WR802: Israel Joseph I

WITCHPOLICE RADIO: Usually for people who know the show and who've listened for a long time, the format has always been pretty similar. I've been talking to artists who have a connection to Winnipeg or to Manitoba, and that's kind of been the scope of the show for the past ten years. Every once in a while I interview artists from out of town or out of country who are coming through Winnipeg and playing shows. But it sort of has dawned on me recently that this is my show, I'm booking all the guests...why not reach out and talk to artists who don't have a connection to this part of the world, but are making music that's meant a lot to me and has been very significant part of my listening, I guess, over the past number of years? So I think that the guest on this episode is someone who definitely fits that category. I've been listening to your music one way or another for decades now, and I'm really happy to have you on here and really looking forward to getting a chance to talk to you. So I think that the best way to start this off is if you want to just introduce yourself and give a bit of background about what it is you do as an artist, because I know there's a lot going on. ISRAEL JOSEPH I: Sure. First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone tuning in and listening to this podcast. It's great to be here. My name is Israel Joseph I, I am the singer-songwriter best known for the album 'Rise' by Bad Brains. 'Rise', and as the singer-songwriter on the albums with the band Fireburn and with Todd Youth on bass guitar the albums Don't Stop the Youth and Shine. I'm the singer-songwriter, Israel your man on the vocal teeth, and I've come out with a new album called 'Meltdown' It's all new, hardcore punk, I would say, but there's other influences here. But it's mostly like, hardcore punk and some reggae. There's reggae on there too, so, yeah, pretty excited about it. That's me. WR: Cool. And like I said, I think the people who know me know that the Bad Brains are my favorite band of all time. So when I first heard your record, I would have been a teenager in high school, probably at the time. And when I first heard Rise and that was a big record for me. I don't think I knew enough about the band at the time to realize that there was a different vocalist, that it was you on there until a few listens. And I kind of caught on to the fact that, hey, this is something different. It's the same band, but with a bit of a different sound. And then fast forward many years later when Fireburn came out, that was kind of the first hardcore record that I'd been really excited about in a long time. It really grabbed me and I think all the things that really appealed to me about the Bad Brains also appealed to me about Fireburn. A lot of the content and the lyrics. A lot of the kind of just the energy behind it, the drive behind it. And so it's very cool to hear when I heard you had a solo record coming out because all of these other projects you've done, I've always been a fan, so it's great that Meltdown is out and that you've done everything completely DIY and it's this kind of really legitimately solo project. I mean, you've done sort of everything from start to finish right down to the cover art on this thing. IJI: Yeah, well, in the end, yes, I did. But in the end, right before production, I got together with Paul Stone over in England, in London, and he helped me with the background firework on the album cover. If you've seen the album, there's background fire and all of this work. Paul Stone added in and the font for the name know he worked on the fonts, but otherwise, yeah, I did this drawing. This is my artwork. It's symbolic of the times, I thought. We're in pretty serious times. And this artwork represents where we're at right now. It's supposed to be the Earth and where we're at right now, figuratively. Everything's on fire, figuratively and literally. And he also helped with the back. We arranged the lyrics, which looks really good. WR: I think it does, yeah. IJI: And we arranged all the lyrics on the back. Just like the old school, you get an album and you're like, Well, I can read the lyrics, I don't have to. I sing pretty clear. I sing clearly, but I put them on there for keepsake. And he helped with the fire and the font, so that's Paul Stone. But, yeah, I did the art and I basically wrote, arranged, performed, recorded, mixed and produced the entire album by myself, with the exception of one song, which I had Norwood Fisher from Fishbone play on that song. Norwood came through and dropped. I think it's a man on All Unite, first song on the second side. So it's a real slamming song. And I wanted somebody to guest appear on the record. It could have been on my record, but I wanted somebody to guest appear. WR: If you get a guest too, as far as bass players go, that's a pretty solid get right there. I mean, that's someone you want on the record for sure. IJI: Yeah, well, that's my friend. I mean, I admired as a kid in the growing up, but when I joined Bad Brains and I wrote Rise, man, we took it on the road, and I met a lot of my people that I was admiring real quick, and I was like, wow, man, this is a