Up With People Under the Stairs

Other than the all-you-can-eat avoirdupois of the Fat Boys, it’s difficult to imagine a rap group with a more appropriate name than People Under the Stairs. After all, while local peers Dilated Peoples, Jurassic 5 and Ugly Duckling inked major-label deals to capitalize on the ephemeral underground rap rush of the late ’90s/early ’00s, the duo of Thes One and Double K spent the majority of their 10-year career so subterranean that only the most dedicated heads were aware of their existence.

“We do well in L.A. now, but it has been a slow, slow build,” the Peruvian-born, L.A.-raised Thes One says. “We realized early on that to survive, we needed to be on the road. We’d been around the world 10 times and done Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds before people had even thought about leaving L.A. And we’ve never been heralded by any local media.”

Few things are more trite than underground rappers bemoaning perceived slights, but Thes One has a point. Just recently, I wrote a piece for L.A. Weekly listing the most notable local rappers of the past 15 years, and egregiously overlooked People Under the Stairs. My bad. But that’s been the general rule, despite a discography that ranks as the deepest and most consistent of any of their indie-boom brethren. Indeed, save for the occasional offhand pejorative uttered by haters condescendingly labeling them “backpackers” or “boom-bap revivalists,” the critical cognoscenti have mostly ignored People Under the Stairs.

Related Stories

• The Best Concerts to See in L.A. This Weekend
  September 6, 2013
• The Best Concerts in L.A. This Weekend
  March 1, 2013
• The Orb
  September 12, 2013
• Best of Coachella: Weekend One
  April 15, 2013
• The Coachella 2013 Awards
  April 18, 2013

More About

• Jurassic 5
• Dilated Peoples
• Leeds
• Underground Hip-Hop
• Hip-Hop and Rap

“We knew from the first time we went to Europe that we’d eventually catch on here,” Thes’ partner, Double K, says sanguinely. “Urb put us in their Next 100 once, but that was it. It didn’t help our stature that we were selective in who we associated with. We didn’t just jump on every show bill; we wanted to keep our brand a mystery.”

Opacity has been a chief characteristic of the pair since they first hooked up in the mid-’90s at now-shuttered Martin’s Records on Pico. It’s there that Thes, an up-and-coming producer at Loyola High, bumped into K, who’d already earned modest local renown for his beats and work in Log Cabin, a loose collective that featured several future Living Legends, including fellow Hamilton High classmate Murs. There was tension between the future People, though, because mutual friends had stoked animosity.

“We were either going to fight or sort it out peacefully,” Thes One waxes nostalgically. “K had a cassette on him and we opted to go beat for beat. We connected immediately; we were two guys who cared about music, surrounded by a million dudes with backpacks who wrote rhymes. No one else around us was listening to Freestyle Fellowship, Led Zeppelin and the Beatnuts.”

Opting to join forces (and thus keep their beats for themselves), the pair left their other groups and became People Under the Stairs, after the 1991 Wes Craven horror flick and a shared penchant for secrecy. Keeping their plans discreet, the newly formed duo rode through the glory years of L.A. independent hip-hop, with the Project Blowed scene and fabled Unity shows providing a fertile womb for the next generation.

Finally emerging with the self-released The Next Step in 1998, an auspicious, left-field gem studded with esoteric psych, soul and jazz samples and B-boy boasts, P.U.T.S. were met with a lukewarm local reception. While their peers drew major-label suitors, they were forced to beg Fat Beats to sell their debut on consignment. According to Thes, part of this stemmed from their more eclectic aesthetic, a hodgepodge of the jazzy flirtations of Tribe Called Quest, the goofy, laid-back attitude of the Pharcyde and the stoner insouciance of the Beatnuts. By contrast, Dilated enlisted producers like DJ Premier and Alchemist to create an ominous mid-’90s New York sound, while Jurassic 5 mined the old-style harmonies of the Cold Crush Brothers and Furious 5.

“People Under the Stairs never had the right promotion,” suggests Mark Luv, the longtime L.A. radio personality/DJ legend and one of the group’s first supporters. “Take a group like Dilated. They had a lucrative deal to have albums released on both Capitol and ABB, so they got double promo. It didn’t help that Thes and K wouldn’t come into a Fat Beats and hang out all day. Plus, Dilated had Babu, J5 had Cut Chemist and Nu-Mark; DJs run record stores and look out for their own.”

Ultimately hooking up with tiny, predominantly electronic Bay Area indie Om Records, the group relentlessly toured Europe. Back in the states, Dilated and J5 became the city’s standard-bearers and Peanut Butter Wolf and Madlib started to build Stones Throw into hip-hop’s best label.

Settled into the role of the quiet cult favorite, P.U.T.S. churned out a pair of subterranean classics in 2000’s Question in the Form of an Answer and 2002’s O.S.T. (Original Soundtrack) — two records that set them apart from their friendly rivals but also shared a thorough, atavistic reverence for hip-hop history and culture. While such academia often breeds orthodoxy, Thes and Double K stayed proudly irreverent, lambasting narrow-minded academics trying to oversimplify hip-hop into the four basic elements — as well as the “superlyrical” MC types so pervasive in the underground.