Interview: Wordburglar discusses his “Welcome To Cobra Island” album 10 years after its release (Part 1 of 2)
Warning: The following interview features a lot of nerdy talk related to G.I. Joe. Sean “Wordburglar” Jordan and myself spend an inordinate amount of time conducting an in-depth discussion of the toys, comic books, and cartoons related to the property. And we speak to each other in a very “Inside Baseball” manner. So now you’re aware.
Both Wordburglar and myself are very passionate about G.I. Joe, particularly its 1980s-90s incarnation. I owned many of the toys throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. I read the vast majority of the initial comic book series, written by Larry Hama and commonly referred to as G.I. Joe: Real American Hero; it was one of the best-written titles on the shelves during much of its run. And like many of my fellow Gen-Xers/1980s babies, I watched the syndicated cartoon series (also referred to as G.I. Joe: Real American Hero), from the initial limited series to its extended seasons to its straight-to-video movie. Along with Star Wars and hip-hop music, G.I. Joe is among the most formative forces of my childhood.
However, Wordburglar is the one who recorded an entire album about the franchise. And a really damn good one at that. Welcome to Cobra Island (2013) was released 10 years ago through his Bandcamp page, where it’s still available for “Name Your Price” today.
Welcome to Cobra Island is a labor of love by the Canadian emcee. Using his encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise, he creates a 12-track album to demonstrate why G.I. Joe is worthy of the same respect and accolades that many of the ’80s and ’90s pop culture fixtures. The project was made with a reverence to the source material, as well as some winks to the more overtly ridiculous parts of its mythos.
Wordburglar explores many facets of G.I. Joe lore throughout the project. The title track is a recruitment advertisement for the Cobra terrorist organization, pushing the nominal island and its unique diplomatic status as unique selling points. On “Rap Viper,” he describes his own awesomeness and makes frequent allusions to obscure Cobra-related minutiae.
Welcome to Cobra Island features a lot of tracks narrated from the point of view of many of the property’s characters. The album’s “center piece” is the three-part “Letter From Snake Eyes,” explaining the complex origin of the property’s most popular and distinctive personality. He also delves into the backgrounds of some of the series’ most compelling villains, rapping from the perspective of weapon-dealer Destro (“Call Destro”), shape-shifting assassin Zartan (“The Guy With the Disguises”), and Cobra Commander himself (“Venomous Ideology”). Wordburglar enlists many of his rhyming cohorts for “Rank & File,” where they assume the role of various Joe members, from the well-known (Stalker and Roadblock) to the less-heralded (Muskrat and Alpine).
Welcome to Cobra island also goes into the property’s fantastical and often very dark corners. “I Don’t Want to Go to Cobra-La” lays bare the harrowing realities of G.I. Joe the Movie’s villains, residents of a hidden Himalayan civilization “known for wearing living crustaceans” and led by “flying tumor” Golobulus. “Chuckles (The Last Laugh)” digs into one of the bleakest G.I. Joe comic offshoots, the G.I. Joe: Cobra series from the late ’00s and early ’10s.
Wordburglar has shown how special the project is to him over the years. He recorded a very fun and awesomely detailed video for “Rap Viper” in 2014. Years after its release, he pressed up copies of the album on vinyl. He’s bonded with writers of the comic and many other fans of the property. He’s part-way through a sequel, which he hopes to release in 2024. And he’s even ready to pitch Skybound, who now owns the publishing license for the comic, an idea for graphic novel related to Real American Hero cartoon series.
Wordburglar and I spoke at length about both Welcome To Cobra Island and G.I. Joe in general in this lengthy, wide-ranging, two-part interview. For part one, we talk about his entry point to G.I. Joe, the genius of Larry Hama, and what makes Snake Eyes so incredible as a character.
Jesse Ducker: How did you first get into G.I. Joe? Was it the toys? Was it the comics? Or the cartoon? What was the order?
Wordburglar: It was the toys. I benefited from having a lot of older cousins. So my older cousin, Joe, coincidentally, was into G.I. Joe. My grandma would buy him G.I. Joes, and then she’d buy them for me because I was three years younger. And she’d be like, “Oh, Sean would like them.” That’s me. I’m Sean. She wasn’t calling me a Wordburglar back then.
I think my first guys were Grunt and Tripwire, and then building up basically from probably around ’84, ’85 up. And then I remember my mom got me a Recondo, and I loved Recondo. My mom was like, “I really liked his mustache.” [laughs] That’s why she picked him out. If you know Recondo, the jungle trooper guy.
