Who Is Alexander Spit?

Back in late January, Complex premiered Alexander Spit's album, A Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside.

Although that project was probably the first time many fans outside of the Bay Area caught on to Spit, we had actually first become fans of his when he dropped his instrumental tape Mansions last year and when he produced Bago's excellent Sunday's Best. But now, with his new album out, the West Coast rapper/producer has hit the road and is in SXSW playing shows this week, the perfect time to get on the horn and find out: Who Is Alexander Spit?

He told us about growing up in the Bay, his former group The Instant Messengers, and why he doesn't sell his beats to other people...

As told to Insanul Ahmed (@Incilin)

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Alexander Spit: “My mother grew up in the Philippines in a very strict Filipino family. My father grew up in San Francisco. My pops raised me on Bay Area sports teams and to be proud of having roots in the Bay Area. He raised me in a very San Francisco way, like showing me how to drink Root Beer with certain food.

“We were lower-middle-class. Both of my parents worked so a lot of the time was spent between me and my playings sports and biking. When I was eight, my pops got laid off from his job and he was unemployed for a good two to three years. That forced my mom to work a full time job. I didn’t really understand the magnitude of being broke until I had to see my moms crying at the dinner table because we had to eat fast food dinners.

“After looking for work in L.A., my pops eventually found a job at this golf course in Marin County which is a pretty rich area of the Bay Area. So it was me, my moms, and my brother for a good two years while my pops was just stacking money. We would go visit him a for a weekend like once a month. Eventually my pops had stacked enough money for us to move up closer to where he was working and my mom transferred jobs.

“We went from living in a simple L.A. neighborhood to a little part of the Bay Area that was noticeably a lot richer. It was filled with a lot more rich white suburban kids than I was used to. When we moved up there it was the first time I realized that I was a minority in the sense of social structure, race, and the way I think. Me and my brother grew up kicking rocks around, but these kids were skiing.

“That’s when I realized there is a divide between people. No matter what the lines are. I found myself coinciding with a lot of the weird kids, kids that I knew didn’t fall into no popular clique but they seemed cool. It just happened to be that those kids were also the broke kids. That’s kind of where I really started getting into rap music."

Alexander Spit: “Growing up in Los Angeles, I listened to stuff on the radio and bought a couple cassettes. I remember going to Tower Records and buying Bone Thugs’ E. 1999 Eternal and Green Day’s Dookie. We didn’t really have that much money but if we bought music we listened to that for like four months straight on repeat.

“My first year living in Marin County, there was this one kid in my class named Kelsey Rivera—he’s one of my best friends to this day—and he was dipped out in Wu Wear, head to toe. During class the teacher would be like, ‘What is it called when an artist does this craft in Mesopotamia?’ He’d be like, ‘Tiger style.’ Every time he said a joke he was laughing his ass off, I didn’t really know what he was talking about but I knew it had to do with Wu-Tang.

“So I went to Tower Records and got 36 Chambers. At that time I didn’t really have no friends, so I went home and studied that album front to back. After a few weeks, I went up to Kelsey Rivera like, ‘Yo, you like Wu-Tang too?’ trying to fake it like I been down with Wu-Tang since the beginning. There was just a mutual bond from there and we became homies.”

Alexander Spit: “One day, Kelsey bought a tape recorder. We would cop CD singles which had the instrumental on it. We would take that instrumental put that CD in our boombox, play the boombox as loud as possible, put the tape recorder next to the boombox and we would just freestyle into the tape recorder. We had no skills, I hadn’t hit puberty [so my voice was different] and we had nothing to talk about. All we had to talk about were girls in school and making fun of kids.

“We would get to school and record on this little tape recorder. We had weird mindsets like if we record in the bathroom it’s going to have more of a reverb effect, if we record in this little tunnel under the freeway where there’s a lot of weird echoes and delays it’s going to pick up. We would just do weird shit.

“In high school, we would ditch school and go to this underground sewer in the soccer field that had the craziest echo reverb. We would sneak down there during class to record freestyles. We recorded non-stop, even during class while teachers were talking, we’d whisper freestyles. We probably have an entire walk-in closet full of cassette tapes, front to back recorded.

“That led to us putting a tape together. We sold them and made $50 bucks one day from selling tapes for $1 each. It was funny to everyone because our raps weren’t serious. It would be like, ‘This kid is gay/And we from The Bay.’ Real simple elementary rhymes but they were relevant to whatever was happening in school.”

