Respect and a check with C.R.A.C.

PHOTO by ANGELICA GARDE

Two sentences into a C.R.A.C. interview (“This is Ta’Raach.” “This is Blu.”) and they run right to fundamental questions of craft and creation before they even sit all the way down—is Pete Rock the best producer because he has the best record collection? Does Blu need more RAM or just more self-esteem?

“I’m smart—I need RAM?” says Ta’Raach. “You don’t need RAM—you need to work! Let me teach you something—producing in hip-hop is about manipulating the sound that comes off the record. The more records you have, the more sounds you have to manipulate. Why was Jay Dee ill? He fucked with records in a genre before niggas got to that genre.”

This is a conversation—a particularly plosive conversation, thanks to Ta’Raach, who carries obvious authority from long experience—that probably started two sentences after they first met (“This is Ta’Raach.” “This is Blu,” and then Ta’Raach made Blu do his verse over) and which is too immediate to interrupt even for an interview, and which illuminates the specific machinery that made the first-and-only C.R.A.C. full-length The Piece Talks (released officially only months ago, but recorded three years ago in a one-week lock-in session where the food was all eaten on the very first day) such a strong and strange release.

Detroit expat Ta’Raach is a fierce producer—one of the founders of the transcended-into-legend Breakfast Club production collective—and a hard-ass MC who’d ably maintain conversations with Kool G Rap (“I’m a street dermatologist—poppin pimps!”) or Paul Mooney (“Girl, I been with you five months—take me to the Man!”) and Blu comes through with streamline style and lattice verses that look like circuit boards if you diagram how the rhymes connect. Seventeen songs—some character sketches (“Mr. Big Fizz”) and some monsters (“Respect”) and some adorable goofiness (“Buy Me Lunch”) plus loose randomness and buried tracks (“I heard you was in rehab for them drugs?”) that all fell together fully assembled and unassailable after that one week. In the years between, Ta’Raach did The Fevers on then-Long-Beach label Sound in Color (even lived for a while off Ocean) and Blu showed up on Exile’s Dirty Science and released his own underrated Below the Heavens, ripe for rediscovery when his next solo album wins everybody over. It’s an uninterrupted discography, too. How do you keep up that kind of good work?

“Because we always do,” says Blu.

“We always do it,” says Ta’Raach. “We talk shit. Let’s cause some shit.”

“It’s just getting on the same page,” smiles Blu, the younger of the two. (“You was NINE years old when Spike Lee put out Malcolm X?” asks Ta’Raach on the album.) Which so far means withering criticism by Ta’Raach for using the default drum sounds that come packaged with production program Reason (“I don’t know how my Reason works,” says Blu. “Just click it twice!” says Ta’Raach. “Don’t you own a phone?”), and for liking Common all the way up to Like Water for Chocolate, and for not answering his phone when they were supposed to make a mixtape together. (Which ended up being The Piece Talks, anyway.) But the way these two work together puts every possible thing—the jokes, the shit-talking, the details of how and why a verse or a beat will work or won’t—right into the music. If you poked a question into the gears, it might return bloody. Instead of an interview, decisions are being made—C.R.A.C. is back, if only for a little bit, and within 18 hours, they’ll be out on stage. With Pete Rock, actually. How do you keep up this energy, I ask?

“This isn’t energy,” says Ta’Raach. “You come out tomorrow.”

ABSTRACT WORKSHOP PRESENTS C.R.A.C. WITH DJ COCOE, KAY AND STEELMAN DETROIT BAR | 845 W 19TH ST | COSTA MESA 9262 | ABSTRACT-WORKSHOP.COM | SAT 9:30PM | $10 | 21+

Tags: blu, costa mesa, crac, detroit bar, hip hop, ta'raach