In other news, I've recently been relishing Rushdie's books: Midnight's Children, Shame, now the Satanic Verses, and after I'll read his recent memoir.
I Watch a Palmer Squares video, and I have no idea what I’m looking at. Why are two white boys rapping in a bathtub? I almost want to cringe. I’m about to click to a different page, but then the lyrics hit me —
Keepin' a stiff upper lip
— And I take hand off of the mouse to listen. And listen, and listen, and listen,
Four hours later, after scouring their YouTube oeuvre, I knew I had to interview them. Three months later, over Skype, I got the chance to meet the wordsmiths behind the witticisms.
***
Term, short for Terminal Knowledge, is a stout kid with a round face. You’re both shocked and charmed when you see Term, who grew up listening to Bob Dylan and Dean Martin, raps as though he has a firecracker up his ass, jumping up and down, and saying things like,A fortified design of the mortified and blind, I ain't suicidal, it just sorta crossed my mind”
Acc, short for Accumental, is the Hutch to Term’s Starsky. Older, scruffier, Acc combines introspection with silly humor, ambition with melancholy, and spits more movie references than Soulja Boy drops swag references.
By their appearances, you could mistake Term and Acc, The Palmer Squares — Palmer for their Chicago street name, Square for its ordinariness — for frat boys at the University of Colorado or even Hipsters in Williamsburg.
What you couldn’t tell, though, is that they can rap their asses off.
Which is kind of their point They’re proving that “"you don't gotta put on a costume to be a musician or to be something that you aspire to be. It can all be about just the fact that you're some ordinary idiot and like, mostly when dudes meet us they laugh when we tell them we rap or some shit.” Acc interjects "Somebody laughed at me today when I started rapping, like, whatever. But that's the angle we're playing: You don't expect us to rap, but if you heard us, you might be surprised…we're music for the normal folks.” Acc and Term look at each other with a knowing shrug. “We're a couple squares. “
Their music, however, begs to differ.
Acc, 24, and Term, 22, have been friends since childhood, and started rhyming when, disappointed with the heaps of wackness blared on the radio, they thought they could do better.
Their timing was propitious. The Palmer Squares have come of age in the YouTube era, where any aspiring musician that connects with his/her audience can amass a fan base. The famous YouTube Cyphers, where Term and Acc made a name for themselves, got 100,000s, if not millions of views. Tellingly, the Cyphers also featured a bald 30 year old caucasian, a thoughtful Lebanese chick, a few asian dudes, and a black guy rocking hipster glasses, embracing his nerdiness. Indeed, times have changed in hip hop.
10 years ago, there’s no way Palmer Squares could be even thought of as commercially viable. Two white kids from the ‘burbs? No way. After all, They don’t rap about gangs and prisons, toil and torture, hardship and homelessness. No —
— No, they don’t.
Unlike other white rappers, who typically tend to rap with rage to compensate, the Palmer Squares are serious about not taking themselves too seriously. (They rap one video in a bathtub.) They relish the interplay between the serious and the silly, noting that the “intended-to-be-serious type shit can at the same time feel like parody music, with the goofy shit that’s sprinkled in there”
Their style is reminiscent of Das Racist, two rappers known for their brilliant combination of the brilliantly juvenile and the somehow profound; who are loved because they’re simultaneously not-joking and joking about how they’re joking. (Incidentally, Das Racist is on the list of artists the Palmer Squares want to collaborate with.)
However, their music isn’t solely movie references and weed jokes and bashings of mainstream rap, although, to be sure, it features plenty of those things. They also rap about, among other topics, economic inequality, corporate greed, and the state of YouTube.
Their energy evokes Eminem but without the trailer park and if he watched David Fincher movies. The inspiration for their raps, by their own accord, is less of a cathartic measure, and more of an exclamatory love of the craft". “We definitely write some conceptual shit when we have something to get off our chest,” Term K submits” but you don't always have something to get off your chest -- and i'm pretty much always going to have something to rhyme with.”
I can only take so much. A couple times, throughout the interview, I feel like screaming: Acc, Enough movie references; Term, Stop mooning people, and both of you, Enough with the trivial Palmer Square Reports! But, truth be told, The Palmer Squares wouldn’t be who they are without their antics.
And, ultimately, I love them for the whole package. For the sense that, through their music, I actually know them. For mixing the high-brow, low-brow, and the occasional deep.
