Hip hop dreams from a Vancouver boy

The Thesis—Portland's longest-running showcase—comes from a place that's both local and a world away: Verbz’ world

In my mind’s eye I can see a teenaged Grant Stolle—pronounced like the vodka—gazing across the Columbia River, wistful and wondering whether he’d ever get to have a life in that big Oregon city.

Now a grown-ass DJ, he owns Thursday night in hip hop Portland with a jam called The Thesis.

DJ Verbz and I go back to “Northwest Mixtape,” a discussion that I put on 20 or so times for Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, nine or so years ago. I’d just come back from speaking at the Smithsonian’s American Cool show and was eager to keep getting my talk on when I heard about the conversation facilitation gig. The idea of discussing the history in the Pacific Northwest appealed to me because Macklemore had just happened, and I knew what I was hearing from my newly-adopted region was more than that.

This was in 2015, and Dame Dolla hadn’t in his unlikely way put Portland on the rap map. Mix-a-Lot and the symphony dancers aside, my only real Conversation Project asset “get” was Vancouver’s The Rascalz. I kept the “Northern Touch” remix video close like a talisman.

So I sought out iconic Portland rapper Cool Nutz and Verbz, whose podcast I enjoyed. Cool Nutz was excellent to me, but Verbz’ understanding of the region and enthusiasm for sharing his breadth of knowledge was invaluable.

The Vancouver-born curator and scene creator put me on to Sandpeople, whom I rock til this day. Then at the Portland Playhouse, Verbz spun for local MC Glenn Waco, in support of my first Conversation Project event.

In our most recent back-and-forth, Verbz schooled me on the very first Portland vinyl rap release, from DJ Vitamix. More importantly, my guy fleshes out the singular history of The Thesis, downtown mainstay and projection of Portland hip hop.

Consider The Thesis durable shareware. Here is a lightly-edited rendition of the aforementioned podcast conversation.

Donnell Alexander: We have a guest from Portland, Oregon today, one of my hip hop authorities on the local tip—the guy who helped me understand the history of the Pacific Northwest in the rap game—I knew Macklemore. I’m just kidding I did more than that.

I did The Rascalz, dude.

Grant Stolle/DJ Verbz: Yeah, you knew something.

[Laughter]

Actually, you dug in really fast. If you found me and you found Cool Nutz you found a cool little…. in.

DA: Ladies and gentlemen, DJ Verbz, from Portland Oregon. Welcome to the podcast

Verbz: Happy to see you. Always good to check in with you.

DA: We were talking a few minutes ago, off mic, about the first Portland record to appear on vinyl, if you want to call it.

Verbz: Let’s call it that. I kept trying to find more and more information. I’d turned 18 in 2003. So, I’m a little late to jump into the scene, so there’s 20 years of history that I’m not super deep into.

When I was digging into things, the first thing I saw this record by an artist called DJ Vitamix. The song was called something like, “Girls Always Want to Party” or somethin’, and I’ve never seen it on vinyl, I don’t know why. Even on Disclogs, it’s hard to come up on. It’s very much an old-school rap song by a white dude. It’s boom-boom-bap, ba boom-boom bap.

“Often times [performers will] leave our show and not realize they have a check sitting there waiting for them because they’re not used to getting paid for their art, so I’ll have to hit ’em up later on or drive it over to them or whatever and be like, “No, this is how it should work.’”

DA: What year would that be?

Verbz: I’d say it’s eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six, something like that. That’s kinda the first one that I see out there. Also, he was part of a breakdance crew, so there’s some videos out there of him and his breakdance crew, the things that were bubbling up before that were more graffiti, dance, and deejaying. Those things were more established within the city. It’s just me looking back on any video I can find from the old stuff.

And then you have The U-Krew, the next group that comes up. And they still have an impact on the city today. Their sons and nephews are still rappers in Portland. They had some big songs out there, they had stuff on vinyl… they had “underground”-ish New Jack Swing shit. I like U-Krew a lot. They were called Untouchable Krew for a while, and then U-Krew.

Then you get Cool Nutz, then you a whole new era of that. When I come in, the groups that are kind of the biggest groups are these big, conglomeration rap groups that are almost more like cliques. There’s a group called Sandpeople, with Illmaculate, who’s kind of a battle rapper.

DA: Because we’re going to go down this road, I just want to make sure we have set up who you are. DJ Verbs is from Portland, and right now he is wearing his identity [a knit cap with The Thesis emblazoned across the front]. He’s known as the guy who runs The Thesis, the longest running show in Portland. What is it, nine years that you’ve been doing it?

Verbz: Nine years, minus the pandemic. But we were the last ones out and the first ones back.

