Ever since he first stumbled upon the polarizing counter-culture fringes of pop music—arriving in a singularly off-putting, genre-mashing, artistically drunken stupor, Brooklyn chameleon Tim Fite has never exactly…“fit in.” His musical introduction (both to the world and the neon-bright confines of MTV) came in 2001, with the jokey novelty hip-hop curio “Shaniqua,” released under the moniker Little-T and One Track Mike, a duo he formed with friend Michael Flannery while attending New Jersey’s Rutgers University. The song was—and still is—the equivalent of a musical hangover, one of hip-hop’s most regrettable moments: With its dead-end beatboxing, ill-fated DJ scratching, and tossed-off rhymes about a wrong number in a college dorm room, it’s also one of the 2000s’ most unlikely one-off hits (no matter how minor), landing halfway between Biz Markie and The Bloodhound Gang, released in an era when overt rap silliness had long ceased being cool. But even still, there was a free-spirited zeal bubbling beneath the stupidity, most evident in the track’s surreal, highly likable video—what with its random karate lessons, zombies, buxom babes, enraged truck-drivers and Fite himself, mugging desperately for the camera amid the random visual clutter. He seemed too bizarre, too adventurous, too downright interesting for such simple-minded fare. Even in his own music, Fite was a misfit.
On his first solo record, 2005’s Gone Ain’t Gone, Fite was a thrift-store mutation of Beck, sampling withered folk and jaded rock grooves from dollar-bin purgatory, alternating between slack-jawed raps and back-porch country harmonies. 2008’s criminally overlooked Fair Ain’t Fair showed signs of honest maturity, incorporating more live instrumentation and higher lyrical sophistication (best evidenced on the quietly strummed folk-pop gem “Big Mistake”). But on Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t, the third installment in his triumphant “Ain’t” trilogy, Fite has gracefully evolved into an even more fascinating songsmith, bulldozing any lingering shreds of irony—leaving in its wake a sonically rich and thematically mature core. Simply put, it’s the sound of that musical misfit settling down, harnessing a more emotional, more universal side of his creativity.
“I think if you make something,” Fite reflects, “it takes a really long time. What you did before, what you were making before, all of the steps that you take early on while making something—the inspection of those steps, the inspection of what you made there in order to continue making in order to finish the project, it all becomes part of the project. So you have to look back at everything else that you made before in order to finish the project.”
“And I think this record [Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t] in a lot of ways is me looking back at every song that I’ve every made,” Fite continues, “looking back at every note that I’ve ever played, every note that I’ve ever stolen. Every moment in those three records—and also the records that aren’t part of the trilogy [like 2007’s politically-focused hip-hop outing Over the Counter Culture] but also a part of the system—thinking about how those pieces fit into the whole project, how those pieces fit into my understanding of what I’m doing for my life. If you’re an insurance salesman, you look back on your life as an insurance salesman and say, ‘What the fuck?’ If you’re a musician, you look back on your life as a musician and say, ‘What the fuck?’“
He laughs and continues: “It’s a little bit of that. I guess over time, the older you get, you start to look deeper into your soul. My grandfather is 98, and he gets really introspective. We’ll see what the records I’m making when I’m 98 sound like.”
It’s fitting that Fite’s been doing a lot of soul-searching since Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t is an album about exactly that. It’s an album about accepting your past, your mistakes, your place in the world, about relating to the common experiences of one’s fellow human beings, even when it may seem impossible. It’s also an album about being a teenager—the extreme sadness, excitement, and vulnerability that penetrates those formative years—and how that period of our lives shapes everything that follows it.
“That feeling of inclusiveness and of a broader scope—it was intentionally chosen to be on this record. Whereas the other two records are strangely just of the world, not of the heart. There’s a lot of heart in them, but it’s heart about the world. This one is about a much more universal heart, and that was important for me to make because it’s the final record of the trilogy. That was the note I wanted to end on—I wanted to end on that note. It really embodied that feeling of…a universal understanding. We all kinda get what it feels like to be torn up as a teenager or be bullied or just to want to go out and be silly or whatever. We all understand those pressures—it doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It you’re a teenager or you were a teenager or your brother or sister is a teenager. You know what the deal is.”
Fite explores teenage life from just about every possible angle on Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t. The low-key sing-along “Joyriding” explores the seemingly mundane experience of aimlessly cruising a small town (“Donuts, we done ’em / Red lights, we run ’em,” Fite sings enthusiastically), but the song’s slightly melancholy refrain (“No de-ny-ing / We’re joy-ri-ding”) transforms these “wasted” hours into something magical fading away in the fog of a rear-view mirror.
“I was…sort of a quiet kid,” Fite says. “But it was such a small town that your friends are who’s close enough. So my brother and my neighbors—they were more adventurous and had more fun. So I was always in the backseat when they were doing side-wheelies in the truck, looking out the back window. We’d tie Mark onto the back of the truck, put him on a sled and drag him behind the truck down the street. I was always the kid, saying, ‘We shouldn’t light the roman candle in the car. It’s not smart!’ But there it was, lit, squealing with delight as it launched higher into the sky.”
Conversely, the perky, horn-fueled “Bully” tackles its title topic quite directly (“I’m a bully—a big hard-ass bully / Do what I say, or get punched the fuck in the face”). But its chorus (“Bully, bully, if you could see the world fully / You would know that there will always be a bigger bully”) is focused not only on high school cafeterias—but on the world at large.
“Most of the time,” Fite reflects, “I was the one getting bullied. But I think everybody has their moments on either side of that coin. But most of the time, I was the one getting picked on [laughs]. I’d already figured out that the album was leaning toward the adolescent vibe, that it was going to be an introspective album about what it means to be a teenager. And it was sort of right about the time that Osama Bin Laden got killed, and there was all that stuff about cyber-bullying, and I was thinking about the hierarchal structure—that there’s always going to be a bigger bully. ‘What the fuck?’ How do I connect that to this happy-ass bassline? Where do those pieces fit?’ It’s almost absurd how there will always be someone to pick on somebody smaller.”