Alexander Spit: “The Internet started popping off [when I was a kid]. On the Internet I was learning more about rap culture. Up until that point my knowledge of rap was the CDs of whatever rap albums were in the front rack at the store. I would cop because I didn’t know no better. I wasn’t old enough to go to shows, so I was just buying blindly.

“Once the Internet started booming I came across a site called UndergroundHipHop.com. I don’t know why I ended up on that site but I always liked the term ‘underground/’ I was so naive as a kid that I literally thought it was a hip-hop movement that happened underground, like in the sewers. I thought nobody knew about it, that it was a secret cult. It fascinated me.

“I ended up on UndergroundHipHop.com and they had a forum, I signed up for the forum, created a name—I was Alexander The Great. I posted verses on that shit from like middle school all the way until halfway through high school. If you wanted to go on UndergroundHipHop.com and go on the forums and look up Alexander The Great there’s probably over a thousand verses posted by me on there.

“That’s kinda how I learned how to write raps—by sharing my verses with other writers and other music peers and them critiquing it. When I first started posting in it fools were straight hating on me. But down the line I started honing my skill. That’s when I let them know I’m 14 writing these verses and fools was blown away. That was a boost to my self-esteem, it made me want to continue to dive into this music.”

Alexander Spit: “Over the years J. Dilla has continuously influenced me. His shit is innovative and creative and not everybody can do it. He expanded my scope of where good music comes from, it doesn’t always come from what’s popular or what is most talked about.

“I’ve been influenced by folks like Tom Waits in regards to his whole charisma, aesthetic, and his song writing. He has this very simple yet heartfelt songwriting. Cats like Andre 3000 who could talk about real life issues and say it in a way that you could dance to it. Obviously cats like Jay-Z, he was one of the first rappers that I became a huge fan of. And Slug from Atmosphere.

“My list of influences—I’ve never been able to hone it down to a top three or five because I’m really one of those music listeners that has 10 different moods. All of my moods are influenced by different artists.”

Alexander Spit: “Slowly but surely, I started experimenting with drugs with Kelsey [and my small crew of friends]. We liked to be rebellious, we would ask people to buy us 40s and cigarettes from the liquor store when we were like 10-years-old. By the time we were beginning high school—don’t know if it was teen angst, teen depression or what you would call it—but shit got dark for all of us.

“We started drinking more, smoking more, and trying mushrooms. My grandma was living at my crib at the time—God bless that woman—but she had an amputated leg so she had Percocets on deck at all times. We would steal Percocets from her so we were fucked up on painkillers at the beginning of high school.

“I don’t know if you would call it a drug addiction or if it was a completely alcoholic mindset. But around sophomore year, we all started getting caught more. Mom was finding weed in our drawers or we would come home smelling like cigarettes and alcohol. Fools would be getting arrested, getting caught by the cops. Things just started catching up to us.

“I had been semi-decent in school but as freshman year hit, I stopped caring. Sophomore year, they literally pulled out my transcript and they were like, ‘You showed up to only three days this semester.’ I always got away with it because I got home before my parents so I could erase the voicemails that the school would leave. Eventually my folks caught onto the fact that I was fucking up.

“Ultimately, my parents thought the thing that I needed to keep away from was my friends. So they sent me away from The Bay to live with my grandparents down in Los Angeles when I was a sophomore. They didn’t enroll me into school or nothing, I was literally on lockdown with strict Filipino grandparents. I knew nobody in L.A. and had no means of transportation. I was literally on lockdown for about six months.

“I don’t know if you would call it alcoholism, drug addiction or what, but eventually I gave in. I was like, ‘I can’t beat the system I’m in right now, I’m still under the law of my parents until I turn 18.’ So I gave in and told my grandparents and parents that I’ll stay sober, do good in school, and eventually move back to The Bay. And that I’d go to AA meetings.”

Alexander Spit: “From ages 15 to 20 I was going to AA meetings and 12 step meetings. In a weird twisted way, I thought AA was really cool. Fools was real. I was hearing crazy stories. Grown men telling me about their drug stories and now they’re killing it and they own their own business. They were like ex-Hell’s Angels.

“Somewhere along the lines I was like, ‘I’d rather kick it with these ex-cons, ex-alcoholics, and ex-addicts than some high school party.’ So I started getting hella involved in Alcoholics Anonymous. I was showing up to meetings seven days a week and I would bring the homies and put them on to it. I stayed sober for five years—heavily involved in 12 step programs.

