Kalae All Day - AFROMATIKNEOHIPPIEROCK*SOLEMUZIK

Kalae All Day – AFROMATIKNEOHIPPIEROCK * SOLEMUZIK

Posted by Isso On August - 19 - 2010

Photography by Clay Duda

Written By: Clay Duda

Video and Director: Matthew Charof

Artist: Kalae All Day

Location: Harlem, NY

Release: “AFROMATIKNEOHIPPIEROCK*SOLEMUZIK“

Date: March 17, 2010

Genre: Hip Hop / Undefinable

Website: www.KalaeAllDay.com

“If you’re in the pursuit for being an artist for money just stop right now. Stop right now. Stop wasting our time. Stop wasting your time. Only if music is what you want to do for the rest of your life, and you would do it regardless of if it could make you money or if it could make you successful and all the other shit and glamorized nonsense that is viewed about artists in the entertainment industry… I don’t know, if that’s what you’re in pursuit of go be in PR or something.”

Damn. Maybe that’s a harsh introduction, but it’s real talk. All in all that may sum up the package that is Harlem-based artist Kalae All Day. She’s not about bullshit. She doesn’t rap about big cars and flashy rings. She pushes the rhymns she knows.

KALAE ALL DAY – INTERVIEW from The Music Tip on Vimeo.

Even today she is pushing. Over the past two years Kalae has made her way to the head of the NY hip hop pack, and had to devote about 95% of her time to the business side of things in doing so.

“It’s uninspiring,” Kalae said.”It’s not like after a night of networking I can come home and write a song.”

Her solution? GRK management, a team of industry pros with a handful of talented, passionate artists on their roster. It’s a hard reality all working artists face. With a raw, jittery album on the shelf Kalae made the sacrifice to put business on the front burner.

“I don’t consider myself in pursuit of being an artist, I just consider myself an artist and then other people will catch on,” she said.

Her creative talents have slipped a bit, she admits, but no artist wants to stay a weekend warrior forever. Now with management handling the logistics she’s back on the lyrical grind. It’s hard to believe this girl’s only been running at 5% creative capacity, but now she has multiple releases in the works. The first of which, an EP with GRK artist Sciryl dubbed “The Sun, The Moon & The Stars,” is slated for release in September.

As for those artists that aren’t quite ready to pick up a team to run the behind-the-scenes, Kalae advised to find a nice balance – at most 50/50 – and to not sacrifice artistic merit anymore than necessary.

“I pop water all day,” she said.

Kalae doesn’t drink. That’s a unique feature in an industry that has been dominated, more or less, by one form of substance abuse or another for as long as this young author cares to remember.

“I have a different way of thinking and living my life that probably isn’t parallel with the lives of most people in the industry.”

When asked she said her reasoning was personal. “I did drink for a very long time,” she admitted, but ultimately decided it was better to take on the adversities thrown her way than to drown them out.

“I wasn’t the type of person that was like ‘oh, I need to loosen up.’ I don’t need to loosen up. I’m fucking crazy as it is.”

Kalae grew up without many of the amenities 21st century youth take for granted – no computer, no cable TV, hell she didn’t even have a radio – but that never stifled her love for music.

“That’s kind of sucky huh?” she said. “But I listened to my moms music.”

And her mom deserves a lot of credit – from Kalae’s very first lyrical rendition of Barbra Streisand to her introduction into choir at age 4. She didn’t pick up the hip hop mic until Lupe Fiasco’s “Kick Push” came out her end of the radio in 2006.

“I started writing rhymns, but not rapping them,” she said. “I still don’t know how to rap, y’all just think I know.”

Unsure exactly how to classify her sound, Kalae created the Afromatikneohippierock*solemuzik tag as a way to define her sound, and hopefully distinguish it, in the eyes of a society that feeds off the branding of an image.

“I don’t know if you want to say it’s a sub genre of hip hop… Maybe it just includes hip hop in it,” she said dissecting her music’s relation to hip hop culture. “Maybe it’s the broader genre and hip hop is the sub genre.”