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Last
year Danger Mouse rose to the top of everybody’s hot list when
he combined Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles The White
Album to create The Gray Album. Considered a conceptual masterpiece,
the album became an instant classic. This year there is another extremely
distinct album that takes the idea of the conceptual album one step
further; Insanate’s Production 9401.Production
9401, released earlier this year on UVInk, is a lyrical remake of the
movie Psycho, which was named Production 9401 before it became Psycho,
and is something Insanate feels could only have been done through Hip-Hop.
“With Hip-Hop music in general, and what I liked about it, that
was different from every genre, is that on a Hip-Hop album they can
do a lot of stuff that shows they're really lyricists. With subject
matter alone, Hip-Hop is one of the only genres where you can talk about
anything as long as it’s done in a clever way or a personal way.”Originally
Insanate, who was born and raised in P.G. County, Maryland and currently
lives in Brooklyn, New York, was just looking to make his debut album
cohesive as he explains “I knew when I had the idea for the album
I knew it was going to be a story to some degree but I didn’t
know how much. However I figured out how to freak the story around it
I would have to put every song I planned for the album in it.”
He continued, adding “I had never planned the album, or thought
about the album before as an audio remake to Psycho but all that just
fell into place.” A few songs into recording he noticed “I
can freak my story around this.”The
Pyscho concept wasn’t the furthest of stretches for a man named
Insanate, in fact, he notes “I already knew what the album was
going to be called, cuz the name Gnorman Insanate Bates. I wanted to
do an album called The Bates Motel.” Insanate thought The Bates
Motel might have a lot of connotations and expectations attached to
it, however, especially for a debut album, so he decided “for
the first album I couldn't call it that, but I knew about Production
9401. So before I make The Bates Motel there would be Production 9401.”The
album features Insanate answering a psychiatrist’s questions in
the form of a patient getting interviewed for his possible release from
an insane asylum. He says of the idea “that seemed like genius
without pushing it too far and people won’t get it.” His
main problem isn’t people not getting it, but rather people taking
it too literally. Insanate has had more than a few concerned people
ask him if Production 9401 is based on personal experience. “People
ask me that more often than I thought they would,” he explains
“a girl asked me that and I was like wow you are not going out
with me.” Guess that’s the one drawback from calling yourself
Insanate, though he notes “I’m as approachable as I think
anyone on the planet is.”Insanate
came up with his name a few years after he started rapping. Though he
felt the itch to rhyme in the ninth grade it wasn’t until his
junior year in high school that he became Insanate. “I was a big
Grave Diggaz fan back then and this chick broke my heart so I just told
myself I was gonna just start rapping this whole bunch of crazy stuff
from now on and just be out there. And Insanate sounds pretty cool,
it’s a pronoun so it sounds like a name.” Eventually, however,
rappers all started using aliases. “I didn’t want an alias,”
he remembers “but if I don’t have an alias what I’ma
be called?” The search was on. “Insanate, what would go
well with Insanate? I’ll make Insanate my middle name. Freddy
Insanate Krueger? No that doesn’t sound right. I wanted something
that sounded like a real name. Gnormen Baites, that sounds real! In
the movie, in the simplest form he’s a guy that loves his mother.”
Suddenly Gnormen “Insanate” Baites was born and Insanate
had created a longer name so his actual moniker, Insanate, became his
alias.While
Insanate’s Production 9401 is a concept album, and he hopes he
has an influence on the hip-hop community he doesn’t want the
idea of a concept album to become a fad. “I don’t have a
problem necessarily with seeing more and more doin it,” he explains
“but if it gets to the point where it’s like hip-hop videos
that are taken from movies then you weren’t just thinking to do
it you did it because it was acceptable to do it and other people are
doing it.”Even
if people don’t grasp the idea of a lyrical remake to Psycho Insanate
notes he has another goal for his work. “I want people to be like
‘wow man that was really really just personal, he put it out there.
He had the guts to come completely from left field and make it work
and he can spit like crazy.’ A lot of times people will put you
in one category like ‘oh he does a lot of cool conceptual songs,’
but I want people to be like ‘he can spit!’”Currently
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