Rah hoWard calls his new album, Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away, more mature than his previous work.
The 27-year-old Little Rock hip-hop artist critiques his discography while sitting in Community Bakery on an August afternoon. The Motivation mixtape, released in 2009 around the time Rah hoWard won the first Arkansas Hip-Hop Showcase held at Vino’s, is, he says now, an album infused with “this feeling that I am better than everybody else so I’m going to do a lot of things to try to prove it.”
Some of the tunes on The Winner, hoWard’s first full-length album released in late 2010, he calls “really immature. Some of the topics are things I would never say again. I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed of them, but I wouldn’t play some of those songs in front of my grandmother.”
But the topics of the 16-track Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away, which was released earlier this month, “are a lot more mature,” he says. “I’m talking about being concerned with my wife having MS. I talk about autism. People getting older and death and dying. It’s more mature.”
This self-censuring is not intended as complete disapproval of hoWard’s previous two works. His criticism is simply putting distance between the hoWard of 2010 who would rap “I can be your money/I can give you sex/I can be your drugs/I can be that one you love, you lust, you need, you dream about every single time you go to sleep” to the hoWard of today, who raps: “In all honesty, I don’t feel as if I’m good enough to be a father because immaturity is something that I greatly harbor.” The latter verse is from Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away’s “Fatherhood,” hoWard’s ode to raising children, especially his 7-year-old stepson.
Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away is a reflection of where hoWard is in his life. The Hall High School graduate is married and works as a creative at the Apple Store in west Little Rock. He’s also earning a degree in digital media with a focus on audio engineering. Dressed this day in a brown newsboy cap and an orange gingham button-up, hoWard appears content. He is. Gazing out from behind his dark-rimmed glasses, he calls Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away “something for maturing adults to listen to.”
The new album is not hoWard scrapping fun, though. Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away just marks a transition from college student to adulthood, he says. And Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away still contains plenty of big beats and hooks, such as the twirling synths, stuttering beats and banging piano of “I’m Good,” a track that shows off hoWard’s smooth flow while promoting individuality, with the boast, “Hey, you do you/Cause I’m gonna do me/And I’m gonna be the best damn me I can be.”
“Let It Die” sees the return of piano, juking and jiving over a simple bass beat with scratching intersperse. And then hoWard throws in some bluesy harmonica wailing as a coda.
The beats on the album, minus Finess on “All I Know” and Ferocious on “Forever,” were all produced by hoWard, using his home studio. Guests on the album include Ferocious on the hymnlike “Forever,” and artists such as Osyrus Bolly, Southwest Boaz and Duke Stigall.
The album was created over three years, in two different stages. Most of the first phase of the new album was lost when hoWard’s apartment was struck by lightning and his computer was zapped. He’d recorded about half an untitled album at that point, but most of it couldn’t be recovered. After hoWard set about retrieving as much of the unfinished album as he could, some tunes, such as “Foolish Pride,” about bombing a live performance showcase and re-evaluating his approach to music, were recreated. Others were lost forever.
Once hoWard reached the halfway point of his new album the second time around, the title came to him, shortening by one preposition the “better to burn out than to fade away” line from Neil Young’s “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue).”
“Neil Young wrote that and Kurt Cobain made it famous, and I spent a lot of time looking at the meaning of that,” he says of the line. “The consensus is that it is better to go out with that big flash than to grow mediocre. A lot of times when you are young you think you are going to have this one big occasion or this one big thing that you are going to pull off that is going to define your legacy, but I think now that I am older and a little bit more mature ... that fading away is depending on what you make it. I think it’s about the legacy that you actually leave behind. For me, burning out is making sure that every interaction you have with somebody you have something that is meaningful for them. Live every day to the fullest. That’s the kind of stuff that passes on.”
And knowledge like that, and hoWard’s wisdom passed on with Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away, is maturity.
GET THE MUSIC
Rah hoWard’s Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away is available for download via iTunes or Bandcamp, or for streaming via Spotify. For more information on Rah hoWard, visit his website at rahhoward.co, follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.