Eric Steuer: Well, the re-release is a tribute to my good friend Lafura Jackson, aka A-Twice, who was one of the rappers in mic.edu. That crew was made up of me and four other guys who went to college together in Santa Barbara and who met at KCSB, the radio station there, where a bunch of us had rap shows. This is like 1998, I guess....Unfortunately, not too long after we made that music, Lafura found out that he had testicular cancer. He had grown up in Japan, so he went back to Tokyo to get medical care. He was able to return to California once more, but in a pretty short amount of time, the cancer killed him. He died in 2000 at the age of 24.
Eric Steuer: Well, he was fluent in Japanese, and he could tear dudes up with rhymes in English and then flip on ‘em in Japanese. But more than that, he was just totally unafraid to be himself, and luckily for him and everyone who knew him, he was unique and hilarious and weird in a really great way. His dad was a jazz musician; he was the bassist for The Headhunters, Herbie Hancock’s group. He met Lafura’s mom while the band was on tour in Japan in the ‘70s. Lafura’s dad was black and his mom was Japanese, so Lafura grew up pretty much racially unlike any of his peers in Japan. He talked about getting a lot of looks growing up, and he would talk about how there was no one else like him in his school or his neighborhood or even in his whole city, as far as he knew. But he would also always talk about how he used that experience as an asset. He used his differences as a bridge to connect with more people rather than fewer. Being different let him relate to a wider range of people instead of feeling like he needed to tie himself to a particular group. In fact, the name A-Twice was based on that idea. The Japanese term haafu is used to describe people who are half Japanese and half something else. He hated that idea. He was like, “No no, fuck that, I’m not half anything. Call me twice everything!” I know that everyone’s got friends that have gone too soon, and that there’s a tendency to rewrite the history of the dead, as if they were the coolest, best people that ever lived. But this guy, Lafura, he really was the best dude ever. He made such a mark on everyone he met because he was born different and he wasn’t scared of that and he didn’t mind being weird and he could talk to you about a million things from obscure cartoons to Donald Goines books to Prince.
