URB: Tell me about the origin of the title.
Sage: The title is in reference to an older lyric of mine: “Life is just a lie with an F in it, and death is definite.” That particular lyric eventually turned into the amalgamation of what the album title is now, which is Life with the F in parenthesis. I didn’t come up with that; my fans came up with it. This lyric in that song is something that a lot of fans started gravitating towards, and getting tattoos of, and I’ve just seen it used in multiple ways all over the place over the years. Eventually I came up with this incredibly large collection of Li(f)e memorabilia, well not memorabilia but things that Li(f)e was written on, whether it be a tattoo or a piece of artwork or whatever. I just started getting immersed in the whole fucking frenzy of it and thought, “Hey, I like this. I wanna use it.”
That’s where it came from, and that was sort of the underlying theme on a lot of the record, where I was trying to tackle exactly what is the lie that we all live: What illusions do we live under? Why do we live under them? Who’s responsible for the lies? And you know, some are detrimental, some are helpful. How do we juggle that? Which ones should we call out and which ones should we ignore? So it was the launch pad what for a lot of the songs ended up being about.
URB: On the first single (“Slow Man”), you’re coming from an older, more weathered perspective, looking back to the early years in your career. The way rap’s changed in the past decade and a half or so, do you feel like an old man in a young man’s game?
Sage: [Laughs] Yeah. I always felt that way. I always felt that and now I’m finally there. Now I’m actually old. Not by regular human lifeline standards but by hip-hop standards I’m at the age where, when I was kid and I thought about someone who’s my age, it’s like I shouldn’t be rapping right now. Too old.
URB: You’ve grown your record label a ton in the last five or so years. How do you keep this business growing, and keep up with the business side, and still maintain creativity and grow artistically?
Sage: I have a very tough time with that. It’s part of what is full-on burning me out. So, I don’t have a good answer. I’ve just been trying to stay on top of every item. I get my creative impulses whether I’m working or not, and when I get a creative impulse I follow it and that all works itself out, but the business side of things really takes up 99 percent of my fucking days. That’s annoying. That’s definitely not what I envisioned for myself, and yet at the same time it’s the only way I can stay creatively active and put out my material, and my friends’ material, artists like my contemporaries, who I’m kind of responsible for getting their records out and making sure they get the acknowledgement that they deserve. If I don’t stay on top of the business side of stuff, that will all go away. Of course there will also be 50 or 100 or 1,000 people that seek it out on their own, but still I want as many people as possible to be exposed to the records that I think are incredible from these talented artists.
It’s a headfuck for sure. I don’t wanna spend this much time doing this, but on the other side of the coin, I know if I don’t, it could potentially all fall apart. So yeah for five years I’ve been on that, and I’ve been working my hardest. And we have people who are working for us helping to build this mini-empire. It’s not like I’m trying to take over the fucking music industry, but indie hip-hop has no base. We have to keep hitting up all different avenues, different media outlets, that don’t specialize in what we do at all, and convince them to cover our shit so more people can be exposed to it, and that’s a pain in the ass. Even getting stores to carry it is a pain in the ass. Getting distributors to distribute it is a pain in the pass. There’s no easy element. The easiest thing is making the music, and I like that part.
URB: It seems like all the labels that are similar to your own are going in different directions. RhymeSayers is getting bigger and bigger and taking on practically-mainstream acts like Freeway and Evidence, while Def Jux is about to go on hiatus. Do you see Strange Famous Records going in any specific direction?
Sage: As far as Strange Famous is concerned, I don’t wanna go that route. I don’t wanna keep growing bigger and bigger. I’m fine with just the roster that we have, which is the main artists that I’ve been working with through the years. Some are very active, some are not so active. All of them inspire me, and I think they’re all super-talented, and when they have records to put out, I’d like to help make that possible. We’re just gonna keep it like this. I don’t wanna grow bigger than we can handle, and I think what we’re going to have to figure out is how to just be reliable. Reliability is the main element of what we need to focus on as far as being the place where people come to get their music from. I really would like to just be a place where people know that they can trust to come and get news, or albums, or shirts, or whatever, and just maintain ourselves. And that might be weird, and it might be the worst business move of my life to say, “I don’t wanna grow,” but I don’t. I really don’t want to expand beyond our ability to handle it. And I don’t have ambitions to do that, either. I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to play the parts of the game that are necessary in order to grow, and I think we have the ability to do that but that’s not where I want to focus my energy and my time at all. As head honcho of Strange Famous Records, I’m fine with where we’re at. We do well, we get by, and we make music with no concessions at all.
Sage’s Li(f)e hits stores May 11.
The album can be preordered over at the Strange Famous store, and his new single, “The Best of Times,” can be downloaded here.
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