Hailing from Nova Scotia, Buck 65 was a pioneer on the Canadian hip hop scene in the early 1990s. The last few years he’s kept himself busy as a producer and host of a weekday “Drive” show on CBC Radio 2 (under his birth name Richard Terfry). Friday night, Buck 65 is in town to play a show sponsored by the Regina Folk Festival as part of its Concert Series. The gig is at the Exchange (doors at 8 p.m.) and tickets are $20 $25 advance and $25 $30 at the door.
Somewhat last minute while winding up production on our gargantuan Best of Regina 2014 I got a chance to do a phone interview with him from Victoria about the gig. You can read more in the issue that comes out today, but the album he’s touring is called Neverlove. It was inspired by the break-up of his marriage, and contains a lot of dark material.
Below is the first video single “Super Pretty Naughty”. In the context of the album, I read it as a takedown of the Justin Bieber-style celebrity that exists in the music business, and as a possible parody/commentary on the pressures of being a musician and trying to maintain a relationship.
When I asked Terfry about the song, he said it started as a joke in the studio to help lighten things up a bit. “I’d been feeling bad for a long time and was sort of sick of myself. I thought ‘I need a break from feeling this terrible.’ So as a way to do that I just sat down with a friend to make the stupidest thing I could make in the hope I’d make myself laugh.”
While he was doing that, he added, he remembered a girl he’d liked years ago. “She loved music, and it seemed to play a big part in her life, but it seemed so different from what music meant to me and I couldn’t understand. For her, music was mostly to go out to clubs and dance to. So I asked her to put into words what it was specifically that she liked about the music because I couldn’t hear it.”
When Terfry was in the studio, he said, he stumbled across the notebook with the girl’s comments and incorporated them into the song. “It sounded like the music that I knew she liked, and the lyrics are just the most lurid stuff I’ve ever written. I played it for the first time in London two years ago. It was toward the end of the show, things had gone well, so I felt I had the crowd in the palm of my hand. So on a whim, I asked ‘Do you want to hear the silliest thing ever? The dumbest song I’ve ever written.’
“Everyone was in a great mood, I think it was a Friday night, and they said ‘Yeah.’ I said ‘Okay, you’ll hate this, and I apologize in advance.’ But to my surprise everyone loved it. Before, I’d been thinking the song would get discarded. But the reaction was so strong that I decided to give the song another look because the response was unbelievable. And I got to say, as outside from the rest of my body of work that it is, it’s a blast to perform every night.”