Photo courtesy of Luke Vick
Let’s face it, we’re all fed up with stupid people. The current presidential administration in the United States underscores how prevalent the unintelligent crusade is. From the highest office in the land, to his staunch supporters, and everyone in between, we are besieged with stupidity. Rapper/producer/engineer Jake Palumbo has the solution for simpletons — Euthanasia For The Stupid.
“Euthanasia For The Stupid” is a 14-track album where Palumbo lightheartedly suggests disposing of the dumb. The release is produced, written, and mixed solely by Jake Palumbo. The project features appearances by Kurious, E.Smitty, Greezi Amiin, Q-Unique, and Psycho Les of the Beatnuts.
The Real Hip-Hop chatted with Jake Palumbo about identifying as polyamorous, the struggle of dealing with independent labels, and his new album, Euthanasia For The Stupid.
TRHH: Explain the title of the new album, Euthanasia For The Stupid.
Jake Palumbo: It’s kind of odd in that every album I have made-up to this point I always had the title first before I had any music. I would come up with the title and the title would almost kind of dictate the direction of the music in a way. So, what basically happened was after I released the Plant-Based Libtard album, which was kind of my first album that had modest commercial success in some degree, I followed that up with The Violence of Healing, which was an album that was entirely about mental illness and very dark times in my personal life. It was basically the must unmarketable album I could have followed up Plant-Based Libtard with. So, I’m saying that to say that once I had gotten that out of my system and was feeling better and was ready to rap again I didn’t have a title. I just knew that it was time for me to make another album, because that’s who I am and what I do. I just went in the lab and started making songs.
In the process of that I noticed that there was a unifying theme to a lot of these records. I was just kind of going in and raging a little bit about the state of the world, about the decline of human cognitive thinking skills, and just the absolute dumpster fire that’s going on in Washington D.C. right now. I noticed that a lot of the unifying themes was me raging against stupidity. So, to put a bow on the story, I did have a song years ago on the Jobber to the Stars album called “Euthanasia For The Stupid” and in that it said, “My truth in the booth is euthanasia for the stupid.” I got to thinking about it and I was like, “You know, that actually kind of fits.” It just kind of fits the vibe of what we’re talking about here. It’s as if with my bars I’m trying to crush stupidity one bar at a time in a way.
TRHH: On the hook of the song “Product of Stupidity” you talk about how so many of our current issues are products of stupidity. Many years ago, I remember reading an interview with Sticky Fingaz by Todd E. Jones, who inspired me to start blogging, and he was asked what the last incidence of racism he experienced was and Sticky said, “I look at things differently. I look at it as ignorance and dumb people. So, I may not be looking at the situation as racism. I just may look at it like ‘This person is stupid.’” That always stuck with me, because ultimately, being racist is being stupid.
Jake Palumbo: Exactly! And that is the common thread. That was another theme I tried to get across with the album is that every problem just about is a product of stupidity. To be racist, to be sexist, oligarchy, police brutality, celebrity and politician worship, fake news. Everything that we’re bombarded with on a day-to-day basis is a product of people who clearly do not know any better, because if you knew better you would do better type shit.
TRHH: How can we make racist people realize they’re stupid, or is that impossible?
Jake Palumbo: [Laughs] It sometimes feels like an impossible task, but you gotta keep swinging for the fences.
TRHH: It’s so dumb. It’s like the dumbest shit in the world. It’s the one thing that needles me more than anything because of how stupid it is. And we are bombarded with it right now.
Jake Palumbo: In the matrix that we’re currently stuck in you’re not just bombarded with fake news, and incorrect information, and poorly sourced info, but like you’re also dealing with an administration that quite literally you know will piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. As everyday citizens struggle to pay bills and make it to Christmas they’re literally telling you that they have an A++++++ economy and this is the best it’s ever been. I guess what I’m trying to say with that is that the audacity — they obviously believe that you’re stupid because all the governing bodies, all the oligarchs, all the social media influencers that do not use their voice for good they all believe that you’re stupid. They’re OK with that. That was definitely one of the things that I was raging against on the record.
TRHH: The first single is called “Bubba Cola.” I’ve never heard of it. What exactly is Bubba Cola?
