October 1, 2003 (Vol. 38, No. 1) noise. Editor: Kimberly Chun Art director: Lori Spears Noise logo designer: J. Fish Music accounts executive: Chris Owen Cover Photographer: Winni Wintermeyer

By Peter Nicholson

TOM SHIMURA IS a big deal. No, really. Just because Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, is forced to use a closet to do a phone interview doesn't mean he isn't one of California hip-hop's pivotal figures. Together with Josh Davis (DJ Shadow) and Blackalicious's Xavier Mosley (Chief Xcel), he's one of the label Quannum Projects' principals. He's a serious producer who's trusted by accomplished musicians, like the Poets of Rhythm, with whom he also recorded the 2001 hit single "I Changed My Mind" (Quannum Projects). He's one half of Latyrx, whose self-titled album was a smash in 1997. Hell, Quannum precursor Solesides' first release in 1993 was one of his songs, although he used the name Asia Born and might have been overlooked a bit when the producer of the flip side, a certain DJ Shadow, saw a little success.

Almost a decade later, it's damn near impossible to sleep on Lyrics Born. "Calling Out," the bumping single from his debut solo album, Later That Day (Quannum Projects), is a Bay Area staple for any Indian-summer session. He just returned from a European tour and is gearing up for this year's CaliComm Tour, but first he's got to do his album-release party next week at Bimbo's 365 Club. The buzz is widespread: Tomas Palermo (Voltage Music, XLR8R) has the album on his most recent top 10. J-Boogie, who cohosts the long-running "Beatsauce" on KUSF 90.3 FM and recently released his own album on Om Records, takes it even further and says, "Lyrics Born is ... blazing trails of new sounds that other rappers don't even know how to follow. He's the John Wayne of hip-hop – keeps killin' 'em."

For his part, Shimura is calm, although his satisfaction with finally completing his new album is clear. "I'm really blessed. Every now and then everything comes together.... I feel like that's happening right now, and it's a great feeling," Shimura tells me over the phone from the busy Quannum HQ on Fifth Street, where he's commandeered a closet in search of quiet. A former dot-com enclave, the building now hosts several offices sharing common spaces, including Gen Art, another record label, and a therapist who employs some sort of primal scream therapy, judging from the din. Safe in his closet – I resist the temptation to make any "coming out" jokes – Shimura balances patient, thoughtful responses and the occasional gracious marvel at how far he has come. "Man! I'm, like, one of the luckiest guys on the planet," he says. "I get up every morning, I walk into my studio in my house that I own, and I make beats, and I write raps. I'm happy!"

Conscious party

And he should be happy. Later That Day is by turns party-rocking, thought-provoking, boundary-pushing, and consciousness-raising – the kind of work that stands proud alongside other Quannum breakthroughs like DJ Shadow's Endtroducing (1996) and Blackalicious's Nia (2000). Shimura – a hip-hop double threat who crafts his own tracks and rhymes – serves up an album with a rare unity of sound and style that, though it incorporates his many influences ranging from Kool G Rap and Ninjaman to Barry White and Janis Joplin, sticks together as a whole, demanding to be played from start to finish. Perhaps Shimura's greatest success is forging a seamless union between his grooves and his skills on the mic. Wrapping heartfelt content in powerful delivery and employing an arsenal of cadences, he isn't content to just drop funky beats as a backing track, but crafts songs that are inseparable from the lyrics.

This symbiosis is reflected in Shimura's switch-hitting approach to songwriting. "Generally it all starts with a sample or a melody in my head. Other times I'll write the rap first, and I'll try to come up with a rhythm that fits the cadence, and I'll construct the track around the lyrics," he explains.

As the track progresses he tweaks each element to fit the whole. And he definitely takes his time to get it right: he began working on one song on Later That Day, "Rise and Shine," back in 1999. But as Shimura argues, "Those are the best tracks to put on an album, because if they still sound good a year or two later ... they stand the test of time."

