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Dessa: American recording artist. Type A personality, type O blood donor. Types sixty words a minute. Me.
Doomtree: A hip-hop collective based in Minneapolis. Founded in 2001, maybe. (Didn’t keep great records then.) Known for genre-bending releases—blending rap, punk, pop, rock, and classical sounds—and an impassioned, physical live show that’s part tent revival, part intramural hockey game.
Current roster: Cecil Otter, Dessa, Lazerbeak, Mike Mictlan, Paper Tiger, P.O.S, Sims.
Draw: The number of fans a performer can attract to a show.
“What’s your draw?”
“A thousand at home, 250 on the road.”
Day sheet: A detailed schedule of the day’s events on tour, including drive time, phoners, time zone changes, opening acts, club Wi-Fi passwords, catering information, and set times.
“What time do we hit tonight?”
“Check your own damn day sheet, my guy.”
Door deal: A show that pays performers a cut of the money collected at the door. Generally less desirable than a guaranteed fee.
Drop: Merchandise shipped from a warehouse or manufacturer to be intercepted by a touring party, to replenish their inventory on the road. Often addressed to a club or a hotel. Lost in transit approximately 30 percent of the time.
Ears: In-ear monitors that allow performers to listen to their live sound in earbuds, as opposed to hearing themselves amplified through speakers on the stage.
Femcee/Feminem: You do not need these terms. For anything. Ever.
Head: A rap fan well versed in hip-hop music and culture who identifies enthusiastically with both.
Hit the split: To draw enough fans to warrant a bonus at the end of the night. If and after show expenses have been recouped, an artist typically earns 60 to 80 percent of the profit.
Hype: Rap backup vocals. To hype another rapper’s lyric usually means delivering that line in unison with the lead vocalist, often to allow him or her time to inhale.
Laminate: The laminated pass a performer wears to prove to security staff that he or she is part of the touring party and should be granted backstage access. Usually affixed to a lanyard, often threaded through a belt loop. Worn around the neck only by tour managers and nerds.
Midnight it: To set the knob on a sound console to zero so that the dial points straight up, like the hands of a clock at midnight. (I made this one up, and I think it’s got promise.)
MOUNTAIN: The name of Doomtree’s fifteen-passenger Econoline tour van.
One-off: A single show, not part of a routed tour.
Over/Under: A complicated betting game in which small amounts of money are won and lost based on the ability to accurately predict a bandmate’s one-word answer to the question, “Overrated or underrated?”
“Okay, Paper Tiger: Divorce. Overrated or underrated?”
[All passengers in the tour van quietly place bets on which he’ll choose. Meanwhile Paper, in silence, contemplates everything he knows about divorce. He may consider the challenges of single parenting, private property law, the women’s rights movement, the genetic foundations of pair-bonding. He’ll then compare his assessment of the merits of divorce with the broader cultural appraisal—an impression he’s gleaned from a lifetime of watching movies and TV, reading VICE and the New York Times, and conversations in bars and classrooms and on the train. He is strictly forbidden from offering any of his rationale.]
“Underrated.”
[Paper shakes off his own private turmoil—who wants to say divorce is underrated?—while money trades hands. Now it’s Lazerbeak’s turn.]
Spit a pella: To perform a rap verse a cappella. The rest of Doomtree argues that I invented this term, out of whole cloth. I did not. But I concede that it sounds dated and like it’s trying much too hard—a description that sometimes fits me too.
Phoner: A publicity interview conducted by phone. While on tour, this type of interview often happens in a moving van, with bandmates listening in, mocking your answers, or talking whenever you’re silent, pretending to be the interviewer on the other end of the line.
Punisher: A relentless fan who won’t heed polite cues that a performer has other work to attend to. Rappers sometimes give one another discreet signals to indicate which members of the crowd are punishers.
Radius clause: A term in a performance contract that prevents a musician from booking a second show within a certain number of days and a certain number of miles from the first. Designed to consolidate draw and ensure that an artist does not book shows that might compete with one another. Very difficult to explain to old high school friends asking if you’ll perform at their son’s best friend’s school’s fund-raiser.
Rat king: The tether-ball-sized knot of microphone cords that forms in the center of the stage as five rappers run around each other all night. Nearly certain Cecil Otter coined this one.
Ring the mics out: To test microphones for feedback and remove problematic frequencies. Part of the preshow sound check.
Spitter: A technical rapper, capable of delivering complex patterns at speed. (In Doomtree, Mike and Sims are, arguably, the spitters.)
Tour blues: Spells of sadness that hit either midway through the routing—when you sulk against the window with your headphones on for seven hours a day—or after you’re home, where you have to do laundry at regular intervals and maintain human relationships and everyone confuses your job with a vacation which is insulting and you are exhausted and have what might be bronchitis and you’ve lost a lot of muscle mass sitting in the car all day and have blown out your knees by jumping on them as soon as you’re out of the car and now that there’s actually some downtime you’re not sure how to function without the adrenaline baseline of living in a moving vehicle with the other Lost Boys.
Truth or Consequences: A municipality in New Mexico where tour vehicles are often stopped and checked for contraband, particularly drugs.
Van call: The time of day at which all members of the crew must report to the tour van for departure to the next city.
Walk-ups: People who purchase tickets at the door, as opposed to in advance of the show.
X: My ex-boyfriend. Depending on how you count, we dated on and off for thirty-two months or fourteen years. We’ve been in the same rap crew for most of our adult lives. We’ve been trying to fall out of love, and stay out, for a very long time. This is my side of our story. He was nice enough to green-light the telling of it. (He was, and is, a pretty remarkable dude.)