Six months ago, we couldn’t have blamed anyone who thought Swordplay’s rap career was a thing of the past. The Richmond rapper, known to the government as Isaac Ramsey, was a fixture on the local scene around the middle of the last decade, playing tons of shows and dropping strong studio releases like 2005’s Tilt EP and 2007’s Cellars And Attics. But his new album, a full-length collaboration with French producer Pierre The Motionless entitled Tap Water, is the first release he’s put out under his own name in over half a decade. So where has he been?
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Six months ago, we couldn’t have blamed anyone who thought Swordplay’s rap career was a thing of the past. The Richmond rapper, known to the government as Isaac Ramsey, was a fixture on the local scene around the middle of the last decade, playing tons of shows and dropping strong studio releases like 2005’s Tilt EP and 2007’s Cellars And Attics. But his new album, a full-length collaboration with French producer Pierre The Motionless entitled Tap Water, is the first release he’s put out under his own name in over half a decade. So where has he been?
CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW ISSUE OF RVA MAGAZINE!
Photo by Ron Rogers
Back in the mid-2000s, when Swordplay was making a lot of things happen locally, his position in the scene might have seemed enviable. But for Ramsey himself, the situation seemed off. “There was something that wasn’t sticking right for me,” he says. “That’s because it’s all that I was doing, and that’s not me. I can’t just go to hip hop shows every week. I need to do something different sometimes. I didn’t know it at the time, but that felt very limiting, and eventually it sort of imploded.” After the implosion came a period of reckoning for the MC. “I had some things I needed to figure out. [It was] an awkward part of being in my mid 20s–a little debate I had to have with myself on a mountaintop somewhere.”
Taking a break from playing shows, Ramsey spent most of 2008 and 2009 traveling to foreign countries for months at a time. “There were a couple years there where it was just–work for six months, save up money, crash in mom’s basement inbetween trips.” His budget was very limited, but between working on farms in exchange for room and board and busking on the street to earn food money, he survived quite well. In fact, he says, “I might have just stayed in Chile, worked on this guy’s farm and helped him open up this pizza place. But I had this awesome show to return home to, and there was no way I was gonna miss it.”
The show in question was the Richmond date on the Our Accents Sure Are Pretty Tour, a 2009 jaunt that brought several European MCs and producers, including Pierre The Motionless, to the US. This show was the first time Swordplay and Pierre The Motionless actually met, but they had been working together for quite a while. Their collaboration began by coincidence in late 2007. “I was recording some songs for a split 12 inch that my buddy MC Homeless was doing with this Indonesian punk rock group called Homicide,” Ramsey explains. “One of those songs was called ‘The Opposite Of Happy,’ and I really dug the beat. I thought it brought out some of the best stuff I had ever heard from this MC, so I wanted that for me, obviously.” Pierre The Motionless was the producer responsible for the beat, and Ramsey began working with him over email. “Pierre remixed one of my songs, ’64 Bit,’ first, then he sent me a beat to write to. We just kept collaborating.”
The oldest material on Tap Water dates from this era, but after putting together a few songs, work ceased for a while. “We [had taken] a year-and-a-half long break on the album,” Ramsey explains. “I didn’t write any songs for the album when I was in South America. At that point we were talking about just releasing what we had as an EP.” However, the collaboration was re-invigorated by the show the two played together in 2009, and a few months after that RVA date, Swordplay made a trip to Europe to continue working with Pierre The Motionless. “After I went to Europe and recorded the blueprints for ‘No TS Eliot’ and ‘Wonderful Things’ there, we resumed the writing for the album.”
Another incident that occurred during Swordplay’s European trip had a great effect on his future as a musician. “I was there in France, and my buddy, the French producer/MC Zoen, was about to leave for tour with MC Homeless and Ridlore. He asked me, ‘Would you like to come on tour with us?’ And how am I gonna say no?” Swordplay’s sets on the tour were well-received, and provided a new dose of inspiration for his music. “Music is something that musicians often make for themselves, but when you get positive responses when you share it with people, that makes you feel like you should continue to share it,” Ramsey explains. “Maybe you’re even making a difference in the world. And so that whole experience of touring was very encouraging.”
It was in 2010, after a trip to El Salvador, that Ramsey realized that he wanted to become a full-time RVA resident again. He made the trip with the Latin American Community Art Project, a group founded by Salvadoran-American artists (and siblings) Sandra and Oscar Cornejo. The Cornejos are friends of Ramsey’s, and “they invited me to go to El Salvador for seven weeks and do a music program for kids there,” he says. Ramsey describes El Salvador as “like being in a little colony of the Empire. There were Coca-Cola flags everywhere. They use the dollar–they don’t have their own currency. Everyone you meet knows somebody, whether it’s family or a friend, who’s gone to the US. I think it was the first time I really had to wrestle with my privilege. It changed what i wanted to do with my life.”