DA: So, he’s an authority. We were talking before I started recording. My main takeaway was that there’s an aesthetic to Portland. We can go back to talking about the depth of the groups, but I want people to understand the context in which they occurred.

Verbz: We’re heavily influenced by West Coast dynamics. You get a lot of fluidity between here and San Francisco and Oakland. So you have people moving up from there. If you got in trouble in Los Angeles or The Bay, you could move up to Portland or Seattle and stay out of trouble. Or, you could move your crew up here and establish your own shit in Portland, because wasn’t really anybody stopping you. So you get that confluence of Bay Area swag and and the kind of Freestyle Fellowship-y, lyrical-miracle stuff that’s happening in Los Angeles at the time. That starts migrating up the West Coast.

Portland’s also become a city that people will move to from around the country. If you were a weirdo in your city, you might find some of your fellow weirdos in Portland.

DA: Right.

Verbz: They come here, and maybe this place is where you find the foothold for establishing yourself someplace else. Or, try to make it out of Portland.

DA: I like to differentiate for people, because I often say that you’re from Portland. But you’re from Vancouver, and there’s a distinction. I’ve spent time in Vancouver. It’s a different place—very close, but a different place.

Verbz: The dynamic is, a river separates Portland from Vancouver. There are two different bridges you can cross to get over here. Essentially, I lived in Vancouver until I was 20, then I moved to Northeast Portland. But I had wanted to be over here. There’s definitely the people and energy in Vancouver of the kids who want to get out of Vancouver and be in the energy of Portland. And then there are the people who never want to leave and are just, like, settling in the suburbs.

I was more the first guy and was working at 16 in Portland and was coming to shows and was interested in music and that just wasn’t available in Vancouver at all—and probably discouraged at the time.

DA: And that’s where you picked up your nickname.

Verbz: I was like 16 and my way of connecting to the music at the time was the burgeoning era of the internet message boards and that kind of stuff. It was before you could put audio out into the internet, and so there were people who were interested in hip hop all on these message boards and we would discuss artists.

But that evolves into people wanting to rap themselves. I was part of these battle rap communities on these online forums at like 15 or 16. They introduced me to people from around the world who were interested in the same things, and that was hard to come by.

DA: We don’t talk enough about that era very much.

Verbz: It was so slight, and everybody's going to be interested in the era where audio’s available. At the time it was text-based battling.

DA: I remember. [laughter]

Verbz: I was one of those little kids. [mimics furious typing] Verbal Hostility was my lil rap name, because it was that lyrical miracle era where everybody had those crazy-long names, Immortal Technique, and all that kind of stuff. And so, I’m a part of these communities and one of my friends from Manchester who was a producer on there was like, “Yer just Verbz.” Changed it right there and I’ve been Verbz ever since.

That was the early era for me, before I moved to Portland and got involved in the music scene. I met one artist in the city, from Vancouver, and I was blown away that— everybody liked rap, but it was: did you want to do it on another level? Did you want to learn how to DJ? Did you want to buy turntables?

DA: What made you start The Thesis?

Verbz: The Thesis is a project that came together between me, Blake Hickman, who was working at KPSU at the time—that’s the radio station for PSU, our local college. There was also Mack Smith, who’s a vocal leader. He was a rapper for a long time in the city and is now very much a community leader. Him and Blake and I all kinda converged on our frustrations with things in the rap community in Portland, partially over being overpoliced—having police show up to shows and shutting down shows.

DA: That was a huge time for that, too. There was a cluster of incidents. This was like, 2014? What are we talking about?

Verbz: Somewhere in that area. 2004 to 2008 were hot, contested eras of overpolicing and having weird things like venues would say you can only have 75 percent of capacity if you were doing hip hop or you had to have like 15 security guards if you were doing hip hop. And it was all kind of ridiculous, it was all kind of overblown nonsense because we weren’t having any problems. I would go to the Christian rap show and the police showed up, lining the back of the place. It was insane.

Our idea eventually was putting the same artists that were getting in trouble on our showcase and hiding it underneath, with this school-tied-in hip hop that we called The Thesis. And we really did want to connect with the local school and local hip hop community and essentially provide a safe space for people and kind of change some of the dynamics we were seeing at shows. A lot of what we were seeing, like all-dude showcases or shows where, like, 15 guys who were all friends—a lot of shows that weren’t working in ways that felt conducive to growth or doing anything good for the community.

We jumped in pretty soon and saw that we needed to have women on all of our showcases and we had our first all-women showcase, in like June, 2015. So, we really wanted to make sure these were things that were changing in our community, and I feel like they kinda have.

