Inverse: The _Heeb_ Interview, Part 1: Toby

Inverse was an L.A.-based rap duo comprising Toby, a Jewish MC, and Tunji, a Muslim MC. Even on paper, Toby and Tunji came from vastly different places, but they set those differences aside to make some pretty lyrically tight independent hip-hop.

As with most interreligious relationships, it didn’t work out, and I had my suspicions that Toby’s mom’s constant nagging (“Why don’t you rap with a nice Jewish MC? What’s that Matisyahu boy up to?”) had a lot to do with it.

In part one of a two-part series, Heeb interviewed Toby to get his side of what happened.

Wait, you were a competing gymnast?

I competed once in nationals. I was regional champion. I think I got second in nationals when I was 14 years old.

So you did everything, like, rings and shit?

I did the whole thing. It’s a good foundation for everything else. You never lose that sense of body awareness.

Getting away from gymnastics—was your family practicing Judaism religiously?

Not religiously. Culturally, yes. We celebrated Jewish holidays and all that stuff. But [my parents] were both athiests.

But you didn’t have a Bar Mitzvah?

My mom didn’t want to give me a Bar Mitzvah when I was younger, because she didn’t want to spend all the money on it. But I actually got Bar Mitzvah’d in Israel when I was like 23.

Whoa, what were you doing in Israel?

Well, the first time was just on a Birthright trip. I’ve been a few times since then to see family, a girlfriend’s family.

Did you rap at your Bar Mitzvah?

No, it wasn’t traditional. I just went through the religious ceremony. I just repeated whatever [the rabbi] told me to say. But, according to them, that’s you taking on the responsibility of your Mitzvah, or whatever.

Did you have to learn Hebrew?

I didn’t have to. I took a couple years of Hebrew in college, and my girlfriend’s Israeli, so I can speak Hebrew pretty conversationally. My Spanish is much more useful here in L.A.

You guys touch upon L.A. in a lot of your songs. What’s the biggest influence L.A. has on your music?

My verse in ‘Beautiful City’ wasn’t at all about loving L.A., [it was] just describing some of the phenomena here. But I think the most profound effect L.A. has had on me, as far as musically, is the diversity of it. Any time you interact with people of different cultures and languages—the different sounds—all those things will affect you in one way or another. So being surrounded by that, all those elements of music and philosophy and thought and speech have been incorporated into everything I’ve been putting out. Also, I’m a pretty laid-back person, so that could be attributed to the L.A. thing.

So you made the So True EP free for download. What was that decision?

We were trying to get people to know who we were, what we were about, who we were working with and associated with. The world is completely oversaturated with hip-hop, and nobody wants to check anything unless you’re associated with somebody else. [We were] establishing ourselves without just dropping the record and people not wanting to buy it. We were setting it up so that when we got to the point where we made our album and put it out, people would know what our music was like, and then have some interest in getting the album or at least checking it out. But, obviously, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be doing the Inverse album.

Yeah, what happened with Inverse? Is it on permanent hiatus pretty much?

Well, I mean… I just feel like what’s happened [is that] both of us have different ideas of what we want to do with music, and different ways of getting the music out there. We’re also just extremely different people–how we interact with people and how we do business and all that stuff. It’s been difficult to maintain any kind of relationship, because we both just have completely opposite ideas of how we wanted things to go.

How did you guys hook up in the first place? It seems like an odd duo, like the hip-hop Odd Couple.

I feel like we had much closer approaches to doing things eight years ago when we first got hooked up. We met at a hip-hop show actually. And the first day we met, we realized that we had similar influences and similar ways of wanting to make music. We made a song that day. I just think we grew apart. People between the ages of 18 and 27, you’re trying to figure out who you are and where you want to go, and different people go in different directions.

That’s the way things drift sometimes, man.

But, to be honest with you, I think it would’ve behooved us to finish the album and put it out there, just because there are a lot of people that are waiting for it. Because if the goal was to then move on and do solo music, then we would be established as a group and people would know the individual members of that group. Now, we have to take a couple steps back and re-establish ourselves as solo artists. Then again, my other thought on that it, if you really care and love making music, you don’t really want to spend all that time, energy and money on a project that you’re not 100 percent into. So I can see where Tunji’s coming from and he can see where I’m coming from on that.

Do you guys talk to each other now that you’ve put the project aside?

A little bit, just because we’re still trying to do some business. We have a couple iTunes releases coming out, we have a video coming out that’s going to be on MTV2. Just a couple things like that. But, to be honest, we haven’t really hung out much for a couple years. We just moved apart and have different circles that we move in.

What do you have going on now?

I have to get a few more of these solo songs down before I can start doing some solo shows. I’m reveling in the responsibility of doing everything myself now. It drives me to go further. I’m excited about re-approaching the live show. I’m trying to finish the album, figure out how I’m going to put it out. It’s cool that I get to be the one that controls what I want to do. The only hard part about that is, I’m the only financer for it. Since I don’t make a lot of money, it’s very difficult.

Click here for more info on Inverse.

What do you think?