“From the age of 15 to 21 I was completely sober, even though I smoked cigarettes and drank a shitload of coffee. Prior to that I was on one: From the ages of 10 to 15 I was on one with the homies and shit.

“I don’t ever regret any of that period of my life. I already knew I wanted to do music for a living. I already knew who my core friends were I wasn’t worried about being social in high school. I was chilling—I was kicking it with people that were mature. I was able to hear real life shit.”

Alexander Spit: “When I was 17, I graduated with the quickness when I moved back to The Bay because I started going to all of these alternative education schools. Which really means hella easy school. I was homeschooled, getting English credits for writing verses and P.E. credits for skating.

“When I turned 21, I moved out of my parents house. I moved into the homies house in San Francisco. Around that time is when I started to realize that I had been in 12 step programs for five years without necessarily even having a real problem. I was like, ‘Fuck it I’m going to start partying.’

“At that time I was fully convinced that the people that were popping—not even on a global scale but in San Francisco the people that were cool and known—were going out every night.

“Their face was seen every night, they would go out campaigning their shit. So I adopted a lifestyle of going out every night. San Francisco is perfect for that type of life because even the regular Joe Schmo’s be doing that, they don’t even have to have a hustle. People just go out every night in San Francisco and party.”

Alexander Spit: “When I came back from The Bay after living with my grandparents, I started attending these weekly emcee battles/open mics called Tourettes Without Regrets in Southern California and Oakland. I was treating it like it was a big deal. I would go ham on these verses—screaming. I didn’t have much style but folks could tell I had passion.

“Along the lines of me showing up to these open mics, I eventually met these two other emcees named Cambo and Cheshire. During the weekly battles, we were the only three winning. The three of us had completely different styles and eventually everyone told us we needed a track together.

“So we did a track together and the song was called ‘I’d Rather Be A Rapper Than Have World Peace.’ People [liked the song] and were like, ‘Ya should make more songs together.’ We ended up making four songs. The same people that threw that open mic were like, ‘We want to book you guys for a show, what’s your name?’

“Again, my homie Kelsey Rivera was like, ‘Ya’ll should be The Instant Messengers.’ We all started laughing. Then we got a phone call a minute later like, ‘We really need to make this flyer, what’s your group’s name?’ We were like, ‘The Instant Messengers.’ We stuck with that name and we started making music.

“We started doing a lot of shows and getting local buzz in the San Francisco and the Bay. At first it would be 20 kids showing up to shows, then it would be 50 kids, then a 100 kids. Then it would be we started selling out venues like the Rickshaw Stop where it’d be 500 kids.

“One night, I went to a show at the Fillmore for the Living Legends and I seen this kid Brick Stowell who I went to highschool with. I was like, ‘Hey what are you doing here?’ He was like, ‘I work for the Living Legends, I’m their assistant.’ For me at that day and age and at the time he might as well have said he was an A&R for Interscope.

“At that time, I was pretty much a backpack rapper. I gave Brick my CD and the Instant Messengers and I’m like, ‘Play that for them.’ He listened to them and two weeks later he’s like, ‘I want to manage you guys’ and then about a month later he introduced us to the Grouch of the Living Legends. A month later we were doing a show in Oakland called The Brokeass Summer Jam which is an annual independent hip-hop show in Oakland.

“Grouch eventually was like, ‘I want to put your next album out.’ That led to us recording an album [called Slammers] on Grouch’s label, Simple Man Records. We didn’t know how to put out a commercial album in the sense of actually trying to sell units so it flopped. But It was a very cool thing for the San Francisco area and our peers.

“That spawned the beginning of the end for The Instant Messengers. We had our creative differences. I wanted to keep it on some hardcore hip-hop but they wanted to do something more that would get people dancing, some party shit. By the time I was 21 we decided it was time to break the group up. Once the Instant Messengers broke up that’s when I really started to really fully dive into my solo career.”

Alexander Spit: “To be honest, at the beginning of my solo career I was trying to piggyback off of the success the Instant Messengers. I would book myself as Alexander Spit of the Instant Messengers for shows. I started with having 70 to 80 people at my shows. I started recording a lot of solo music by myself, I started getting really heavy into beats.

“I would pick up whatever shows I could. If someone was down to give me a 20 minute set at their coffee shop, I would do that. If someone was down to let me play in their living room during a house party, I would do that. It was very organic for me, I wasn’t picky with any of my opportunities. I would do whatever show that came my way and any opportunity I had to work on music with an artist I would take.