Representing or not

Shimura has been around the game for a while. Born in Japan in 1972, he grew up in Berkeley, where he fell in love with hip-hop before heading off to UC Davis. Davis isn't normally thought of as a hip-hop hot spot, but something must have been in the grass surrounding the rural community circa 1992, as a group coalesced around campus radio station KDVS 90.3 FM, eventually forming Solesides (which would later be renamed Quannum Projects). Today the names are well-known: DJ Shadow, Lateef the Truth Speaker, Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab of Blackalicious, and DJ Zen, a.k.a. Jeff Chang.

Chang is now a Bay Guardian contributor whose book, Can't Stop, Won't Stop, a cultural and political history of the hip-hop generation, is due out next summer on St. Martin's Press. Chang, Shimura, and the rest were inspired by Los Angeles's Freestyle Fellowship and the scene around the seminal Good Life Cafe. He recalls the crew's high hopes over the phone from his East Bay home. "We were very young and full of ourselves, and we put together Solesides with the intention of changing the world," he says. "For me, it was an extension of my activism and organizing experience. I think for Tom, it was a matter of raising the game artistically."

Chang went on to describe the fiercely independent nature of all involved and how that manifested itself in Lyrics Born's music. One way was Shimura's refusal to sell himself as an Asian American rapper. "Tom didn't really come out of an Asian American scene," he remembers. "I did. I was big into Asian American activism in the '80s at Cal, and I remember that we would have a lot of discussions about this stuff, him and I. I represented one pole, and he represented another.

"He was coming from more of an artistic realm," Chang continues, "where he was like, 'I'm not the kind of person who's going to wear this Asian American flag around my chest.' " Far from it: Shimura was brusquely dismissive of the relevance of his ancestry when I later brought up the subject via e-mail, responding, "I think that because the Bay Area has a high concentration of Asian Americans, there will be a higher percentage than average in every profession in the Bay – that means more dentists, construction workers, DJs, and yes, rappers."

Clearly Shimura doesn't give much weight to identity politics, but I wanted to pursue this further, because my own introduction to hip-hop had been influenced by the Bay Area's strong Asian American presence in the genre, from parties like Cream of Beat to DJs like Shortkut. So I sought out another Bay Guardian contributor, Oliver Wang, who is working on a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and works as a senior contributing editor at URB magazine. "While Lyrics Born doesn't write songs about his ethnicity, he clearly comes out of a social environment where talent, rather than heritage, is respected," Wang wrote in an e-mail. "After all, in the Bay Area, you have all these major hip-hop icons who are Asian American like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz – Filipino – and Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, who, like Lyrics Born is of Japanese American descent. I won't say race doesn't matter but in the Bay Area, being Asian American is less a liability than other places. Lyrics Born is a product of that embrace for diversity." In fact, the inclusive, but still demanding, nature of Bay Area hip-hop might even discourage an artist who relies on his or her heritage as a crutch or gimmick: it's hard to imagine someone like Jin tha MC, whose weak rhymes lean heavily on his claim to be the "first Chinese rapper," coming out of the Bay Area.

Open-door policy

It seems Shimura's reluctance to assume any mantle of representation stems from his independence and his desire to keep all his options open, a plan embodied by his inclusive production style on Later That Day. From dirty funk-rock on "Bad Dreams" to lover's reggae on "Love Me So Bad" and bumpy electro flavors on "Hello," Shimura's broad tastes mirror his years of crate digging, years that only deepened his early eclecticism. From the start, he never wanted to make only one kind of music, as Shimura illustrates when recounting a decade-old conversation in photographer B+'s basement with the drummer JMD, who played on the first albums of Freestyle Fellowship and Pharcyde. "I told him, 'I want to do rap songs, I want to do soul songs, I want to do reggae songs and everything in between. But I don't know where to start.' And he said, 'Well, my advice would be – do it all!' Those three words illuminated my career path. From that day on I figured, 'Well, fuck it!' If I had an inclination to do something, well, goddamn, I'm gonna do it!"