great thing. Because not only have I met them, it turns out I'm very much like them, and we're getting along like friends. Man, this was a great thing for me and the whole thing. Rastafari, the meaning behind life in general to me is very sequential and kind of like a lot of synchronicity. So I saw all that and it's produced till today. I performed with Norwood a lot in his band Trulio Disgracias here in LA. All up and down the coast. Yeah, vocals and all that. It's just so much fun. But I asked him, I said, look, man, please, I could play on this song. And he jumped right on it, which was great. Came over one day, we had a nice time just playing on the song really didn't take probably like two hours and it was over. But we had a good session. WR: Yeah, for sure. IJI: Positive. And it shows up on the song. WR: It does. It sounds great on the record. One of the things that I think is interesting about what you were saying with the sort of the theme and the way the album cover is depicted and sort of this feeling about the state that the world's in. I feel like punk rock and reggae have always been two of the genres that are best suited to talk about those issues. I mean, reggae more from the spiritual side of things and punk and hardcore sort of from the political, from the angry side of things versus the spiritual side of things. What is it you think about those two genres that work so well together because they mesh so incredibly well on your records, on the Bad Brains records? I mean, there's such a connection between the two. IJI: Thank you, Sam. Well, you know, I'm going to tell you what, I am all of that and my brain is a guy who was born in the mean. I came up listening to well, I grew up in Trinidad. We had a lot of American music there, but I came up listening to music from the Caribbean as well. And so I was always tuned into my personal roots. At the same time, I always heard the music of American artists. And by the time I got here to New York, I was eight years old. So I was hearing, from that point, hip-hop. It was 1979, so I was hearing Rapper's Delight and all of that stuff mixed in with all of the rock and roll that was around on the hit, man. All the hits, early 80s, late 70s. And I always tell a story about the little clock radio in my parents kitchen that played oldies. 50s, 60s. I heard it all. I was lucky enough to hear it all. And you know what? I was blessed with one thing, with two things. I was blessed with a good sense of rhythm, like time. And I was also blessed with a good memory. I could hear a song once and remember the whole thing basically, or twice and forget it. I knew all the lyrics and everything. I knew how to sing it right back to you. But I didn't do it on purpose. I just enjoyed it. So it was like a natural pastime for me, writing songs. So writing Meltdown and the other albums I did through the 90s, which nobody really knows, because I pursued more of a low-key career after Rise. And we can get into that later on. But this album, Meltdown, I felt, should go out. It should be heard. All the other albums should be heard, too. But this one is a really special record that I wrote here. So I put it out. But it's just been a natural process for me, writing music. WR: You've obviously been doing this for a long time. And so when you when you finally put out Meltdown, I mean, I know it's been online. It was online before it became out in vinyl. Now it's a physical copy. You're sending them all over the world, which is really cool to see your social media posts and all these people from all these places. I mean, up here in Canada, too, ordering the record. That's got to be validation for you, right? The fact that there's all these people from everywhere who are still listening to what you're doing and however they got into your stuff, that they have this connection to you, and they want to hear sort of what you're doing all these years later from Rise, which would have been kind of the peak of your largest audience, I guess, right? IJI: I am absolutely thankful. I'm humbled, and I'm really just ready to give the best that I can as an artist every time I get on the records. And I'm just thankful that the audience is out there. I love you guys. I love y'all so much. Like Jimi Hendrix said one time, I wish you could put my arms around and give a big hug. Remember he said that on record? It's so funny, but it's true. I feel that you so much appreciation to y'all, and I'm humbled that you like my music enough to buy my records. Just so thankful for that. And I will always put out the best music that I can. That's all I can say. I come from a real place. I was never schooled as, you know, Israel Joseph I is a self-made dude. I came here as a Caribbean youth. A lot of people in Canada from the Caribbean, I don't spend some time in Toronto, some Caribbean people all over the world, but this is not for people all over the world. People come from all over the place to different parts of the world to be who they want to, you know. I came here, my parents, I didn't even know what was going on. So when I came here, I had to be who I had to be regardless, you know what I mean? It was right. Plate was set in front of