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Kenny 'Dope' Gonzalez Interview
Continued from 1 / 2
From the outside, Gonzalez occupies an enviable position. After all, nobody seems to be hipper than the drummer, or the upstart programmer who ekes out timeless beats. When they're by themselves, though, rhythm generators can dream of a post-percussion existence, and Gonzalez insists that he's been more than the beats demon to Vega's heavenly keyboards. "I did a lot of those records," he says, "but people like to categorise us."
Kenny demonstrated that he can make a whole record by himself, and a very good one at that, with his Bucketheads album, which was released in 1995 and included "The Bomb  (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind)", a sensational track. He deepened his production work on the seminal Nuyorican Soul album, which included "Nautilus", which was cherry-picked by the Brooklynite for a reworking. And he showed off his skills again in his recent cover of Sylvester's "I Want You". "When Masters at Work do stuff together it's magical," says Gonzalez. "But separately I'm able to venture out a little more because it's just me and I'm not second-guessing anything." He adds, after a barely discernible pause, "I also get recognized in a different way."
Recognition is like a drug - the more you get, the more you need, just to get the same feeling of that first hit - and Gonzalez, hailed repeatedly for his contribution to dance over the last fifteen-plus years, wants even more recognition. There's a shameless New York-style bravado to his self-belief; what he's got so far is simply not enough, no matter how far he's travelled from his lowly back-street origins, no matter how many tributes have been cast in his direction. Gonzalez plans to make the most of whatever comes his way in the future by concentrating on his own projects, even if MAW and Nuyorican Soul remain ongoing ventures that he'll stay attached to for as long as he can imagine - like the perfect taste of a favourite childhood dish.
"To be honest, after Nuyorican Soul I wanted to break off and do something on my own, but I felt I couldn't break off because it was just at that level," he says. "It would have been selfish to break off and do something on my own. So we kept it going for a couple more years and then after that we broke off a little. That happened in 1999, 2000." It was at that point that Gonzalez turned his attentions to his labels Dope Wax and Kay-Dee. The focus of Dope Wax has been new material - remixes of artists such as Kanye West and Jill Scott, original recordings from breakthrough bands, plus the sonic chemistry of streetwise beat scientists. Kay-Dee, meanwhile, is run as a joint venture with the Scottish funk DJ Keb Darge and operates as a vinyl orphanage where long-lost funk records can be nurtured and then released back into the world. "Me and Louie always knew there would be a time when we wanted to break out," says Gonzalez. "We still do things together, but right now we're featuring ourselves separately and people are starting to realize who Kenny Dope is, and what he's done for the business and dance music."
Having played the sullen background man to Vega's sociable, loquacious front, Gonzalez is starting to talk the talk. The thought that up until now he's simply done what a DJ/remixer/producer is supposed to do - play and create records - makes the change of direction sound unnecessary, but Gonzalez says he's tired of the fallout that can come from being a little to the left of interview-friendly. "It's kind of my fault because I never talked with people. If I was DJing, I'd go in fifteen minutes before, do what I had to do and leave. I wouldn't socialize, so everyone had this perception of me as a knucklehead. But through these compilations I can speak my thoughts."
Like so many musicos, Gonzalez has an obsessive streak that he's barely able to contain. He says that he's not addicted to vinyl, but it's clear that he's not about to quit buying, and he sounds a little guilty when he guesstimates to owning some thirty-five thousand records. About half of his collection sits in his condo, while the other half is in storage. Until recently, Gonzalez insisted that whenever he toured he was taken straight from the airport to the best records stores in town. "I've got stuff from all over the place - Turkey, Greece, Germany," he says. "It was crazy." Gonzalez confesses to having bought an unknown quantity of records that he's yet to play. "You go out for a couple of days and get stuff and seal it all up and they end up in storage," he explains. It's a rainy-day strategy: who knows when Gonzalez will need to hear some fresh vinyl, and who knows if he'll have the money to buy some when that day arrives?
Gonzalez, though, has become more worldly-wise as he's hit his mid-thirties. The initial fever of wanting to own everything that's good has given way to an acknowledgement that the source material is infinite and the purpose is to enjoy what's out there, including the records you can't get, rather than accumulate for the sake of accumulation. "I've got ten or fifteen friends who are hardcore collectors," he says. "Everybody always has different collections and you always get turned onto stuff. The period I love is from 1968 to 1976, 1977. That's my time period."
It's a period that is reflected on his Kenny Dope "‘Choice - A Collection Of Classics" compilation. "Azuli were expecting a house compilation, but I didn't want to do a house compilation," says Gonzalez. "Anybody can mix out of a house break, but I wanted to create a story and that's what this is. I take breaks, loop them up, introduce edits and just have fun. That's the thing that's missing in dance music production now - people aren't having fun." It's easy to hear Gonzalez having two tonnes of fun on this compilation and disco - perhaps the ultimate fun dance music - lies at the root of his selections. "I've done quite a few compilations now and I wanted to focus on records you don't normally hear. I'm thirty-six this year, and I'm constantly trying to educate the younger crowd. I've tried to capture an era. I wanted to have the compilation sound a certain way - for the mixing to sound the way it used to sound when I started DJing."
 The expectation that Gonzalez would put together a mix of house and hip hop was natural enough. Why would the beats man choose anything that didn't have its head buried deep in the cavernous world of rhythm? The answer to that question lies in Gonzalez's labyrinthine record collection, which functions as an idealistic (if somewhat inert) musical community. Different sounds from different ages and continents nestle up, side by side, forming a tight-knit resource of sonic pleasure. Gonzalez says, quite reasonably, that his knowledge is "ridiculous" when it comes to music, and although it might be impossible for him to listen to all of his records, each time he is asked to put together a compilation he swivels his baseball cap around to burrowing position and digs out some gems - gems to share or, to use one of his favourite words, "showcase".
Managing and sharing his collection, Gonzalez is part archivist, part librarian, part press officer. However many records he might go on to produce and remix, both by himself and alongside Vega, and however many records he might break on Dope Wax and Kay-Dee, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Gonzalez is in his element when he's sifting through his shelves and picking out tracks for a collection. "I'm sitting on fifty or sixty mix tapes that I made for myself to listen to," he says. "I could do these compilations forever."
On this one, we hear Gonzalez as he wants to be heard and as he would like us to hear. "I'm not just into hip hop or beats or house," he says. "I'm into music. Everybody gets caught up in this fucking categorizing shit, but at the end of the day you've got good shit and bad shit. You've got music you can feel and music you want to throw away." There are no vinyl "Frisbees" (Gonzalez's term) here. "I'm into going a step further than just the beat. I think there are a lot of people noticing what I'm about in the last two years. It's taken all this time."
The Gonzalez that followers are beginning to recognise has been there from the start. Nineteen-seventies Brooklyn was never just a colourful biographical detail that prefigures the real bit of his life. It's the neighbourhood setting and vibrant street culture that seeped into his bloodstream and left him rooted in disco and funk - the very sounds that would blare out of car radios and home stereos as Gonzalez went to buy the milk, and that continued to echo around the neighbourhood as he dawdled by the local DJs on his way back home.
Original sleeve notes by Tim Lawrence ©. Tim is the author of "Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79", available on Amazon. He is currently writing a biography of Arthur Russell and a book on eighties dance culture.
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