We’ve all heard the cliché that says you’ll never be ready enough, so the time is now — otherwise, you’ll spend the rest of your life getting ready. For Long Island-based rapper, slam poet, and songwriter Bruce Pandolfo, leaping first without knowing whether the ripcord will work has been one of the defining ethics of his career. This isn’t to say that Pandolfo, who makes music under the moniker AllOne, prefers to be careless. On the contrary: Pandolfo has spent countless hours studying the craft of MCing, and he is nothing if not meticulous about the placement of every syllable in his dense, rapid-fire rhymes. Like the disciplined, woodshedding instrumentalists who showcase their technique on social media these days, Pandolfo has chops, and he isn’t afraid to use ‘em. Take any celebrated gunslinger-type musician — from Eddie Van Halen to Victor Wooten to Buddy Rich, etc — and you’ll hear parallels in the way Pandolfo embodies the ultimate definition of lead instrument on his new album, Emotionauts.
All that said, Pandolfo understands that there comes a time when, creatively speaking, you just have to risk falling on your face. In fact, his career started out with precisely such a moment when, as a sophomore in high school, Pandolfo took his notebook down to the local coffeehouse and, surrounded by seasoned poets who were all in their sixties, he took his place at the mic and gave it a go. He’s never looked back since. An avid reader since childhood whose father was a rock guitarist, Pandolfo has nevertheless continued to step into unfamiliar arenas: hip hop, slam poetry, jamming with other musicians, and (most recently) production and arrangement were all somewhat foreign territory for him when he discovered them, but he’s jumped in with both feet at every stage. He has also, over a span of 8 albums and 4 EPs broadened our understanding of DIY so that it no longer stops with the artist — part of the AllOne mission is for you, the listener to feel encouraged to go out there and do it yourself.
Pandolfo’s musical journey begins as a teenager immersed in the cerebral end of the punk pool: “My mother,” he explains, “encouraged reading so strongly that I still do it voraciously now. So my life has always been defined by words. Even the music I was drawn to pre-hip hop was very lyric-heavy — bands like Bad Religion. I was always fascinated by how lyrical composition could completely transmogrify a genre. You take a piece of music that you might immediately have all these assumptions about because it’s easy to identify within certain genre parameters, but then you do something more ingenuitive with the words, and then you’ve changed that piece of music almost on an alchemical level. So when I got into rap music, I was naturally magnetized to people who were doing it on such an articulate level that I couldn’t help but be blown away by and fall in love with the genius of it.”
It was fortuitous, then — it actually altered Pandolfo’s destiny — that Epitaph Records began featuring cutting-edge hip hop artists like Sage Francis, Atmosphere, and Eyedea & Abilities on its annual Punk-O-Rama compilations in the early 2000s. Pandolfo’s path was set. From there, he dove into slam poetry, which then led to the collaborations with Long Island musicians documented on AllOne’s 2010 debut Coal Aberrations. Since then, he has worked with a variety of different producers and instrumentalists, tending to organize each release according to a unifying theme, so that subject matter and musical presentation contrast significantly from release to release. Still, even when he delved into the blood-curdling world of true crime on his 2017 Dusty Dossiers EP, the common thread has always been Pandolfo’s irresistible attraction to being a constructive force. Even when he’s writing from, say, a murderer’s perspective, the goal is to inspire and motivate (no surprise from an artist who has the words “keep pushing” tattooed on one forearm and “pull through” on the other).
With the eighth AllOne album Emotionauts, Pandolfo has upped his game both on the lyrical and musical front, working with the production duo Conscious Robot for his most fully realized work to date. Whether he’s urging us to let our freak flag fly and find community in niche spaces on “Left Field Day,” raising questions about how to navigate the ambiguous boundaries of romance on “Heart Syncing” or trying to wrap his head around the unfathomable scale of the universe on “Laniakea,” Pandolfo sounds like a finely tuned athlete delivering his most dextrous bars to date. Moreover, the musical variation from track to track gives listeners the sense that they’re stepping into a different world on each successive track.
“This is the strongest relationship and interactivity I’ve ever had with a producer,” says Pandolfo, “so it’s really the first time where I feel like I’m not just adding my vocals on top of the music. There’s a musicality and a progressive quality with Conscious Robot that hasn’t always been there in some of the more lo-fi boom-bap stuff that I’ve rapped on. I love that stuff, but it tends to have a uniform feel.”
Of course, there are times when it seems as if Pandolfo crams as many syllables as humanly possible into a single line or phrase. Listen closely, though, and you’ll realize that’s not actually the point.
“I heard an interview with Rakim once,” he offers. “He said that he thinks of himself as a lead instrument taking a solo over the beat. And as long as he gets to the end of the measure when he’s supposed to, musically he can do anything inside the lines and it’ll work, even if it’s syncopated against the beat. That’s exactly how I’ve always thought of the way I interact with the music. But with Emotionauts, I’m stepping into a place where I see myself more and more as a musician within the music. That’s the latest challenge for me.”
“I still feel like I can fall on my face with it,” he chuckles, “but at this point, I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable without that level of uncertainty. There’s such a great spark of creativity in all that tension that comes with it.”
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