Q&A: Asher Roth

Rhapsody: It seems like things are going so fast for you. With the release of the record, has it been overwhelming?

Roth: I mean, a little bit, but at the same time I keep a good head on my shoulders, as far as what I have going on. I can’t take it too seriously. It’s a blessing that everyone wants to talk to me and figure out what’s going on. It does get hectic when you keep answering the same questions over and over again.

Rhapsody: What question is most annoying one that keeps coming up?

Roth: Everyone asks me, “How do you feel being compared to Eminem?” I don’t even know what that means.

Rhapsody: (Laughter) Well, exactly. I got a chance to listen to your record a whole bunch over the last two weeks. I like it a lot, and I like Eminem a lot. But I don’t know if I necessarily would put those two side by side.

Roth: Just because we are both white and make hip-hop music. But like you said, when you listen to my album, you sometimes forget that you’re listening to a hip-hop album.

Rhapsody: I saw an interview of you awhile back and one of the goals with the record was to make a whole record, not a collection of songs. I think that it does have a feel as a record and makes a trip. I would love to hear in your own words what that trip is about. When you were thinking about it as a whole, where does that ride take you?

Roth: Asleep In The Bread Aisle was me being unaware of all the vices, the craziness of the music industry, the craziness of society, and almost the naivety to it. Where I could just be who I am, be myself, very pure, very untainted, I’m sure my mentality will evolve and change as I am this really cruel and cutthroat business. With Asleep In The Bread Aisle, I’m essentially releasing an album [with] nine out of 12 [tracks] is from Oren Yoel, who doesn’t even have a placement before. It’s very pure, it’s very new, it’s very fresh, its will be very interesting moving forward. Asleep In The Bread Aisle for the most part is my making sense with the world around me very early on and trying to create something to me, this is who I am, what you see is what you get.

Rhapsody: With the big college anthem, it seems like people are reacting to that tune.
I know you went to West Chester for a bit, and left school. Do you ever feel like you’re left out of that college experience now that you’re doing the music thing full-time?

Roth: I mean, little bit. Sometimes I miss that, the simplicity and the irresponsibility of the college scene. Now I have much more responsibility on my plate, even when 11 or 12 year olds tell me how much they like my music, you have to take that into account, you just can’t just disregard them. Of course I loved it when I could just do anything, smoke anything, say anything and it didn’t matter but nowadays I do have to take into consideration of who’s listening and looking up to me.

Rhapsody: I was trying to imagine myself in your shoes, and playing that record for my mother. Have you ever found yourself having to explain to your mom that I didn’t really party with the girl who took all her clothes off. Do you ever feel sheepish when you’re presenting some of the more racy themes in the record with younger fans or not in the same generation as you?

Roth: Not so much, maybe the older, older generations, in the sense of my grandparents. My parents are super, super understanding and they understand that I am my own person. And a lot of the stuff I’m saying isn’t anything untrue or anything that be people haven’t been exposed to. There are some pornographic lyrics, yes. Everyone is pretty much aware of sex and weed has been everywhere. We have been trying to legalize marijuana since the seventies and the sixties. Other than that, I’m not talking about heroin or all this nonsense. The things that I’m glorifying like going to third place with a girl or smoking a joint, it’s stuff that we should be talking about. We should be talking about important is to have protected sex. Smoking a joint shouldn’t be looked down upon, considering with all the craziness that is going on in the world. Here we are locking up marijuana smokers and paying our tax dollars to keep them in jail. One of my philosophies with marijuana is they don’t want us to smoke it because it sits down and we start thinking and we start to ask questions and they don’t want that. They just want us going into our jobs everyday and they’re cool with alcohol because we just get belligerent and forget about everything.

Rhapsody: What are some of your great epiphanies from smoking marijuana? For my own disclosure, I remember the first time I got stoned, I was listening to a Neil Young record and how it blew my mind. What are some things that stick out in your mind when you’ve been high?

Roth: Listening to music has been one of them, but also it brings me back down to Earth. It helps me prioritize and realize what’s actually important and what’s not. For instance, these record sales or all this nonsense, it’s not important. What matters is family, friends, health, taking a deep breath, wearing SPF in the sun. People all get caught up in money and capitalism and that’s really what’s important. I understand that you gotta live and everything like that but it’s much more important to take care of yourself health wise, love the ones that you’re close to and things like that. When I smoke weed things start to make sense on a reality base. But I also understand why people do hard drugs, because reality is scarier than that world.

