"Armenian Rapper tells it like it is..."

by Paul Chaderjian

Long after disco was dead and Rock & Roll was slowly fading off the mTV pop charts, 10yearold Nazaret “Nazo” Aslanian used to amaze his sister by his uncanny ability to sing the lyrics of TV show theme songs like “Diff’rent Strokes,” even after just hearing them a few times. “I’d hear it a couple of times, and I could just do it,” he says. “I don’t know how.” Then came the Rodney King beating. The L.A. Riots. Fear that Western civilization was coming to an end. MC this and MC that were speaking up. White boys were singing hip hop heard on underground radio stations. Soon KISSFm and Power 106 were spinning songs that expressed the angst of urban America, songs professing to “fight the power.” “I grew up on rap,” says 24yearold Nazo. “I grew up on Tupac. The first CD I ever bought was Warren G, the GFunk Era in 1993, 14 years ago. Dr. Dre and Snoop were around also, and I’ve been listening to a lot of rap ever since.” The King of Pop and the Material Girl had been unseated by a coup, underground music of the Black ghetto taking over as the predominant voice of a new generation. The Stones had grown old, John Lennon was dead, the Boss was divorcing his wife and his band, and the children and grandchildren of Baby Boomers were buying more CDs than their folks. “I knew how to rap, even before I knew I could do it consciously,” says Nazo. “I would listen to music, and I would pick up the words. I would be able to rap entire Tupac songs, perfectly.” Out were Metallica, REm, and Guns and Roses and in were Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Janet Jackson, Dr. Dre, Paula Abdul, Ludacris, and even MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Topping the pop charts and changing the culture of what was cool in America were the rap lyrics on the lips of school kids from the east to the west. “Sometimes, I’d be in the car and a song would start,” says Nazo, the Armenian rapper. “I would start rapping with it, and I’d turn the volume off and keep rapping for a bit. I’d turn the volume on, and I’d be right on the track.” Hip hop was cool. Rap was hot. And young Nazo was using his keen memory to sing along the masters on the radio without missing a beat or forgetting a word. Writing rap was also something that came naturally to Nazo; he’d been driven by the muses of writing as a teenager. “I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid,” he says. “When I was 13 or 14, I’d write poems for the girls, nice stuff. It’s pretty funny, but I started developing the skills to rhyme and make sense and all that stuff.” Then came college, the University of California at Irvine, where Nazo studied computer science and met two friends with whom he’s been collaborating ever since – Kris Palyan and Taron Elizarian (AKA Taron and Kris P). UC Irvine “When I was a kid, I liked playing video games,” say Nazo. We’re in his North Hollywood studio, where he records and produces his music. “I wanted to make video games, and that’s what I wanted to study.” After graduating from the University of California, Nazo found a job in Orange County in the information technologies sector and still continues that profession today. “Learning computers has helped me,” he says. “I learned how to edit my own music, so I don’t have to pay an engineer an hourly fee of hundreds of dollars. It’s been very beneficial for me in terms of music.” While studying computer science, it was Taron who told Nazo, “Bro, when you sing the songs, other people’s song, it’s as if you wrote them.” Taron told Nazo that he wanted to produce some beats and asked Nazo to write the lyrics. “So I tried,” says Nazo, “and eventually, I started to write music. That was maybe in my sophomore year in college, and I wrote two or three songs that year.” Taron, Kris and Nazo decided to call themselves “Entity,” and they even recorded one of Nazo’s early songs called “Nouns and Verbs” in their college apartment. “It was me playing with vocabulary, flipping rhymes, like complicated, composition comes to me kinetically,” he raps. “So I forward all my findings with finesse phonetically.” Nazo performed a few of his songs in clubs, developing his lyrics while Kris and Taron developed the beats, developing friendships with rappers in the black culture. “After a certain point,” he says, “you start comparing your music to what’s out, and you compare your music to what other people are putting out and what you hear on the radio.” That comparison gave the three friends the confidence they needed to put their material out for public consumption. “We put together a demo to see how people react,” says Nazo. “We are trying to get management, trying to get to people in high places, see if I can get on the radio. That’s the current push, and it’s hard. It’s like a startup company, and you’re the product. It’s neverending.” The creative process Nazo says creating rap music is an interactive process with Kris and Taron “They create a lot of beats,” he says. “I’ll go through and say, ‘yo, I like this one, I can make a song on this one. And I write my song. Then I show it to them and see what they think. With choruses, I’ll work with Kris a lot. He’s very good with melodies and Taron is amazing with the drums and sequencing.” Nazo’s demo reel is called “Demo of the Year.” Why? Because the 12song presentation shows several different styles of music. “It shows serious, lyrical, commercial,” he says. “It’s all these different styles I’m putting together basically, and I feel like it’s put together thoroughly. It’s real. It’s not a joke. To me, it’s tight, so that’s why I gave it that title. That’s what I feel.” “Demo of the Year” is