Rafael Casal Showcases his ‘Bay’ Voice in “Mean Ones”

I first met Rafael Casal in 2002 at a Youth Speaks poetry workshop for Bay Area teens. We met at La Peña and the instructor Paul Flores gave us a writing prompt: to view the world through another person’s eyes. Casal began furiously scribbling into his yellow notepad. At the end of fifteen minutes, what he revealed were several pages written from the vantage point of his grandmother with Alzheimer’s looking back at him, and him wondering what she sees when she looks through her eyes.

I had written a one-page poem. Not only did Casal’s output surpass mine in length, but its complexity dazzled the other high schoolers in the workshop. His piece had a tight rhyme scheme, meter, and it was bursting with imagery, wordplay, and double-meaning. He performed the piece on the spot. The rest of the workshop listened with wonder. This Berkeley kid was off to a promising start to a great career.

Fast-forward a decade later, and Rafael Casal has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry three times, released 2 mixtapes and 3 albums, the latest of which Mean Ones, dropped February 2.

Rafael Casal portrait by Laura Tomlinson

What makes Mean Ones Casal’s most provocative album to date is that he isn’t afraid to part from his spoken-word past and pursue wider sonic pallets to express himself. In YouTube comments to his music videos, some of his most fervent spoken-word fans have been critical of his using Auto Tune on several tracks on his latest albums.

He responded to this negative view of Auto Tune in my interview with him for The Rumpus: “If you think about all the tools used in the studio, there’s this real negative stigma about Auto Tune. But Auto Tune’s been used for years on everyone’s favorite records…. Stylistically, I think that it’s a sound we’re embracing now in hip hop. So for me, the beef with Auto Tune people have is not a beef with the tool, but a beef with people who can’t sing, pretending as if they can.”

And Rafael Casal can sing, as he’s demonstrated on the track “Giant” from his last album, and “Fall Back” on his latest. Casal doesn’t completely eschew his spoken-word upbringing. In Mean Ones, he balances his singing with his “spitting” or “bustin’,” where he raps so fast, his mouth sounds a machine gun spitting out Bay Area slang at E-40 speed, or even faster. Examples of this are on tracks like “Dreamer.” Casal sings the chorus, and then lays into his trademark no-holds-barred style in the second verse.

“Skitzo” is another example, where after he sings the chorus, he plays off of his Getback bandmate Daveed Diggs with a fast-rapping, back-and-forth style similar to Eminem and Royce da 5’9”.

When asked why the album has a Dr. Seuss theme, Casal responds, “Growing up in Berkeley and Oakland, we got such a strange, eclectic compiling of characters that’re everyday to us, and very strange to the rest of the country. We have the hippies with their organic everything, running their cars on vegetable oil, the people at the Ashby flea market selling bootleg Jordans—there’s just all these kind of interesting characters. In telling stories to people [when travelling outside the Bay], people would be like ‘There’s nothing like that here.’” Casal said he used terms from Dr. Seuss to describe the Bay Area, to put its eccentricity in context for people who’d never been there.

Casal said that he gets frustrated when he sees the East Bay, “the liberal capital,” suffering from problems like economic inequality, abysmal public education, racial injustice, and many contradictions where the values many in the East Bay proclaim aren’t actually practiced. When he returns to the Bay, he turns “Grinch-like” and into a “Mean one” from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas! when he sees so much hypocrisy and failed dreams in the place he loves.

Rafael Casal with Getback bandmate Chinaka Hodge

in Oaklandish display in Downtown Oakland

The title track “Mean Ones” is an autobiographical piece about growing up in Berkeley and Oakland in the 1990s-2000s. The song covers topics like the drug culture, East Oakland turf, gentrification, skateboarding, Berkeley hippies, East Bay slang, and returning home after gaining notoriety and being on TV. Casal explains that the track is about his bittersweet relationship with the Bay.

“Bay boys have a short life span//We dream big, get stuck doing weak shit,//Then accept defeat quick,//’Oh well, we did the best that we can.’” Casal explains that no matter how big an artist gets in the Bay Area, he’ll remain a small-time artist because of the lack of opportunities in the Bay. To get a national stage, one needs to move to LA or NYC.

In the music video for “Whoville,” the Bay Area is represented by a tiny spot on a dead flower. A girl needs a telescope to see the Bay Area. Casal feels it an apt metaphor of how the Bay Area is viewed by the rest of the world on his travels.  In the Bay Area some feel that it’s the center of activity and that the rest of the world is watching what’s we’re doing, however, when he leaves the Bay, like when he worked as Artist-In-Residence at University of Wisconsin, Madison, he feels “like a kid from a land that’s a spec to the rest.”

And some of the Bay Area’s most talented artists in their 20s have moved to bigger cities. Chinaka Hodge, George Watsky, Dave Smallen, and Darren Criss have all moved to Los Angeles. When asked about why he lives in LA, Casal responded that he will always rep the Bay and be first to celebrate the Bay Area’s contributions to culture, but LA can give him exposure to a national audience. In LA, he also has more opportunities to develop his skills in filmmaking and directing.

In the interview, Rafael Casal is proud to celebrate the Bay Area’s role in “culture creation,” but he feels the need to leave “Whoville” (the Bay Area) for periods of time to bring his music to a larger audience. He said that the Bay Area is great at exporting culture, but it’s not good at keeping and developing these artists who’re truly innovating because they soon reach a glass ceiling. There are a limited number of clubs in the Bay and a relatively small audience compared to LA or NYC. Let’s hope that Casal and others don’t stay in LA long, and get back to the Bay soon.

Rafael Casal’s album Mean Ones is available for free download at http://rafaelcasal.bandcamp.com.