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BOSKO
(2001) | Interview By: Westcoast2K
West Coast 2K's right hand Big
Sly chopped it up with Producer Bosko. The veteran has been in the game for
over a decade now. His Production can be heard on many mutli-platinum records.
No longer, sitting in the back seat, stuffed in the cut, Bosko Kante has
emerged. We speak on many issues in this exclusive interview.
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Fresh Outta Chicken....
...at Bosko's Chicken & Beats, major knock is the special of the day.
Talent or tacos, u betta bring sumpn to the table if u fuckin with Bosko. I
brought tacos.
But before it got to that point, I had to track down super-producer Bosko
Kante, the beatmaker behind salty mouthpieces such as E-40 and WC. It’s like
trying to contact motherfuckin Inspector Gadget; it takes me a half-hour to
dictate to his messaging service, as I pause to spell vocabulary landmines
like “scrillion”, “bossalini” and “crackalatin”. Is there spellcheck for a
gangsta?
To my surprise, the wireless angels relay my words along with the quickness,
and before I know it I got Bosko in my earpiece. He’s giving me directions to
the shack, and now I’m the one trying to spell – Spanish street names and
shit.
Less than an hour later I’m cruising thru the Silverlake suburb of Los
Angeles. I’m both early and hungry, so I stop to round up a taco plate right
quick. Food in hand, I begin to push up the hill into the elevated rent
district, where Bosko’s shack is actually a mini-mansion tucked back from a
quiet residential street. As I head up the driveway looking like a G’d-up
delivery boy with my food, I admire the SUV custom-airbrushed with an image of
Bosko and his group DBA, which stands for Doing Business As… I eyeball my
reflection in the twilight tint, and I’m beginning to see how thoro bizness is
being done. This ain’t no small b-boy affair – the doorbell should play “For
the Love of Money”. I test it.
BEHIND GATES
I don’t aplolgize for havin’ thangs, and I don’t expect Bosko do either. Maybe
they can’t understand back in Portland, but he left that scene a long time ago
for the city where dreams get lived. Somewhere way back in Ghana, another
young boy can see himself behind the wheel of a Range, living that rap life.
He just ain’t made it across the globe to L.A. yet.
A bespectacled, dumpy G answers the door. “Bosko?” I inquire like a true
schoolgirl. He nods and leads me inside. Not ten steps thru the door, I turn a
corner and stumble upon a team of individuals seated at a table laden with
gizmos and gadgets. They regard me evenly. The man seated in the middle,
hunkered over a laptop, appears to be Derek Fisher with a natural. The eighth
dwarf who answered the door introduces me, and Derek-Fisher-with-a-natural
greets me, in turn identifying himself as Bosko. Eureka! I’d been duped, just
like in Superman 2 when the three supervillains demanded to see the President.
It wuz the loyal footsoldier who pretended to be the boss, or in this case,
the Bos’.
Mistaken identity cases solved, I retreat to the kitchen to eat while the team
in the war room figures out who to select with their number one draft pick. Or
sumpn. Presently Bosko joins me, looking like he wanna escape from the bizness
for a minute. He loiters conspicuously close to my tacos. Like a motherfucker,
I offer him one, never expecting this rich-ass rap nigga to stoop so low. A
second later, I’m one taco short of a fiesta platter, like the bitch on
Weakest Link would say. This is the price I must pay for access behind gates.
We share taco-talk to begin to scratch the surface of who Bosko Kante is and
where he came from. “I started out rappin’ with everyone else,” he explains,
“but nobody else could make beats. So if there’s eight niggas that can rap and
one cat that can make beats, then I’ma end up making beats.” Flipping logic
like that at a young age, it ain’t a surprise that Bosko has hustled up his
own business – Bombay Entertainment – and attracted the corporate backbone of
Universal. Earlier this year he released a full-length from DBA (Bosko, Poppa
LQ & Cool Nutz), which boasts a full slate of big-name guests and ain’t far
from being a major compilation. Bosko attracts heavy hitters like stink do
flies, but at the moment, the traffic thru his rooms is minor.
