Derelict
Slow Fade of an Endangered Species
2022 | Hip-Hop
— track 2: “Writer’s Block”
Jerry Craddock: I'm old school, man. I'm all about breakbeats and sampling. I know a lot of cats are not into that anymore, they want to do something more original, which I'm cool with, I don't have any problem with that. But that's how I started out, that's my roots, is with sampling and digging in the crates. I've got over 5,000 records in my garage because I've been collecting since I was like 16 years old. I've got pretty much anything you can think of in there, man. I got rock & roll, soul, I got punk rock, I got R&B. You never know, you find some old dusty record from the 60s, and you'll find a piano on there that you like or something, so I'll sample anything, man. If you listen to my whole catalogue, you'll hear something for everybody on there. My favorite album of mine is this one called Live From The Ghetto Blaster Vol. 2, nothing but video game samples. All Super Nintendo, Nintendo, PlayStation. I took all the video games I used to play when I was a kid, made beats out of them, and put out an album. So pretty much anything, man. I'm open for whatever.
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I started around '91, '92, so I've been doing it for a long time. 30 years, I guess. Pretty much nonstop, never stopped doing it. Seen a lot of crews come and go over the years, you know, mostly down here in Rapid City. I was born in Austin, Texas. My dad was Air Force, my mom's Native American. So I was born down there and then we moved back up here, I think it was like '76. So I've been here, off and on, my whole life here in Rapid City. Grew up here, went to high school here and all that good stuff. I've been played on the radio here, KTEQ from the School of Mines, and KILI the Native American radio station.
[I started making music] when I was 15 or 16. I was living in North Carolina, then I moved back [to Rapid City] in '91. How it started, was — I was a big skateboarder back in the day and I broke my ankle skating. Was laid up in the bed, and my friend Winston, he goes by Red Soul, approached me about doing music. So I started writing. And we originally had this cat, his name was Kevin, he was supposed to be our producer, but he really didn't do much. It just wasn't progressing like we wanted it to. So I saw what he was doing, and I told Winston, I was like, "Hey, I could do that. I can do everything he's doing." So we ended up buying some equipment: microphone, mixer, turntable. Started making our own beats. Started off doing pause tapes, I don't know if you what know those are: you take a dual cassette deck, and you find a part of a song that doesn't have any singing or anything over it, and you record it onto one tape, rewind it, record it again to the other tape, rewind it, and you expand it, and make it longer, make it into a beat. That's how we started off before we got samplers and stuff. I got my first sampler in '94 or '95. It was a little eight-second Gemini sampler that I that I bought off the back pages of one of those Source Magazines. So that's how I started doing it. I switched to computers when I moved back to Texas for a while to be around my dad. I hooked up with some cats down there, and they were digital age. I was still using hardware-type stuff, and they were all into computers. So they talked me into it. Now I use a mixture of hardcore equipment and then computers too, so it's kind of a nice blend.
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I have a lot of aliases, just so you know. I'm always reinventing myself. When I first started back in '91, '92, my original name was The Derelict of Sedition, and I ended up shortening it later. I also go by Asharri the Vagabond, that is a persona I came up with when I lived in Texas. When I moved down there, we started a group called Guerrilla Platoon, that was in 2005. It was kind of like a Public Enemy-type group, real conscious, and we decided to all come up with aliases for ourselves. When I moved to Seattle everybody knew me under that name Asharri the Vagabond, so I just kept it. My Vagabond persona is more political conscious, where The Derelict is more like boom bap hip-hop, underground, lyrical skills-type stuff. But I didn't want to put on my albums “produced by Derelict” or “produced by Vagabond,” so then I was like, “Well, I gotta come up with a third persona for my production name.” And that's where I came up with Self-Taught Knowledge.
I hesitate to call myself a DJ because I only did it out of necessity, man. Nobody around here was DJing. Nobody out around here was actually cutting records, and I needed someone to do that for some of the projects I was working on, so I just ended up teaching myself how to do it. I've never done it on stage, I've just done MCing, rapping on stage. I kind of retired from doing live shows. The last live show that I did was down in New Mexico in 2008, 2009, somewhere around there. I was married for 14 years, ended up getting divorced in 2009, and that just threw everything off. You know what I'm saying? I was living in Seattle at the time and had to move back home to Rapid, put all my stuff in storage. So it was kind of like a forced retirement. I've been offered to do live shows when I got back home, but I just wasn't prepared for it anymore. Just kind of fell out with it. But I still write music and record music.
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This new album [Slow Fade of an Endangered Species] actually didn't come out the way I wanted it to. It was supposed to be all original material, but I was on a time crunch because my father got sick and wanted to move up here from Texas. So I had to give up my studio to accommodate him. He was trying to get up here within six months, and I only had that amount of time to finish the album. Everything on there's me. Some of it's original, and some of it's from past albums, like remixes. So [when I'm remixing], I usually just try to give it a different variation, a different flavor. You know how sometimes you hear a song and then you hear a remix, and you're like, "Oh, I like the remix better." That's what I was trying to go for, something fresh. The newer material that I put out on [the album], I’m really proud of. I'm proud of the whole album. I think it came out pretty well, considering the timeframe that I had. I did that album in nine months.
Since then, me and my friend — Benny NoBull, he lives out in Colorado — him and I have been doing music for past 15, 20 years. We've actually got an EP coming out. Talon [Bazille] did all the beats on it. [Equinox of the Gods was released on February 13, 2023].
So I've only had my last four albums officially pressed up, you know, with the packaging and everything. I just recently really started getting into that. Everything else was just a burned disk and a cover that I made myself, and I just passed that out to people. I'm not really into a lot of internet stuff. I like handing it out to people. I used to do it out of the trunk of my car, try to sell them and pass them out to friends. My homie, Maniac the Siouxpernatural, he's the one that's always trying to get me to get more online. He's always like, "You gotta get online, nobody buys CDs anymore." So I'm trying to get more into it or whatever. Right now, Bandcamp is the only place you can get my albums, or you hit me up personally.
I just got remarried about two years ago, so I just moved into this place here a little while ago and I don't have a whole lot of room. So lately, I've been sampling mostly from computer. So like, the Slow Fade of and Endangered Species, that's mostly all done on computer, stuff I downloaded off the internet or whatever. I've got a bunch of [audio editing programs], I've got Acid, I've got Fruity Loops, I've got Adobe Audition, just a bunch of them. Some of them I use for beats, some of them I use for recording, some of them I use for drums, it just depends on what the song calls for. It's a lot of work, man. People don't realize that it involves a lot of work. Some people appreciate it, some don't. Sometimes you get the newer people that have only been listening to hip-hop from like the past 10 years, they hear my stuff and they're like, "That sounds old," or whatever. And I'm just like, "Well, purists will like it. Hip-hop heads will like it,” cats my age or whatever. I call it "grown folk's hip-hop." You know what I mean? That's what it is. If younger cats like it, cool. If they don't, hey, it's all good.
JERRY CRADDOCK’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Maniac the Siouxpernatural — Nightmerika (2005)
Bazille — Traveling the Multiverse with Iktomi, Pt. 1-3 (2021)
Optional — Out Da Box (2002)
Night Shield — The Addiction (2015)
SOURCES
Craddock, Jerry. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 20 January 2023.
