“This is my entourage,” jokes Rhymefest as he walks into the Jefferson Park home studio of his friend Franco de Leon. He’s accompanied by his teenage sister, his girlfriend, and a seven-year-old son from a previous relationship. “You know, all us hip-hop stars have a big posse.” Wearing a navy blue mechanic’s jumpsuit with rhymefest printed across the front, the rapper otherwise known as Che Smith settles on the couch, takes a bite from a hoagie, and glances at the TV–it’s tuned to BET, and 106 & Park is doing a segment on Kanye West’s GQ spread.
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Blue Collar will obviously get a big boost from the Kanye connection, but Smith insists that the album can stand on its own two feet. He thinks of it as a concept record devoted to the day-to-day African-American experience, an antidote to bling-obsessed mainstream hip-hop–he does mention a Hummer, for instance, but it’s driven by army recruiters targeting young black men. “If we went to the hood right now, you might not see any brothers on the corner selling dope, but you might see some people at the bus stop going to work,” says Smith. “There’s hardworking people that try to make ends meet that come home and have to deal with a drug addict in their family, or with children that’s been molested, or with utilities that have been turned off. Hard times are something that great comedy has been made of. Hard times are something that great books have been made of. Why not great rap?”
By the late 90s, though, a change in circumstances had forced Smith to put aside the notion of a music career. Shortly after he enrolled at Columbia College to study radio broadcasting, he got his girlfriend pregnant. They married and Smith moved to West Lafayette, Indiana, where his new wife had been attending Purdue. Their son was born in 1998, and Smith worked a series of low-paying jobs–usually two at a time–to support the family. He managed to finish Raw Dawg nonetheless, and when his wife graduated and found work as a chemical engineer in Indianapolis, he was once again free to pursue music full-time.
Smith has spent much of 2005 working on Blue Collar, both at de Leon’s place and at studios in New York, Atlanta, and New Orleans, collaborating with an impressive roster of producers–not just Ronson and West but Chicagoan No ID, the Miami team Cool and Dre, and New Yorker Just Blaze. Musically the album reflects his broad tastes–“I listen to Coldplay, the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Robert Johnson,” he says–but lyrically it’s tethered to the blues. “I bite blues stuff all the time,” Smith admits. “When you hear a blues song and they say, ‘Love don’t love nobody,’ I take that and say, ‘Love don’t love nobody, drugs don’t love nobody, so why we put that shit in our body?’ If not for somebody like me taking it and making that stuff relevant for today, nobody would. I have a sister that’s 16 and a son that’s 7 and they’d never hear it. They’d never know that tradition.”
