Thurs Sept 9, Chop Suey, 9 pm $7.
"I want to have a soft hand when I touch ya, and musically that's what I'm doing. I'm lotioning it up, I'm gonna touch it, make it pleasant. I don't mean pleasant in a soft way--we're pleasant in the most masculine way you can be pleasant." Tilsen, one half of the Saturday Knights' tag-team emcee duo, is giving me the 10th version of the comedy routine that he hopes will explain this new Seattle hiphop act.
But the Saturday Knights aren't just any kinda hiphop act; they're a party band that specializes in hiphop, among other things.
Combine the skilled vocal gymnastics of Tilsen (the Grain) and Barfly (Oldominion, Norman) with the musical trickery of DJ Spencer Manio (DJ Suspence, DJs on Strike!) and guitarist/keyboardist Brian Weber (Dub Narcotic Sound System, Dead Presidents), and you have the new soundtrack to leisure. In two-minute clips, TSK use the power pop idiom as a palette for more than hiphop. "The idea was to make a hiphop record that wasn't funky," says Weber. "It's funky, but it isn't based on funk records. It's based on gospel, rock, and blues records.
"And a lot of local hiphop is dark," he adds. "We don't want to be dark. We want to be up-tempo."
Combining banging drum samples and big, loud riffs (which Manio calls "Billy Squier hiphop") with garage rock trashiness and the old-school desire to slam dunk the hooks, the group is loose enough to get laughs and slick enough to slide between genres. And although they've only been around since April and have yet to release any music, the foursome pool their combined influences (which include Just-Ice, Schoolly D, Jungle Brothers, producer Ced Gee and, well, Ricky Ricardo) into the kinda music you can pump a fist and swill the Courvoisier to.
And then there are the lyrics.
"My perspective is about relaxing in the Lay-Z-Boy on the bow of the King's Ransom," says Barfly. While Tilsen adds that the music has a strong political presence--if you turn it off, close your ears, and close your eyes, he jokes. Otherwise, it's all about the females. "We're just trying to be lady friendly," he says, grinning. "Sometimes ladies like to dance and we like to watch the ladies dance. So I'm trying to think about stuff that ladies like to see and hear about... like myself." He adds that he and Barfly "have these little yachts, and we pretend like we're on them when we write things. So you're getting our perspective from the yacht on the coffee table."
From that little yacht comes some outer-limits material--about "Motorin'," avoiding cracks so ya don't break your mama's back, and action heroes. And although they've barely begun, the Saturday Knights already know where they want to end up. "We want to be Vegas show singers," says Tilsen. "Snapping fingers, you know, a little horn section behind us."
Adds Barfly, "I just want to drive a golf cart into a fucking swimming pool at the Sands."
