The way Geometric, also known as Geo, emcee of Seattle’s Blue Scholars, talks about the study of hip-hop and raps using the vocabulary of labor organization, it almost seems wrong calling his carefully crafted verses wordplay. This is word work, carried out with the skill of a master craftsman.
Coming up through the often-overlooked Northwest hip-hop scene, Blue Scholars have made a name for themselves with intelligent rhymes and solid production, which Geo says is in part a result of his scholarly devotion to hip-hop.
“A lot of people study hip-hop just for the sake of it, just to accumulate knowledge, but I’m trying to do it in a way that I can put into concrete action,” Geo said.
This action manifests itself in a sound that draws on a diverse range of sources of inspiration that come together to make music that, Geo hopes, sounds good on a purely musical level as well as inciting listeners to take action themselves.
“I want to make sure that I’m making music that I feel like is also creative in a way. I obviously have a political message I want to put through, but I also want to make sure the music is tight. No disrespect to anybody out there but there’s a lot of good political hip-hop with good solid content that isn’t tight, that I can’t bump in my ride,” Geo said. “I’m trying to find that balance.”
Geo finds that balance through a long and diverse list of influences and through a knowledge of and respect for the origins and power of hip-hop, the genre he fell in love with growing up in Hawaii.
“I lived in Hawaii from ’82 to ’91, those were my childhood years, and my first introduction to hip-hop was, like, my friends’ older brothers and sisters. We were like six or seven at the time, it was 1987, we were into every and all types of music, but this one specific type of music, you know, these older cats, these teenage cats were like… I don’t know; there was this vibrant energy from it,” Geo said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow,’ because it was more than just music, because people were break dancing, people were actually engaged in it, DJing, rapping.”
That energy and individual involvement would lead Geo to get personally involved in Seattle-area hip-hop culture when he moved to Bremerton, Wash. By the end of the 1990s, Geo was helping keep the scene alive, and in the process laying the foundation for the Blue Scholars and the label they helped establish, Massline Media.
“We got involved with putting on our own shows with this group called the Student Hip-Hop Organization of Washington to fill the void of having no all-ages shows in the town after one of our biggest all ages venues [Rock Candy] got shut down in ’99,” Geo said.
From there, it was only a matter of time before the Blue Scholars were releasing recordings of their work, eventually bringing together the component parts of Massline Media as a way of further legitimizing their craft.
“We were already doing it on the super grassroots do-it-yourself level, the self-release thing, but it’s such a hard road for anybody to do it that way,” Geo said. “Once you start getting attention, once you start trying to make a career out of it, it’s difficult if you don’t roll with some sort of collective, whether it’s a label or crew, production team, whatever.”
Massline Media finally came together last year, when the artists got together and put together a plan to make this idea a reality.
“We all hadn’t sat in a room together quite yet until early ’06 and decided it was time to pull our resources together and we’ve all known each other for a couple years, some longer than others, but one thing that we all had in common at the time was a shared vision of using music as a means to educate and mobilize folks,” Geo said. “If you listen to the music there’s a similar kind of vibe among all the artists.”
The sounds are as diverse as their influences. According to Geo, this variety is, at least in part, due to the lack of a recognized Northwest hip-hop sound, which allows artists room to grow within and experiment with different styles.
“[Northwest hip-hop artists are] – maybe because of the isolation – kind of eclectic, man. Kind of schizophrenic, a little bit. We’re solidly West Coast, you know, a lot of people up in Seattle grew up listening to West Coast music and whatnot. At the same time, living up North, we share this affinity for, like, New York, East Coast hip-hop, and then also Midwest hip-hop. We were heavily influenced by all areas. I would say the Bay has been the biggest influence, though,” Geo said. “You see it in our slang, too; we say ‘hella’ hella.”
The Blue Scholars are currently touring the western United States with their labelmates and peers Common Market and Gabriel Teodros. So far, the reception has been positive.
“We’ve rocked big crowds, we’ve rocked small crowds, we’ve rocked mid-sized crowds, and they’ve all responded real well. They were all live, whether it was 50 or 500,” Geo said. “We treat shows not like shows, we treat it like a party, so I think that’s what folks should expect.”
The tour wraps up on Sunday with a performance at WOW Hall.
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