You may have known him as that Slimkid Tre, the high yalla dreadnaughty sun-spitter on a Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, but these days he simply goes by Tre minus the locks. “I’m not the slick kid Tre character. I’m not any of this shit.” Above all, and beyond being nearly impossible to pin down, Tre Hardson is a multifaceted and evolved spiritual being. Enigmatic and sphinx-like, he’s still likely to evince more tangential questions than definitive answers. “We’re ultimately spirits. That’s one way to look at it. How I look at it now is we have to utilize everything about us-our spirituality with where we are physically on this earth plane, and we have to make it work for us.” But for all the things a person is, was, and could potentially be, the things a person is not can also be as instrumental in providing a more definitive portrait of the individual.
No, he’s not with the Pharcyde anymore (“Naw man. Imani and Romye are still holding their name up.”); he’s definitely not with Delicious Vinyl, the musically progressive record label that unleashed Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde and Labcabincalifornia on unsuspecting masses in the early nineties (“We were trying to get away from Delicious Vinyl. We didn’t let them hear seventy or eighty songs but we had that in our arsenal. Things we gave them, they were like, It’s not good enough. We were like, What the fuck! Tellin us our shit’s not right. It felt like slavery. Trying to keep people there by putting them under pressure at a precedent.”); and judging from his latest solo effort on iMusic eponymously entitled Liberation which features expansive contributions from MC Lyte, Charli 2na, Saul Williams and N’Dea Davenport, Tre Hardson definitely ain’t mad. “Ultimately, the journey was for me to get back to making happy music. That’s what Liberation is about. We went through so much turmoil back in the days. It started with Labcabin. I kinda lost it one year. We were on Delicious Vinyl trying to get distribution. We were always struggling to get the music to the people. We were doing everything in our power to make things happen and that shit fell through and I just fucking lost it, dude. I couldn’t take it.” Under more pressure than David Bowie and Freddie Mercury combined, the bizarre ride went unplugged as Tre subsequently took flight. “Taking a pocket full of money to New York I was in the moment I was sayin I don’t care what’s going on I don’t care about the music business don’t care about shit just sittin eatin Indian food on a stoop with my girl tears for days just trying you don’t know where you are all these challenges I can’t really point the finger at any one it’s just the universe puts things before you”
Momentarily at an emotional impasse, Tre heads back to the future from what was to what is and what could be concerning his life and work. He alludes to the road many hip-hop artists have taken with live organic musicality. “During the course of three years I was trying to put a band together. I love orchestrated music. I’m taking off the training wheels of sampling and reaching into myself and coming with it. I’m trying to get people outta the mindframe of thinking that you can just put two brothers out with a DAT and a deejay. It’s cost effective but you wanna give people more. You can’t stay in one space forever. You gotta keep coming in there. I know I have it in me to do it. It’s time for me to do it.” Asked to sum up what he hopes people will take from his experiences transmuted to wax, he muses, “I just hope it takes layers off people to make them feel good. That’s the energy I put into it. To be life to people. Light, love, energy.”
