My first look interview with Alexander Spit started out with us discussing the weather in our respective cities. Alex was in LA chillin’ in some shorts and a bucket hat. I on the other hand, was wearing a lumberjack hat and a hoody in my basement. The warm weather is something that Spit is well aquainted with. He grew up in the Bay-Area but relocated to Los Angeles only a few years ago to push his career with music further. While Alexander Spit may not be the name that comes to mind when you hear “West Coast Hip Hop”, he might be soon.
2011 was a good year for the artist. His project These Long Strange Nights was his first in over a year. Prior to starting it, he had worked for three to four months in professional studios and with professional producers, but the product “just wasn’t really clicking.” So Mr. Spit did what he knew best, and that was go back to the basics. He moved back to using his own production, recorded at his house, and after 6 months of creating, These Long Strange Nights emerged. The album is a great reflection of his hard work and DIY approach and is chalk full of trippy samples and dope rhymes. And it’s a big change from the rhymes he used to lay down on his tape recorder. In 2012 make sure to look out as the young artist has plans to take SXSW by storm as well as an EP and album in the works. Alexander Spit is in his own lane, he’s talented and ambitious, and seems to balance it all out with some chill Cali vibes. Read on to see why you should expect big things from him in the future.
RubyHornet: I saw that you’re about to put out a beat tape, and you’ve got like 50 beats, are those all older one or are some of those newer ones?
Alexander Spit: Uh yeah, its funny it just all kinda happened at random, I’m a big Dilla fan and I was listening to a bunch of Dilla and then randomly earlier this week or last week I saw Chuck Inglish from the cools kids put out a beat tape. I’ve been thinking about it a while because uh, I’ve been producing since I started making music, since I was ten. And I’ve got literally, hundreds almost, its safe to say thousands of beats that have just gone unused. And I was just like fuck I need to do something with these beats one day, and then I saw Chuck Inglish drop a beat tape and it just kinda got me pumped up, I was like fuck it I’ma do my own beat tape, you know, I got so many beats. The past week I’ve just been going through all of my archives and whatnot. A lot of the beats and stuff, some of them are as recent as last week that I made and some are as old as 2006/2007 or something like that.
RubyHornet: Thats leads nicely to my second question. When did you start making music and when did you really get into it. You said at ten is when you started making beats.
Alexander Spit: Yeah the way it started I was living in the Bay-Area at the time and I was ten years old and around that time me and my homie used to go to tower records, and this was back when they’d sell CD singles you know. So the CD singles always had the track, the radio edit, and the instrumental, so me and my homie always used to go there with ten bucks, buy eight CDs you know, eight different beats and then buy two blank cassette tapes and then we would go back to his crib and just record freestyles over beats, you know with a tape player, just a tape recorder and we would just like rap into the tape recorder and rap over instrumentals and this was when we were ten. And then within that first year we discovered fruity loops, and we started making beats on that and then we discovered this program Cooledit and we started recording on that. So pretty much since ten or eleven we’ve been fucking around making beats and recording raps, me and my homie.
RubyHornet: So at what point did you really decided you wanted to do make music as a career, like really make something out of it?
Alexander Spit: Honestly man, its crazy, for as long as I can remember I can honestly say that probably within that first year of me messing around with recording raps and making beats, I was like pretty set on the fact that that was what I wanted to do. Obviously my perspective on what was realistic of how to make it a career was a lot different back then. But for as long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to make a career out of music you know. Its funny cause at that time when I was like ten or eleven, they were by no means inspirations to me, was around the time that like Lil Bow Wow and Lil Romeo were blowing up, so it didn’t seem farfetched. We were like “we’re tighter than these fools,” so we could blow up with this so lets get on our grind.
RubyHornet: So obviously it wasn’t Lil Bow Wow and Lil Romeo who influenced you, who would you credit with being the most influential artists you had growing up in the past?
Alexander Spit: I mean I grew up on Tupac and Biggie and Wu-Tang Clan. Those were the artists that really got me into rap. Wu-Tang really got me into rap, the whole look and the vibe of rap music, of hip hop. Like black hoodies and that that dark feel, it was like my version of punk rock, listening to Wu-Tang.
RubyHornet: Yeah I feel you. The Timberlands, big sweatpants, polos and everything.
Alexander Spit: Exactly, and over the years my influences have grown and become more expansive, but from the jump Wu-Tang and Tupac were probably the biggest influences. And then during high school you’re discovering new music, but it was always the typical go to hip hop forefathers that I really liked, especially the ones around that time.
RubyHornet: You grew up in the Bay-Area, but you’re currently located in Los Angeles, what prompted the move? Did it have anything to do with how booming the music scene is in Los Angeles or was it just a natural progression?
Alexander Spit: I moved here two years ago and when I was deciding to move down here the scene was still almost non existent. There were a few artist out here making those moves, folks like Dom Kennedy and Pac Div, but the scene wasn’t necessarily booming yet. And at the time, my best friend, a guy named Brick Stowell, who works real closely with Odd Future, he’s their photographer and he works on the business side of things. But Brick has been my best friend since we were like fourteen. And at the time he was living in LA, and I was living in San Francisco and for hella years I was that kid that hated on LA shit, like not the people or nothing, like the lifestyle of Los Angeles living. I was born and raised on living in San Francisco, so it took him like a bunch of years of him telling me I needed to take my act down here to Los Angeles to make moves with it. Just cause San Francisco’s really flourishing with content and what not, but not a lot of people get the opportunity to do anything with it out there.
RubyHornet: Yeah I get what you mean. I mean the LA scene, like you said, has really blown up in that last two years, which is crazy.
Alexander Spit: Yeah it’s really crazy and it’s cool because I’ve got to see it blow up firsthand cause all the acts that are blowing up are people I see on a regular basis.
RubyHornet: Yeah everyone hangs out together. Rosewood must be cracking with all the artists around and everything.