Photograph by Kathleen McNamara.
In the time between his first submission to the Review, in February of last year, and the publication of his short story “Lil Spooky” in our new Summer issue, the writer Chad Fore and I exchanged almost a hundred emails. I also read several of his stories, which tend to be somewhat autobiographical, at least in the sense that they often take place in one of Fore’s two neighboring hometowns—Piru and Fillmore, in Southern California—and are rich with the kinds of details and characters that feel impossible to invent. “Lil Spooky” follows its high-school-age protagonist, Brad Camacho, through his gradual—then all too fast—initiation into a local gang. In a humiliation ritual disguised as a tryout, he has to freestyle for members of the gang’s hip-hop arm, also known as the Sick Minded Clique, which records posse cuts in a “decrepit shack” they call the studio, at the end of one of their driveways. Knowing what I did about Fore’s fiction, I wasn’t entirely surprised when, alongside the first draft of this story, he included the link to a song he was featured on when he himself was in high school. He and I talked about the musical influences of his characters and of his own past over a lunch this past spring, when, after all those messages, we were finally able to meet in person. I found he has an encyclopedic memory for rap verses, some by artists we both love, and others that he’s been writing in his head, he said, for twenty years.
INTERVIEWER
While we were editing “Lil Spooky,” you told me it was partly inspired by time you spent with your older cousin’s rap group in the nineties and early aughts. What drew you to that specific experience as a subject and how did you approach writing about it after so many years?
CHAD FORE
From the start I had in mind the type of story I wanted to write. When I think of friends from my hometown or family members who got involved in gangs or drugs or whatever—there were always opportunities before it got bad, where they could still get out of it. But then something happens, and they can’t anymore. I wanted the story to end it at that moment where, without having been told anything, the reader would know that Brad’s in a different place, and now it is too late. There was one sentence that I almost cut. I went back and forth. Does this explain too much? Does it not explain enough?
Which sentence?
FORE
“It was all pretend until the moment it wasn’t.” At a certain point you’ve fallen through the hole. That was the feeling I was trying to reproduce.
One thing that’s been on my mind is why it was attractive—the gang. The attitude toward things like gangs that I hear where I live now in Arizona is like, Why the hell would people ever do that? If people are stupid enough to join a gang, then who cares? Arrest them all. Let them kill each other.
In a way, it is hard to understand why someone would join a gang. But having grown up in that environment, I’m just like, Gangsters were the coolest people. They were the most popular. They got all the girls. Everyone looked up to them slash lived in fear of them. If you’re in a setting where everyone’s saying, This is cool, then it is cool. Anybody would think it’s cool. You’re in this world. This is what you might do.
In the story, there’s a sense of aspiration that I think ties in well with the music. I’m curious how the music plays into the story for you. You said your cousin had a rap group back in the day. That song that you sent—
“Flow Trip.”
Yeah. I’ve listened to it a number of times. So was there a “hip-hop arm” of the gang in real life?
I conflated the gang and the rap group a little bit. Some people who were involved in the rap group were also involved in the life. But I was not a gangster growing up. I did well in school, which made me not popular. I was on the basketball team. There was this one dude who was a fantastic rapper. He’s the first guy on “Flow Trip.” His name was Mikey. He’s got that gruff voice. I remember him in the studio being like, “We have to live it. We have to live the life if we’re rapping about it.” I felt that as a response to me in a way. I was kind of like Brad. Hip-hop in general, you’re rapping at a hypothetical enemy. You’re boasting. “I’d kick your ass.” I had never really done those things in my life.
The story exaggerates the attachment of the group to the gang, but at the same time there were gangs that had—you can find this online—rappers associated with them. Even in just this town of ten thousand people, there were probably a dozen active rap groups. A lot of it is gangbanging on wax. They’re making threats. My cousin’s rap group, not quite so much.
Are you the hook on “Flow Trip”?
That’s me singing it, yeah. My cousin knew I could sing, which was also not cool.
Listen, it’s not bad.
Not bad, but it’s also pretty crushing when you show up and it’s like, “You’re singing.” You know what I mean? I wanted to be a rapper. They gave me a lot of shit about it too. I remember Mikey was like, “Your name is gonna be Silky Chad. You’re not going to be C-4, you’re going to be Silky Chad.”