rap. On the album are political rap songs, a reggae rap song, and even a comedy rap song called “Zankou Chicken.” “There’s a funny song, where I talk about Zankou Chicken, which is like a food chain around here in L.A.,” says Nazo. “I’m actually trying to do something with that song. I’m trying to get the owner to sell that song as a single in his stores. It’s like a different approach to marketing music too. I feel like if he agrees to it, and I’m in the middle of negotiation, it’s a good way to get exposure, and it also represents our culture.” Nazo says he wrote Zankou Chicken about 18 months ago. He says he was listening to a hip hop song about Vans, the sneaker maker. That inspired him into writing about his favorite chicken joint. “I was driving in my car and thinking, damn man, what are these guys doing,” he says. “I was like, ‘Ever since I was a baby I’ve been eatin’ my chicken with a little bit of rice, put it on the side, man I even like mixin’ / At first I couldn’t get enough of my mama’s cookin / But got tired of it everyday, ha, just like with my exgirlfriend / Now I’m out the house free, I started with KFC / Moved C6 Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture 6/9/2007 onto El Pollo Loco but homie, it wasn’t me.” Nazo says he wrote the song so that he can stand out as an artist. “Every rapper that comes out around here is like, you know, tough, really lyrical, powerful with their words, which is really cool,” he says, “but I felt like I need a way for me to stand out. Not every artist can make a song that you’ll like immediately, that’ll get stuck in your head immediately.” Even though he is rapping, says Nazo, his raps aren’t just about repeating lyrics. “I feel like I’m bringing something new and innovative,” he says. “I don’t want to remake the same song. I feel like, to be relevant, you gotta carve your own niche, your own lane, your own space. So Zankou Chicken is definitely, probably my most unique song. And that is part of the package in the ‘Demo of the Year.’” Nazo, the Armenian One of the main things that Nazo says he wants to do as an artist, aside from trying to be commercially successful, is to get nonArmenians to like Armenians. “We kinda have a bad rap, out here,” he says, “especially because of the young guys who are rowdy.” Nazo says at the end of the day, hip hop is music from the Black culture and the ghetto and the poor. “I like the music, and I like the rawness of it,” he says. “It’s real, and when it comes out in my music I’m talking about living in America, that every American can relate to. In one song I talk about my own culture. I say, “I’m from a people dispersed, deserted and cursed / what’s worse / we work but we’re moving in reverse / It hurts / We’re thinking that we’re going to be reimbursed / Berzerk / Dreamin’ while we’re screamin’ fuck the Turks.” After hearing Nazo’s song about the Armenia Genocide on the web, one fan told him, “I didn’t know that about you guys, that you guys had a genocide. It made me like Armenians more.” That statement, says Nazo, made him feel that he had accomplished something. “Because that’s a great thing to hear,” he says, “that something you created made someone like your culture more.” What has surprised Nazo more after performing “Armenia,” was reaction from an Armenian teenager in the suburb of Montebello. “He told me, ‘Bro, after I heard that song, I wanted to learn more about my culture and my history.’ And that’s like the greatest thing anyone has told me in terms of getting reaction from my music.” His alias Rapper Nas, says Nazo, debuted in 1994 and is known as one of the most talented underground rap lyricists. That’s why Nazaret couldn’t use his nickname as his stage name. “We were thinking of different names,” he says. “And Kris said, ‘profit.’ He brought it up. He said, ‘why don’t you use profit.” Nazo says he immediately thought Kris was suggesting the word ‘prophet,’ and he told his friend that ‘prophet’ would come off too serious. “There was no way I could be in the commercial business of hip hop with that type of name.” That’s when Kris said he was suggesting the word ‘profit,’ beAfter hearing Nazo’s song “Armenia,” a fan told him, “Bro, after I heard that song, I wanted to learn more about my culture and my history.” Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture 6/9/2007 C7 cause of the duality of its sound and meaning. “That kind of interested me,” says Nazo. “It’s a name that can mean a lot of different things. Anyone who lives out here has that mentality of financial success, profit. So, “I’m a product of my own environment. But profit also says something about my people. They are a hard working people. Armenians have been able to go into any society and rise, and that’s because we value education. We stick together and work hard. So if you look at the word ‘profit’ that way, it kind of represents my culture also.” Nazo says one of the definitions of ‘profit’ is progress and that as an artist, he is always trying to make progress. “I try to push the envelope, do something that I haven’t done,” he says. “People who hear ‘profit’ might think prophet, phet, and I’m not saying, ‘I’m a prophet,’ but I do speak the truth. I try to speak what’s real to me and what I feel. So in that sense, it works out. I really like the name.” I am Armenian, says Nazo, “but I was born in America. I love my culture, and I love this country, because it’s given me the opportunity to possibly make music and make a living doing it. It’s all here. I just have to put my hustle on and get to that. And that’s Profit.” connect: www.thatsprofit.com OR myspace.com/thatsprofit

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