And How an Indie Rock Loving Theatre Kid is Making His Mark on the Hip Hop Scene
You wouldn’t pick Andy Bothwell out of a crowd. He’s not incredibly tall. The blonde, lean span of him is attractive, but relatively unassuming. He doesn’t usually don expensive suits or sport facial jewelry. No, it wouldn’t be until he stepped on stage, smiled and revealed a row of gleaming gold teeth and started rapping hilariously about Ed Mcmahon and World of Warcraft that he would command your complete and undivided attention. This is what Andy, aka Astronautalis, does best. He effectively rouses an audience into a captivated throng of listeners and participators. On stage you will find no instruments or additional band members. Simply a guy, his Mac and his brain—and I assure you, that is enough to create one hell of a show. After performing a few songs from his albums You and Yer Good Ideas and The Mighty Ocean and Nine Dark Theatres, Astronautalis will inform you that this is the part of the show in which you, yes you!, get to participate in the fun, by proffering original topics for him to rap about. Bill Cosby in Ghost Dad? Gotcha. Ninja Turtles? Check. And if you’re in Fort Worth, Texas, a guy in a cowboy hat will yell “Painted on bay-kinis bah the lake on Labor Day Wake-end! Woo!” And Astronautalis will grant his request, too. And then you will watch as he cleverly and effortlessly weaves this array of unrelated topics into a rap song that really flows, makes sense, even, and you’ll wonder to yourself if he’s just extremely talented or if, perhaps, his mind really is wired differently than the rest. Andy will be the first to assure you that it’s neither. In spite of two successful records, an incredibly diverse fan base and a tour roster of over 1000 shows in his four-year career, he’s a regular slice of humble pie. In fact, he would rather not classify himself as a musician, but rather a “self taught, laptop jockey.” Andy says he owes his success to several things, the first being his hometown: Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Although he was born in Virginia and raised around Maryland, he spent his teenage years in Florida, the formative years, which everyone knows are the years that really count, anyway. And he inherited quite a lot during that span of time. “Florida is a tough little state,” says Andy. “It introduced me to indie rock, taught me how to rap, taught me how to surf and skateboard, gave me my southern accent. I wouldn’t be anything of what I am today if it wasn’t for Florida. I owe it quite a lot.” What Jacksonville Beach also gave him was a like-minded circle of friends, a posse of nine souls who would listen to records in their bedrooms and go see Superchunk and Nirvana when they rolled through town, and when the tour schedule was slow and there was nothing else to do they would create their own music, feeding off each other’s talents and determination. One of these friends was Ben Cooper, aka Radical Face, who ended up producing Andy’s first two albums. But it was his older brother, the DJ, who first introduced Andy to rap music at the tender age of 13, when all Andy knew was mid-90’s American rock and The Clash. He gave Andy a tape with Lord Finesse’s Return of the Funky Man on one side and Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Volume 1 on the other. Andy listened to this tape until he memorized every word, and, believing the rappers must have freestyled the entirety of the albums, he decided he would learn to freestyle, too. “It was something I needed to know,” explains Andy. “A man should know how to build a campfire and freestyle.” This he did. While he practiced, he admired from afar the african-american kids in his cafeteria who would freestyle during lunch, until one day, the revelation occurred to him: he was better than those guys. He just knew it. So when he agreed to do a battle and test their lyrical prowess, it was no surprise that he beat them. Every last one. And thus began a six year career as a battle rapper, from competing with school peers to strangers, winning a handful of cash here and there as prize money for being the best of the best. Now, if this life had been enough for our hero, we probably would never have known about him. He probably would have faded away into the muddled stutter of rap obscurity. Fortunately for us, Andy’s soaring reputation as a battler left him unsatisfied and bored, he could pretty much rhyme in his sleep and, well, there are only so many times a person can be called “gay” in a battle before it’s considered less than enjoyable. The catalyst was the Scribble Jam Battle, arguably the largest and most competitive emcee battle in the country. And Andy, well he…lost. Big time. As he puts it, he had his “butt handed to him by people who really loved doing battle,” and, realizing he would never love battle rapping that way again, he spent the drive home thinking everything over. His history, his experiences, his musical influences…what would he do if he was no longer a battler? One thing was school. After graduating from high school in 1999, Andy got a scholarship to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, a private (read: expensive) university, where he studied theatre directing and lighting design. This is where he learned to lead an audience, through directing and watching plays and watching people watch plays, and he’s refined this technique through touring and performing. As Andy says, it’s “road tested.”In the meantime he was testing out the waters of some other musical ventures. White rappers weren’t what they used to be. That is, unusual. In the wake of Vanilla Ice and the Beastie Boys, but most notably Eminem’s blinding takeoff into the realm of rap aristocracy, a door opened, and in streamed the kids from middle-class suburbia, the white kids who listened to Tupac and Coolio secretly in their bedrooms, all wanting a piece of the action, now that the action was being shared. Now that the terms “Battle Rapper” and “Emcee” were no longer color coded, these kids had their eyes on the prize: an illustrious career, incredible fortune, and a chance to tell their story like it is. But could they do it? Could they rap about time in prison, throwing gang signs and growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, when all they knew about such stuff came from the black rappers they idolized? And in comes the irony. No. They could not. People would see right through their Fubu jerseys and backwards caps, straight down to their white, tattoo-less bodies and clean track records. So if they couldn’t participate in the angry, violent, gangsta rap that everyone was into, what could they rap about? Simple. White kid things. Andy was realizing it was now not only acceptable but cool to paint a white world with rap lyrics. So what could he do about that? Andy’s brother introduced him to folk music, Jacksonville Beach brought him indie rock, and he loved rapping. Certainly there was a way to let all these genres coexist, to create one glorious trifecta that could somehow allow seemingly unrelated musical terrains to connect, right? In a moment of clarity, he decided to quit his day job and move back in with his parents, so he could focus on his music and make the album he intended to make. That album became You and Yer Good Ideas, and was originally only sold at live shows until it was picked up by Fighting Records in 2005. The record is a poetic, lyrically-fueled saga of musings of reality and fiction, incredibly emotional in flavor (think Dashboard Confessional) backed up by cut ‘n paste beats (think The Streets) and instrumentals, and with the particular Floridian twang of Andy’s voice it rings more country than one could suspect. And his tours are no different.
“My music is influenced by traditional bluesy, folk Americana music, because it’s lyrical, like rap,” says Andy. “There’s not really a huge leap between those genres. They’re just from different backgrounds, different versions of the American dream.”But that doesn’t mean he’s a good ‘ol boy, or that he doesn’t appreciate the high end successories that the elite members of today’s Hip Hopica proudly boast—that is, the bling. “Flava Flav had the gold caps, and I always thought they were cool. I’ve realized I’m not that person,” Andy says.But if I ever see a ’66 Impala with 28 inch rims, I’ll always go man, that’s awesome. I just thought yeah, I want those gold teeth, I’ll get ‘em.”As for his music, Astro insists it is always under construction. His writing methods have evolved, from jotting down ideas and emotions in journals and on cocktail napkins, to researching his song topics in textbooks. So how does Astronautalis classify his music? “I still think of myself as a rapper. Most people don’t, I think. I always feel comfortable being a rapper; maybe it’s more of a security blanket to me than anything else. I’m going to do my rap music with banjos and string sections until they kick me out of the club.”
By: Lauren Kent