In what you would call gangster rap—that’s never a term I’ve used because it feels like something they would say on the news. “Oh, these gangster rappers …”
Delores Tucker, that congresswoman who was always bashing rap in the nineties, would use that term.
Yeah. But there is a real artistry to the way violence is depicted by the best rappers of that genre. I was just thinking about this line in Liquid Swords, the perfect album.
Don’t even—it’s so crazy you say that, because the GZA might be my favorite rapper of all time.
He’s unbelievable. But there’s that line—I think it’s in “Gold”—about waiting for the subway to pass and make enough noise so he can shoot this person without anyone hearing. There’s something about the way that he conveys it that makes you believe it’s something he’s actually done.
You said a lot right there. I’ve been thinking about why hip-hop was so important to me. Why was I so obsessed with it growing up? The lyrics are amazing. I teach rhetoric. I’m always talking about how writing is ethos, pathos, and logos. The rhetorical triangle. I was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and they have this discussion about the question of what beauty is in art. Stephen Dedalus is talking about Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s definition of beauty in art is that it has to have wholeness, harmony, and radiance. And then Dedalus describes radiance as a light that shines from another world. What he’s trying to say is it has to be good on a technical level, but it also has to have something else—some true sense of what the artist’s life is like.
Then, what did hip-hop stop doing for me? Why literary fiction? When I taught beginning creative writing, my students were like, “Why is every story sad?” Whereas, in certain kinds of hip-hop, there’s just the side that’s beating your chest. “I’m the best. I will kill you.” It’s missing some of life, where you’re alone with loss or vulnerability. That kind of hip-hop really resonated with thirteen-year-old me, who wanted to feel confident. I didn’t want to feel scared, so I wanted music that wasn’t scared. But my older self was like, I am scared. I want to hear someone say that.
Fear is a rare emotion to hear in music.
Absolutely. That’s why I like “Tha Crossroads,” Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. That song came out after my grandma died. My sister wouldn’t listen to it. It was too sad.
Wasn’t that song about Eazy-E dying of AIDS? Horrifyingly scary, especially at that time.
Speaking of the transition from trying to be badass to making art about however you are feeling—Bone Thugs-N-Harmony were protégés of Eazy-E, some of the hardest-core rappers of all time. There was literal Devil worship in their songs—“Mr. Ouija” on Creepin on Ah Come Up. Imagine my parents when they caught me with that. “What are they rapping about?” “Well, Devil worship.” I wasn’t allowed to buy CDs with the “explicit lyrics” stickers on them. So I would find CDs with stickers that you could take off. That’s how I wound up with a really weird collection. It was whatever I could peel off.
When you think about the time in which this story takes place, in Southern California in the late nineties, it’s immediately post-Biggie and Tupac. Life After Death has come out. Who was big for you?
It’s a good question. It was Cypress Hill. Because this is a Mexican community, ninety-nine percent Mexican. Latino rap was huge. Kid Frost, Delinquent Habits. The Mexakinz was a group. Even more regional, Lil Rob, and this guy Cowboy, who was a producer. One of the members of my cousin’s group had had an interaction with him. He was like, “Send us an EP.” This was the holy grail—this thing that you’re always reaching for. That was huge.
People really liked the melodic aspect of Bone Thugs, the speed of it. Ice Cube, Mack 10. The West Coast response to the East Coast. I would buy stuff from the East Coast because the lyricism—that type of rap where … We were trying to describe this in the story.
“Wordplay, poison darts.”
People like Chino XL, Crooked I, Black Thought, Kool G Rap. All these rapper’s rappers. Life After Death had a removable EXPLICIT sticker. I remember I bought it, took it off, and I was in heaven, listening in my headphones in my room. Any of those lyricists. Canibus, Kurupt, Killah Priest, and Ras Kass—they didn’t have hit songs. The beats were very spare and they were just cutting loose over them.
So that’s what you were listening to. Was that different from what your cousin and those other guys were listening to?
I remember being in the studio for the first time. In high school I worked at the lake with my cousin, cleaning bathrooms. One day he’s like, “Just come by the studio.” They had this throwaway beat. “We’re not going to put a hook on it. You can just rap on it.” It wasn’t a good verse. I still remember it, but it wasn’t good. I was intimidated.
