{"id":29439,"date":"1999-07-01T14:40:35","date_gmt":"1999-07-01T19:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/?p=29439"},"modified":"2022-06-13T20:27:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T03:27:17","slug":"orange-9mm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/orange-9mm\/","title":{"rendered":"ORANGE 9MM"},"content":{"rendered":"

ORANGE 9MM<\/strong>
\n Pretend We\u2019re Human<\/strong>
\n interview with Chaka Malik<\/strong>
\n interview\u00a0 by Bryan Stahel and Dan Levy<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Chaka Malik\u2019s office,\u201d Todd H20 answers the cell phone. Dan and I are at the basketball court at 11th and 1st to shoot hoops with the new Orange 9mm lineup and to discuss life, the new record “Pretend I\u2019m Human” and Dan\u2019s b-ball skillz, which kinda caught the guys off guard.<\/p>\n

Are you guys playing other bands?<\/strong>
\nTaylor<\/strong>: We\u2019re gonna start. We play all the time with Todd from H20. He never gets tired; he\u2019s real good.
\nChaka<\/strong>: You see this shit? (points to eye) Some kid came down real hard on a rebound, now it\u2019s all swollen and shit.
\n[We watch as Dan Spellman smokes a cigarette and plays one-on-one with some little kid.]<\/p>\n

\n

“Everybody\u2019s searching and now it\u2019s time for something interesting.”<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Matt<\/strong>:\u00a0 That just looks like a commercial. It\u2019d be funny if the kid just steals the ball and slams on him.
\nTaylor<\/strong>:\u00a0 The most off-the-hook time was a week ago. This kid was out here with a box with the new Slick Rick and we were running full court. Isn\u2019t that amazing? It\u2019s so New York.<\/p>\n

They just let his (Slick Rick) ass out of jail. He recorded that album while he was in, like HR did on a song once.<\/strong>
\nTaylor<\/strong>:\u00a0 I had always heard that.<\/p>\n

You recorded the new record as a three-piece, but there’s five of you here.<\/strong>
\nTaylor<\/strong>: We just got these guys (new members Dan Spellman and Greg Ekerman) and we\u2019ve had the whole line-up for about a week and a half, so we\u2019ve been rehearsing like crazy. Dan\u2019s a friend from way back, and Greg was in another band on our label. We tried out a bunch of people but found ourselves going back to the people we knew. We liked a lot of the same stuff, like the New York stuff, but also Pink Floyd and Zep. That\u2019s kind of what the band spawned from, but now it\u2019s obviously a different time. It\u2019s cool because I can see the steps that the band has made as a unit itself. We went out to L.A., just the three of us, to make this record and we just tried to focus energy. We made a great record and getting these guys just pushed that forward live.<\/p>\n

Where are you going with this new record?<\/strong>
\nTaylor<\/strong>:\u00a0 We were touring on the last record and when we started to write for this one, Chaka would say \u2018check out this new Jay-Z record, and vibe on what the drums are doing\u2019. The way those drums would convey a meaning like in the ticking of a clock, and everything has its space. When they\u2019re off, they\u2019re off and when they\u2019re on, they\u2019re on. We were trying to get those concepts going.<\/p>\n

Chaka<\/strong>: Yeah, trying to angle rock music a different way than it currently is. Y\u2019know, the flow of the rhythms to the flow of the vocals, to have the syncopation marks. We looked to other genres of music, other colors and palettes, than we were given coming straight out of hardcore bands. Even in hip hop, everybody\u2019s searching and now it\u2019s time for something more interesting. Different things in the world are happening, and music needs to move people differently at different times. Especially me. Like when we came off tour, we were listening to a certain kind of music and I was bringing in a certain kind of thing. After being on tour and lucky enough to tour with bands like the Deftones, Korn, H20, you want to listen to something completely different. It\u2019s like the first second of a cold shower. We kinda got stuck listening to a lot of different shit and not really listening to much rock. We brought our music towards some of the shit that we listened to conceptually.<\/p>\n

Taylor<\/strong>: I can listen to this record as a fan, and not sit there and overly critique it. That\u2019s the first time I can do that with any record I\u2019ve played on. I\u2019m not wishing we\u2019d done anything differently.<\/p>\n

What about differences in making a record in L.A. versus NYC?<\/strong>
\nChaka<\/strong>:\u00a0 It\u2019s super important for me to change my whole area of being when I do something as important as a record, \u2018cause when I\u2019m here (in NYC), there are all these distractions and other stuff in the air. I feel like there\u2019s a collective consciousness. We\u2019re all in touch with each other on a deeper level, y’know? But when I put myself outside of my natural area, I can be closer to the feel. I get great ideas and I\u2019m more in touch with myself. I can be more giving which makes me a better artist. I think going to record in L.A. and taking us out of everything but ourselves made us do much better work than we\u2019ve done here in the past or anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Taylor<\/strong>: We went out with a bunch of ideas and ended up pretty much writing the entire thing there. We were just digging on being away from home.<\/p>\n

Chaka<\/strong>: We needed a completely different reality. There was this little apartment that we lived in and the studio; that was it. I went out four times in eight weeks, I think.<\/p>\n

Doing the organic approach. So, what do you want to get across to the people?<\/strong>
\nChaka<\/strong>: For people to be themselves and as positive as possible<\/p>\n

Matt<\/strong>: Try to look for the good in shit. There\u2019s plenty of bad out there. If you recognize bad, that doesn\u2019t mean anything. If you act to change it, like \u201cthat\u2019s bad but this is good\u201d, if you have more of that, it counters the bad, you can take action and make shit better for yourself and other people.
\nchaka: Don\u2019t settle for things; work your ass off. Music needs to heal people; that\u2019s why I\u2019ve always listened.<\/p>\n

TO ORDER JUICE MAGAZINE ISSUE #45, PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ORANGE 9MM Pretend We\u2019re Human interview with Chaka Malik interview\u00a0 by Bryan Stahel and Dan Levy “Chaka Malik\u2019s office,\u201d Todd H20 answers the cell phone. Dan and I are at the basketball court at 11th and 1st to shoot hoops with the new Orange 9mm lineup and to discuss life, the new record “Pretend I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4028,4034],"tags":[11000,11001,11002,14570,6132,14255,6825,5051,2383],"class_list":["post-29439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-music-2","tag-chaka-malik","tag-dan-spellman","tag-greg-ekerman","tag-h20","tag-hardcore","tag-juice-magazine","tag-orange-9mm","tag-pink-floyd","tag-punk-rock"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/ORANGE9MM.png","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29439"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90047,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29439\/revisions\/90047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juicemagazine.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}