my face on the table. So I began to partake and I made sure that I ate the right stuff and that I had a plan of thoughts of longevity. And so I knew my music was an art that I could possibly turn into something, because otherwise I had really no options. My parents were not rich. We were pretty broke, actually. I grew up in a time in the 80s where racism, unfortunately, was still an issue and there were very few options unless you were really educated, man. But I didn't have any money to go to college, man. I didn't go to college. So I taught myself music. My music is self taught, you know what I mean? And a lot of people are like this. I'm not saying I'm unique, but my music is self-taught. And I'm really in essence, what I'm saying is I'm really thankful that it's been my ability to make music and get it out there to people on a big label like Epic with bad brains and on my small label here, Age of Aquarius Records and get it out as Meltdown and everything else in. WR: Yeah, yeah. That's great. Are you hoping to release more stuff on this label? Is this going to be now sort of the home for your releases and maybe other releases as well? IJI: I would hope so. Every record label needs money, of course, and usually that's called an investor. And so investors are nice, but they require repayment. And so at this point, I'm just an artist that had a dream most of my life. I'm living that dream and I am manifesting things within that dream that I think are going to be important now and in the future. So I think that AOA Records is going to be signing artists. When I turn some personal type of interest over in what I am doing, if people are buying this record and checking it out and saying, hey, Israel produced this, he didn't just sing one. He played everything. He played everything. He produced this, he mixed it and it sounds fantastic. Like some old school punk. I want to sound like that. Then call Age of Aquarius Records and I will give you that sound if you want it's like Phil Spector, forgive me for comparing myself to these people. That's crazy. But that's the first person that came to mind. He's mad old school, but I'm not going to use the newer school guys because they're still around, you know what I mean? I don't want nobody know. I'm going to respect everyone, but I'm saying like a dude like that, if you wanted that sound, you had to go see that dude, you know what I mean? And that's what Age of Aquarius is hopefully going to be. So I don't want to deal with investors, but if people want to bring some funds to Age and say, hey, give me one of those songs, you got one of wild hardcore sounding pieces, I'll do that for you. And that way the record company will grow. It's organic. It's organic. I'm a farmer. I'm a farmer and I'm signing sowing seeds in the mentality. And the mental seeds hopefully will grow into something that is universally accepted and grows monetarily. Not just something that but that's the future right now is Meltdown right now. This album right here? WR: Yeah, that's the focus. IJI: Yeah, right there. You see, you turn it from turn it from 06:00 p.m., 12:00 a.m., where you're on the a.m. So you turn it on from the p.m. to the right time right there. That's what's going on. So Age of Aquarius records. We'll see what happens. WR: Makes sense. Yeah. It's cool to see that it started and you have product out in the world and the names out there, people are seeing the label on the record and everything. So that's great. IJI: Super thankful. I mean, on a level, like as an artist, I have to talk about it, but on a really human level, I'm super thankful, man. My heart is just I'm not a hard person, you know what I mean? Maybe what society might say over the years would be the outcast, but really inside I'm a very human being, man. So I'm very thankful, man. WR: Well, that's maybe a good point there, too, is I think that that kind of humanness comes through in a lot of your songs too. And I was going to ask you, with the Fireburn record, Don't Stop the Youth and with some of the songs on Rise, and with some of the songs on Meltdown, there definitely seems to be -- correct me if I'm wrong here -- but there definitely seems to be sort of a message of like a hopeful message that young people can make change, right? And that youth can rise up and some of these issues that humanity is struggling with. You seem to have a lot of hope and a lot of kind of confidence in young people to be able to accomplish this. Is that an accurate reading of your stuff? IJI: Yes, it's great, Sam. Thank you for checking on it that way, looking at it that way and explaining it that way, because it really is I do have a lot of hope for young people, and that's really what I've always had. We all were young at one point, you know what I mean? So I was a kid who was very caring about the environment. I don't know why that happened to me. That is a whole other conversation. But I did find myself as a young person caring about the environment and caring about what was happening in my world on the television and the news, in the scene of my life, I was conscious and I looked around and I saw a lot of people weren't, but I wouldn't never fault them. I