Ivey Widens Rap Horizons on ‘Toys’

Is that Donovan--the peace ‘n’ love hippie crooner from the ‘60s-- rapping ?

Not quite, but the talk-singing on “Play With Toys,” the album by Basehead, sure sounds like him.

Actually, it’s Michael Ivey, Basehead’s one-man gang. As a rapper, producer, guitarist and composer, he’s responsible for most of the debut album.

Ivey, though, claims to have minimal knowledge of Donovan.

“I certainly am not trying to copy him,” said Ivey, 23, by phone from his home in Washington.

Ivey is, however, well acquainted with Lou Reed, whose droning, detached, downbeat vocal style also seems to have influenced him.

“I may sound like those guys--I’m not saying I don’t,” he insisted in a droning, Reed-like tone. “But this is how I talk and this is what sounds most effective on the record.”

His distinctive rapping is just one of the distinguishing elements of Basehead’s hard-to-define music, which falls into that exclusive alternative-rap category peopled by the likes of De La Soul, Arrested Development and Me Phi Me.

It’s certainly nothing like surly gangsta rap and much too quirky and downbeat to qualify as pop. Though not overly political, it’s introspective, dealing with some everyday situations--girlfriend problems, drinking beer--while also tackling tough issues including black-on-black violence.

But what really sets Basehead’s material off is that the guitar-bass-drums music, which has a funky folk-rock feel, is mostly done with live instruments--unheard of in this age of sample-happy hip-hop.

“Rap music, with all the samples, is all sounding the same to me,” said Ivey. “There’s no real human element in it. I was just trying to put a human element--something unpredictable--back into music.”

“This just isn’t the kind of music black kids like,” he explained.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Pa., Ivey, moved to his current home in the late ‘80s to go to Howard University. Though a rap fan while still in Pittsburgh, he developed a serious interest in it while expanding his musical horizons in college.

“I wanted to rap but I wanted to do something intelligent and different from some of the formula-stuff that’s out there,” he recalls.

So he put together a record that was so different--and supposedly difficult to market--that only Emigre, a tiny Berkeley independent label, would touch it. Only 3,000 copies were pressed but the album created such a buzz in collegiate and alternative circles that bigger labels, with wide distribution in mind, started bidding for it. The relatively new Imago Records, run by former Chrysalis head Terry Ellis, won.

Ivey relishes the diversity of the album which, he says, is part of his master plan: “I purposely made the record full of a lot of different elements so I could go in a lot different directions in the future. I’m not locked into any one style. I can write a song about anything. I need that kind of freedom. I don’t really function well without it.”

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