They’ve also inspired a lot of other artists to build their own events. They’ve used similar things to what we do—put up their graphics the way we do, using our designer and that kind of stuff. Really, that’s kinda what we wanted. Mack says it was a literacy project. He wanted to get people connected to… cause he runs a website called WeOutHere.net. Initially, it was a part of that, connecting through the written word, too. We’ve had lots of different angles to things. We’ve found new meaning in things as we’ve gone along. And we’re at a turning point as well now. So, we’re re-evaluating how we’re going to do things.

But, yeah. We’re going to make sure Portland has a place for Black music—or hip hop and related genres; I say Black music as a catch-all.

DA: Let’s say 99 percent of the people consuming this haven’t been to The Thesis. Give ’em an idea of what you’re talking about.

Verbz: It’s not a showcase you can sign up for, that’s the number one thing, that we don’t have a list you can just jump on and say, “I’m on your showcase now.” We’re also not a showcase that you can pay to get on. So we don’t have any influence in that way wack artists can push yourself to the top through [laughs] artificial inflation.

What we do every month is put three-to-five artists on a stage. We try to keep it a small number. And we try to mix up the artists so that they’re cohesive, but don’t all come from the same crews. We can help exponentially grow audiences that way and connect artists that we think, “Oh, you know if Wavy Josef from Portland connects with LIV from Seattle. They have a cool vibe, they would be cool on stage together. I bet they’d get along. What if this happens in a way they become something new and unique?

The other thing we focus on is really great media. We always make sure our photographers are there and are posting pictures that are on point. We want to make it look like you have professional stuff coming out. Not only so the artist can get paid for their showcase. And that’s another thing: we pay our artists, and that doesn’t happen at every show. Don’t know if you know that.

DA: I wasn’t going to assume that you did pay, that’s how infrequently I imagine it is.

Verbz: Exactly. Often times they’ll leave our show and not realize they have a check sitting there waiting for them because they’re not used to getting paid for their art, so I’ll have to hit ’em up later on or drive it over to them or whatever and be like, “No, this is how it should work.” We’re giving an example, a thesis of how it should work. We wanted to be a building block or a starting point, that’s what a thesis is, right?

DA: I left in 2017 and I’m curious to know how—from the beginning, to that phase, until now—it has changed. Has the talent changed? People’s expectations?

Verbz: What’s kinda cool is that you get generations coming through. I didn’t quite realize how that would work, but new people are turning 21 all of the time. New artists are coming to the city, and they build group dynamics together. I’ll see people come back.

Last month we had Wavy Josef on our stage as the headliner, who for the past few years has been kind of a dynamic artist for us. But we also had Mat Randol come an join that, and Mat Randol has been on our shows since, literally our first year doing it. I wouldn’t say that all of the guys who were on the show nine years ago come every month? But they’re always welcome to be there and I feel like they’re at home in our space.

Our front row is filled with some of the best artists in the city. I think its very connective for the community to have that many artists and creatives. Like, in the back there’s merch being sold, or there’s a guy who does a designer clothing line, he’ll be there. We have an interviewer crew that’s there. So, we can help all of these entities grow at once with this one event, maximize the potential of this event. We always want to make sure that the artist is the focus—their growth, supporting them is the focus.

As it’s evolved over time, the city of Portland has lost and changed venues. A lot of the dynamics are changing there, the dynamics of downtown Portland are changing. It doesn’t feel quite the same in our spaces. It’s evolving.

DA: Is it keeping crowds down at this point, the changes happening downtown?

Verbz: I’ll be completely honest about it. [Pause] Portland has been through a lot in the last four years. For awhile, every single time they would do an editorial on Portland and the problems that we facing, a lot of it would focus on what they’re calling “the open-air drug market” — and that was happening literally across the street from our venue.

[Laughter]

DA: I don’t mean to laugh.

Verbz: I wouldn’t say that was very helpful, it didn’t give a positive image to the place. It almost made it a destination, like “That’s where the open-air drug market is—here we go!”

[Laughter]

Verbz: I’d say it keeps people away. I would say it makes things harder. The energy down there is different because a lot of other places have closed. It’s a more difficult task to do what we do there, but we’ve made it an event that people want to come out to. So, it’ really impressive to see on a Thursday night.

DA: I caught a 60 Minutes piece on the so-called Urban Doom Loop, empty office spaces and everything that comes from that, and how cities are going to have to be transformed. We’re just kinda caught up in a moment, and it’s amazing that you’ve been able to keep The Thesis going, because downtowns everywhere are in a different space.

I wanted to ask you about the nature of performances. You have people come in and sing, too. Has performance changed over the years?