would just say, well, it's up to me to bring forth what I think they might want to look at, because some of it is you're eating poison. WR: Yeah, sure. IJI: So it seems like an obligation, but when I saw the young kids in 2019 and 2020 marching for their world and standing up against the corporations, I was very inspired, I got to say. I'm always inspired, but I was very moved by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate and these people standing up for the future. And keep in mind, they were 13. She was 13 years old at the time. WR: Yeah, it's crazy. IJI: Thunberg and she sailed the seas, which was crazy to make a point. She could have died out there. WR: Absolutely. IJI: And I'm sure now she's older, she's probably like, I can't believe I did that. You know what I mean? Like, whoa. But she was 13. Like, really feeling it, man. And she'd probably do it again, man. She's really a great person. So she sailed seas, came over here to make a point, and ended up making a big point, ended up making like, hey, this is what's wrong. This is what we can do about it. And I'm the future, and I'm telling you to do it, because if you don't, then you might as well say goodbye to your future. So she woke them up on her level, and I appreciated that. And that wasn't the only thing. There was a conjunction that happened in the universe between Jupiter and Saturn in 2022 that I was very interested in and seemed like, I don't know, man, I didn't even notice it was coming, man. And I was just, like, feeling it. So I think this record was a lot of music coming out of my head. I remember 2019, 2020, there's a lot of music coming. And I realized afterwards, about a year later, that, hey, man, that happened too. Connect that. So that came out of that, right? In the quarantine. We were having riots going on all over the streets and protests. I was out there walking around, checking it out, and I filmed a lot of that stuff, man. It was actually really positive, man. It wasn't, like, negative stuff. It was just a lot of people partying and want to release some energy. WR: Well, they've been locked up for so long, right. Being indoors and you can't go out and then having all these issues you want to address as well, right? So definitely letting it all loose. IJI: I just wish there were some hardcore shows that you could go to let it loose. Like, look, you could be out here mad and going around in the streets, or you can come and do something positive with it, get together, and you can then take it to another level with more positive interaction instead of just coming out. And there's a lot of people gathering and partying still. Yeah, but you got to make something come of that, you know what I mean? And when you get together in the scene, you can meet together over and over again and get something more solid going as far as representation and stuff like that. But that's a whole other conversation. You know what I mean, though? So it was great being out there, and it just inspired what had been coming since before Fireburn, during Fireburn and after Fireburn, which was a need to make songs that were like songs I heard as a youth, the songs I liked as a youth. I'm getting older now, okay. And I've been making a lot of albums. I just haven't put them out on a large level. A lot of it has been reggae. I never trusted myself to really move beyond certain styles of music. Punk, I would usually turn to a group. WR: Yeah. IJI: But things have changed, and I become a different individual as I got older. And so Meltdown is a reflection of that. It happened at the right time. The music was written and recorded, I would say, in three weeks, probably three or four weeks. WR: That's quick. Yeah. IJI: Well, three weeks, it was quick. The music itself was written in one week because I was only home that one week. I have a day job, a job I tend to, of course, as everyone does, but I got a week off and I decided, hey, man, I'm going to put this thing together. It's, like, pouring out of my brain at this point. And so I start laying drums and guitars, and then I would listen back and try to follow the guitar on the bass. Before that, I was looking for a bass player, but I decided, hey, this is taking too long to find a bass player. I'm going to do it myself. So I just follow the guitar. So this is anyone who wants to build a record. This is kind of like the formula of how you build a record, old school style, like me. Like, no computers, no auto tune, no programs, just straight to track. You build your drums and then you build your guitars. What I do is build my guitars. I hear my guitars, so I write the guitars next. Once I feel that the guitars are set, which it has to be really nice, so appealing and something to sing to, then I'll move on to my bass. I never write anything simple or something that sounds like something else, or I always try to write something that has a lot of feeling, a lot of heart, a lot of movement. It's not like the metal of today, either, which is a different kind of like drop D flavor. It's not that drop D flavor. Yeah, it's a different kind of skate pump, kind of like kind of like PMA, positive attitude kind of music. Which I'm not saying