Rhapsody: I wanted to ask you some questions from fans through our Twitter feed. Who would you fight in a cage match if you knew you were going to win?

Roth: That is a good question. Is this for Pay-Per-View purposes or for pride?

Rhapsody: Both pride and Pay-Per-View.

Roth: Who would I think would draw the most fans? That’s a good question, I think it could be anybody. I think I could fight anybody and beat anybody. I think I could fight Lady GaGa.

Rhapsody: What would be so fun about fighting Lady Gaga?

Roth: It would just be dope to put her in the "Sharp Shooter."

Rhapsody: Did you grow up practicing wrestling moves in the backyard with the neighborhood kids?

Roth: Absolutely, we used to have little kid’s brothers come over on the "Razor’s Edge" in the swimming pool.

Rhapsody: One more from Twitter, they wanted to know actually about your childhood. “Tell me about your childhood, did you grow up loving women, weed and college?”

Roth: No, I kinda got slowly got into those things. Growing up it was more about the pool, little league baseball, handball and playing suicide. The weed, the women and college came a little bit later, right around junior or senior year of high school. For the most part I had a quiet upbringing. I was really surrounded by little league baseball and hanging down by the pool.

Rhapsody: When you’re looking down the road in the next couple months, this is probably going to be a pretty chaotic time in your life. What are those next few months going to look like? How will you process with everything that is going on? How do you step back from it?

Roth: It’s very necessary to step back and look at things objectively. But for the most part, I really just take it day by day and never get ahead of myself because that’s when stuff becomes overwhelming. When you see that you’re booked four months down the road and you start worrying about something that is three months down the road. Forget about it, and take it all in stride and not worry about stuff that you don’t have control over. For me, it’s just taking it day by day, hour by hour and letting things just fall into place and that’s important to me.

Rhapsody: How do you interact with your audience when you’re off stage? Are you communicating through MySpace or Facebook? Do you go deep on that? Or do you mostly leave it on the stage?

Roth: No, definitely I think it’s important to keep communicating with your fans. I’m a product of the more information age and the digital age with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Obviously, Facebook learned from MySpace’s mistakes and Twitter learned from Facebook’s mistakes. So it’s all kind of boiled down to Twitter, as you can see it’s a recent phenomenon. However, it’s easy, you can let people know what’s going on with your life with Twitter and Facebook. MySpace has gone way to crazy as far as everybody is promoting any and everything. MySpace has kinda faded out a little bit, which is a bummer, because that got me from the jump, but that just got too noisy.

Rhapsody: During those days when you seemed to grow, that must have been a trip. Can you put us back in that place, when you were about to explode?

Roth: It still didn’t make any sense until recently. For awhile, I thought alright this is cool, this isn’t real, this isn’t real., this isn’t real. Just recently, sometimes things go down and you have you’re “wow moments.” Like Cee-Lo coming in, and singing on one of the hooks that I wrote, that’s a “wow moment.” And then him and I shooting a video together and when I rapped for Jay-Z. Like whoa. For the most part, when I look at it in retrospect, it’s like wow, for the most part I look at it like this is just supposed to happen.

Rhapsody: I like you perspective on things. It’s cool to hear that your response to some of the things that is going on is in some ways similar to your record that it feels fresh and going with it.

Roth: Yeah, I think that’s the only way to go. I think what attributed to my success is not trying to push the river, it’s being who I am, not trying to put on any act or façade, just let things roll. When I used to get panicky about freestylin’, when I didn’t think about it I just let things roll, and the outcome became so much better. I encourage people to do the same thing and just go, just put your feet in and try it out, you’ll never know. They talk about there is no such thing as a stupid question and stuff like that, you just have to go in and see what happens. It’s really how it all started. With Atlanta, I was like I could leave school and let’s see what happens. And it just kept rolling from there.

Rhapsody: Let’s go back to the Lady GaGa cage match. What would be your signature cage match move be?

Roth: I would do the Rey Mysterio where I would jump on the ropes and grab the head with my legs and twist. "Razor’s Edge" is a great finishing move.

Rhapsody: I don’t know the "Razor’s Edge."