Silky Chad.
“By the way, you’re Silky Chad. Let’s see what you’ve got.” They used to tell you the name of the song, just like in the story.
And you just had to interpret it on the spot.
This is what Bone Thugs did. It’s what Cypress Hill did. It gives people creative freedom or whatever. The song was called “No Peace.”
I remember the verse I wrote was like, “There’s never any serenity / showing love and befriending me / but they’re never defending me / when there’s many an enemy / like Serbians to advance their plan / and put a bullet right through Franz Ferdinand / or when the people of France heard a man”—you know.
Super embarrassing. They let it go, but they’re also kind of looking at me askance, like, What are you talking about? We are rapping about no peace in these streets. Now when I listen to it, I’m cringing. I should’ve just rapped about punching someone’s brains in or something.
What happened after you got that invite from your cousin to the studio?
We were cleaning restrooms at Lake Piru, driving around in a golf cart. The fucking bathrooms were disgusting. Speaking of small towns, my mom’s first cousin got me the job at the lake. He was a dam keeper there. He also had a band, the Piru River Band. The music goes back generations. My grandparents’ generation were in the choir at the Catholic Church. My grandma played guitar.
Anyway, my cousin’s friends at the studio, they put out a CD before I ever went there. It was called Get More to Fillmore. I remember thinking, This is dope. I was always wondering if my cousin would ask me to come, like, Why hasn’t he asked me? He’s older than me. And then he finally invited me.
The second CD was supposed to be called From Struggle Comes Hustle. That one was supposed to go to Cowboy. So much care and effort went into it. A lot of tracks got made. Some of them are on the internet, like the one you heard. It never got finished. They started to lose people. They kept making songs, but if you don’t get a break, at some point, you’re just like, I’m forty. What do you do? I think they did it for a long time for the love of it.
It can’t be easy to produce a whole collection of actual songs like that, especially if there’s no money involved.
What happens to that stuff? It’s just in the wind. Stuff that gets made and doesn’t catch on. Even writing. There are so many things that you spend forever on and they still just sink to the bottom of the sea. I thought of music as my way into the culture.
But for people like my cousin, it was going to be the thing that got them out. If you stay in that small town for too long there’s only a few ways it can go. Some of them are bad. One reason why I’m always writing about these Chicano rap groups—we were always competing with one another. “We don’t want them to make it.” But then you look back and no one made it. No one made it out.
What do you think rap music means to Brad? Your identity as a rapper mirrors his in a way. There’s that very lonely scene where he’s rapping to himself and he’s flipping through all these CDs. What does he think about it?
One thing I was thinking about was, Is he good? I think it’s an interesting question. It’s not so good that people are like, Let’s sign Brad, but it’s not so bad that it’s like Dr. Seuss–type shit. On the one hand, it’s evident from the lyrics that the mechanics of rap are something that he’s thought about a lot. This is his artistic outlet, without him wanting to be conscious of it in that way.
It’s similar to me growing up. None of these guys that were making rap would’ve been like, I’m an artist. But that summer when my cousin finally invited me to the studio, and I did the Franz Ferdinand verse, I remember Mikey saying, “We gotta get in as many hooks as we can.” I was about to move away to college. But I would go—if I remember correctly—almost every day.
What was it like in the studio itself when you were working at that pace?
The studio was at my friend’s house, like in the story. It was a little converted closet. They’d glued empty egg cartons to the walls for insulation. One dude was just a wizard on the audio board. You’d pop on your headphones and he’d speak into your ear. I didn’t know anything about this, but when you layer tracks, you say something once and you say it over again so it thickens the voice. And you try to do it exactly the same every time.
I layered all these hooks they had me sing that way. Once, though, I thought it would be cool if the voice I did in the background was deeper. I remember, during layering for one song, I tried singing in this deep voice. They cut the track and the dude was like, “Ay. Nah.”
I was like, “Nah?”
“Nah.”
Okay, got it—normal voice.
Owen Park is the Review’s assistant editor.
Chad Fore is at work on a novel forthcoming from Henry Holt.
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