Described by slam champ Charles Ellik as “emcees with no beats, (and) a hardcore band with no instruments,” Jamie’s spoken-word group, The Suicide Kings, performs at venues as varied as punk warehouses, hip hop clubs, poetry slams, high schools, and shelters for at-risk youth. The group’s ability to attract punk audiences stems partly from the fact that one of its members, Rupert Estanislao, is also the frontman for the bilingual, Filipino-American hardcore band, Eskapo. As Jamie contends, Rupert brings a hardcore sensibility into their performance, because he “has all the demonic, guttural, earthshaking, bio-blast flying out of his throat on any given night.” Yet, on some nights Suicide Kings have opened for famous hip hop-agitprop groups like The Coup, and still manhandled their audience: fans of both scenes “really get what we’re doing, because it’s the same aggression, and the same meter.”

Growing up, Jamie says he loathed rap for all the “typical” reasons: He thought it was mostly about “gold teeth, and rapping about the honeys” –which, to be fair, is still a large part of it. One day, Jamie’s brother promised him a blunt if he agreed to stay up and watch Yo! MTV Raps, “because my brother thought the music I was listening to at the time –Ministry, Janes Addiction, the Sex Pistols- was art faggy, gloom-and-doom, loud, screamy, bullshit, and he hated it.” While Jamie sat, completely blitzed, with his eyes glued to the tube, a Cypress Hill video came on. The rappers were laughing about shooting a guy who’d broken into their house, belting a chorus that went: “Here is something you can’t understand/How I could just kill a man.” Jamie was hooked.

Rachel: Introduce yourself.

Jamie: My name is Jamie Kennedy. I’m the host of Tourettes Without Regrets, a freestyle battle/poetry slam/variety show in Oakland. I’m also a member of a spoken word poetry troupe called the Suicide Kings, which also has Rupert Estanislao, the singer for the bilingual punk band, Eskapo.

Rachel: Can you talk about your upcoming tour with Sage Francis?

Jamie: I’d gone on a solo tour in Minneapolis which did very well. It was actually the same week that Sage Francis had his shows –I actually went to one of his shows when I was there. I discussed the idea of Suicide Kings opening for Sage Francis, some promoters bit at it, and ended up booking a whole bunch of shows with us together. I guess it’s called the Abusement Park Tour: Suicide Kings, Sage Francis, and three other bands who meld hip hop and spoken word.

I met Sage in 1999 when I was on the Oakland Slam Team –the first year Oakland had a slam team- and we went to the National Poetry Slam in Chicago. Sage has always been a rapper, but he’s also done slam poetry, so we were going against his team. He did a poem that was about his re-incarnation as a B Boy –it’s known as “The Mullet Poem”- and he beatboxes in it, but also details how he grew up in a white town where everybody was into butt-rock and had mullet haircuts, but he was all about Run DMC. He talks about his evolution as a fan of rap music.

I had just performed, and was walking to the bar to get a Long Island Iced Tea. Sage comes up, starts beatboxing, and launches this whole poem about his allegiance to hip hop. For whatever reason, I was on a highly politicized, extremely opinionated, African American-majority slam team. There was something about his poem that just pissed them off, because they felt like there was this white man trying to rob them of their culture. They actually started booing and hissing at him. It was really ugly. Morley Safer from 60 Minutes was actually in the audience, filming stuff for an upcoming 60 Minutes documentary. It was just this wacked, chaotic moment where people were booing, and he was still ripping through his poem.

He finished his poem, got a nice score, and all that, but later when I ran into him that night, he almost swung at me because he thought I was one of the people booing him –that I was part of the contingency. I actually had nothing to do with it. In fact, I was adamantly trying to stay out of it, because I didn’t want to cross some weird barrier. I was the little redhead Judas on the team, and they sort of used me as the sucker punch, where they’d just throw me out there to fight dirty and do my thing, but there wasn’t a whole lot of intensive friendship or comradery between some of the poets on that team. I was the only white member, and I was pretty apparent.

