Culture That Made Me: Kojaque the rapper selects his touchstones
Kojaque plays in Cork Opera House on Friday, Picture: Joshua Onabowu
Kevin Smith, 27, is the rapper known as Kojaque. He grew up in Cabra, Dublin. In 2018, he was nominated for a Choice Music Prize for Deli Daydreams, a concept album about a week in the life of a deli worker. In 2021, his album Town’s Dead was also shortlisted for a Choice Music Prize. He is a co-founder of the independent label Soft Boy Records. On Friday, he performs with his band at the Cork Opera House. See: www.corkoperahouse.ie
Arctic Monkeys were a favourite band growing up, one of the first bands I went to see in concert. It would have been Suck It and See era. They're a band I still listen to. I love the direction they've taken their music.
Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino is one of my favourite records from the last few years. They’re a band that I evolved with. My teenage years was soundtracked by them. As I got older, their sound changed and my tastes changed.
I was into indie rock when I was a teenager. I was mad into The Maccabees. Toothpaste Kisses was one of their first tunes I heard and I loved it. I loved the music video for it. Their record Given to the Wild came out when I was maybe 16. Orlando Weeks vocals are amazing. He's got a particular tone. It’s haunting. It’s something that grabbed me. And their musicality and song-writing is brilliant.
Doom is one of my favourite writers. He’s got a bizarre mind. He does a lot of stuff with different personalities through his records. Super niche and cult. He seemed like someone who wanted to write for the sake of writing. There was no way any of his music would place on radio.
When I started listening to him first, it felt special. You could dive into his lyricism. He's got an interesting way with words. The punchlines are never what you expect: “One thing this party could use is more …ahem/Booze, put yourself in your own shoes.” He got me more into the writing side of things. I was obsessed with him.
There isn’t anyone that's topped Kendrick in terms of lyricism in our generation. Even going further, he's one of the best recording artists ever. One thing that didn't cross my mind when I started doing music was how important your performance is when you're recording.
The different kind of characters you can bring out from your voice’s inflection when you're putting something down. He does that so well. With every record, he's got a different performance in his vocal quality. His voice is his instrument. When that record Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers came out, it took me a good few listens to understand what he's talking about. I haven't stopped listening to it since.
The music video for Drop by The Far Side was directed by Spike Jonze, who directed Her and other films. It's this iconic video. The gimmick is that the whole thing is in reverse. The lads from The Far Side learnt their four-minute long song in reverse.
They had a linguistics coach come in. He wrote out the lyrics phonetically and the lads learned it that way. Taking it a step further with a music video so that it's not just something visual – there's actually a performance element to it. I always found that interesting.
J Dilla is brilliant when it comes to sampling. He’s got a tune with Slum Village called Fall in Love, which I love. It's got a sample of Gap Mangione’s orchestral song Diana in the Autumn Wind. It's 16 bars of this gorgeous orchestral tune, a little refrain with some strings underneath it. Dilla put a high-pass filter on it and drums that he sampled from something else. That tune is one of my favourite hip hop songs.
I love Magnolia with Tom Cruise and John C Reilly. I'm a sucker for films that have multiple stories with one similar timeline. What I like about the film is that it follows several different characters and how the things they do influence different people. It’s the butterfly effect.
There's something about that that I like. Tom Cruise’s character is amazing. I feel it was an interesting prediction for how stuff has gone. There seems to be a lot of characters like him where satire is lost on them nowadays.
There's a film I saw years ago called Ida, directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, black and white, and shot in a 4:3 ratio. It’s about an orphan who grows up in a convent. Before she takes vows to become a nun the Mother Superior takes her aside and says, “Listen, you've got family. You must talk to them before you decide you want to be married to Jesus for the rest of your life.”
She meets her auntie, who's a lawyer in Poland. It's after World War Two. What I found arresting about the film is that every shot is static bar two shots, which means the camera doesn't move. Shots are composed gorgeously. It's like watching paintings because they've taken so much time to compose the scene, to get all the actors looking exactly right. It's also set in a convent, which has powerful imagery to begin with.
The Sopranos is the best telly ever made. It was such an interesting take on Italian American gangsters. Especially when you come in from Godfather era and Goodfellas, and how slick mob life was portrayed in those films and how tough all the men were.
To go from that to modern-day, the-heydays-are-over mafia portrayed in The Sopranos. Even the concept of a mob boss who has to see a therapist is hilarious. What I love about The Sopranos is everything they don't say. They've got a beautiful way of saying nothing. It's unbelievably written and very, very funny.
Kevin Barry is one of my favourite writers. All his books are brilliant. In particular, I love his short stories. Dark Lies the Island was the first collection I read by him. I adored it. There's a great story in the book about this guy who's got fanciful ideas of retiring to the country to run a hotel by day and to be a writer by night.
He ends up running this hotel on the west coast. He never writes. He's stuck day in, day out with these people in the hotel bar that he absolutely hates. One day a big flood comes and he realises he's in his own grave, essentially. It's a beautiful story, about getting trapped in a fantasy.