And if Shimura couldn't get it done exactly how he wanted by himself, he was smart enough to call in some heavy help. D-Sharp and Cut Chemist on the turntables, Tommy Guerrero on bass, his domestic partner, Joyo Velarde, on vocals, the Whitefield brothers from the Poets of Rhythm on drums and guitar – almost every song has a different lineup, yet Shimura manages to keep it from sinking into chaos with the strength of his production and his one-of-a-kind voice.

One voice

That voice is the album's one constant, a reminder that Lyrics Born is an MC, not just a producer. Shimura's throaty, deceptively laconic baritone rolls steadily throughout the album, no matter how he switches it up. Never falling into a routine, he scales octaves on "Bad Dreams," speeds into a scat on "Rise and Shine," and imbues a phone conversation with barely registered rhythm on "Cold Call" with Gift of Gab. Shimura's own gift, his rapping style – easily identifiable by his rapid-fire delivery laced with triplets and syncopated shifts of inflection – is hard to pin down, because his approach always changes shape, his cadence seems custom-built for each track, and his tone becomes a floating variable.

Chang, for one, sees Shimura's willingness to experiment with his voice as one of his major contributions to hip-hop, although the rapper has been "really underacknowledged because he's not the most prolific cat," he says. "He's not the dude that's making guest appearances on every single record that's out there.... But he has the reputation, because he has always been unafraid to take it out there on the ledge.... He wasn't afraid to make his voice all skinny and small and tiny and whiny and do crazy shit with his voice. Liberated a lot of folks.... I think that has opened up the playing field for a lot of different types of voices to come into the game."

One of the key tracks that proved heads were open to something different was Shimura's 1997 Latyrx single "Balcony Beach" (Solesides), which featured a drawling, almost mush-mouthed delivery that makes it sound like he's leaning on the mic, trying not to slump down and mumble off to sleep. Despite Shimura's oddball style, or perhaps as a result of it, "Balcony Beach" was a big hit for Solesides, and if you were around the Bay Area in '97, you heard its dreamy, loping beat, Velarde's sultry chorus, and Shimura's narcoleptic rhymes in frequent rotation on the radio.

Scoping out the territory

Throughout our interview, Shimura pauses slightly before answering my questions, whether stopping to consider his response or wondering at the inanity of the query, I'm not quite sure. I like to think it was the former, for planning certainly plays a role when Shimura begins a song. "I take a deep breath, take a step back, and survey the landscape," Shimura explains. "And I'll say to myself, 'OK, what's missing out there?,' and then I'll try to provide that.... People appreciate what they can't get elsewhere."

Innovation may be the core of Shimura's approach, but what makes Later That Day a great album is his refusal to sacrifice the groove while still delivering the knowledge. Even on its most serious song, "The Last Trumpet," featuring his Latyrx partner Lateef, Shimura minds the details, like adding a hooting cuica to the pauses between dramatic lyrics that deal with our country's own role in terrorism. Though he's never been eager to draw attention to his ethnicity, with lines like, "All the wicked seeds we've sown and grown / And poisoned all the earth / It serves us right / Can't really act surprised when the harvest has no worth," it's clear that Shimura is far from apolitical. But he's making music, not giving a speech – "The Last Trumpet" is a theatrical song complete with kettledrums and spaghetti-western guitar that is miles away from a couple rhymes rattled over a few loops.

Shimura is obviously devoted to his music. He lives and loves hip-hop, not just his own version but also that of anyone who is striving to further the art, and particularly the members of the Quannum family. "One of the things that is beautiful about hip-hop ... is this kind of community aspect of the music," he says. Warming to the subject, he speaks more rapidly and forcefully, his dedication clear, "And I think that's what Quannum is really – I mean, I'm going to go to bat for every one of these artists."

It may have taken Shimura a while to get his own solo album together, but he wasn't exactly in a hurry, and he never felt a need to latch onto some passing phase. "It's just a trip, because I damn near seen every rap trend," he observes, "and I'm still here – matter of fact, I'm just getting going!"

Lyrics Born plays with Lifesavas and Joyo Velarde Oct. 9, 8 p.m., Bimbo's 365 Club, 1025 Columbus, S.F. $15. (415) 474-0365.