So that was how I met Sage. I met him on the street, and he was about to swing on me. I totally explained the misunderstanding, and he gave me a free CD. I remember listening to the CD, and listening to his old band called AOI. Then I ran into him again when he was opening for a show out here at Slim’s, and he invited me onstage to perform. Then I ran into him at a few other shows –he’s friends with a lot of the same slam poets as I am.

He became enormous in the underground from winning a couple really big freestyle battles. One of them was Scribble Jam which is in Minneapolis. It’s one of the benefits that’s put on by Mr. Dibbs and Slug from Atmosphere. It’s a big, enormous hip hop convention –in fact, one of the largest in the United States. He’s been getting larger and larger, and just recently, he got a record contract with Epitaph –I believe it’s a three album deal, but I’m not sure.

He has some of his slam poetry on his albums, but he’s primarily a rapper now. But he performed two years ago –I wanna say in 2001, or 2002- on the slam team from Providence, Rhode Island. So he’s been doing shows all over the place, and he just did a song with Bad Religion. A lot of Bad Religion fans were very miffed by the idea of a rapper on a Bad Religion song.

Rachel: How long have you been a slam poet?

Jamie: Since 1999. I had no idea what was happening. I was just launching myself blindfolded into this maelstrom of egocentric madmen and wacked-out wordsmiths. I mean, Nationals has a really long history, and there’s documentaries, and money and career on the line, and I had no idea what was happening. I had sorted gotten on a slam team on accident, and my team actually didn’t lose any of its bouts, and went to the final stage, and ended up performing for 2000 people, got in the New York Times, and all this publicity. Then we came back –the whole slam team sort of blew up in the Bay Area, and slams started popping up everywhere- and promoters were racing, trying to promote the inspired lunacy.

Rachel: What brought you to slam poetry?

Jamie: Actually, it was because I’d been kicked out of every other open mic in my hometowns of Benicia and Vallejo, California. I couldn’t find any open mics that were up my alley, and at that point I was writing a lot of fragmented suicide notes, and a lot of bile and bombast, shrieking, and guttural roaring, reading poems about slashing myself with knives, or fisting Christian girls. I was kicked out because I looked like a terrorist who hadn’t pulled out his gun yet, and was gonna start taking hostages at any second.

I had to drive to find a show that wouldn’t kick me out, so I drove to San Francisco. Actually, the first slam I ever did, I actually almost got kicked out. But when I saw my first show, I was blow away. It was such a hybrid of rap, poetry, standup comedy, and damning, confessional psychotherapy inflicted on an audience. I was immediately hooked. And the fact that it was competitive, I originally resented, but in fact, it forces people to sharpen their blade and have an idea of what kind of an impact their words are having. If you go to an open mic, you can be frankly ignored, but if you go to a slam, you’re gonna get beaten down if you aren’t coming with it.

Jamie: I would say my first real slam was on my twenty-first birthday, when I read a poem about the savage irony of living this long. It was, again, suicidal –I was writing quite a bit of those at the time. I was also carrying knives around. I was a walking timebomb.

(But officially), my first slam was at Café Du Nord in San Francisco. I got the lowest score of any poet. My poem was about a Christian girl I’d been dating, and about the brutal sadomasochistic sex that entailed all of her moral and spiritual defenses against the utter depravity inherent in acting upon each other’s bodies.

I definitely had come from a different type of background, where I wanted to burn my words into their retinas, and just smash it through their heads, shrieking, spasming, and flailing around. It was like The G Beyond at a tea party. It was just not flying.

I started Tourette’s because I wanted to showcase artists who were too extreme for regular shows. I wanted to make a celebration of all these fringe voices. Tourettes has had different incarnations –it’s always had a poetry slam. Gradually over time, in the last two and a half years, or so, a freestyle battle has become the other half of the show. I became more and more obsessed with battle emcees, and battle emcees are growing and rising in their ranks everyday. It’s just such an amazing artform. It really harkens back to a primitive battle of the wits, and Oscar Wilde comebacks, and (tk Syrno Debursiac?), battling it out before the swords are drawn. It’s fuckin’ entertaining: I mean, it’s just such a bizarre mis-mash of improv, stand-up comedy, and performance art, all in these blurred thirty second increments. You’re battling mono and mono with someone whose objective, onstage, is only to destroy you. Definitely a tightrope over a shark tank.

