Dark days, bright sparxxx

Every life hinges on a few pivotal moments. For Bubba Sparxxx, aka Warren Anderson Mathis, one such moment came just as he’d fallen through fortune’s false floor. A crucial business deal had come undone, and he with it, but what the 23-year-old native of LaGrange, Georgia hadn’t counted on is that the trapdoor swings both ways. Having also failed to make it as a football star, and on the point of freefalling into drug hell doldrums, that same trapdoor caught Bubba on the rebound and catapulted him into a vertical lift off, culminating in him becoming hip-hop’s greatest white hope since Eminem.

And so on August 1st, 2000, Bubba ended up on a flight to LA to meet with Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine, his first time on a plane. That feeling of vertiginous, stomach-churning fear is chronicled on ‘Take Off’ the opening track on Sparxxx’s debut album Dark Days, Bright Nights, with its Gregorian chants and claustrophobic cabin fever (“Shit, and I ain’t slept in like, a month of Sundays/Still I’m wide awake as we coast out on the runway”).

Post-September 11th, Sparxxx acknowledges that the track has taken on a whole different meaning (“I don’t think I’m a fortune-teller or anything like that. It was just an honest emotion and it just so happened that the tragedy took place. So goes life.”). But for him, it will always signify the point where he, literally and metaphorically, left the earth’s surly bonds.

Bubba’s shed a few pounds, although he still looks like a great unshaven infant in what can only be described as an electric blue Adidas two-piece babygro with white trainers. However, he’s a little more clothed than at last night’s show at The Astoria, London, which ended with the rapper’s top off and his trousers at half mast. There may have been a g-string thang goin’ on, possibly some genital pouch action, but to be honest I was afraid to look.

Right now, in a plush hotel suite, I tell Sparxxx I like his record and he says, “Thank you very much,” in a straight-up no-irony Elvis accent. He doesn’t exactly call me sir, but stops just short of it. Sitting back in his chair, the rapper expands on the circumstances that led to his sudden fall and just as sudden rise.

“A lot of people don’t know this but Fred Durst was actually the first person that ever heard my stuff,” he says. “We were talking about doing a deal, and for whatever reason he didn’t pull the trigger on it. So when that didn’t happen, when he flaked or whatever, I went into about a two-month period of just serious, serious depression, self-annihilation, drugs, you name it. Ugh. I don’t even like to think about it. And so Shannon Houchins, CEO of 11th Hour Entertainment – me and him put out the independent version of the album – he was trying to get in touch with me for like a week straight, and I’m off the face of the earth.”

What exactly was Bubba doing at the time?

“I don’t know. I was probably… I think for this particular week I was in a little place near Greenville, South Carolina laid up with some bitch on a fuckin’ coke binge or something.”

How bad did it get? Was he nose-down in a bowl of crack?

“Naw, not actual crack, but really a lotta blow. And when he (Houchins) finally got in touch with me, music was the furthest thing from my mind. I was looking for an excuse to stay alive, because at this point I’m 23 years old, I put all my eggs in this basket and somebody just fuckin’ dropped them off the balcony of the tenth storey. I have no direction in my life; I’m really clinging on by a thread. And he finally gets in touch with me and basically pulls me out of a ditch and says, ‘Two days from now we’re going to fuckin’ California to meet with Interscope. You need to fuckin’ get right.’”

When I ask if he was in any state to digest this news, Bubba shakes his head.

“I didn’t believe it,” he admits. “I was like, ‘Aw man, this is just more of your bullshit. I’m tired of it. Fuck you, get away from me.’ And he says, ‘No man, I’m serious. Man, please.’ ’Cos this was his one shot too. He actually wrote down the flight information, what time I left, all that stuff. In the back of my mind at that point I was thinking, ‘Maybe it is the real deal’. I told a couple of buddies of mine and they were like, ‘We’ll call to see if you’re booked on the flight’. And I was, and that morning my buddy took me in a little ’87 Nissan truck, the windshield was cracked, we had to tape over the windshield, and we drove an hour and a half to Atlanta Airport. I get there and I’m anxious as fuck man, my palms sweat, it just pours when I get on an airplane. And sure enough I get on the fuckin’ plane and I don’t move the whole time, the adrenaline rush or whatever it is when the plane starts accelerating… they had a real problem with me on the plane, the turbulence, I was like, ‘Why is it doin’ that, is this normal?’ And I remember the in-flight movie was Gladiator, and I didn’t have the five bucks for the headphones.”

All of which is recounted in forensic detail on ‘Take Off’. But how did Bubba feel walking into do the most important deal of his life with a near-legend like Jimmy Iovine – one of the rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest producers turned hip-hop entrepreneur – wiped out from a coke binge and freaked out from the plane ride?

“At that point I don’t have anything to lose,” he says. “I can honestly say I wasn’t nervous. I just gave him a spiel and he really, really related to it. I have to say, Jimmy Iovine believed in me from day one. He’s by far the most artist friendly of those guys. He’s just got a great ear for good music, period.”

