http://www.oaoa.com/news/sicks_27981___article.html/texas_microphone.html

Motion Sicks-ness

Odessa native hip hop artist on the rise in Austin music scene.
March 16, 2009 - 3:35 PM

BY MATTHEW MCGOWAN

In West Texas - where God-fearing people live, work and don't want trouble, Justin "Dubb Sicks" White is the boogey man hiding under your bed with a microphone and a black bandana.

When you're not looking, his lyrics will kidnap you and take you to places you hoped never to go.

After all is said and done, you'll find yourself right where he wants you, standing in the aftermath of his seismic wit picking up the pieces of the inside-out and upside-down world you once loved.

And the 2002 Permian High School graduate will do all this with a clear conscience.

"If you're offended, it's not my fault," he said. "If you're offended, it's your fault. You don't have to listen to it, so if you get offended, that's your problem. The world is split up into people who disagree with each other, but if you truly get offended by somebody else, then that's something you need to check out for your own sake."

But then again, he said, he does sometimes say things that are over the top.

After four years of moonlighting as an emcee in the state's capital, scrapping for a fan base and carving a name for himself - not to mention touring on Greyhounds and an empty stomach and sleeping in bus stations all over the country on tours he financed himself - it seems the word on the Permian Basin's exiled son is beginning to get out.

The Austin Chronicle named Sicks as one of the city's Top 10 best hip-hop performers of 2006-2007.

And here he goes again.

The emcee said he is slated to take to the stage in Austin this month at the preeminent venue for southern acts, the South by Southwest 2009 music festival.

After rejection letters from the festival's organizers two years in a row, he said performing at SXSW probably won't catapult him to any immediate new success.

Instead, Sicks said, the acceptance testifies more to what he has done so far than it prefaces what he will do.

"It just shows that what I have done has paid off in a sense," he said. "There are a lot of people - my contemporaries - from around here who I admire and look up to but who didn't get picked to be in the festival. I guess it just shows a progression that I'm actually getting noticed."

Sicks celebrated the release of his newest album, "Music for Assholes Vol. 2," on March 7 at Odessa's Roadhouse after making the road trip from Austin the night before with two fellow emcees, including his roommate, Los Angeles native Zack "Cali Zach" Ingram, who knows what acceptance to the festival means to an aspiring artist.

"It's gotten so big, and there are so many musicians from all over the world that come to it, that it just shows that you're accepted as a professional in the industry," Cali Zach said. "It shows that people understand you're not just out there faking it. It's really a benchmark, to a certain degree."

Many aspiring rappers don't ever get the props they deserve, Sicks said. Unfortunately, many of the ones who achieve commercial success probably aren't as gifted as the underground "hip-hop heads" who toil long hours and strive for the intellectual and artistic authenticity.

"It sucks to see a 15-year-old kid from Atlanta just blow up huge and not really say anything," Sicks said. "That's better than him sitting in the street selling crack, but, for somebody like me who is trying to use this more as a type of art form, that's discouraging."

Hip hop, after all, is an art form that takes practice and a penchant for poetry, he said. Hip hop at its finest is the product of a poet with a grasp of the realities of the world around him or her, which is not to say there's not a little room for embellishment.

Admittedly, Sicks said some of his own lyrics aren't all fact, but they aren't all meant to be taken literally.

Many rappers who brag about their money and cars don't have nearly as much wealth as they purport. They put on the front to fit the living-large mold.

To Sicks, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really his style.

"There's room for embellishment," he said. "It can be as embellished as writing a nonfiction book or as embellished as writing a totally fiction book. You can go anywhere on the spectrum you want to. A good deal of it is embellished, but the good rappers are the ones who don't have throwaway music who touch people with reality."

Soon after his arrival in Odessa on March 6, he proudly recounted how their truck ran out of gas on their way into town. Their wallets being emptier than the tank, the trio pulled into a gas station, sold two CDs, and used the money to make it into town.

He told the story with enough enthusiasm to romanticize his starving-artist status. He's a rapper who's proud of his Hoover flags, not his Benjamins.

In other words, Sicks isn't raking in the cash on hip hop.

He's actually pretty broke, and unabashedly so.

Sicks, an avid reader, works at a sandwich joint to make ends meet while he attends classes and, as a backup plan, studies English - he talked about Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson with wide eyes and talked about "keeping it gonzo" with his lyrics.

What he will do with his English degree?

Beats him. That's not the point.

"I've got to keep a job on the side, because I'm not making enough money yet to just live off hip hop," he said. "Any type of piece of paper is going to give you a pay increase and more opportunities for work. Just having any type of degree is one step higher than one I have right now."

As an unsigned artist, Sicks said he has his plate full doing his own booking, promotion and the broad array of other tasks on the periphery of performing music.

But he insisted that selling his rhymes does not equate to selling out. First and foremost, he's an artist.

"I'm not necessarily trying to market it as much as I am just trying to make it as realistic as I want it to be," Sicks said. "I'm trying to stay true to myself in that sense."