Interview: Wordburglar discusses his “Welcome To Cobra Island” album 10 years after its release (Part 2 of 2)

Here’s the second part of the discussion between Wordburglar and myself about his Welcome To Cobra Island project, released 10 years ago. Part 1 can be read here. And check out the full album here.

We continue to get deep into the creation of the album and G.I. Joe lore. During this section, we discuss choosing his collaborators for the album, the horrors of Cobra-La, his idea for a new graphic novel, and favorite obscure G.I. Joe characters.

Jesse Ducker: How did you find the producers for the album? When you pitched them the album, did you say, “I’m making this G.I. Joe concept album. Give me some G.I. Joe shit”?

Wordburglar: I found the samples. So it’s something that I’ve done because I used to dabble making my own beats, until I eventually got to know producers with real beat making skills. And then I’m like, “Oh, I’m just going to focus on the rhymes, and you can keep feeding me these amazing beats.” But I have always, since I was a kid, always heard samples, and dug samples, and like, “Oh, I want to sample this. I want to use this.” So I was already in the habit of finding a sample, and giving it to a producer, and being like, “Hey, maybe we can try looping this from this part to this part of the song, and then we’d rearrange it and flip it backwards and do it.” I would be beat-seat sample direct/loop.

I’m pretty hands-on with all my albums. For the Joe album, yeah, I found the samples, and I basically sent all the producers I wanted to work with a few different samples that, knowing their production style, I would love to hear what they could do with this, I want to hear them flip this. Oh, they made a beat like this before, what if it’s like this? The producers I work with all are in that Boom Bap-y, we all are that same lane of the stuff we love, maybe that 90s East Coast era. Well, I shouldn’t say East Coast, because West Coast too, I think of all the guys in Bay Area and Hiero.

I would find the samples, send a few to a producer and be like, “Hey, what do you think of this?” They’re like, “Yeah, yo, these beats are dope.” And all credit due to the original composers of all the music. We found some rare stuff. One of the producers I work with, he didn’t even sample from the animated series, he had his own sample from a G.I. Joe thing that came out. It was this weird vinyl release, and he found a tiny little sample on there. So everything in there is connected in some way.

And I knew that they were G.I, Joe fans, I think pretty much everybody on that album was a G.I. Joe fan in some way, they all liked something. Jesse Dangerously was a rapper and an old friend of mine, he raps as Lifeline, and to me it was like, this is a character that suits you. We have that one track “Rank and File” where everybody plays a different Joe character on it. I was like, “Well, who do you want to play? Who do you want to be?” And I was very strict about it. I was like, “Well, you’re rapping as the character, you’re not rapping about the character: you are this character.”

My buddy Chokecules, who’s in Swamp Thing, which is a dope rap group here in Canada, we’re all in this group, we’re all in this crew Backburner. We’re now spread all across the country, but we’ve all been rapping together for 20 years, rapping and making beats and DJing and stuff. So I had this huge rap G.I. Joe team already. So I could just be like, “Yo, who am I going to select for the mission?”

We love to make posse cuts, so that’s one thing, we’re always trying to do different styles of posse cuts, when I was like, here’s a posse cut, but we’re all playing Joe’s, and it’s going to be dope. I think I gave everybody the brief, it was like, this album is like Wu-Tang Clan, Prince of Thieves, maybe Dr. Octagon. I wanted people to come with that energy, and I wanted to come with a gravitas and taking the lyrics seriously, taking it, we’re not phoning this in.

As soon as people hear GI Joe rap album they’re going to be like, “What is this wackness? I don’t want to hear this.” And I’m like, “No, man, I’m a serious rap head and I am a serious G.I. Joe head, I’m not going to make a wack GI Joe rap album.” I felt like the biggest pressure of my life to not make it wack. And also I just had so much fun with it, man. The “Cobra La” song is just so fun to me, “Rap Viper” is just so much fun. It’s just playing in the toy box with your Joe’s, it’s showing your nephew all your guys, “This is why Bazooka is dope, and this is why Scrap Iron’s awesome.”

What made you decide to rap from the perspective of Lowlight on “Rank and File”?

Well, because there was a cartoon episode of his [“The Nightmare Assault.”I don’t know if you remember it; it’s pretty chilling. That episode always stuck with me, I always related to it in a weird way, and I always liked Lowlight from that point on. … And Lowlight, it just was like, man, there’s some pretty dark stuff, and I just always thought he was interesting. I always thought he looked cool. They couldn’t say that he was, they always called him a night spotter. They never said “Sniper” in the cartoon. You can’t tell a kid what a sniper is. [laughs] I don’t know that night spotter is a real term used in the military or not, I’ve never heard it, except in GI Joe. You never hear “Sniper” on the cartoon. “Yeah, what does he do?” “Well, he just kills people”. …

For the content of Welcome to Cobra Island, you draw from both the comic and the cartoon. But overall, most of the references seem to come from the comics. Was that a conscious decision?