that other stuff isn't either. I'm just making the difference between hardcore metal. WR: Of course. IJI: I write the drums. I write the guitars on that level, on that hardcore type fast. In fact, the drums are moving fast, too. And then I'll drop the bass, and then I'll wait, and I'll come back a day or two later and listen to what I wrote. That's why I like to write quickly. If I'm writing something and it's taking too long writing a guitar line and I'm not hearing something within the first few tries, I'm moving on to the next idea, okay? I don't want to sit there and just work an idea. Work an idea. You know what that does to me as an artist? I'm not like an entertainer or a musician. I'm an artist. Right. I never been trained to create music, so I create from my soul. So when I'm playing, if something ain't soulful, man, I'm not there anymore. I'm just on some next things, so I don't circulate on trying to figure something out. So it has to be resonating right away. And I look for that, and that's how I write, and I keep playing until I hear those chords resonate with me, and I say, that's it. And I play them a few times and I sing, and then I record them. I don't like paralysis by analysis. I don't like that it makes the music boring. If you're going to be paralysis by analysis, write 20 songs and put a few of them out. Yeah. And let's get some albums and let's have some fun. Let's have some shows... don't write one song for a year. WR: The type of music that you play and then sort of the urgency of it... I think urgency is maybe a good word to describe it. It suits it. I mean, having that the idea that it's just it's just coming out of you and you're capturing it sort of as it comes out, and then you move on to the next thing, it totally suits kind of the whole vibe of everything. The reggae songs, too. They have that sort of feeling to them. IJI: That's exactly trying to get at Sam. That is exactly what the urgency that's what I'm trying to capture. That's funny. That word is the second time that that has come up as far as this description of this record. And it's good. It's a good thing. That is exactly part of it. There's an urgency in recording, urgency in getting it out, urgency in the feel of it. And that is part of the punk thing that's all my life has been part of the creation of this kind of music. Not even just punk, just the creation of soul music, creation of what I would call soul music. I know you say, well, it ain't James Brown, but no, but all music coming from that level, if it's punk, reggae, whatever. That's all soul music. That's all for your heart, you know what I mean? Heart music. WR: No, I totally agree with you on that. I think that people often think of soul music and they just think of the genre. But I think that anything could be soul music. Country music can be soul music, jazz can be soul music. Hip-hop can be soul music if it's something that the feeling is at the forefront rather than the technicality of it. I mean, you can have heavily technical music that's soulful too. But I think you could have a guy playing a one string guitar and it could be the soulfulest shit you ever heard because he's putting that's what you're saying? IJI: Yeah, technical music is you can say that that music is crafted by the brain. The mind either has everything to do with both or nothing to do with both, because the brain will create something technical and it's beautiful. I sit around, I sit and listen to technical music a lot, you know what I mean? Like music that has a certain level of technicality. I enjoy it, but as for playing it, I don't want to play technicality. As for singing it, I don't want to sing technicality. That's not what I'm into. But I'll sit and listen to Malmsteen all day. That dude is bad. I'll be like, Yo, all right, let me listen to that. But I don't want to play exactly like that. But his influence will influence me to play fast solos and stuff in my way, in my way, and that people might say, oh, well, you're not following the school. Well, okay, well, then I'm not following the school, but in my way, I would like to play those songs. And that would be in a non-technical way, in a soulful way. So, see, it won't be with the mind then, it'll be with the heart, soul, whereas, like, not trying to of course, everything is so philosophical. You can't say one thing and sound like you're not talking about the other thing. Right? It's so bad. I'm not saying that mental brain music is not soulful, okay? It can be very soulful in its way. But there is music that is soulful that comes from pain. It's not coming from the brain, it's coming from the pain, you know what I mean? It's like a cry. You have to think to cry. WR: Yeah, it just comes out. IJI: Something is bad and you're going to cry. You don't have to think about it, but you definitely have to think to walk. Well, not to where you're walking. You have to navigate. You don't have to think about where you're crying, you have to just cry. You have to think about where you're putting your hand down. You have to think about what you're saying. You have to think about all these other type of personal things. But a thing like crying or laughing and