MICRONUTS
Words and Photo by True 54
Self Divine and Kool Akiem Allah, the two integral elements of the "Many Individuals Combined Raising A Nation
Of The Sun," known as the Micranots, have been making music together for ten years. They've probably recorded
three or four albums' worth of material between the numerous tapes they've cast into the drifting sea of under-
ground hip-hop and the demos they shopped to closed ears in '89-'90. The unrequited hard work of the early nineties
left a bad taste for industry politics in their mouths, and they gave up on even getting signed until a small label in
New York picked them up on the strength of their underground tapes. The first label dissolved soon afterwards and
caused their career to stumble but not fall, and now they've got a hot record, "Farward/All Live/141 million miles" out
independently, and another single, "Exodus/Pitch Black Ark" and an album, Obelisk Movements, in the works on Sub
Verse records. So open your mental catacombs and let the Micranots set up camp in your brain cells for a few minutes.
Is there anything missing in hip-hop that
you're bringing to the table?
ISD: Hip-hop is missing a lot. We're not here
to save hip-hop and I don't think we have any-
thing that's necessarily brand new, but I can
say that we provide a different angle of what
you're already looking at. There are certain
omnipresent entities that you can look at from
different angles and we're just providing a dif-
ferent visual landscape in terms of hip-hop. At
this point, right now, I would like some recip-
rocation. I don't feel that underground means
broke. I'm trying to sell some units. I'm not
gonna just be ass-naked, running around like a
dummy just to sell units; we want to be able to
put out quality material that we can stand by,
that gets the Micranots stamp of approval. I
won't simplify my flow just for the average cat
to get what I'm dealing with. But there are
some people who get so scientifical that they
do lose a lot of people, and for me, in this busi-
ness of hip-hop, my main thing is to reach peo-
ple. When I leave my house, or look outside
my window, I see people who are oppressed
just like me. I see people trapped into a cycle
of possibly selling drugs, or having a gambling
problem. Those are the people we need to
reach. We deal with something called word
association; like Pharoahe Monch said, I say
bitch to spark brain cells, so there's that word
association that I know will grab people, and
once they hear that, there's a
whole bunch more informa-
tion that I'm quickly rushing
in. We have a passion for
this. Look at hip-hop as a
woman; there are some people who go home
and hit their wife, but we caress and love her.
What would you say to someone who
said, "Yo, I like your beats, but Self,
sometimes I just can't understand what
you're talking about. Why can't you be
more like Puffy?"
Kool Akiem Allah: I would say Self's
dealing with an artistic form that's not blatant
and obvious. It's not spoon-fed because we're
not dealing with babies, we're dealing with
grown people. This an art form that you have
to think about and take time to realize what it's
saying. Things that come immediately pass by
quickly. This is something that you can ride,
that stays around for a long time. The purpose
is longevity, not just in and out and that's it.
ISD: Another thing I wanted to add is that
within the Micranot formula there are things
that we've been fine-tuning in terms of the
beats and the lyrics. The first and foremost is
to make sure the beats are slamming. We're
dealing with reprogramming. Whatever has
been built can be destroyed. With that in mind,
it is our goal to be able to reprogram people
through visual stimulus as well as audio stimu-
lus. You know, colors do affect the way that
you think and feel-certain soundwaves, cer-
tain vocals, subliminal programming, mental
programming and whatnot.
Tell me how you might construct a song.
ISD: When Kool Akiem makes a beat, the
beat sometimes keys in to a certain
emotion, and then it's my goal to add on to
that. A lot of times when he builds something
he may already have an idea at hand. For
example, for "Farward," he put the beat.
together, then he had the idea and relayed it to
me, and then together we constructed it how
we felt hip-hop would be in the future.
Everybody was talking about taking it back
and how breakdancing just came back when
we know it really never left.
What kind of influences do you have in
terms of samples you choose? How do
you dig for records?
KAA: I don't sit down and try to memorize
breaks. I don't even look at the artist that I'm
sampling in terms of what kind of breaks they
I have that have been used. Sometimes I don't
even remember what breaks I've used.
Basically I have a big record collection and I
go through it, looking for what's gonna fit into
the track that I'm working on. I let the break
come to me. I let the idea come out of thin air.
I might start with one track and by the time it's
finished it sounds way different from what
started with. Like a painter may have all kinds
of paintings underneath what you see.
Tell me about freestyling. There was a
time in your shows where they were
almost all freestyle.
ISD: Right now we're concentrating on
pushing the singles, so that's what we're
performing, but freestyling is still useful; if
you mess up on a lyric but you're a good
freestyler, you'll be able to play it off, so that if
your audience doesn't know the song word for
word and if you don't show it on your face, you
can keep it rolling and they won't even know.
But freestyling is also cool because it's like
your conduits; it's like you open your sunroof
and just allow divine energy to come through
the circuits. There are all types of freestyling.
Sometimes I watch cats battling and they don't
really aim their rhymes at each other. Battling
is in the tradition of the dozens, and playing
games and telling jokes on each other which is
from slaves and what they used to do in their
spare time. It isn't about making fun of each
other, it's about the quick wit.
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