I incorporated all my favorite stuff. I thought about it as playing with the toys as a kid. When you’re creating your adventures, you take information from, oh, this is in the cartoon, I like this part from the cartoon, but I like this part from the comic book, and I like this part from the back of the file card, and then I’m just going to make up this other part because I just think it’s cool. That’s what I incorporated. I mean, there’s “Call Destro,” where I pulled from everything.

On the Destro song, you mention both Darklon and Voltar. Those are pretty deep pulls.

The great thing about Joe was there were all those little sub-lines and sub-characters and families. Zartan had his family and his crew with the Dreadnoks and his brother and sister and cousin Zanzibar.

I never knew that Zanzibar was Zartan’s cousin.

Zanzibar is his cousin, man. Oh, cousins are big in GI Joe. Darklon is Destro’s cousin. Somebody else has a cousin. We could get really deep, if you want this interview to last for a day. Do you remember that toy line and cartoon C.O.P.S.? Well, they’re connected to GI Joe because Checkpoint is Beach Head’s son. There are all these weird connections. Like in Transformers, Marissa Faireborn? You know who she is, right?

Flint and Lady Jaye’s daughter.

Yeah, there’s all these cool things. This is why I had to make a rap album about it, man, because I have this useless information. That’s what I joked about with my wife, it was like, “Look, I have all this information in my head, you don’t want to hear about it, so I’m going to just record it.”

Welcome has the song “I Don’t Want to Go to Cobra-La.” What did you think of Cobra-La when you first saw it?

Dude, it scared the hell out of me. I know people think it’s ridiculous. People a bit older than me at the time I think were like, “G.I. Joe jumped the shark, this was wack.” I was enjoying the comic at the time, and I was a bit confused because, wait a second, we’ve seen Cobra Commander’s face in the comic, he’s not a weird mutant snake man. But what I loved about it was there’s a moment there where you realize everything we know is a lie. It’s like Matrix, that scene when Joe Pantoliano is eating the steak, and he’s like, “ I know this isn’t a real steak, but ignorance is bliss.” And the world had been open, everything changed after he found out he was in the Matrix, it was like everything changed once [they went to] Cobra-La, it was like, what?

It was just the way everything got flipped so drastically, and that movie, there’s a scene where Golobulus is projecting what’s going to happen, and the spores are going to come to the earth and they’re going to melt humans’ flesh and they’re going to de-evolve them into mindless creatures. And it was just so vivid and epic, and it was so beautifully animated. But these were all the characters that I’ve been watching every Saturday morning for the last couple years, and then all this stuff happens. It pretty much blew my mind and I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and I would probably say it’s one of my top five movies of all time to this day.

I love Cobra-La. I love all the military, the real-world GI Joe stuff, and I also love the really out there, crazy Cobra-La and the space stuff, and that’s what I think is so good because it just lets your imagination go from the grounded realities. I mean, let’s be honest, with war, which nobody wants to joke around about that, and then you can go into this imaginary escapist fantasy land of Cobra-La and mutants and bizarre [creatures]. And when you looked back through the series, there was a whole pattern of weird stuff. They go underground and meet the Egyptian gods in one episode. There was precedent for G.I. Joe to be out there. Lowlight? They turn him in a kid. Him and Lady Jaye, they hit them with a ray and turned them into kids. There was precedent for all that in Sunbow, it’s kind of like, you should have seen it coming, guys. You can’t hate on it.

So yes, I loved Cobra La, but I can also acknowledge how outlandish and ridiculous it is. That’s why I don’t want to go to Cobra-La, that’s the perspective. If I had signed up to be in this Cobra Army, and I’m doing my time as a Viper, and then all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh, yo, by the way, we’re actually run by mutants. It’s like, “What? Send me anywhere else, man, don’t drop me in Cobra-La.”

I keep coming back to it, there’s humor in the cartoons, there’s humor in the file cards, humor in all Larry Hama’s stuff. Larry Hama’s such a great writer, and he’s quite funny. If you go back, dig up any of those comics and you read it, some of the dialogue is just hilarious. The way he writes Cobra Commander is so funny. So there’s always humor in it. There’s a lot of facets to this plastic Army toy. So again, why I had to make an album about it, because I’m like, “I’m going to tell people why I think G.I. Joe’s cool.” Clearly I have a lot to say about it.

Did you stick with the original series to end? Or did you fall off on it?

Yeah, no, I stuck to the end. I think I regularly started getting it in the 60s. I would get scattered issues here and there at a newsstand, whenever, and then I remember my dad actually took me to a comic book store, and they had two or three issues on the racks and I was like, “What? How is this out already? I just read this other issue off the newsstand.” So yeah, I read it right up to the end of the Marvel run, and I was reading, like you I read, it was my gateway to all the Marvel books, and DC and Image and everything, I just loved comics. I read it to the end and have bought every issue of G.I. Joe to come out since.

