There’s a Good Ladd: An Interview with Rapper and Musician Mike Ladd

Tell me about your life growing up in Boston. What was your introduction to music like as a child?

I grew up between my mother’s and my ‘aunt’s’ home. Both lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My mother is an academic and an administrator and lived in a nice middle-class neighborhood. Dinners consisted of conversations with fellow black academics, in the late ’70s and ’80s; those were some heady conversations. My auntie C took care of other people’s homes, her six kids, and kids like myself, what with single moms who were working all the time.

It was much more of a working poor environment. Conversations were amongst us kids; we spoke about music, sports and the eldest in the house, Dean, would often have something profound to say about what was on TV during dinner, usually the news. Knowing the two homes intimately shaped my class consciousness from an early age.

Breakfast at Auntie C’s: WILD played on the radio. At the time, it was the only black radio station in Boston. It was AM, a certain quality of extra lo-fi sound with too much treble that I remember fondly. While watching TV in the afternoons/evenings (anything from the Electric Company through to Barney Miller), my cousin would play Parliament, Kool & the Gang, etc. in the room just above the TV, so it was like a low pass filter. I just got the drum and the bass. I could feel it in the floor while I watched TV so, like most kids in a similar situation, you start engaging in involuntary mixing. Fading the drum and bass in and out with the TV.

Mom played WGBH every morning, Morning Pro Musica. It started with birds in the forest at six or seven in the morning and kicked into classical music. The DJ, Robert J. Lurtsema, had this deep mid-Atlantic voice – his name says it all, really. In the evenings, my mother’s playlist was Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, George McCrae, Jimmy Cliff, The Missa Luba, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert. She used to take me to a lot of concerts (all this is between the ages of three and ten) Sometimes it was to see Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles but often it was to free rehearsals of the Boston Symphony Orchestra or some pretty difficult jazz.

She would always elbow me when I started falling asleep. It was always a first name/last name I was prepared to sleep through: “Tonight we’re going to hear some Johannes Brahms or Cecil Taylor,”; a first name/last making music that would put me in a daze as I tried to understand and eventually fell asleep. After a series of these concerts, one night she asked me if I wanted to go hear another first name/name last name. This time I had an option so I was like ‘Naah, no thanks’. It was Bob Marley. At least Bob Marley’s Live! was on heavy rotation after that night.

When I started making my own choices, I was listening heavily to Emerson College’s WERS. At that time they played reggae in the late afternoon, rap in the evening, and punk rock at night. I would record as much as I could. “The Message” was the first rap I memorized. Rap honestly did feel like an explosion. One year we were listening to Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and the next year kids were breaking in the streets. That’s what it felt like at least.

When I started altering my mind with various drugs I remember Eric B & Rakim’s “Check Out My Melody” being the first rap track that took me where I wanted to go. When I was digging through my mother’s vinyl and discovered Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sex Machine” and eventually Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow”, it was a wrap.

Your earliest forays into music were playing in punk bands during the ’80s. You played bass. What were those times and experiences like?

I was a terrible bass player (can’t even say bassist). We had a band called Uncle Fester. We put out a 7″. To this day I’m positive the original bassist replayed my takes and was too nice to tell me.

Your family comes from an academic background, and you would later get your graduate degree in poetry. This would find its way into your music, particularly your debut album. What were your earliest experiments in poetry like, prior to music?

Yeah, like I said above, it was a heady environment at my mom’s. By the time I was ten, my mother was dean of students at Hillary Clinton’s Alma matter, no small feat for a Black woman in 1980. Listening to her and her friends, there was a sense of responsibility and pressure to continue to forward the race. A pretty common narrative. My mother would read me novels when I was little, everything from Toni Morrison to John Irving. From when I was tiny I’d go see a poet named Brother Blue.

When I was 11, I had to do a project on Langston Hughes and recite his poems. I think I was trying to write something between Hughes and Brother Blue for a long time. But for the most part, I kept my poetry quiet. I never thought it was very cool. My first day of high school, three other kids and I started making fun of beat-poets doing bad imitations. They became my best friends in that school (kinda telling; I’m still doing bad imitations).

Around the time you were playing in punk bands, hip-hop had found a wider platform beyond just a subculture on the East Coast. So there was the merge of both your punk influences/background and the influences of hip-hop. How did you begin your work in hip-hop? Which artists captured your imagination and helped set you on your way?

Big Influences in junior high and high school, only listing what was in heavy rotation. Dancehall/reggae: Yellowman, Charlie Chaplin, Captian Sinbad, LKJ, Sister Nancy, Steel Pulse, Culture (International Herb was the first reggae record I bought on my own, I was 12. (The first record I ever bought was Elton John when I was eight but we don’t have to talk about that) and Peter Tosh and Bob Marley. Ska was big in Cambridge, so the Specials and English Beat also got a lot of play. Punk: The Freeze, Channel Three, Catholic Discipline, the whole Decline of Western Civilization soundtrack, The Punk and Disorderly compilations, and of course, Black Flag, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains.

I used to run cross country races. If I had “I against I” in my Walkman, I usually placed pretty well. Rap/hip-hop: Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, Redhead Kingpin, Run DMC, Eric B & Rakim, Special Ed, Ed OG & the Bull Dogs, Just Ice and, of course, Boogie Down Productions and Public Enemy. That was definitely high school. Then that bled into Paris, Kool G Rap, EPMD, and Digital Underground.

In my freshman year in college, I was already looking for something more bugged out/psychedelic, especially because Funkadelic (over Parliament) was probably still my favorite artist at the time. So when De La Soul came out, I was happy (Posdnuos is one of my all-time favorite emcees), but it wasn’t till I heard Divine Styler that I was satisfied.