Still, It makes me wonder, though, how long their shtick will last. The Palmer Squares have already proven that they can dominate a YouTube Cypher, and that they can make us both think and laugh at the same time. But at this point, It’s like, we get it. Write a song with a chorus already.
They too, understand that, as a group, The Palmer Squares need to evolve. Their primary goal -- in fact, the reason they started rapping)-- was to collaborate with Youtube Superstar “Wax”. They’ve accomplished that.
So. What's their next goal? The two answer without missing a beat. “Live off of making our music. It doesn't have to be luxuriously and, fucking super-baller—just to not need a job because this [hip hop] is what I can call my job, and not be poor as shit at the same time, [to] find that balance.”
“To be, like, a working musician" Acc interjects, as seamlessly as he interjects in their tracks, “Because I work [at my day job] during the day, and I’m not motivated because I’d rather be working on my music. But that doesn’t bring in enough [money], so if we ever got to the point where it was just comfortable—”
"And if not that,” Term chimes in, making me unsure if he’s selling himself short or wise about the realities of the music industry, "If that's unavailable, ultimately, we wanna be a name in hip hop. We want, like 15 years from now, for when cats who listen to hip hop, we're just one of those names that you list off.”
And they want do it their own way: They think it would be "nice to find some sort of indie, mainstream, indie” Term wobbles his hands to indicate a combination of the both “not mainstream but one of those indie shits” — Term cracks up — “that's getting a lot of push and you don't need to fit some sort of corporate sound. “
***
But, while they may be heading there, following the likes of fellow Youtube sensations Wax, George Watsky, and Dumbfoundead into broader audiences— The Palmer Squares just aren’t there yet. Although Acc would rather be plotting rhyme schemes, he has to keep his day job to make ends meet; Term K’s about to graduate college and will likely have to find paid gigs that don’t involve rapping.
Making a living as musicians, indeed, will require ambition and packaging and next level-ness that we (just) haven’t seen yet from the Palmer Squares.
Which they acknowledge, nodding to the importance of marketing. But you can easily get the sense — from how their eyes light up when they talk about craftsmanship, or artists they aspire to collaborate with — that their priority is, above all, to write dope shit. They got this far not by going around asking people to “peep their links!” but by making quality music.
For better or worse, The Palmer Squares just aren’t about attention in that way. They’re the rare artists who care more about sharing their music than starring in the limelight. They seemed to only take the interview because I pestered them. From their website, you can’t tell anything about their personal lives except that they make music and that you can find them “performing in some shit hole.” After spending an hour speaking with them, I don’t even know what their real names are. And yet, I’m unsure whether their reticence stems from modesty, laziness, ambivalence to fame, or some combination of the three.
It’s manifested in how they treat their angsty fan-base from up north. They can’t last a day without a fan from Toronto heckling them: “WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TORONTO?!” When I asked when they were planning on going to, you know, Toronto, to perform for your legions of fans, they were caught off guard. Oh, Acc stammered, as if he were deliberating the trip for the first time, yeah, I guess we should check that out. I wanted to reach through the computer, grab them by the shoulders and tell them: GET YOUR ASS TO TORONTO, PRONTO!
***
They’re giddy about their upcoming projects; I can sense a nervous anticipation. Their next EP, which’ll feature Term’s illustrations, Acc’s video work, and collaborations with artists that they admire, will drop before the end of the year. It’ll be a big test for them.
I’m giddy too. Their previous work was mere YouTube fun, I sense, but now this EP will reflect the gnawing feeling that time’s running out. They’ll rap about shitty jobs they have to take and the first groupies they encounter and what it'll be like to be two ordinary white dudes who get more famous in a predominantly black culture -- all in an endearingly shocking blend of original rhyme schemes, thoughtful societal critiques, and idiosyncratic showmanship.
Long term, though, who knows where the peak is for the Palmer Squares. Whether they’ll have the initiative to tour the country in a U-Haul; — and stop by Toronto! — whether they’re capable of employing the marketing prowess of Wax and Watsky before him; whether they’ll drop a well-produced, cleverly thought-out, concept album; or whether, despite their best efforts, enough people will “get it” and connect with their music.
There’s one thing I can say for sure: Their music, videos, and journey will be anything but Square.
Here’s hoping that, sooner than later, they’ll be able to quit their day jobs.
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