Malkovich Music

Malkovich first gained fame in the late ‘90s as the standoffish founding member of Gershwin BLX, the Los Angeles crew known then as much for their fondness of pocket hammers, acid and petty larceny as they were for their maniac rhyme skills, impossible live shows and three albums VocabuDrab Sessions 96-97, Sunch Punch and Veganz Want Beef. An illegal immigrant barely in the U.S. five years at the time, every LAPD squad car that would roll by was another reminder of the fact that he was not on home turf. Several tours, breakups, children, jail terms and rehab stints later,ABCDEFG, MolMan, Milx, Omni and Cee Brown are the closest thing Malkovich has ever had to brothers, and the rent-controlled wilderness of the Palms section of West L.A. is the closest place he’s ever had to home. Revolutions always leave some of their people floating in the wind. Malkovich is a product of two. The same year Sugar Hill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight”, he was born in Genoa, Italy – the hometown of explorer Christopher Columbus – to an English father and Iranian mother who were forced to flee Iran after the U.S.-backed Shah Pahlavi was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters in a bloody February now known as the Islamic Revolution. After fourteen years of bouncing around Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Malkovich’s family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1992, the year the Rodney King riots and Dr. Dre’s The Chronic put L.A. at the center of the universe, and introduced him to hip-hop, the culture he had unknowingly grown up alongside. Today, hip-hop is the only true allegiance for this man of no one race, no sole religion, no real homeland, able to slip into most any lifestyle – and rhyme style – with the grace and ease of a method actor. His lyrics balance intelligence with soul, chock-a-block with internal wordplay and multiple layers that require repeated listenings, whether he’s laying the words hard and heavy or nimble and unpredictable. To date, Malkovich has toured all over America and the Hawaiian islands, opening for the likes of Murs of Living Legends and Fatlip of Tha Pharcyde. And as time goes on, the question of where home is for Malkovich becomes less and less of an issue. Because what he’s realized is that while he never quite feels at home anywhere, he never quite doesn’t either.