So that was Bubba’s music career snatched from the fire, and hip-hop’s gain is football’s loss. But given that his best friend Steven Herndon plays offensive guard for the Denver Broncos, does he ever miss his former life as tight end and linebacker?

“That was probably the most difficult pill to swallow,” he considers, “coming to the realisation that I wasn’t going to play professionally. When I think of football, I think about the pureness of my childhood. ’Cos really up until I was 16 or 17 I was just a normal kid, but when I hit my head on the ceiling of my football aspirations, that’s when I started taking the other path. When I graduated high school and my family said it was time to go to work, I didn’t want to do that. Once football didn’t work out I just wanted to do music. And this is a bumpy, bumpy, bumpy road. Your business gets handled. Either you handle it or somebody else handles it for you.”

So far, Bubba Sparxxx seems to be handling his business okay. It helps that Dark Days, Bright Nights was one of the hip-hop landmarks of last year, featuring the production smarts of not just Timbaland but also Outkast’s Organized Noize production team, Khalfani and Gerald Hall. The record was announced last September by his debut single ‘Ugly’, a beef-jerky jam with a skittery mandolin line, hog-calls, mud-caked beats and a riff sampled from Missy Elliot’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ (another Timbaland production). In fact, that riff, a sort of jungle morse code tattoo, has become so ubiquitous I hear it used as the ring tone on one guy’s cellphone a couple of hours after leaving Bubba’s hotel.

“It’s ridiculous,” Bubba smiles. “The fact is, when Timbaland actually put the piece of Missy’s song in the record it was like he was droppin’ a hint to DJs.”

Despite his obvious pride in the sounds, Sparxxx has some misgivings about the ‘Ugly’ video capitalising on the “squeal like a pig” factor, with images of hog-rasslin’ and Missy Elliot on a tractor. Obviously though, a six-foot 200lb white rapper called Bubba who grew up on a dirt road in the South is an easy sell. Immune from the influences of MTV or cable, Warren Mathis first heard hip-hop from his closest neighbour, a black kid who lived 15 miles away and received mix tapes of 2 Live Crew, Run DMC and the Fat Boys from a cousin in New York. Next thing you know, a new musical mutation is born – redneck rap, hick-hop, Tommy Hill-figure – choose your own label.

“That’s the story that’ll sell,” Bubba concedes. “With or without good music. I probably had myself to blame, because it really all stems from the video. I see what happened now and I’m gonna have to slowly wean the consumer off of that. That is what people know and love about me, but my concern was that it looks too gimmicky. A lot of the things we did in that video was for theatrical effect, a lot of that stuff is taking a jab back at people who may have those perceptions of what life in the rural south really is. But if I could change one thing about ‘Ugly’ I wish that I could’ve shown elements of life that people wouldn’t think (of), something very modern and sophisticated. People tend to think that I grew up in a Third World country or something, but it was still in the United States in the 1980s and ’90s – I wasn’t that sheltered.”

Plus, there’s a country archetype that never figures the likes of Miles Davis and Arthur Rimbaud into the equation.

“A lotta great minds,” Bubba nods. “Certainly in the case of myself, because I didn’t have many friends growing up, because I lived in such a remote area, there just weren’t that many people around me, period, and my parents both worked. Incessantly. So I think that maybe – and this holds true for probably those other people you mentioned – I was left so much to my imagination. I know for a fact that contributed to what I am in terms of creating. I would literally walk in the woods when I was seven years old for 12 hours until sunset and just talk to myself.”

So is that where the rhymes come from? Thinking aloud?

“That’s exactly what hip-hop is. That’s certainly what hip-hop always was to me because I didn’t have a corner to go stand out on with other cats that were rapping, so it was a much more introverted thing, I would just sit in my room at night for hours on top of hours and just spill, just get whatever was on my chest off my chest. I don’t literally write: for some reason I just can say it with more vigour if I just teach the verse to myself like you would a song that you hear on the radio, you say it to yourself aloud.”

Dark Days, Bright Nights thrives on the push-pull between Bubba’s obvious pride in his background and his glee in sending up the more easily caricatured elements of southern culture (check out the skit ‘On Any Porch’). It’s a record that brings to mind Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats, and that writer’s attempts to present waitress jokes, Elvis impersonators and alien abduction cranks as a kind of reclaimed, marginalized folk culture.

Bubba: “I think that there are certain aspects – and it’s not just a white thing, it’s really not – of those perceptions with the waitress and what have you, we like it, we love it because that is what we are, but what I got to do is show there’s more to it than that. Lovin’ Elvis and aliens and bein’ ignorant like that for me now is like leisure time – does that make sense? (laughs) Like you just shut down and then you just be stoopid, you’re bein’ southern! Like for instance I might read something in a reputable magazine and know it’s not true and understand how the press works, but then read something about Bill Clinton in the National Enquirer and be like, ‘Damn, I can’t believe Bill did that!’ It’s fun. But with the pigs and the farmboy shit (in the video), I don’t ever want the hip-hop aspect to be de-emphasised, ’cos this is hip hop music at its finest, regardless.”