Jake Palumbo: Bubba Cola was a generic soda. Roughly like a generic Pepsi that was sold in a chain of grocery stores in the south called Save A Lot. I don’t know if Save A Lot is still around or not, but in the 90s when I was a kid shopping at Save A Lot was like a dead giveaway indicator that you were poor. And at Save A Lot they had all these generic brands that were unique to Save A Lot and Bubba Cola was their soda. So, my point is that if you were caught drinking Bubba Cola it was just a dead giveaway that you were poor. Kids oftentimes would take their Bubba Cola and pour it into a glass or a squeeze bottle or something to try to front like they were drinking Coke or Pepsi.
There was one day I was blowing on some Bubba Kush and that one little thing fired in my brain. They stopped making Bubba Cola around 2004. It came out in the early 90s and by the early-mid 2000s it was gone. Something got me thinking about Bubba Cola and so as I was blowing on the Bubba Kush I’m like, “Bubba Kush/Bubba Cola.” It was just kind of a metaphor of relating to my southern roots. You were a bit embarrassed to be drinking this Bubba Cola because it was a dead giveaway that you didn’t have Coke or Pepsi at home and trying to flip it into something ill is like a metaphor for making it out the mud.
TRHH: That’s interesting to me because how crazy is it that poor kids ridicule other poor kids for being poor? That’s exactly the environment I grew up in. Everybody’s poor here in this neighborhood!
Jake Palumbo: I did notice growing up that other kids would itemize. Even though we were all in the exact same tax bracket they would really itemize things. I had a childhood friend who his parents thought that we were rich because we had a telephone and they didn’t. OK cool, we had a telephone, but we didn’t have much else. I do find that a lot of times that those kinds of things can get itemized amongst poor people. It’s unfortunate.
TRHH: Worse than that is poor people robbing and stealing from other poor people [laughs].
Jake Palumbo: [Laughs] There’s also that.
TRHH: Everybody’s struggling, everybody’s got very little and you’re taking from other poor people? It’s insane! I don’t miss that, man. I don’t miss it at all. The song “Shoot This Dude & Get Away With It” is a song I can relate to. The first verse speaks on you getting the runaround from labels that you do work for. Obviously, you can’t shoot these people, but how do you deal with situations like this in real life?
Jake Palumbo: I’m dealing with one this second. I can’t obviously say who it is, but it would be a juicy name if I did. You know what it is, unfortunately I hate to say it, to some degree it is the nature of the beast in that so much business in the music industry is done almost on the honor system. A lot of times, especially when you’re doing bigger jobs for bigger labels, you do the work, you submit an invoice, and then what’s supposed to happen is in Net 30 you get paid. The odd thing I’ve noticed in my career is that any time I’ve had to invoice major labels, yes they make you jump through a lot more hoops with the paperwork, and you have to get a PO number from an A&R, if there’s one thing off on your invoice they’ll reject it and make you start all over again, but once your invoice is accepted you get paid like 30 days from the date.
I’m saying this to say that I was conditioned to hate major labels because they rip you off and don’t pay you, but every time I’ve dealt with a major label I’ve been paid on exactly the day that I was supposed to. When dealing with independent labels and people that are supposed to be more entrenched into the culture you often find that, yeah, you do get the runaround. I’m blessed in that I generally have a full enough work plate that while I’m chasing down payments from all these different labels and things like that, there’s always more work coming in and things of that nature. But yeah, that song was me definitely airing some things out.
I was frustrated that day and it was funny because for the hook I was listening to an audio book. I heard that phrase and was like, “Wait a minute, if I could chop this up a certain way to make it land on beat I could make it sound as if it were almost rapped that way.” It’s one of those things. I hate that it’s that way because it doesn’t have to be. Behind a lot of your favorite albums there is quite possibly producers and engineers behind the scenes that are still chasing people down trying to get paid. Now thankfully I can write songs about it and deal with it in a way where nobody gets hurt [laughs]. But no, that’s a real thing.
TRHH: The album has tons of old wrestling references like Kane, Big Bubba, Dr. Tom Prichard, and Chief Jay Strongbow. How are you feeling about the current state of pro wrestling?
Jake Palumbo: I’m a bit detached at the moment. Mainly in terms of I’ve just been busy and working on a lot of music, but it’s embedded in my blood like I’m going to watch WrestleMania, I’m going to watch the Royal Rumble, I’m going to watch SummerSlam and things of that nature. I do still show up for the the main event pay-per-views. But it’s weird because I spent so much of my life parked in front of the TV every Monday night, and every Saturday, and Sunday. On a week to week basis I’m a bit out of the loop, but that doesn’t mean I don’t watch wrestling because via the WWE Network I watch a lot of wrestling on a week to week basis. It’s just most of what I’m watching took place somewhere between 1985 and 2000. I’ve had the network on Peacock for a few years now and that’s really good from just doing deep dives on the classic stuff.
