Before the co-sponsored Sound Liberation Front event Booty Crisis at Public Assembly last Saturday, I got a chance to talk backstage with Planet Rump – the monthly party’s founders and resident booty shaker – about the Casio, breaking boxes (the metaphorical kind), and just getting down with your funky ass self.

SLF: How did Planet Rump come about?

Nasty Ness: We landed here on Earth.
Miss Strawberry: Crashed our spaceship.
DJ Tantric: It was an accident.
M: We’re from the Planet Rump, and we were going on a funky space odyssey, and then we ended up here. We were, like, what are we gonna do, we really gotta get back to Rump – it’s like the funkiest planet in the universe.
D: Then we saw there was a need for us.
M: We saw a lot of funky people, a lot more lame people, so we decided to bring the funk of the universe, channel it through our bodies…
N: Earth isn’t ready.
D: And it’s not about materialism, it’s not about something you need to have to bring the funk. It’s about harnessing the funk within you. You could be wearing some Tevas, you could be wearing some Keds, you could be wearing some Fruit of the Loom. It doesn’t matter because anyone can get funky with anything you want, and that’s how our music works.

SLF: Why Brooklyn?

N: Because this is where the trends begin.
M: And Brooklyn needs it the most. We got a lot of shoegazers here, a lot of too-cool-for-schoolers.
N: A lot of conformists.
D: A lot of people who just want to buy something to make them cool, but they don’t want to be cool on the inside.
M: But we know that this is the media platform of the world, and we just want to be at the center of it all. Get the message out there that love, peace, and funk are the only things you need.

SLF: Why use the Casio as your main instrument?

D: The Casio embodies pretty much the principle of you don’t need anything to be funky.
N: Keep it simple.
D: We play little baby toys from thirty years ago, and we can blow people’s minds away harder than someone with the most updated products of blah, blah, blah production. I mean, you don’t need to buy something to be funky.
N: You can be yourself.
D: And we’ve done a lot with those little toys.
M: That shit BOOMS!
(laughter)
D: And we work with some sound generation tools that don’t actually play notes. Like, we don’t even need notes. We don’t even need a scale or melody or whatever. Yeah, we do that a little bit, but creating bass tones generated out of some sort of nonsense…we’re playing in between the notes, and the sounds are cool. That’s what works with us.

SLF: How do you get the ideas behind your songs? What’s the creative process?

N: We take our real-life experiences from going out and being ourselves every day and just enjoying life. We take real-life scenarios, and we make it something tangible.
D: We don’t really stick to any genre or anything. We’re just playing music. And we can embody anything about anything by just playing music. You don’t have to pigeonhole yourself into a certain box. We try to play across all boundaries, and some of our songs embody a lot of different elements of other types of music.
N: Like, why be negative? Why not just make something positive out of everything? Just put it on display and build your self-esteem.

SLF: Is that the whole idea behind Booty Crisis?

N: Hell yeah!
M: Definitely.
D: Booty Crisis is, like, the boundless booty party where you can have anything, and we’re sort of exposing people to things that they were sleepin’ on. Whether it’s Chico Mann or Hiro Tha Jap or DJ A-Ko from upstate New York. There’s a bunch of people out there right now dancing to a DJ from upstate New York, and they don’t know it.

Tayisha Busay

SLF: What’s the process of choosing the acts in the lineup?

N: If we don’t like them, then they don’t play.
D: It’s group knowledge, but we’re all specialists in different ways. So, we get to combine our strengths – sort of like a big net – and bring in people. If we can agree on it, see what the benefit is, and how we can draw people together with our own scene, then that’s what we do.
N: And that’s the most important thing.
M: It’s gotta be fun. It’s gotta be positive. It’s gotta be boomin’. It’s gotta be danceable. Electronic is what’s hot right now, and we love that.
D: Enough with the diva entitlement thing. We just bring people who wanna bring the funk.
N: If I can’t rock out to it, then I’m not gonna book ‘em. That’s it.

SLF: What’s the act tonight that you’re the most excited for?

Planet Rump: (in unison) All of them!
M: They’re all amazing.
N: I’ve been to all of their parties, and they all blew my mind.
D: And if we’re lucky, they’re all gonna be friends at the end of the night. We got Latin- Cuban-Afrobeat music. We got Japanese dance music. We got Israeli, Brooklyn-based dance music. We got us. And everyone’s gonna love each other.

Chico Mann

SLF: So, it’s gonna be one big group hug afterwards?

N: Of course, it’s already one big group hug. Everyone here is a friend. There are no enemies here. It’s all love.

SLF: What are your plans for Planet Rump in the future?

N: Planet Rump is more than just a group – we’re an entity.
D: It’s a movement. So, we’re booking acts and getting momentum with that. We’re cutting an album right now. One of our guests Chico Mann is a good sounding board because he doesn’t live in anyone’s world or anyone’s box. He’s a good person to talk about a lot of things like that. We’re gonna keep moving in a different direction. Use some different elements of different music, and see where it takes us.
N: As long as we keep having fun.
D: Nothing less than sexy.
N: If we’re not having fun, how could anyone watching us be having fun?