"I don’t look at it as pressure. I just look at it as my job and something that I have to do.”
12 years into his role as Jay-Z’s right-hand man, and Gimel “Young Guru” Keaton has this superstar sound engineering lark down to a science. As he takes time out of his busy schedule at the Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid to talk to Hot Press, the man who counts his work on Jay-Z’s seminal 2001 album The Blueprint as the proudest moment of his career to date is enjoying his current surroundings.
“It’s such a great environment that I really don’t wanna leave so I’m sticking around for a little bit,” he gushes. “This is some of the best talent that I’ve ever seen and it’s absolutely the best environment that I’ve ever seen for those talents to develop and for those people to interact with each other. I just think it’s a great idea. It should be hailed as one of the greatest musical mash-ups of different ideas. I walked in and I was like ‘I can’t believe how great this is’.”
Given that Keaton is always working in some form or another, it seems fitting to catch up with him just seconds after the red light is switched off in the recording studio. You get the sense that it’s his dedication to his craft that gives him his relaxed focus. Still, acting as the right-hand man to one of the world’s biggest acts must keep you on your toes?
“Of course,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I understand how big Jay is and it’s my job to help try and facilitate making him even bigger or to continue the legacy of what he’s done so I can’t stop and look at it as, ‘Oh this is Jay-Z, this super-huge artist’ – I do, but only from the standpoint of trying to make him better or trying to continue that legacy of what we’ve done so far in music. He was the specific person who changed my life. It’s my way of saying ‘thank you’ to him, by always making sure everything is ok.”
When it comes to a star as stratospheric as Jay-Z, it’s fair to assume he has an entourage of sycophants to tell him how great he is and never question his decisions. Does Keaton challenge his friend?
“Oh, absolutely!” he chuckles. “We argue more than any other artist I’ve ever worked with, but the beauty of Jay’s genius is that he’s able to take my opinion and a couple of other peoples’ opinions and then form his own. But I absolutely challenge him because there’s not many people that do, so I feel like it’s my position to bring out the best in him which sometimes means questioning certain things that we do.”
It’s that desire to question, to delve deeper, that has served Young Guru well throughout his career. Though his speech is often calm to the point of sounding somewhat methodical, you get the impression that lightbulbs are constantly going off in his brain, such is his obvious passion for his craft. Having spent his childhood taking apart household items and appliances to figure out how they worked - “Once you blow up enough things and burn enough things and shock yourself a couple of times, you’re not scared of it anymore” - Keaton immersed himself in as much culture as possible. For him, education isn’t just enhancement; it’s essential.
“It makes the music more personal,” he argues. “That’s why certain magazines and books are so necessary. They flesh out the environment of one of your favourite songs or groups, and knowing the mind state of the people when they made it, whether it’s stress or happiness, whatever emotion they were in is important because it’s not just this two-dimensional thing that’s coming out of speakers, it starts to get this third dimension and depth to it about what that person was going through.
“If you listen to Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’ and you don’t actually know the history of what was going on in the United States at the time, you’re not really getting the full reason of why he wrote that song or why that song was so important. If you know nothing of the Vietnam War and listen to that song, you won’t get the full thing but then if you do know the background information it becomes that much deeper.”
Someone who knows all about conveying the heartbeat of current affairs through music is hip hop legend Chuck D. Speaking to a packed audience at the Hot Press Chatroom at this year’s Electric Picnic festival in Stradbally, the Public Enemy man spoke at length about the responsibility that hip hop stars have to their respective communities, and while he praised Jay-Z and Kanye West for their music, he also took issue with the message given out in the duo’s Otis Redding-sampling single ‘Otis’.
“People are the most important thing in music,” he said. “So you can’t show off to people what you have. I think it’s a bad policy especially in these times… Right now the United States is going through a recession headed into a depression and with black folks it’s a desperation… You’re the now people so represent where people are at. How many people can relate to owning jet planes?”
So, does Young Guru share Chuck D’s view that modern hip hop has lost touch with its roots and become a brand?
“No,” he calmly retorts. “I think that a lot of people sometimes don’t listen fully to Jay-Z and understand exactly what he’s saying because I think that Jay-Z has just as much message in his music as Public Enemy did and I would challenge anyone, including Chuck D, to sit down with me and go over lyrics and I would prove to you that there is just as much depth in his music as Public Enemy. It was just in that moment and at that time… hip hop was very Afrocentric in ‘89 and ‘88, but Public Enemy still has songs like ‘My Uzi Weighs A Ton’, KRS-One has ‘9mm Goes Bang’. That’s when you start to look at labels and not really listen to the music.
“That’s why you get the Jay-Z line ‘Do you listen to the music or do you just skim through it?’ [from 2001’s ‘Renegade’] because you’re looking at the label of who Jay-Z is. You’re looking at a big flashy chain and going, ‘Oh he’s all about champagne and girls’. No, that’s ‘Big Pimpin’’, that’s one song. I would challenge anyone to say that Jay-Z isn’t just as deep. You put Jay-Z against any conscious rapper, I guarantee you that he has more message in his music.”
As someone who has spent his career ensuring that the music clearly carries the message, and having long since trained his brain to recognise, mould and shape every little sound, can Keaton simply just kick back and enjoy music in its purest form?
“Yes,” he says, almost triumphantly. “It took me about two years to be able to do that. You study records for so long, you study sound for so long that when you do go out to just enjoy yourself it’s hard to turn all that off and just listen to music for enjoyment. That’s key because that’s the way the listener is listening, they just enjoy the sounds. So sometimes you need to just turn everything off and just listen."