Chee Malabar is hitting the internet airwaves once again. One half of the duo Himalayan Project, last month, Chee dropped a solo EP project under the name Oblique Brown. Titled Dust, the four song EP takes us on a lyrical dust storm where hip hop is a religion, words are an ode to life, and poetry slams with beats.

I met up with Chee at a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles to ask him some questions about his new EP, his life as an artist, and his work bringing poetry to incarcerated youth. As can only be expected with the Murphy’s Law in my life, when we walked out to Chee’s car after the interview, we saw that it had been towed – for a movie shoot going on in the street. So, please, read the interview and after you are done go to Itunes or CD Baby and download Oblique Brown’s Dust today. And hopefully, all will be forgiven.

Taz: When did you first fall in love with hip-hop?

Chee: Is that from the movie Brown Sugar? Uh, okay… Basically, I moved to my neighborhood in San Francisco when I was twelve and all the kids in my neighborhood listened to hip hop. I fell in love with it in the sense that it was so different than anything I’d ever heard before. But I didn’t really understand what I was listening to back then. I liked the beat. I could nod my head. And the kids seemed to like it and I knew I should like it. That’s how it started…I was listening to Ice Cube, Paris, NWA…You start making connections to what they were saying and you start looking around and saying, “Oh wait, what they are saying is kind of important because things are kinda fucked up.” I would say that is the first time I fell in love with hip hop.

T: Was there an album that really influenced you?

C: I loved the Paris album, Sleeping with the Enemy with the song Bush Killer. I just loved that album. And all the NWA stuff and Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted and Predator…For me it was like playing catch up, I had missed all the hip-hop history… I remember the kids at school they‘d give me a tape, and I’d ask who’s this what’s that. For them it was something that had past but for me it was something brand new. I‘d go up to friends and say, “Have you heard this?” They‘d say”…uh, yeah. it‘s four years old.”

T: When did you start performing?

C: I started writing a couple of years after that, but I kept it to myself. Talking over a beat, you know. Not seriously until high school. Ray, who’s in Himalayan Project with me, he and I would make little tapes. Ray and I have known each other since sixth grade but we didn’t start really connecting until high school …we started talking about music… and we’d make a mix tape battling each other. I’d make a tape, and I’d clown on him, and I’d give it to him. And he’d respond. So that’s how we started…

I remember that we pressed up a bunch of tape, and we’d try to sell it. We went to somewhere in the Haight where they used to sell mixed tapes. We went to the guy with this cheesy ass cover of us on the tape. Like an actual cover. Photocopied and made with a cheesy tape cassette. The guy was super nice about it. He said, “Yeah, I’ll listen to it. If I like it you guys can stop by and drop more tapes off.”

T: Did he like it?

C: I have no idea. I dunno. We were too embarrassed to go back and find out. We were like kids, pretty much. But that’s pretty much how we started.

T: When was the first time you performed?

C: The first time in front of people, where we got paid to perform was probably in ’01 or ’02. Up to that point, we were just focused on making music. We had no idea how to perform. I was super stage shy. I didn’t like being on stage, and I still don’t.

T: Where was it? How was that?

C: It was fine. It was in Minnesota…It was easier than I thought it would because there’s so many aspects to performance, right? One is you just get up there and recite your lyrics…

T: And the other you have to hype the crowd…

C: Right. So we make headphone music, we don’t really make party music…It’s hard for us to go on stage and say, “hey, everbody! Get your hands up, get your hands up!” That’s not us.

After we got our first performance out of the way, I started hitting up a lot of open mics and just going to shows where ever. I needed to just get that out of the way so that I could see that it wasn’t that bad.

T: Where was Ray at this time?

C: Ray was living in Boston. On the weekends, we’d go to DC. He’d come down to NYC or wherever I was and we’d drive to DC, because our producers were in DC. So we’d record our music and come back.

T: That’s crazy how spread out you were….I’d imagine it was difficult to find places to perform together…

C: Yeah. It became that if they’d pay us and fly us out to do it, we’d go. But we didn’t have that much money to go. All of our money at the time would go to our producers. We had to do this because this is before people had home studios. We had to go to the studio and pay for studio time… It was a lot more difficult to make music back then, than it is now. Now it’s easy.

T: So you’ve made a lot of albums?

C: We’ve done three Himalayan Project albums, and I’ve done one Oblique Brown. Oblique Brown is me and my producer Harry. I just released an EP, so that’s five total.

T: When I was listening to your solo stuff it sounds like you have a different sound. Is that hard?

C: With Oblique Brown stuff, it’s just me and Harry. So, I feel its stuff I’m concerned with personally. With partner stuff you got to make compromises. Which is dope, I like that. I like being able to work with my friend and make music with them. But with the Oblique Brown it’s more about whatever.

T: How do you think your South Asian identity affected how you create your songs…?