“That was around the age of 21. From the age of 21 to 23, I made a mark in San Francisco . When bigger acts came into town, promoters knew that I was the local act to hit up to open up for them. I ended up opening up for a lot of bigger acts when they would come to town on tour. More and more folks started to catch on.

“This was a time when I didn’t have much product to push either so they were just trying to be fans off of the few songs I had on my MySpace page. I didn’t have a website, Tumblr wasn’t popping, I didn’t have no YouTube videos. I just had a few songs on my MySapce but on my computer at home I had been working on my album.”

Alexander Spit: “Since the day the day Instant Messengers broke up I started working on my album called Open 24 Hours. I didn’t have the right means to record music and didn’t know how to mix my shit, so it took a couple years to make. By the time I finished it, I was about 23. I finished the album but didn’t know what to do with it.

“Beginning of 2008 or 2009 I started working for The Hundreds because they had opened up a shop in San Francisco. I had heard about The Hundreds through my homie Brick, who told me they were the next big clothing company. I didn’t know shit about that realm but I knew it was some cool shit.

“I met the manager of the shop, we became friends, and eventually somebody got fired and they needed to fill the position. He was like, ‘You want a job with The Hundreds?’ I was like, ‘Fuck yeah.’ About a month or two working for the company, Ben and Bobby Hundreds—the owners of the company—came to check up on the shop. I introduced myself and told them I’m a rapper.

“At this time I had long hair, I had a mustache, I was wearing skinny jeans—I didn’t look like no rapper they had seen. At this time, Dom Kennedy and Pac Div were popping in L.A.. That’s what they were familiar with in regard to what rap was going to potentially be successful. At first they took it as a joke like this is just another rapper spawned by the Internet fade.

“One day I emailed them a link to my music and Bobby Hundreds emailed me back like, ‘What the fuck, this is insane. You’re killing it.’ A couple days later he posted it on The Hundreds blog. After that my MySpace followers went up, my Twitter followers went up. Bobby Hundreds—I don’t think he put me on but he was one of the first people of influence to recognize what I do.

“I hit up Bobby Hundreds one day like, ‘Are you guys down to put out my album? I know you guys have never put out music before but you guys are about to be a huge company and I don’t see why you guys shouldn’t be backing some music shit.’ Without hesitation they hit me back like, ‘We’d be honored to put out your first album.’

“So in September of 2009, I was around 23, they put out my first official solo album, Open 24 Hours. We put it out for sale with some free press CDs, they put out a really dope music video for me called, ‘Beat For The Street.’ At that point it wasn’t like people came flocking towards me, but I got on people’s radar.”

Alexander Spit: “I was getting stagnant in San Francisco. I was becoming one of those acts in a city where it’s like this is that local act that plays every week, opening for different acts. I got to the point where I’d hit up the fans and homies like come through to my show and they’d be like, ‘We’ll catch you next week and the week after that probably.’ I was just like, ‘Damn what’s the next step?’

“My homie Brick was like, ‘If you want to do this music shit, you got to move to L.A. That’s where the industry is popping and moves are made. I got a place for you to live too.’ I talked to The Hundreds and they were like, ‘We can have you work at the L.A. shop if you move down here.’ All of the pieces were pointed at me moving to LA. It was a lot for me.

“After Open 24 Hours I put out Until Next Summer through The Hundreds again. That album was kind of a pivot for me because in San Francisco I was used to a grimey dark sort of lifestyle. When I moved to L.A. it was sunny every day and the girls were actually good looking. It was a bunch of grimey Bohemians wandering around, not that I’m against any of that but it was a breath of fresh air.

“People started paying attention. More people started hating but more eyes were on what I was doing. Being in L.A., you’re surrounded by people that are getting famous. For me it was a humbling thing to see and kind of scary. All this hometown love shit is tight but then you start realizing that all of the love I’m getting is from people that are obligated to show love—they’re all homies and shit.”

Alexander Spit: “I needed a big break, [to have fans] beyond homies. It pulled me into a place like, ‘Damn is this really my calling? Is music really my shit?’ I started comparing myself to other artists, I started thinking maybe I need to make a club record or some radio singles. I was really lost and this was after the first year of me living in LA. I didn’t know what direction I wanted to go in and I got into a real dark state.

“After I put out Until Next Summer in 2010, I was like: I gotta work on a new project, but I didn’t even know what to call it. I had worked on music for seven to eight months and nothing I had made I was satisfied with. I went through much of that period in a heavy writers block and a heavy creative block and I got real dark.

