Indie hip-hop agitator Astronautalis preaches DIY activism

It was in a coffee shop in a small Slovakian mining town and a squat in Bern, Switzerland, that the snowball began to gain momentum.

A few years back, indie hip-hop agitator Astronautalis (Andy Bothwell) was on the road in Europe, hitting the aforementioned rooms, both of which had been turned into unsanctioned, technically illegal DIY music venues.

Both were for-the-people, by-the-people type joints, communally run, open to all — except for the cops.

When Bothwell asked a woman who helped run the Swiss spot what they did when the police showed up and attempted to shut the place down, she replied with the verbal equivalent of an eye roll.

“We fight them!” she said, her words torpedoing that old cliche about how “there’s no such thing as a stupid question” right there on the spot.

A history buff who once penned hip-hop’s only ode to the Battle of Trenton, Bothwell was both taken aback and inspired at once: Here these people were on a grass-roots level taking power into their own hands and refusing to relinquish it.

“It’s a powerful thing to see,” Bothwell says while riding in the back of his tour van, en route to Houston from New Orleans. “I really bought whole cloth into the idea of the American dream: If you work hard and you do good, you can make good. And by and large, I saw a lot of people doing that overseas. Then I’d come home to America and I’d see a lot of Americans not doing that. That made me reexamine everything in my world. That was sort of a snowball: Once it starts rolling down the hill, it’s really hard to stop.”

The metaphorical snowball that Bothwell speaks of has become boulder-sized on “Cut the Body Loose,” his fifth and most overtly political album. It’s not so in a dogmatic sense: There’s no heavy-handed sloganeering or partisanship here, no catchphrases to be shouted with fists in the air.

But, inspired by his experiences touring abroad, he does espouse a do-it-yourself activism that belies any political party.

“You better fix your own plate or serve one to us / Go and pray to your god or complain on Facebook,” he rhymes in a near-snarl over an oscillating synth line on “Sike!” “Stay waiting for your dad to come save the day, dog / Voted for Obama and expect the change / It’s just one big party all giving the same gifts.”

If there is one overriding theme that unifies this sonically diffuse record — which encompasses New Orleans-style big band jazz, Southern trap music, frenetic drum ’n’ bass, throaty indie rock and more — it’s Bothwell’s belief in the power of self-determination, often voiced by channeling an outsider’s perspective.

“A lot of the views that I’m alluding to and the people that I’m talking about on this record are pretty extreme political thinkers, people who are anarchists and living in communes, punks who fight cops and stuff,” Bothwell says. “I’m sort of taking a real extreme bent on things and talking about it. I think one of the things that’s most striking to me is that, despite the diversity of the crowds who are listening to my music, people don’t look at those views as crazy anymore, which I think is really telling about the times.”

These times have a divisive feel to them, especially in a highly contentious election year where battle lines are sharply drawn. “Body,” then, is a product of this environment, but it also attempts to be an escape from it.

Bothwell must possess a showman’s skills to pull this off.

The former Southern Methodist University theater major’s entree into hip-hop came as an accomplished freestyler and battle rapper. But he ditched that scene when he started to feel like there was a creative glass ceiling to competitive rhyming.

“Battling is like weight lifting,” he says. “You’re just trying to lift more weights than the other guy. Do I want to be the world’s greatest weight lifter? Or do I want to be an artist? That answered itself really quickly. I lost my love for battling almost instantaneously. Then it became all about writing songs and figuring out how to make music.”

With “Body,” though, Bothwell revisited his roots and attempted to work freestyling into the songwriting process for the first time.

“For years and years, I looked at freestyling as this sort of abstract expressionism, just kind of splashing paint all over the canvas, and I looked at songwriting as pointillism, this minute, detailed process. As a result, it was reflected in my songwriting,” he explains. “My songwriting was dense, tightly wound, very purposeful and calculated. For this record, I wrote a lot of the lyrics by just letting the beat play and rapping into the voice memo on my phone, taking the best parts and sort of piecing it together.”

What emerged was an album that acknowledges various hip-hop stereotypes and then slyly subverts them. In the grand tradition of Paul Wall, Riff Raff and James Franco in “Spring Breakers,” Bothwell’s a Southern white dude with gold teeth who rhymes in a syrupy drawl when its suits him.

But he also skewers scene conceits with palpable relish, as he does on “Sike!”

“See? I can write your dumb raps,” Bothwell boasts on the song. “Pay me and go buy some hubcaps / Fake G’ s still talking ’bout gun claps / It ain’t gonna happen, like A-Rod’s comeback.”

Bothwell’s hitting the road hard in support of “Body,” packing 65 shows into a three-month span, performing in all 50 states.

“Body” was inspired in large by seeing people come together in a communal setting.

Now, he’s attempting to create the same on a nightly basis, from one city to the next.

“When I was writing this record, it felt like I was out on a branch by myself,” he says. “Now, when I’m performing it, it feels like there’s a lot of other people there with me.”

And the snowball keeps rollin’ …

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.