C: I feel to some extent I identify with the immigrant experience instead of the South Asian experience because my South Asian experience is based on India where I was born and raised. When I came to the States, I didn’t really have a South Asian community around me. I was one of two or three in my high school. There’s no communal identity in terms of racial or ethnic identity. When I got to college it was basically the same thing. I think I identified more with people who shared the same interest as me, which is music, and writing, or whatever…So I don’t know how much the South Asian thing plays into it. I’m sure it does in ways that I don’t really see.

T: I feel like your song Postcards from Paradise has all these different images from India and was a very heartfelt song. Almost like a memoir to the Desi experience…

C: It’s hard for me to connect what a larger South Asian American identity. I don’t really know what that means. Maybe if I was brought up here, born and raised here, I would have a better chance to know what that means to me…

But I am surprised by the amount of people interested in us because of our background. And it’s cool to see that. A lot of times we’ll do shows and we’ll have people who have never listened to hip hop and don’t listen to hip hop and they’ll support and buy our albums and say kind things about us. To me that’s really heartfelt and genuine. I definitely have gained an appreciation on how open people are. Something I Just never thought about before.

T: I feel like a lot of your work is more poetic than a lot of the other hip-hop out there.In the song After the Dust Settles, you rattle off a bunch of poetic phrases. How do you think poetry influences how you write your songs?

C: It just goes back to what I think every MC should do. Or what I like for MCs to do – an ability to flip a phrase in a way that hasn’t been done before. Everything’s been said, everything’s been done, every kind of song has been done. It’s just about how you re-imagine an idea. Or how you re-imagine an existing idea or song…To me it’s just about trying to find the most economical way of flipping up the shit, basically. Those are the lines that are most memorable.

I think about Nas‘s first album. Everything about that album was just poetic. It was a moving picture. For me that’s always been standard there for how one should go about making a record. And obviously, I’m just as influenced by a bunch of writers as I am MCs.

It’s also about finding your voice. I’m not saying I talk like that all the time, like in poetic patterns or whatever, but I think that’s just sort of my sensibility. That’s how I want to come across, that’s how I want to communicate because I want it to have replay value. Hopefully, I can listen to it personally in a few years and still respond to it in some way.

T: You mentioned earlier how you wanted to collaborate, but how you feel disconnected. Why do you feel like your music is not connected to a scene?

C: A lot of it is by choice. I’m not young enough to go out there anymore. I’m just much more interested in working on songs and finishing them…But hip hop is proliferating because of the internet. It’s not just radio anymore. It’s not just MTV or BET. With the internet now, it levels the playing field for everyone to where you can be heard and people will check you out if you have good music.

T: I feel like the EP Dust is a lot more depressing than the other ones, both sound-wise and message-wise. I wanted to ask about your first song on the EP called “Congregation.” What’s the message behind the lyrics for that one?

C: It’s an allegory for hip-hop as a religion. Because it is, for a lot of kids. I work with kids here in LA. I go to the camps and a lot of them don’t really have an organized religion. They have their gang shit, and that’s about it. And there’s other kids that grew up on hip hop, or are taggers and that’s what informs them about everything. For me, hip hop has been like a religion, because it informed my world view. It informed how I saw myself.

T: What about Kaleidoscope? You talk about a friend that has cancer…

C: Yeah. That’s about Harry’s brother. He just passed away two and a half weeks ago. He was really struggling with it. This whole EP really is based on what Harry was going through with his brother. He was a gorgeous person and led a beautiful life and definitely inspired some of the beats. Obviously, because of that it inspired me to channel his story as much as I could.

T:So you work with incarcerated youth now, and bring poetry to them. How do you think it influences you?

C: I work now with Street Poets Inc. They do great work. They basically go behind the walls and work with young people that are incarcerated. It’s really healing work. We don’t sit down and talk about language and literature in a technical way. Rather, we’ll give them a starter line and they’ll just write. And then we’ll break it down, ask them questions.

A lot of these kids when they are locked up, no one gives a shit about them. Parole officers treat them like shit. Corrections officers treat them like shit. They just don’t have a place to talk about their lives and what they’ve been through… They love being able to talk openly with a group of young men because in our culture that’s just not something that happens. A lot of them are in circumstances where they can’t access opportunities that I would have or you would have. If they were placed in a different situation or had some encouragement, things may have been different for them. There’s no telling what they are capable of doing.

T: I feel like your music has a lot of progressive message, and that you are able to talk about injustices going on…?

C: I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to make conscious hip-hop, it is just what interests me. Initially a lot of people liked our music because of that aspect of it. It’s why I got into hip hop, because of alternative histories and alternative ways of looking at stories.

We kind of have to unlearn stuff and that can be difficult because so much of hip hop is raw and unfiltered. You want to keep it raw but at the same time it doesn’t have to be negative or name calling. But you can be raw with your emotions, you can be raw with laying it out there about who you are.

T: What’s next for Chee Malabar?

C: Hip hop is just one medium. I like art. I like appreciating it, being involved with it. So whatever comes up, if I’m interested in it, I’ll give it a shot.

You can download Oblique Brown’s Dust off of Itunes or CD Baby today. To hear more by Chee Malabar, please visit Oblique Brown’s Myspace or Himalayan Project’s Myspace now.