Being body slammed to the turf by a serious illness can have some strange positives and while it’s often hard to see it at the time, Chapman has acknowledged what his tango with Graves’ disease (a serious thyroid condition that also put a hold on Sia’s touring life) has taught him. That lesson is now being passed on to others through his involvement in The Be Project – a government initiative aimed at tackling the problem of binge drinking. Apart from supporting up and coming songwriters and film makers and keeping young people alive (awesome), it will hopefully reduce the amount of vomiting douche bags we all need to deal with.
“A lot of artists, kids look up to them and they think they wanna be like them but they don’t see them behind the scenes and what they’re really like,” Chapman says. “They don’t see that they’re alcoholics and that they’re really not happy at all. In their photos and shit and it’s so glorified, kids think they’re livin’ the dream and I’m there with ‘em thinking ‘this is all bullshit’. Music is really promoting binge drinking, especially a lot of international music. It’s all like ‘Yeah, you only live once, we get fucked up yeah! Work hard, play hard, we don’t give a shit!’ and somehow it’s cool to be like that. The people in the industry have always had that agenda to try and plug straight into kids thoughts. Before I got sick, everything got crazy for a while. I went from being in a bedroom wanting to do music to playing festivals and I was in front of thousands of people and everyone’s really hysterical and shit and I definitely didn’t handle it very well being a really shy person. You can just start abusing yourself with substance abuse and drinking. I got lucky, when my thyroid went crazy I couldn’t do that anymore and it gave me a slap in the face. Since then I’ve stepped back and I’ve realised that if you’ve got issues you’ve gotta deal with them.”
Chapman’s dealing with his, and that’s why folks like he and 360 are actually living the dream. The next few months are set to be massive with his album looking to be wrapped up by the end of December. “Everything’s being put out on the label with both mine and 360’s solo albums out early to mid-next year and then with the album we’ve done together, we’ll have that ready and we’ll have to gauge how it’s going, whether it’s crazy or not, and see whether it comes out late in the year or early in the next year. Both the solo album’s will definitely be finished up by late December though,” he says.
They says the surest way to lose money is to start a record label, and with the two-way street of Obese and Elefant Traks now divided into a multi-lane highway of countless hip hop specific labels, what motivated Chapman to start the label? “I always wanted to have one just on my own called Easy Records and I was gonna do that and put out my stuff on that,” he says. “Plus I had a few other people just within my circle that I wanted to believe in and put out their music; I’m really passionate about that. But then cause me and 360 have the manager and we’re always talking, he wanted to do the same thing so we were like ‘stuff it, let’s do it together. That’ll be even more fun’. We might lose a shit load of money, we’ll find that out real soon, and it’s all pretty innocent, but we just love it and we’ve always wanted to do it. A lot of the people we idolised in the hip hop genre came from nothing and were pretty entrepreneurial and started labels, so I guess the whole idea was glorified for us.”
Hopefully there’s enough room in this large land of few people to share the hip hop spoils. So far everyone seems to be playing nicely. “The people that I come across seem to be really excited that things are growing to this kind of level but I’m sure there was, well I mean Obese was the huge label for so long,” he says. “Elefant Traks seems to be such a tight-knit little family and seems to be going strong.
BY KRISSI WEISS