So you read the stuff from Devil’s Due and IDW?

It has its ups and downs. There are some moments in it where I think he does manage to capture that magic that he had, but there are some other times where it’s just like, I don’t know, it’s all over the place. But that original Marvel run, especially, I feel like the first 100 issues, maybe the first 110 issues [were really good]. … But that run in the 100s with Borovia, and the SAW Viper story is crazy.

Right. During the stuff with Trucial Abysmia.

Okay, see, you just saying Trucial Abysmia, instantly I’m like, all right, perfect, I’m not wasting my time tonight, I’m talking to a head.

So I know, according to “Rap Viper,” that your mom was a Tele-Viper. What was your favorite Viper?

Well, Tele-Viper was the first Viper that I actually owned, and my mom bought him for me, so there’s a lot into there. Plus, my mom worked at a call center. She was a nurse and then she worked at a call center, so I was like, she technically was a Tele-Viper, because they were basically the Cobra call center, right? [laughs]

I thought Night Viper was always a really dope figure. I’m thinking from the toys, the green and black Night Viper, I always liked that figure. He’d probably be my favorite. But then I like weird guys, like I like the Alley Viper. They really make orange and blue look good. Move over New York Knicks, or the Mets. Maybe they’re Mets fans, actually. I never thought of that.

What are some of your favorite obscure GI Joe characters?

There’s a sweet spot for the 1990 line of figures. I always liked Rampart: he was a guy who played video games and then G.I. Joe recruited him. That was his file card, and he’s a coastal defender. His design, he’s got goggles and, it’s not a baseball cap, but it’s got a visor, and almost like a hoodie. I also like Free Fall. That wave of guys is pretty fun. Pathfinder, who’s got a giant weeded whacker. He’s ridiculous, but he’s also, I always liked. The guys who had really interesting accessories, like Fast Draw who had this giant missile launching backpack. Those guys were just, you always felt like you’re getting a good deal too if you got one of the figures that came with a bunch of stuff, and then you’d get Chuckles who just had a pistol. Why would I get him when I could get Fast Draw, or Stretcher, or somebody with 80 accessories?

Well, “Chuckles (The Last Laugh” is the last song on the album. It’s inspired by the G.I. Joe: Cobra series from IDW. What inspired you to write a song based on that dark take on the comics and characters?

Well, I loved it. As I was working on the album, I started to feel like I wanted to have a loose thread somehow connected. The opening track is welcoming you to Cobra Island, and the last track is basically saying goodbye, but in very different ways. That Chuckles story, I think, was one of the best contained stories in G.I. Joe, in any G.I .Joe media, that I’d ever read or seen. And huge shout out to Christos Gage and Mike Costa who wrote that story, who both I’ve become, I guess, light acquaintances wit, because I made the song and I sent it to them and I was like, I hope they dig it, and they did. That was like, “Okay, fantastic.”

I just thought that story was so cool and such an interesting take on a character that was kind of a joke, and his name is a joke: Chuckles, it’s laughing, but there’s something very likable about him. Even though I’m joking now how the figure just came with a tiny little gun. Compare that to Tunnel Rat, who has his backpack and flashlights and this huge gun, he’s got a satchel. And Chuckles has a pistol.

And a shoulder holster.

That’s exactly right, he did have the little thing. Which was dope, he was cool, he’s the Magnum PI guy. I LOVE that figure.

It just was so perfect, and that story was so dark, and as this album came together, there’s a bit of a specter of darkness over it, which even though it’s fun and playful and you’re talking about all this stuff, the Snake Eye songs are kind of dark. Cobra Commander’s song, his story’s dark. There’s Zartan, there’s some darkness there. There’s that edge, and that’s what I wanted, because GI Joe felt real. Especially when you’re a seven-year-old and you’re really into it, there’s some dark stuff to it. It’s not until you get older that you laugh more at it. I thought that Chuckles story tapped into a darkness that we hadn’t really seen too much of in the Joe world, it had been hinted at occasionally.

I honestly thought it was a great story and it would be fun to play that character. I cast myself in all these roles on the album, and it was a character that I felt I could tap into and tell their story, if that makes sense. It was like taking on a role as an actor, really.

The Skull Buster Range Viper story was crazy. I also liked how they took characters that seemed ridiculous, like Crystal Ball and Croc Master, and turned them into something dark and creepy. Which, if you think about it, they were.

I read all those Cobra ones. The Scoop story, and everything was great, with the Croc Master story and Skull Buster.

So you do have plans to do a sequel to the project, right?