So you’re expected to be spontaneous and immediate, and not have anything that’s premeditated, or pre-written. But at the same time, you’re supposed to utterly savage and bloody your opponent with as many punchlines as you possibly can.

We’ve had all different types of performers in Tourettes: beatboxers, firebreathers, cheerleaders, prank videos, and tons of carnage.

Tattoos: Zodiac Killer: Good old Vallejo prodigal son. He was, of course, the mass serial killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the early 70’s, and was never caught. He’s a representation of me, and what happens when artists go wrong, because he obviously never found his outlet.

This is the tattoo for the Church of Scientology, because Ron Hubbard is my great grandfather, and I view it, in part, that it’s my legacy to uphold the megalonomaniac world domination approach to current events.

This other one is the Gonzo for Hunter S. Thompson. It’s the inspiration to remind me that writing is usually more honest the more brutal it can get.

This one here is a symbol for my five year old daughter: A scorpion, because it’s the only animal that will stab itself if you trap it. This is an invented, demonic perversion of the Scorpio symbol. This says “Leper,” and this says “Letcher.” And here, on my right arm, is the Suicide Kings tattoo (an upside-down crown with blood dripping off the ends). Rupert has one on his left arm, and Jeff has one on his back. That’s our logo.

Rachel: How did you decide on the name “Suicide Kings?”

Jamie: Me and Rupert had performed together for probably about a year. When I met him, he was still gangbangin, rock smoking, and burglarizing. Not to say that I was really that much on the good side of the law myself, in those days. But I sort of used my weight, and sway, to get his name out there, and to get him onstage in front of a lot of folks who needed to see him. Because at that point, he was just in the wilderness of Benicia and Vallejo. I started traveling with him to local shows in the Bay Area, and getting his name out there.

Suicide Kings came from an acknowledgement of the fully-loaded Russian Roulette –like having one empty chamber left. Certainly, we’d all been mighty suicidal when we were younger, so I think it’s definitely an acknowledgement of that. Jeff came up with it. We had different ideas, but that was the one we all agreed upon. It was a definite nod towards utter, complete, suicidal living, teetering on a self-destructive vortex.

Rachel: What’s your relationship to punk music?

Jamie: I have mixed views of it. When I was in high school, anyone who identified himself as punk seemed to me like a fashion whore picking safety pins as his conformist camouflage. I mean, it’s really easy to go out, get some Converse shoes, black levis, and torn shirts, put some gel in your hair, and spike it.

I remember I was growing up right around when the first Lollapalooza came out. At that point, at my school, there was one girl who had a piercing, because she was really into needles and stuck one through her face. But there weren’t any piercing shops, or the integration of sub-cultures into mainstream, MTV teenager suburb land.

Me? I mean, I’d always been around all the punk shows that Benicia was throwing back in the day. They had bands like Fifteen and Green Day. It was just all grungy –definitely scummy wearhouses, or we’d have them at the youth center, and I remember going there on acid and rolling around on the floor, moshing, and beating people into things.

I always had a certain wariness of punk culture, because I felt like such a social pariah that punk was just another click. There was something about me that really resented that: I never wanted to be easily identified, just by my articles of clothing. I feel like a lot of mohawks, Doc Martins, and a lot of it is really just like a costume. It doesn’t detract from the validity of people’s commitment to the artform, and the ideals of it, but I was never interested in the costume.

What interested me, always, was the renegade, pirate aspect of punk. That was what always resounded with me: that really aggressive, forceful, gang mentality. Frankly, I just loved violent music. That was easily the crossover into rap. I think for a lot of punks it’s the same: they love that naked hostility, the aggression, the staccato, grunting rhythm of it. I used to go to 924 Gilman a lot, and for years I’ve had friends who were punks, whether they identify themselves as such, or not. But I was always more of an outcast. I never would have called myself anything, really: Goth, punk, nerd, or any of the other high school subgroups. I sort of viewed myself as a gargoyle who had come to life and did not understand the world. I was sort of walking around with my talons hanging out, staring at people with the evil eye.