Next, my all-access taco gets me into the home studio, where some of rap’s
most gangsterous game-spitters have laid em down. Only by word-of-mouth do you
make it this far, where Bosko crafts the tracks and coaches the vocals. “I
ain’t gonna have a cat in here all night tryin’ to record one verse cuz he
can’t say it,” he deadpans. In other words, the couch don’t pull out. And it
don’t clean itself in the aftermath of sessions where blunt ashes are spread
like someone’s remains at sea, and forty bottles lie around waiting for
someone to plat sumpn in em – the consequences of lettin’ niggas spit where
you eat. But, sez Bosko, things may wobble but they don’t fall down.
“Knock on wood.”
The more dust you kick up in Bosko’s presence, the more money you betta kick
in. But most of the time, it’s straight pleasure interacting with his clients.
He witnesses behind-the-scenes action aplenty:
“You might see an artist get into an argument with his woman, see him goin’
thru baby mama drama….you see it all. It’s cool to see them step into the
booth and transform into the star. At that point, I become a fan. I’m
basically watching my favorite artist do a show just for me. And I get a hand
in it.”
Don’t get it twisted: he got a hand, a foot and twelve toes in it. Basically,
he’s knee-deep in makin’ bomb beats, using the best of the old and the new. A
self-proclaimed “techie”, he not only uses the latest gadgets to contact
folks, he lines the studio with toys to make noise. As a yungsta, Bosko had an
Atari ST computer and did beats on a Mirage before samplers wuz the thing. As
a grown-ass, he uses a Sequence Logic instead of the MP, and plays guitar,
bass, and keys. “I wouldn’t consider myself a musician,” he clarifies. “I’ve
developed the skills to play the stuff I’m tryin’ to write.” He’s gone thru
all the phases – from playing everything live, no sampling, to sampling jazz
to his funk phase – and along the way he’s become tangled in a raunchy affair
with the freshest instrument God created: the talkbox. Shown how to freak it
by an OG in the game, Battlecat, he’s blown a distinct life into it, and
mobbed-out countless jams. And pleezbaleev that he bristles at the suggestion
that he bit.
“How the fuck is any hip-hop producer gon’ bite another hip-hop producer on
the talkbox? Roger is the talkbox. Anyone doing the talkbox is emulating
Roger.”
“We don’t have Roger any more,” he continues, “but we still need the talkbox.
We ain’t gon’ throw out the guitar cuz Jimi Hendrix died.”
ZOOM
Never let it be said that Bosko Kante got his game from a hoe or his name from
a hoe. The name comes from his father, a native African and human conduit for
musical talent. Blessed as he is, Bosko can afford to sit back and daydream
how his life could be different if he gave his name to, oh, maybe gal like
Whitney Houston…
“I would be a lot richer right now,” he oozes. “It wouldn’ta been Rodney
Jerkins doin’ her last album, I’ll tell you that.”
Strictly speaking, he wouldn’t be rich as he is if he hadn’t jumped ship off
Big Beat/Atlantic, who signed him and released his first single back in ’95.
He stopped producing outside acts and sunk all his chips into making a
full-length that would never see the light of day. Soon after Big Beat added
Junior Mafia to their roster, everyone else started getting the dick,
beginning with Atlantic’s entire West Coast offices, and trickling down to
artists on the label from coast to coast. Bosko saw his music and his energies
dry up like the sweat on a benched baller. It took him three years to get back
in the game.
When he did come back, he looked a lot like Derek Fisher – he had the touch.
No one had to scrape the rust off his black ass, and staying in shape like
that has allowed him to liquidate his marbles, translate his dividends into a
small empire. As I emerge from the rabbit hole and head back to my everyday
life I think about where I just came from. Bosko’s crib is like an embassy –
tho it’s smack on American soil, it’s African territory. It’s a mecca for
knowledge of self, and houses treasures that have been co-opted back from
European conquerors. It’s a waypost between Hollywood and the land of his
birth, the land of his father, the land where Bosko’s rap life reality is more
rare than white tigers. For Bosko, however, returning to Africa and seeing
original roots is his diamonds and jewels.
“It’s given me another perspective on being black. Africans have been
subjected to the same kind of brainwashing that Africans in America have
gotten. They watch euro-centric TV and that’s where they get their images of
black people from,” the jig, young CEO sez without a trace of irony. “Having
been there, I don’t have the problem of self-hatred that you see in [black]
people here, becuz I’ve seen where my culture came from. I never thought
everyone wuz in mudhuts and throwin’ spears…
…which is cool, cuz I got some relatives right now that’s livin’ in mud huts,”
he finishes candidly. “Maybe they not throwin’ spears, but they got some.”
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