It’s been in the back of my mind even since I finished the first one, and I was like, “Well, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years already.” I still love this stuff. It’s still so fun. And there’s a lot of concepts that I had plans for on the first album and I didn’t explore because we cut it off at 12 tracks. I had a lot more stories that I wanted to tell.

It’s going to be a lot of deep cuts for stuff that I love. The Ripcord story in Marvel Comics. You mentioned the Skullbuster Range Viper, Croc Master, all that stuff. “Rap Viper,” I made up, and I have a couple other characters that I always thought needed to be in the Cobra ranks, but we never saw them. I have a few more tales to tell that hopefully fit right in for just sort of these original characters. … My own fan fiction, I guess.

What about Firefly?

I had a thought about Firefly, and we’ll see how much Firefly gets explored on this one. There is a Scrap-Iron track. I’ve already recorded it. I’ve recorded maybe about six or seven songs already. There’s a few more in progress and a few more I’m mapping out now. I was hoping to finish it this year, but more than likely it’ll come out next year, which next year will be the 10th anniversary of the “Rap Viper” video. So even though this is the 10th anniversary of the album, I think I can stretch it, because I’m about to do the 3rdburglar 10th anniversary vinyl, which was supposed to be last year, but it got pushed forward because of all this stuff.

On Rhyme Your Business, you had two other G.I. Joe themed songs: “MacGuffin Device” and “Wrong Pulaski,” both on. Were those concepts you were kicking around when you were recording Cobra Island?

“MacGuffin Device” was just kind of its own thing. It’s just more tapping into that with the GI Joe thing. So no, that wasn’t originally going to be part of Cobra Island. And the Pulaski song, yeah, it was an idea I’d had, but it didn’t really fit with Welcome to Cobra Island. It would’ve fit, it just hadn’t cracked that code yet. I can show you pieces of paper I have all over my place, and it’s just song ideas and themes and all these things, but I haven’t quite cracked the angle on how I want to approach it. And “What’s my entry point into this?”

And for the Pulaski one, I’ve written a graphic novel about that story [“World’s Without End”], so I’m just waiting to find out who got the license for the comic’s so I can pitch it to them. [laughs] I have a whole story in mind that is that Pulaski story expanded. There’s a unique angle on there. I drop hints in the song about what I think happened. … It’s so creepy. It’s still creepy bow? We just leave them there. The Joes just leave them there in this other world and it’s, “All right, I guess you can just handle this, really … Steeler? Steeler’s going to be in charge of leading the revolution against this Cobra World Order. Okay, what’s that going to be like?” That’s what my graphic novel’s about, and I think it’s kind of cool to be honest, but I got to get someone to listen to it.

Where do you think Cobra Island stacks up with your whole discography, when you think about it now?

It has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I know that sounds cliched to say, but I did it kind of in a vacuum. I made it with my friends. I knew maybe a handful of people that I was like, “I’m going to share this with so-and-so because they’re going to get these G.I. Joe references and they know where I’m coming from.” And it was my first attempt to just release something on my own. … I’d been releasing stuff independently, but also, I’d been on a few indie labels and I was like, “I’m just going to put this out on my own.” Bandcamp was the only place I could find that I could put up an album and people could just download it for free, because I didn’t have a website. I didn’t have the capacity to host something that could be downloaded for free or whatever. And I was like, I’m just going to put this up for free on Bandcamp. It’s name your price, of course, and I’m going to do CDs like I’ve been doing for all my albums, and I’m just going to put it out there and see what happens.

And honestly, man, to this day, I can’t believe the reaction, how many people found it. The G.I. Joe sites picked up on it. Comic sites picked up on it. Underground hip-hop sites picked up on it. It didn’t obviously blow up, but it blew up more than I thought it would in strange ways. And the ways that it blew up were cool because the people who did find it and had a strong reaction to it, and I’ve gotten to meet so many new people who connected with it.

So in terms of putting something out into the universe and then meeting all these new cool people from all over the world, not just America and Canada, but Europe and all over the place who found this record, it’s amazing in that it’s been able to live on now 10 years. People message me to this day about it. It’s an honor that I could it. When you share all this crazy stuff that you love about something and you put it out there and then people react to it? And the people who “get” it. Which is a pretty small group. I’m not making Drake money or anything. It’s very small, intelligent [group], but I’ve always said the Joe fans are like the smartest, coolest group of fans. I may be biased, but we are the smartest and the coolest fans.

I think because Joe was big in the ’80s and early ’90s, and that certain era of hip hop is so great. There’s a lot of crossover between hip hop and G.I. Joe. It goes together so well that I think naturally there were a lot of people who were into GI Joe who loved hip hop and vice versa. For whatever reason, people found it. Looking back on it, I’m like very, I am very proud of it. It’s definitely a special, special album and yeah, it’s crazy that it was 10 years ago. I can’t even believe it.