it. I was a little rougher looking and intimidating to them than what they were used to when thinking about a Jewish person, and they even said that to me. It got very awkward and then kinda shifted to some cordial conversation about punk and hardcore music. Which is the epitome of why all that Nazi shit is stupid. There I was, a Jew who accidentally stumbled into a Neo Nazi house via stupid fucking friends who I no longer speak to. By the way, if you’re wondering how I wound up there without my “friends” who brought me warning me what we were going to, the explanation from the dude who knew the house owner, was that the last time he saw him he wasn’t a Nazi, he would just make some racist comments and he thought he was joking, and that he must’ve got really serious aboutthat stuff since a year earlier when he saw this dude last (which to me is still a very weak and moronic explanation.) I’m not sure whether the dudes I was chatting with about music with were being cool to me because they were intimidated, or if they actually felt a bond for a minute, but if there was one…

That just goes to show how being racist is fucking stupid. A subject like music brought us together and put their persona and hate aside for a little. I think they were kinda in shock and didn’t know what to do with me. This one dude that was there from Long Island with his girlfriend on the other hand was not being cool at all. He had “SS” tattooed on his earlobe and was a lanky little pussy. He kept saying hateful shit to me and was trying to stir shit up. I was trying to avoid a brawl because I was on multiple drugs and outnumbered, and trying to buy some time to sober up and leave. It just got worse and worse from there. One of these dudes pulled out a speech that he wrote and presented to a courtroom before he was convicted of a hate crime on a black dude. It was sickening. Imagine a group of people listening to their buddy passionately present a poem he wrote as they cheer him on and tell him it was a work of art… Now just switch that to a Nazi hate-crime speech that was said to a court with not a drop of shame before going to prison. And the way he said the speech at this party seemed almost like he was trying to relive the moment. I’m like yo, fuck these people. There were some Nazi chicks there, some of them eyeing me which is also stupid as fuck and is a huge contradiction. Eventually, the down who owned the house came down from upstairs after fucking this Muslim girl we came with which also makes no sense. He called me over, and was like “Are you really a jew?” Their energy was getting really bad and I was trying to figure out how to dip up out of there. He goes “From now on we are going to call you Kristallnacht”, which is the night of the broken class in Nazi Germany where all Jewish stores and businesses which smashed and looted. Disgusting.

I tried to leave and that’s when the brawl popped off in the streets. The people I came with were pussies and the only help they could give me was to pick up my hat and backpack and keep it safe. I was outnumbered fighting 3 methods out Nazis at once, it straight up was like a movie scene, Idk how I held my own. I fucked them up a little and I also wound up with a black eye and then we stopped for a minute. I start shouting at them all like “Look how fucking stupid this all is. Y’all were chatting with me a bunch before you knew I was Jewish. The psycho with the hate crime speech goes “Yeah, yeah you’re right, you’re right… Whatever, Come back in and have a drink.” I’m like Nah fuck that and I get in my “friend’s” car. As he’s trying to drive away, the dude throws a bottle of liquor at the car and smashes the tail light. I thought about calling some friends in the hardcore scene going back there to fuck their shit up. I did not, I needed good karma on my side. I was supposed to leave for a long-awaited tour shortly after and didn’t want any of that energy to linger with me. I wonder if they realize that I spared their pathetic lives. 

Ethan: How do you want to inspire the next generation of artists to be MCs? 

Dizasterpiece: I want to inspire the next generation of emcees to buy in a way that makes them desire to be an emcee and not a rapper. I mean, the terms are all intertwined. But being a Master Of Ceremonies is an energy thing. I need my soul for that shit. It is a spiritual thing. And when you’ve mastered the room and have the crowded reality feeling you they start throwing energy back at you, and it turns into this whole back and forth tennis game of energy almost. To me, that’s the best feeling on earth next to sex. And then to take that room to room, city to city, and keep doing it, you just become a giant ball of influential energy. I’d like to exert that energy back into the universe properly instead of wasting it. To sit around drinking lean and doing xanny bars non stopped, and then mumble about some girl or selling drugs is a soulless thing to me. And again… I’m not here to knock anyone’s hustle, but I could never do that. I Love the art and craft and what it does to my spirit to go that route. So, to answer this question… I would like to be able to influence the youth coming up to find that same feeling and do it from the heart with non-evil or non-shallow intentions. 

Ethan: How do you stay true to yourself while you stay true to your fans? 

Dizasterpiece: I stay true to myself and stay true to my fans by remembering where I came from and the crazy journey I’ve had to get to where I am now. I express gratitude, but at the same time, I keep my feet firmly planted and my head high so that I don’t get my energy snatched. Lots of perpetrators with ulterior motives, and energy vampires around here. I constantly stay shielding myself. But while keeping a business face and tone, I don’t wanna come off as a dick to someone who looks up to me. I just stay as present as I can so I can best assess each individual social and business situation and respond accordingly, as opposed to having just one or two set protocols of how I’m going to treat people and conduct myself. 

Ethan: Who or what is your current biggest influence in your work both in production and lyrically? Or are there any places in Austin that draw out inspiration? 

Dizasterpiece: Currently, the biggest influence on my work as far as sound are artists like Redman, Jeru The Damaja, Cypress Hill, Joey Bada$$, Keith Murray, Method man, and Nas. In my free time when I need to get my mind off of my work, I’ve been listening to a lot of Deftones, On Broken Wings, Loathe, Letlive, Madball, Terror, and Death Before Dishonor. 

Ethan: Who do you have shout-outs for?

Dizasterpiece: Shout-outs to my boy Frank and his band Weaponize from New Jersey. Shout-out to Caleb over at The Quillian Tattoo in Allentown, PA. Shout-out to My homie Tommy Superior in Africa Americana from Georgia. Shout-out to my friends in my old Austin metalcore band Belligerence. Shout-outs to my family and all my friends here and at home.

All hip-hop fans out there tune into this sound from Dizasterpiece with his ability to create a breath of fresh air in the often imitated world of hip-hop.

Follow Dizasterpiece on Facebook and Instagram to keep up with the latest tour and release announcements. Stay tuned for SXSW and more tour dates to be announced soon.