Nearly every friend I had was involved in the punk subculture in Benicia, which was small, but definitely still there. It’s definitely expired, though. Granted, I haven’t been to Benicia in two years. There are always bands, but certainly the collective dynamic of the main folks who are putting shows together, and booking the shit, isn’t there as much. Not to mention that Benicia has little to no good venues at all.

Rachel: What’s your relationship to hip hop?

Jamie: Well, that (could be) a really great example of a crossover. I would always stay up on Sunday nights to watch 120 Minutes on MTV, because it was the only show that played anything that I liked: they had videos by Ministry, Janes Addiction, and whoever. I would stay awake to watch that show, and Yo! MTV Raps came on right afterward, or something like that. My brother would stay up to watch Yo! MTV Raps. My brother was adamantly against any music I listened to –he thought it was art faggery, gloom-and-doom, loud, screamy bullshit, and he hated it. He was always really into anything he could dance to, especially hip hop.

I hated rap ideologically. I hated the whole idea of it, I thought it was retarded, I had a very typical view of rap: I thought of gold teeth, rapping about the honeys –which, granted, is certainly a large part of it. But I remember when my brother forced me to watch Yo! MTV Raps by bribing me with a blunt. He said only if I watched the whole program would he smoke this blunt with me.

So I was sitting there, and we were getting blitzed. I remember this Cypress Hill video came on about “How I could just kill a man.” The homicidal glee that they were showcasing was utterly enthralling to me. And watching Yo! MTV Raps I felt that there was a lot more menace, hostility, and aggression than in a lot of the other music I was listening to, and that was really what I wanted to hear.

I felt that a lot of punk traps itself in a pop structure of chords, choruses, and la la la la las, that’s definitely based in music of the same century –the 50’s, or whatever. What I loved about rap was that the focus was so much more on the oral tradition, and definite praising of depravity, violence, sociopathic behavior, and definite criminal activities. I remember thinking at the time –this shows how little I was connected to rap- that when I was watching this video, and Cypress Hill is laughing about how they’re shooting this guy who breaks into this house, and all that, it really made me think of A Clockwork Orange. I remember I said to my brother “Wow, they’re really just like Alex and the Droogs!” He of course, had never seen A Clockwork Orange had no idea what the fuck I was talking about, but then I was just mad excited. So then I started getting into the more violent aspect of rap.

And then, of course, there was the gateway drug to many suburbanite kids, which is The Beastie Boys. They were an easy transition: they started as a punk band, made a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek rap group, and tried to take themselves seriously by adding punk songs to their albums. They were a closer fusion of the different sounds I was listening to. Even tonight, like any given night, I might play Pantera and Wu Tang Clan right in a row, and notice no difference at all. It’s just the same pitch of primal madness in both accounts.

So then I just got really into gangsta rap. I’ve always been obsessed with true crime, murder, homicide, and all that. I felt what was so amazing about rap was that it would boast about the most reprehensible behavior possible, and take sheer delight, and glee, in a lot of it. I also got really into the lyrics.

What always drove me nuts is that I’ve seen thousands of punk bands and really had no clue why the singer is even opening his mouth. You can’t hear anything, what he’s saying doesn’t even matter, and screaming is just fine –I have no problem with just the sheer banchee will- or if a man just had a tracheotomy in his throat and just gurgled –that’s fine in an audio sense. But part of me really craved that wit and wordplay that I felt was missing from a lot of the punk that I listened to. So rap really got me addicted to the idea of lyricism, and how important it can be. It was all about the narrative, the stories and the prose, your sense of humor, and how wicked your tongue could get.

Also, I remember when I was in middle school –probably the main, big moment for a lot of white kids, which I’m sure was the idea- was N.W.A. I mean, to hear anybody rapping happily about murdering cops was like finding the biggest storehouse of porn on the planet. It was such a dirty, happy excitement. I remember listening to that in the sixth grade. It wasn’t even the obscenity –it just felt more raw. Punk has been around longer certainly, but it definitely was that raw, visceral immediacy that was really exciting to me –to be able to have that energy just flying at you.