Yeah, with the hat.
Yeah, dude, and his gun had the tape around the end of it. I love Recondo, and that was actually, I think the first comic I read of G.I. Joe. It’s got Storm Shadow on the cover, and there were two stories going on with Billy, and Storm Shadow’s trying to help Billy escape Cobra.
That’s issue #38.
And there’s a story with Recondo in the jungle where the Joes dropped down, and Recondo’s going to be their guide. So I was like, “Oh, man, Recondo’s in here.” Storm Shadow was like that, and then I was hooked. Yeah, #38 would have been my first issue. I remember going to the corner store, and again, my cousin, Joe, bought it for me. Because he had money. I did not have money. Maybe I had 25 cents, but comics were 25 cents back then. And he was into all the cool comics at the time. I remember he put me onto Daredevil, and Spider-Man, and all that stuff, and he was like, “You’ve got to read this. You’ve got to read that.” I always tell him that I benefited from his stuff. It didn’t stick for him. He moved on a year or two later, but I was obsessed. Baseball, comics, G.I. Joe, those are my obsessions. And rap.
Do you get into the cartoon when it was out, or was it mostly about the comics?
I love the cartoon. I mean, I’m biased now, but I would say it’s still the greatest cartoon of all time. I mean, it’s so ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous with heart. I don’t know if you’ve gone back and rewatched any of this stuff, but the voice acting is another level. And I’ve read interviews with the directors of the show and how all the actors took it seriously, no matter how ridiculous it is. If you listen to Flint and Lady Jaye and Cobra Commander and Destro, the performances they all give, they’re so good.
I mean, yeah, they’re trying to sell us toys, but we knew it. We wanted it. Just give it to us. All the ’80s and ’90s, it was so crazy. The gloves were off. I remember my dad would always say, he was like, “We never had any of this crap when we were kids. … I played with Lincoln Logs, or I played outside, and I just played sports.” It was like the idea of these toys being marketed to you through cartoons, and cereals, and all this stuff. That is not lost on me, but I love it. I unabashedly love that stuff, and I think having a perspective on it is important, but the fact that here we are in 2023 still talking about this ’80s toy line, which is great.
The ’80s G.I. Joe was the second life of G.I. Joe because of the original 1960s Joe, and then they rebooted it in the ’80s for us. But it’s never been bigger than it was in the ‘80s.
Transformers had its resurgence recently with the Michael Bay movies and the other ones that followed.
Transformers is a perfect example. That has kept renewing itself. Or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman, any of that other stuff that’s still around. But if you went to the playground, talked to some kids, I bet they’d know what Transformers, Ninja Turtles, and Batman, but they’re going to have no idea what G.I. Joe is. They’d maybe be like, “Grandpa liked that.”
What specifically inspired you to want to make a rap album about G.I. Joe and name it Welcome to Cobra Island?
Well, because I knew one day I’d have to explain to my nephew what it was, and I was like, “Just listen to this album here. This will teach you why it’s cool.” Because just lifelong love of Joe and lifelong love of rap. And I always in the back of my mind thought it would be cool. I always thought Snake Eyes’ story is a rap song. That’s kind of what I thought of, just one song. I was going to do one song as Snake Eyes.
There’s comic book references, and movie references, and video games all the time in hip-hop, but very rarely there’d be G.I. Joe references. And even Transformers, like RZA is dropping rhymes about Transformers. Anytime I’d hear a rapper drop G.I. Joe, I’d be like, “Yo, I’m going to follow this rapper forever because he knows who Zartan is.” That’s my people. They get it. I just always thought that the material was so perfect to translate into a rap song. Taking on these larger-than-life characters with their code names and these adventures. And as I started to do it, there’s a lot of factors.
So what was the starting point for putting the album together?
It started in my brain around 2009, when that G.I. Joe [live action] movie came out, and I thought it sucked. It was just the worst thing ever. And as a kid who grew up dreaming of, “How amazing would it be if there would be a G.I. Joe movie? A real GI Joe movie!”
You know how it is when everybody in your crew is like, “Oh, you love the A’s, and the A’s suck,” and they’re all bugging you about the A’s having a bad season or whatever? People were like, “Yo, you saw that G.I. Joe movie. How can you like that, man? That movie was terrible!” I’m like, “Man, I don’t like THAT G.I. Joe. I like the good G.I. Joe, like the Larry Hama comics, the file cards, the toys, the characters, the cartoons. I like the good stuff.”