Ramsey returned to Richmond in 2010 with the goal to put down roots and “do good work in the community. Go back to school, get armed with a superpower like a law degree, and use it for good–because god knows there are some people using it for bad.” Returning to VCU, he also got involved in several community activist efforts, working with anti-Cuccinelli group Cooch Watch and taking part in the 2012 campaign to stop a VA state bill requiring invasive ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Throughout this time, he continued working with Pierre The Motionless on Tap Water.
Photo by Ron Rogers
By spring 2012, the album was done–or so they thought. Mixing was supposed to take place in May 2012. Then, on April 30, Ramsey was arrested while attempting to film a police action on his cellphone. Explaining the situation that led to his arrest, he says, “There were two arrests already in progress, and something that seemed like it might escalate into another arrest very quickly. So we started filming.” Soon, Ramsey found himself caught up in the action. “The more that I was there, the more I realized that this thing isn’t going to end well. And as it escalated, it was becoming obvious that it was gonna take more and more effort to prevent the inevitable. And in all actuality, if the goal was to prevent an arrest, it was a double failure.” He laughs ruefully. After spending a night in jail, he immediately got in touch with Pierre The Motionless. “[I] called Pierre and said, ‘You need to send me one more beat before our record goes to mixing. Please do that right away.’” Pierre emailed a beat that afternoon, which became “When The Hurricane Comes,” the last song recorded for Tap Water. “We probably finished the song within a few days,” Ramsey says. “It just came out, because I had really been reflecting on what the fuck just happened.”
“When The Hurricane Comes” is one of the highlights of Tap Water, a foreboding song constructed around a repeating guitar melody and a chorus that contains lines taken from the video shot during the arrest. The song became one of Tap Water‘s pre-release singles, featuring an incredibly powerful video that simply sets the song overtop of unedited cellphone footage of the arrest. The mixture of left-wing politics and more abstract, emotionally driven lyrics that shows up on this song is replicated throughout the album, and Pierre The Motionless’s beats seem uniquely suited to Swordplay’s lyrical style.
The sound of Tap Water is more melodically-focused than a lot of hip hop albums, and Swordplay’s ability to sing as well as rap is used to good effect on songs like “No TS Eliot,” which incorporates lines from “The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The MC’s understated wit is showcased on the gorgeously melancholy-sounding “Stop Lying To Us.” If you don’t pay attention to this song’s lyrics, you might think it’s a sad song, but the choruses contain lines mocking implausible television characters. Referencing the TV show Who’s The Boss, Swordplay sings “We all know Tony Micelli is a fake housekeeper. In real life, Tony Danza’s boxers are lying about on the floor.” Later in the song, he mocks Ronald McDonald (“Nobody will ever trust a white guy with a red afro haircut”) and David Hasselhoff’s character on Baywatch (“In real life, he’s not successful with women under 60”). The album contains more straightforward hip hop sounds as well–“Conversation Skills” and “No Teleportation” show that Swordplay can still spit rhymes with the best of them.
One cannot help but notice that Tap Water took quite a while to come together; there’s at least one reference in the album’s lyrics to the year being 2008. As amazing as the album is, did it really need to take six years to put together? “An essential piece of information is that Pierre and I are very, very lazy creatures,” Ramsey says, laughing. While he figures the record represents about a week and a half of writing time, “we just didn’t sit down and do it in a week and a half. It had to take place over this four and a half year period.”
While Swordplay may not be at the center of the Richmond hip hop scene the way he once was, he feels like he’s found the proper role for himself. “I enjoy what’s going on in the local hip hop scene much much more than I ever did before,” he says. “There’s a lot of good things in Richmond hip hop right now. I might not be the driving force behind it, and that’s fine. There’s no reason I should be. It wasn’t good for me, or for Richmond’s hip hop scene, that I be that person.”
These days, Isaac Ramsey enjoys being Swordplay, but part of that is clearly because he isn’t Swordplay all the time. Sometimes he’s the singer/guitarist for his indie-punk band, Double Rainbow. Sometimes he’s a student, or an activist. And yes, sometimes he’s a rapper. “Rap is a totally different form of expression,” he says. “I’m not always in the mood to listen to rap. I’m definitely not always in the mood to make rap. But I will never stop wanting to make it sometimes.” When the result is albums like Tap Water, we should all be glad of that.