“As a result I just stopped caring about rap music and I started going out more. I started taking a lot more drugs and started getting a lot more drunk and being reckless when I was going out. What spawned out of that was that I still had this urge to make music, even if the music I was making wasn’t something I was liking and no one was fucking with it.

“At the beginning of 2011 I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to sit down and just make music and not care about what people think. If I put this out and it does good, keep it moving. I put this out and no one gives a fuck, we’re going to keep it moving. Maybe I got to think about doing something else, maybe this music shit isn’t the path.’

“At this point I’m 23. I started rapping when I was 10 and knew I wanted to be a rapper when I was 11. My mind was set on making a career out of rap for a good 12 years and that shit gets exhausting when you ain’t getting results. I was like, ‘I’m going to do this project cooped up in my room and I’m going to get as high and drunk as possible until I feel a creative urge.’

“I built a studio in my room. I started working on one track at a time and paid close attention to everything down to the mixing, reverbs, and echoes that I used on my vocals. It was finally done and I was like I don’t want to put this out with The Hundreds, I want to see where I’m at as a solo artist. That led to me putting out the project These Long Strange Nights at the end of 2011.

“It was a leap of faith. I put it out on my website and sent it to everybody I knew. I did what I knew was right; booked a listening session and release show. Within a week of the project responses started coming in and people were really really fucking with it more than they did with the last couple of projects. I was close to quitting rap and giving up on making music for a living. I put that album out and it ended up being authentic, honest, and true and people respected that.”

Alexander Spit: “When I finished These Long Strange Nights it was Halloween 2011. At that time I always had beats on deck, my hard drive had thousands of beats. It was exhausting recording and creating These Long Strange Nights.

“After that project I wanted to continue to put stuff out. I got re-inspired to listen to folks like J Dilla and Madlib again. I started listening to Donuts again in 2011 and I tweeted something like, ‘I think I want to make a beat tape.’ I remember folks were responsive saying I should do it. I was like alright I’m going to whip something up.

“I gave myself a month and a half to whip together Mansions. I put that out and I really didn’t know what folks would expect, it was really just a side project but it ended up being something that a lot of people paid attention to. Complex put it on 50 Best Albums of 2012 (So Far) and that was the first time I got a major publication paying attention to my music. I think that was the first time folks realized I made beats. A lot of people up until that point didn’t know that I was a rapper slash producer.”

Alexander Spit: “Two successful releases in a row when I was in my most honest and authentic state went well. It was like alright where do I go from here? That’s when I rekindled with drugs like mushrooms.

“Me and homies would just start taking more and more shrooms and I started getting pumped on the realm of psychedelia and rap music. Not even the combining of the two, that was just me. I was the rapper taking mushrooms, why not rap about that?

“It wasn’t a matter of me trying to find a gimmick, I wasn’t out here brainstorming with my folks like Action Bronson raps about cooking, this rapper raps about what they’re on—it wasn’t me like you should be the mushroom rapper. It wasn’t like that, I was just writing about my life and what I do and it happens to be a lane for what I’m doing.

“That’s how the whole A Breathtaking Trip To That Otherside EP came together. As a result of me knowing that when I make trippy beats people fuck with it. I made trippy raps with trippy beats and that’s how that EP came together.”

Alexander Spit: “When it comes to me selling beats—that’s an amazing luxury to be able to do. But it’s nothing I’ve gone full force for because when I make a good beat I tend to write a song to it. If I make a mediocre beat, I don’t want to give people mediocre beats. I save all the good beats for myself. Down the line that’s something that I really want to do.

“Last year we put out that Bago’s Sunday’s Best and that was the first time I fully produced another artists work. It was the type of stuff I want to do with other artists more than me sending five beats to a rapper and they choose one.

“My beats provide moods more so than providing bangers. Even though I’m capable of making bangers, a lot of people are caught off guard when they ask me for beats and I send them some shit that they can write a love song to.”

Alexander Spit: “I’m working on Mansion 2 right now. I’m working on trying to get on the road. I’m trying to bring it back to the essence of—my connection with friends— I want it to be beyond the Twittersphere, beyond my Tumblr, beyond my website, beyond my YouTube. I want it to be like cats know where to find me based off of where I do shows. I want it to be that human connection more so than anything.

“I’m trying to hit the road right now. I want people to formulate their own opinion based off seeing me live. Anybody that has an opinion that hasn’t listened to my music in it’s entirety or seen me live—their opinions don’t matter to me. The only opinions that matter to me are the people that actually invest their time and energy into understanding what Alexander Spit is really about.”