dan monick

Look Daggers are Ikey Owens and 2MEX leading a live hip-hop band toward the robot beats of Can and Kraftwerk. They have an album coming out this fall on Up Above and their Patience EP will be available Tuesday at Amoeba, Fingerprints and {open}. Vocalist Mendee Ichikawa, drummer Chris Clawson and bassist Travis Laws sadly could not be present for a home-cooked breakfast courtesy guitarist Jesse Wilder.

Are Look Daggers a testament to an unstoppable work ethic?
2MEX (vocals): Me and Ikey are both on some ridiculous shit—I definitely wanna do shit, and both of us will drop everything to get things done, and I don’t care about the future like if it sells or if it’s pop or hipster bullshit. I don’t give a fuck—I wanna get shit done! That’s why it clicked. We did eight songs in three days.
Why is it rare to mix hip-hop and live bands together?
Jesse Wilder (guitar/keyboards): Because it ends up sounding like Limp Bizkit?
2: It’s rare the way we did it because we just have respect for it—that’s the difference. People try to mix without any respect. We went in saying, ‘Let’s do rock and hip-hop shit that doesn’t sound like the Roots.’ We give the Roots a lot of respect, but we don’t want our shit to sound like that. That whole Good Life L.A. underground scene—it’s all about being original. Everybody’s always been like, ‘Yo, I wanna do my thing, as long as it doesn’t sound like anything else.’
Ikey Owens (keyboards): I love ?uestlove but we stay so clear of that. Or a lot of Anticon songs where stuff is just thrown on top of a loop for the sake of throwing something on a loop. You don’t see people up there—you see those bands and none of those dudes are sweating when they’re done. When we’re done, we’re sweating—we play like a band! I’ve known everyone forever—I’ve known Veronica the least, and I’ve known her for like ten years.
Veronica Cruz (guitar): And I’ve even known 2MEX—I worked at a record store and I’d buy his CDs when he was first starting. I never in a million years thought we’d be in a band together. He was this bad-ass MC, selling his own shit and doing his own thing, and we totally clicked. I’d be listening to Blonde Redhead or Fugazi or whatever—anything like that—and he’d be like, ‘What is that? That’s dope!’ We shared a common interest because we both listened to everything.
L.A. is a good city to grow up listening to everything.
J: It’s good to see younger kids at shows—I like knowing there’s still hope! We just played with Coaxial, and the kids had no idea who they were—but they were up front and watching and paying attention, instead of being apathetic.
I: Honestly, this record isn’t for anyone that reads L.A. RECORD—I was like, ‘Every record geek is gonna hate this! It’s every record store employee’s worst nightmare record!’ This is my pop—a large part of us is the product of pop music.
Is that why 2MEX is a KROQer?
2: When I grew up, it was KDAY when you’d wake up in the morning and get on the bus—the bus driver would say, ‘I’ll play KDAY if you shut up,’ and if you shut up, you got to listen to Big Daddy Kane and KRS One—how could you not shut up? And then at school, everyone was a KRQOer. KDAY in the morning, at school some KROQ shit, and then KDAY on the way home, and then my homeboy Robert’s brother had every 45 and 12”—everything, Strawberry Switchblade and all this UK shit, every Elvis Costello, and we’d just be diggin’ the 45s—get exposed to the Pixies and all this shit, and then I’d go home and listen to more KDAY. KDAY KROQ KDAY KROQ—I’d listen to both stations probably three or four times each in one day. Probably only change to listen to the Dodger game on the radio. I was engulfed in the radio!
What music were you thinking of when you put Look Daggers together?
I: For the rock side of things in particular, we thought of a lot of Can, a lot of New York late-’70s stuff—Blondie and bands like that. That’s where hip-hop began, anyway, around that same scene. That robotic band playing but still finding room for expressiveness in that stiff krautrock tradition—that’s kind of what we went for on the rock side. When Mars Volta hosted All Tomorrow’s Parties, Beans played and brought Holy Fuck with him, and it made me realize what was missing when hip-hop and rock come together. Holy Fuck sounded like a band—they weren’t trying to play like a drum machine. They had big drums and big guitars and all that shit, and then Beans was a seasoned enough MC to cut through all that. I came home the next week and started Look Daggers recordings right then.
Do you give krautrock some credit for helping to start hip-hop?
I: Omar and Cedric played me Can and I thought it was DJ Shadow. All that Afrika Bambaataa stuff—they were into Can—and that was the natural kind of synthesis of where to go right and not wrong in that era. I listen to ‘The Message’ and it feels like a band. I don’t know how they made it, but it’s like a band—really robotic, but kind of funky at the same time. A really German feeling of control.
J: Or like Silver Apples—kind of the same type of thing.
I: When I heard a lot of the lushness of Blonde Redhead or whatever—there was drama in that I liked as well.
V: And Fugazi have a lot of dub—that kind of ties in, too.
I: One of the last shows De Facto played was with Fugazi in El Paso, and I never knew how funky it comes across live! You see bands that do rap now, and a lot of times they’re playing something that hip-hop doesn’t reference, and it doesn’t work out right. In this case, we can all call out a reference and everyone in the band knows who it is, and if anyone doesn’t, it’s me! 2MEX for sure will know.
2MEX, did you change the way you play to fit with Look Daggers? What do people think of you in a band?
2: If anything, and everybody tells me this—people are like, ‘Finally!’ They probably thought I’d be too overpowering over just rap tracks. When you rap over a track, it’s almost like a dead track, whereas a live band, you could be on the same point or they could be even liver! I feel like maybe this is what I need to be doing—it’s something we could roll with.
Why do you think hip-hop and rock split apart?
I: To me, it’s money. You could see a lot of stuff at the same show when they were all at whatever small venue. People who listen to hip-hop don’t realize that all that stuff was happening at the same time—they don’t hear the commonality, and the people who listen to rock don’t hear the commonality. It’s easy for us to talk about ESG or Can or whatever, because everyone knows them, but…
J: When Jimmy Page played with P. Diddy, my heart was breaking—they’re doing it the wrong way!
I: We’ll see if we do it the right way—we don’t know if we’re doing it the right way yet! I think we just want to make the record we want to hear. The conversations me and 2MEX have—we realize we have to trust who we are, and trust that what we wanna hear, hopefully someone else will wanna hear. That’s the only thing I can see that works at all for people, in my limited experience. You make what you want to hear and see if anyone else wants to hear it.
2: Now I see why old fools like Dylan just put out records and don’t give a fuck if anyone buys it or not—they’re just doing it! David Byrne just put out a record and it kicks ass and it’s new and fresh for him, and I think that’s where we’re getting. The beauty in doing whatever the fuck you want—just doing it! And luckily people are following.

LOOK DAGGERS PLAY FRI., MAY 25, WITH EXISTEREO, RAY BARBEE AND TODD C AND THE BIBLE CHILDREN AT THE TROUBADOUR, 9081 SANTA MONICA BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $10 / ALL AGES. WWW.TROUBADOUR.COM.