lines of flight

One of the first real interviews I did after graduating from journalism school was in 1998 with Del tha Funkee Homosapien, a solo emcee and official or unofficial head of the Hieroglyphics crew. Their whole collective came to Honolulu to film a video for the song “You Never Know.” The song and the video don’t even really go together, but the week or two they spent here confirmed that Hawaii and hiphop did.

As an eager, wanna-be, hiphop journalist, I finagled a bunch of interviews for RE:ACT magazine, which was actually more of a zine, but I would never call it that. I spent hours talking with Del, A-Plus, Tajai, Casual, Pep-Love and the video director, whose name escapes me, as did his interview, due to an amateurish technical error on my part. The Del interview was the most in depth and exists online on a very early version of the quadmag site.

Basically because I didnt know any better, I spent hours and hours doing a full transcript of the interview, including pauses and “ums” and conversational false starts. I just wanted to get it right (despite typing his answers in all caps being so wrong!). In the end I also spent a lot of time editing it down and smoothing it out because of space restrictions.

Del later told me something to the effect that he had never seen himself quoted in such detail, like he could really read that that was the way he spoke. Of course I had already learned why most journalists do not deal with interviews in this way–it is an incredible amount of work! It is much easier to copy in some current info from a press release, rehash a little background, freshen it up with some short quotes and top it off with a few writerly flourishes.

The irony here is that even as I have become more polished as a journalist, my graduate school work has brought me full-circle: I’m spending hours and hours doing painstakingly detailed transcriptions of interviews with people I admire but am not getting paid to interview.

At least this time I know better than to type anything in all caps.