Verbz: We’ve gotten more worldly and connected to a more worldly audience in our space. We’ve had artists doing more Afro-beat styled stuff. Artists like Swego and a few other artists who are in his vibe coming to our showcase. They bring a whole other set of styles, right? They’re there in incredible suits and they’re these tall, beautiful men with great voices. That was a different vibe from the gully-ass rappers we started with.

We’ve also made sure that the space is open to more pop vibes, for women and men. We’ve had artists like Alana Rich come through and bring more of a pop element. She works with hip hop artists. I think everything now has a taste of hip hop in it. We’re using 808 beats on R&B songs and Afro beat tracks. The divides between genres have kind of slipped away in ways that are different from the past. Our show has evolved to include artists like those.

DA: I actually have a Berner question. How much weed do you think he sold while he was doing his career up there?

Verbz: There’s a lot of Berner shows that I’ve been on. Lots of Curren$y shows… yeah, Berner’s a force in the weed world. I work in cannabis and I also work in hip hop. So, if they meet me, Berner’s going to come up at some point. If he doesn’t, it’s really surprising.

I couldn’t tell you how many pounds; that would be an insane amount. I’m thinking about all the pounds in this space that I need to grind up. Hundreds? I don’t know. I’mma say, it’s a lot, bro.

DA: I’m going to put you on the spot—Portland all-time top 5 hip hop artists.

Verbz: Do I include people who weren’t from here, came here, and then left again? It’s an ever-evolving thing…

DA: Ahh, you can’t cop out.

Verbz: I’m not going to cop out. I’m gonna put Last Artful Dodger on my list.

DA: Oooh—comin’ in hot!

Verbz: The Last Artful, Dodgr is one of the most talented people I’ve known in my life.

So unique in her sound and style, and everyone wants that vibe. Everyone wants it. It’s on Mark Ronson tracks, it’s on Anderson .Paak tracks. It’s on Will Smith animated movie soundtrack. She’s just got an incredible voice and an incredible vibe, and the way she can put lyrics together is so unique. I’ll start with The Last Artful, Dodgr. This is me, what I want to listen to. I’m not going to say they’re the greatest people. Who knows?

I’ll give Illmac, or Illmaculate, as he was once known, his shine right here. He might be the best rapper to come out of Portland. His understanding of rap is ungodly. He can recall bars like no one I’ve ever known. He understands battle rap structure and how to put things together in unique ways. Has has some of the most legendary battle rap verses of all time. His third round against Big K has some of the most incredible battle rap verses you’ve ever heard. His battle against Thesaurus; he has two world championships in battle rap.

And he won Scribble Jam when he was 16. When we were just kids he popped on the biggest rap thing in the world at the time, and won. So, I give all respect to Ill. He’s a friend of mine and super talented. Love Ill.

DA: Two down.

Verbz: I think it would be a dumb list if it didn’t include Cool Nutz.

Cool Nutz is the standard for Portland hip hop. He’s more than most everyone. There’s only one, maybe two names that are higher in the things that they’ve done. He’s had some great songs; “76 Nova” is a Portland classic, true Portland rap. Heads all know the song. And he’s just a symbol of hip hop in Portland. He still does a radio show. He’s still making music. He’s always taking care of my boy DJ Fatboy.

All respect to Cool Nutz. One of my favorites, and he’s just a good dude. Me, him, and Mac have been chatting. We’ve been working on some stuff.

It would be hard to say that Amíne isn’t the next one that needs to be respected. I first saw Amíne when he was in a world music vibe, and he had a band with him onstage. He was playing keyboards when he opened for me and Tope on a New Year’s Eve show in maybe 2005-6? At a venue that no longer exists, because it’s Portland.

Amíne though, the first time I saw him I was like, Who the fuck is this guy? This guy is so talented and unique with his sound. Very self-assured in his style, even though it evolved into something more rap. He’s a super creative, unique artist. He’s done stuff all over the world.

DA: I know what I think it was going to be. I don’t know that I know—

Verbz: No, you don’t. I don’t think so.

DA: Okay.

Verbz: Man, it’s tough. If I’m sincere, I would say that my other favorite rapper is my friend Ep.

Ep is so uniquely gifted in his creativity and the variety of styles he can do. I’ve been performing with him since we were teenagers. He was part of a group called TxE, with Tope, and the guy who did all the beats for it was Calvin Valentine, aka G-Force. And Calvin Valentine has worked with incredible artists, like Nas and De La and all kinds of people. They had incredible beats. Calvin Valentine now works with Illa Jay, if that does anything for you. Illa Jay is Jay Dilla’s little brother.

He makes the beats for J Dilla’s little brother. You better be a pretty fuckin good beats smith if you’re making beats for Jay Dilla’s brother.

That group together was incredible. I really loved them.