And it was almost like, “I’m going to make a rap album just to show you why G.I. Joe’s dope.” And I’d always have G.I. Joe rhymes. I’d be at shows rapping, and whatever. I rap about stuff I love, and I just keep it real to who I am. So, I don’t care. … People would be hating on me for dropping a G.I. Joe rhyme or a Spider-Man rhyme, or they’re like, “This is nerdy rap,” or whatever. I’m like, “I don’t care, man. This shit’s dope, and I’ll show you why.”
And that’s like Cobra Island was me just basically saying, “Here’s why G.I. Joe is dope, and I’m going to make a G.I. Joe rap album. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t suck, while also being just for me and my hardcore Joe fan friends.” It started as one Snake Eyes song. And then I got this idea for “Rap Viper.” I’m like, “Well, I want to make all these other rhymes about all these other characters, but it doesn’t fit if I’m doing this song about Snake Eyes.” And the Snake Eyes story couldn’t be told in just one song. I’m like, “Man, I could do 10 chapters of Snake Eyes songs.” And it just grew, and grew, and grew, and I did the “Rap Viper” song.
It was weird how easily it came to me. It all came back to me, and so I’d be writing a song about Destro, and I’d remember all this stuff. It’s like, “Yo, Destro was in a romantic relationship with Baroness, but he was also in a romantic relationship with Zarana.” That’s something. Who could say that? That’s like, “Whoa, you dated both of them? That’s pretty sweet.”
Again, I’m writing it from the mind of a 13-year-old with the hopefully evolved rap skillset. Because I’ve been writing rhymes since I was a kid, and I felt like maybe at that point, I’d maybe gotten to the point in my rapping career, I felt that I could do it justice. I feel like had I tried to make the album 10 years earlier, or when I was 13, of course it would have sucked. And luckily, I was able to convince a bunch of dope producers, and DJs, and other rappers that I know that we could do this. And so I found all the samples, I hit up all my favorite producers who I knew were Joe fans. Honestly, man, it came together so easily. I made the whole album start to finish in under a year, which was crazy.
I could keep going on about it, man because it’s weird now thinking that it’s 10 years old because it was great. I remember staying up late, watching the cartoons, and digging out my box of Joe toys, and reading the comics. And my girlfriend’s like, “What?” I’m like, “Look, I’m playing with G.I. Joes, and watching cartoons, and reading comic books. It’s all research for the next album. This is all work for me.” And she’s like, “All right, cool.”
And she’s now my wife, and she’s the best. The first time she saw my apartment, all my Joes were set up on my TV stand, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, these are my G.I. Joes.” And she was staring at them. I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not weird, right?” She was like, “No, I’m impressed with how organized they are.” [laughs] I was like, “I’m going to marry this girl.”
So you said that you started with the Snake Eyes song? How did you put that together? Did you start from the beginning? Or did you start from, Part 3, which is him starting with G.I. Joe and work backwards?
I started with part one because, again, as a kid, the storyline of finding out that Snake Eyes was actually in Vietnam and had this whole other story before even joining G.I. Joe? To me as a kid, that blew my mind. And it was like, “Wow, you’ve got this whole backstory of this character.” And so I kind of figured out a timeline in my head, and, well, if G.I. Joe started around 1981, and Snake Eyes was in Vietnam, let’s say, I don’t know, the early ’70, late ’60s, Working backwards, and then just taking all the stuff from the comics. Then I had to fill in some blanks and make up some connectors to be like, “Okay, this would have made sense. Where would he have been here? And at what time?” Not too much because it’s all in the comics if you read every single issue, which I did.
I did start with part one, and then it became very clear when I thought of it as one song, it was going to be three verses, and each verse would be a part. And then I was like, “You know what? They breathe better as their own single track.” So doing it into three parts allowed me to get a bit more in depth and let the story unfold a bit more. So instead of three 16-bar verses, the first two parts are, I think they’re both maybe 24 or 26 bars. They’re probably 24 bar verses. Then the third part is two verses, and that basically by the time you get to the third track, he’s joined G.I. Joe.
So the first track is his adventures in Vietnam and then getting out of there. Second track is him getting back, and then what he comes home to, and how crazy everything becomes with his family dying. And it’s this crazy soap opera that Larry Hama created for the character, and there’s so many twists and turns. That alone, when I heard they were making that Snake Eyes movie, I was like, “Well, here you go. Here’s the blueprint. This is all you need.” It’s all there in the comics. And the movie was terrible, I thought. Whatever… we had the comics.
Check out Part 2 of the interview here.