stuff, you don't have to think about that. And that soul music. That's the part where soul comes from that whole place where crying and laughing, everything comes from. That's where this whole record comes from. This whole album. It's like 7:30 here, but we've had rain clouds most of the time in Los Angeles, believe it or not. We've had a cloud cover. That's unbelievable. It's like we're living in Seattle now. That's climate change again. Back. Yeah. So just to finish up what I was saying before those kids, the whole movement really inspired me a lot, and that resulted in the record and songs like Crisis. You can tell the words of Crisis are reflective of that, but a lot of them are. And if you look closely, you can see, like you said, they're messages for the youth directly talking to young people. I'm not 20 anymore, you know what I mean? And certainly not 13 anymore. But I remember being 13 and 20 and being like, want to rise up. We were talking about Greta Thunberg when she was 13 years old. She did that, but I remember being 13. That's why I kind of stood up for her. I was like, I remember being like that. So that's really punk of her to do, you know what I mean? And a punk is a thing that lights a fuse. And she like, how many fuses did she light? She guided the whole thing. Everybody's like, okay, climate change, and now everybody's noticing. Like, that's a very punk thing to do. So it was very cool. The whole thing inspired that record. WR: Yeah. Even if of the million people who see her on TV talking about this stuff, if two of them take that to heart and then go in and start their own rise up themselves, that's going to make an impact. And that's the same thing with punk rock, too, I think. You can have a record that has this really dealing with really serious issues in a way that really is going to get to people's hearts. And even if the vast majority of people who hear it just go on to the next thing, you're going to get those two or three kids who take it to heart and they go and they make their record. And they talk about the same issues and they talk about what they're dealing with and their crisis and their problems and bring those out to a new audience. And so it's like this cycle of punk rock, I think, is just the never ending cycle of turning people on to what's happening in the world. IJI: I think you're right. And that's also what inspired a lot of us personally, right? We heard records that probably weren't heard by the public. When I was listening to Attitude back in 1985, people were like, what is that? You know what I mean? People still hadn't heard about it. The album four years old, two, three years old. You know what I mean, man, it's like you just got to really have hope that the youth are going to just keep on the right mentality because that's really what we're fighting now mentality. It used to be we're fighting physical oppression, physical destruction, and like you stand up for your rights physically, don't like left and come on, just bash your head kind of thing. But now we're not fighting that so much anymore, right? In fact, when it happened with Donald Trump, we were like, whoa, this hasn't happened in a long time. This is atrocious, you know what mean like we move beyond thought, you know, but and we are moving beyond that. Slowly but surely feet are know we're moving beyond that. But right now what we're fighting really for is battle of ground in the mind of the youths with AI, which is going to really kill their creativity. It's just going to tell them, well, we're writing a story about a lamb who meets and they're going to wow, sorry. Okay, great. This is great. Wow, okay, great. I wrote this and suddenly it's going to say the schools are going to say, hey, technically she wrote that. You have to give her a grade for that or give him a grade and that's going to change everything. AI is going to also change things in other ways too. They use it for security, so we have the use it's a background of the mind to get them to understand, hey, you don't have to accept, forget accept. Think about critically about what's happening to the world. If we can get them to think critically, then we can get them to make the changes they need to make, which they already are. But I think they're off on tangents. I think the media kind of stirs their emotions about emotional subjects and they go off on emotional tangents and never pass any laws or never get any representatives or stand up and say, hey, let's make a movement towards that's what King and all these people know, they stood up and they gathered slowly but surely gathered people. I think we need to get back to those grassroots kind of things in punk and rasta and see a unity because we're not fighting physically here. This is crazy to think we're going to fight anything physically. I'm not into physical war, but we have to unify. The war is within. We have to accept ourselves first, accept others. And once we can do that, then we can rise above everything. But until then we got to make loud noise until then we got to make a loud noise. Loud noise to wake people up, you know what I mean? And with clear words that say something. I mean, I just think so.