RAPPER SPEAKS OUT

BC-MUS-BUCK65:SP _ entertainment, people (770 words)Canadian rapper Buck 65 says hip-hop can grow old tooBy Reggie RoystonKnight Ridder Newspapers(KRT) When rapper and DJ Rich Terfry scans the music press’s annual laundry list of greatest albums and performers, often he’ll see much-repeatednames like Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan or Miles Davis. Seldom is the love of his life, hip-hop, mentioned _ not that the Canadian rapper thinks any of rap’s most heralded have warranted it. “Do you think that you can honestly tell me that you can get scholars together and have them agree that if you put those (artists) up there andput `In Da Club’ by 50 Cent next to them that it honestly stands up against, like, the Beatles and the Beach Boys? To me, that’s kind of a joke,”Terfry said. Hating on the state of hip-hop these days has become as common as rappers hating on each other for rep and album sales (see Ja Rule vs. 50Cent). But for Terfry, whose storytelling rap and ambient DJ persona is Buck 65, there’s more to gain by challenging rap’s mediocrity than by being ahero of an anti-cool trend. The emcee has spent the better part of his 32 years carving out b-boy existence from the unlikely hip-hop habitat, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Teachinghimself to DJ and rap in the rural town of Lower Sackville, Buck 65 creates music that is as much about searching for the perfect beat as it is aboutbaseball and haunting lives in small towns. He hosted a hip-hop show for 12 years on college radio in Halifax, under the moniker Stinkin’ Rich, while honing a nasally, loquacious rhymestyle buffered with esoteric samples and trippy beats. His witty independent releases, “Language Arts” in 1997 and “Vertex” in 1998, became the epitome of history-centered backpacker rap, and soonhe began collaborating with challenging hip-hop producers such as Sixtoo and Atmosphere’s DJ Mr. Dibbs. “The next-big-thing” nod from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke helped Buck 65 gain more mainstream exposure, but it wasn’t until his 2001 album,”Man Overboard,” that Terfry felt he was really doing something different with rap. On that release by the avant-garde Anticon collective, Terfry turned away from his tedious odes to beat-digging and braggadocio to wrestle withthe emotional turmoil of his mother’s death from breast cancer: “Who will I ask my stupid questions when they come up?/my first impulse is that Iwant to call my mom up/but, then I’m standing there, holding the telephone/wishing this headache would leave me the hell alone.” “I heard from honestly, literally thousands of people, who said this song was important to them,” Terfry said in a phone interview. “It’s a song about loneliness, it’s a song about losing someone you care about; I don’t care where you are, big city small town, we all know aboutthose things.” The response showed him that rap could go much further. “I’ve always wanted to see hip-hop take over the world. And as I’ve gotten older and see the way it works, I’ve just always wanted more andmore for (hip-hop). I want the music to be respected, and I don’t want it just to be for teenagers, and I’ve always said, `Why can’t hip-hop music bein Carnegie Hall?’ ” he said. Buck 65’s latest album and major label debut “Square” takes a stab at bringing rap to that epic level. Divided into a series of four tracks, unnamed as in most of his previous efforts, Terfry touches an array of hip-hop tempers, using atmosphericinstrumentals to segue between morality tales about teenagers being ridiculed in the forest country of Nova Scotia to an ode to his refrigerator. A bit more laid-back and direct than his previous records, “Square” still comes off as hip-hop for patient listeners, with a catalog of breakbeatreconstructions and eclectic vocal samples from the likes of William Burroughs and Bill Cosby. But there are folk references on the album, too, with subtle bass and violins backing Terfry’s moodier moments. “You get older, and whether you like it or not, you get exposed to other kinds of music. You discover people like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohenand Neil Young,” Terfry said. “If you can hear that music and your mind gets opened to it, then that can almost spoil you. It’s like, `I love this and Iget something great and valuable out of it.’ I want to get that out of hip-hop, too.” ___ © 2003, Saint Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.). Visit the World Wide Web site of the Pioneer Press at http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.