Citizen Cope: The New Gay Interview

(Photo courtesy of CitizenCope.com)

Citizen Cope plays tonight at the 9:30 Club. Show starts, oddly enough, at 9:30.

Clarence Greenwood, the man more commonly known as Citizen Cope, is the kind of musician that my 30 year-old sister would've had a crush on in high school. Not just for his Sassy Magazine, long-hair-and-chin-strap good looks, but for the fact that he practically oozes the bad boy appeal that girls below the age of 17 find so irresistible. No less than three female friends of mine asked me to slip him their number during the course of our interview. I understand where they're coming from, as the guy's music is pretty damn sexy too.

A bluesy, hip-hoppy amalgamation of, say, Carlos Santana and Everlast, Citizen Cope has probably reached you through one or another unlikely forums. "Son's Gonna Rise" popped up in a Pontiac commercial, Sideways (which actually features Santana) added emotional weight to the end of a 2006 episode of Scrubs, and "Let The Drummer Kick" made cameos on two increasingly ignominious TV institutions, "Entourage" and "So You Think You Can Dance."

Below the fold, you can check out the former D.C. resident's thoughts on the changing face of Shaw, underground superstardom and the art of the perfect makeout song.

The New Gay Zack: Where did your band name come from?

Clarence Greenwood: Cope is my nickname, its just my AKA. Its not necessarily a band name, its just like, I was doing demos and I didn't know what to call it, I was just gonna say Clarence, but I started putting Citizen Cope on it. Its just a childhood nickname from when I was a kid.

TNG: So you grew up in Memphis. Did that have a hand in adding a blues influence to your sound?

CG: I was just born in Memphis. It says that in my last bio, they made a big deal of it, but I only lived there for a year, then Mississippi, then D.C.

TNG: Where in D.C.?

CG: I grew up in Northwest. I grew up around Wilson High School [in Tenleytown] and then I lived in Adams Morgan and in Shaw right before I left for New York in '99. I've been back because I play there every year, a few times a year, and its definitely different. I can't believe how different it is, some of the places we used to walk had a real air of danger, even if they weren't dangerous they had an air of danger, and now they seem like Disney Land.

TNG: Yeah, Shaw must be a whole different world to you now.

CG: I went there and there was coffee shop where people were sitting outside. When I was there you had to get whatever you wanted from the bullet proof glass at the Amoco station.

TNG: Do you miss D.C.?

CG: Yeah, but I love New York. I really love it up here, I've been here for like seven, eight years.

TNG: To back up, then, where do you get your various influences from?

CG: I wasn't trying to put them together, its just what I like. I like the songwriting and storytelling of the blues, I like the energy of hip-hop in the sense of the rebel spirit of it, not just the beats of it, but the poetry of it, and the being able to speak up against certain things like the government and having conscious thought about doing what art does, which is test the boundaries. I love the production of soul records like Willie Mitchell, I was influenced by Chuck Brown's live shows. ... Its not necessarily like a hybrid of anything, but its just what I like listening to. Hopefully, you can just make something that can be yours and at the end of the day sound cool.

TNG: Citizen Cope is the name that you record under, but its also the band that you tour with. How big a band will you be playing with at 9:30?

CG: I'll have four other people onstage, an organist, a pianist, a drummer and bass player, and then a background singer for a couple songs.

TNG: Why have a band when you record solo? How different is it from when its just you?

CG: I can't play everything at the same time. I do a lot of drum machines, a lot of programming, but I wouldn't trust myself to play piano at my own gig. I enjoy having different players on the records. I started out playing just by myself with the acoustic, I wanted to bring a band into it eventually. I still do the acoustic shows, but its not me playing all the instruments, its just [me playing the acoustic] and I run some tape on a couple songs.

TNG: I'm probably not the first to tell you this, but you write some really good makeout music. How do you sustain that tone throughout your songs?

CG: [Laughing] I never heard that before, but thank you. People had said that it was good love-making music, I guess its just the tempo and the... I don't know, I have no idea, its a good thing to have, I guess. Usually when you do down-tempo music it lends itself to that somewhat, and the fact that I got a couple love songs is part of that, but I don't think I set out to do anything but write good songs.

TNG: I asked some friends of mine who are huge fans of yours if they had anything they wanted to ask you about, and several of them mentioned the fact that your song "Let The Drummer Kick" was featured on "So You Think You Can Dance." What was that like? How did that even happen?

CG: That was hilarious, I didn't expect that. I had gotten a call from a friend of mine, they were trying to clear it [for use on the show], and I was like yeah, whatever.

TNG: Did you get a lot of exposure through it?

CG: That week it sold a lot of singles just from that TV show. That record came out in '02, it was like four, five years old, so it was surprising that it became one of the top ten downloads on the rock/pop charts that week.

TNG: It seems like a lot of people get introduced to your music through various TV soundtracks, like Scrubs or that Pontiac ad. How do you feel about this?

CG: TV brings people to [my individual songs] and then they get exposed to the whole records, but its always different songs. If you go to a Cope show people are singing all the songs, I don't feel like I have one song in a commercial [that everyone comes to see,], they know pretty much every song from every record. I've been blessed that people enjoy the whole albums.

TNG: You're an artist with a cult following and a pretty wide exposure, but you're still not necessarily a superstar. Is that frustrating? Would you ever change anything about your music to reach that next level?

CG: I like that its underground, I've made what I consider three underground classics. It would've been great for them to go multi-platinum, but with the pace of this music... Its good that the word of mouth is so good and amazing that its just continued to grow and will continue to grow. Mainstream pop culture is something that you can't say "I wanna be in it," it just kinda happens. Once you get there you can expand on it, but at the same time it just kinda lands itself on you and its better to have a solid foundation of good art that you continue to grow. People enjoy the music but its not because of a celebrity. When I see people on the street and they say "I love the music," its genuine. Its not like "I saw that guy on TV." I think its a good point where you get to do what you love to do and luckily I'm still inspired by it.