Whenever I watch old wrestling it’s like I get to disconnect from the world for a minute and go back to that place when I was a kid as invested as I got into things. So, I am a bit out of the loop. There’s people I like though — I really I like Bron Breakker and there’s a lot of people that are doing good stuff right now. I’m glad to see that there are more promotions actually active these days. I don’t like the idea of the WWE having a monopoly on everything. What made wrestling great was so many different territories, and promotions, and different flavors of the same product. It’s one of those things that will never fully leave, as you mentioned there’s wrestling references all throughout the album. I may not be parked in front of the TV every Monday for RAW but it never goes away. Quite literally this morning when I was eating my breakfast I was watching SummerSlam ’91.
TRHH: On the song “Uneligible Bachelor” you rap about not fitting into relationship norms. Do you really feel like it’s hopeless and that you’ll never find love? They say there is somebody for everybody.
Jake Palumbo: Nah, the song is really more about struggling with my polyamorous identity when I’ve spent most of my life in monogamous relationships. I identify as polyamorous. I don’t think love is a binary line. I think you can love more than one person at the same time. In a perfect world I would have ten wives, but we don’t live in a perfect world. I wrote that song more so about the struggle. In today’s culture I talk about how they’re pushing us to Tinder and Bumble and hook up culture is very normalized. If a person is single and they just have a bunch of hookups that’s understood, but if you have three girlfriends, you value all three of them as people, and you have genuine relationships with all of them, people look at you like you’re insane or like you have two heads. So, throughout the years I would struggle with this identity and deal with it in different ways, sometimes which was cheating.
I guess it’s not that I don’t think I’ll ever find love — I’ve spent most of my life in love. It’s that I don’t know if the puzzle pieces will ever fit together in the exact way that I’d like them to. I can feel that way but, if you’re in love with multiple people they may not all be polyamorous. It was more so about the struggle to make the pieces fit. Even at the end of the song I talk about how I just broke down all the reasons that I’m polyamorous, but I don’t even really fit in with the Poly community either. A lot of those people are very lost and the idea of me being friends with some dude who’s railing the same woman I am, that’s odd to me and that’s not something that I need in my life necessarily. It was more just about how I’m kind of just the odd mold that doesn’t fit in kind of anywhere. I don’t fit in in the monogamous crowd and I don’t fit in in the Poly crowd. I’ve made some waves over the years trying to figure it out and I just don’t want anybody to get hurt in the process.
TRHH: In 2024 you dropped “The Violence of Healing” and you were in a bad place. Are you in a better place now?
Jake Palumbo: I am. I think that’s why we have a new album. I’ve been going to psychiatric therapy for two years now. I see a therapist once a week, I see a psychiatrist once a month. At the time I made The Violence of Healing album I was really in bad shape. I was behaving erratically, and having meltdowns in public, and panic attacks, and all kinds of very fringe behavior. After two years of therapy and releasing that album and getting a lot of those thoughts off my chest in an artful manner I did feel a lot better and that’s part of why I was ready to get back.
Euthanasia For The Stupid in a lot of ways picks up where Plant-Based Libtard left off, because when I made that album we were going through the first Trump administration, we were going through George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and everything that was so fucked about the world back then, I was raging about those things. It’s like Jake Palumbo went to the psych ward and as soon as I got out the world was in even worse shape than it was when I left it [laughs]. So, the mission picks back up. I was maybe a little more aggressive and direct on this album because I think the times demand it.
TRHH: What do you hope to achieve with Euthanasia For The Stupid?
Jake Palumbo: I just hope to break through the algorithms and make sure that the record gets in front of the people that need to hear it and would benefit from it. At this point in my career it’s really mostly about building a catalog that will outlive me and just maintaining longevity. I say it in the song “Evident” with Kurious, “My grind was slow, but it never once went backwards.” It has been a very slow grind for me in this Hip-Hop journey, but there’s no year that I can point to where I’m like, “Well, last year was better than this year.” Each year has progressively slowly gotten better. I just want to keep continuing the climb, ultimately. Of course, we’re going to keep making more music videos and doing everything we can to promote it, but I really do hope that I can just breakthrough the noise that’s cluttering up the airwaves and make sure this record gets in front of the people that might want to hear it.
Purchase: Jake Palumbo – Euthanasia For The Stupid