Above: Yelawolf performs "Pop the Trunk" during one of his nine South by Southwest 2010 concerts; photo by me. Below: The hyper-realistic "Pop the Trunk" video features Yelawolf's parents playing themselves; flick by Motion Family.

"Trunk Muzik" by Yelawolf

"Good to Go" by Yelawolf feat. Bun B

"You Ain't No DJ" by Big Boi feat. Yelawolf

Straight outta Gadsden, Alabama, nasal-voiced personality-packed rapper's rapper Yelawolf will be hard to ignore this year.

Touring behind his freely downloadable 2009 mixtape "Trunk Muzik," he became a blog darling and was signed to Interscope Records (Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga, M.I.A.) after playing South by Southwest 2010 in Austin, TX. He's set to release "Trunk Muzik 0-60" later this year, and recently stole the spotlight on the best song ("You Ain't No DJ") on what might shake out to be the best mainstream hiphop album of 2010, Big Boi's "Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty." He plays Nectar in Fremont 07/16/10.

I reached Yelawolf by phone the day before I heard "You Ain't No DJ," so instead of talking about the song, we spoke about album pricing strategies, community college, writing techniques, famous hiphop producers and mud bogging.

My favorite part of the interview was when Yelawolf — who is commonly taken for Caucasian, but is also half Cherokee — quite explicitly said he's trying to put a voice to ongoing racial integration and culture/style fusion in Gadsden. He is a man for his time and he knows it, and while his slithery slice & dice rap style captivates all on its own, I enjoy thinking that social ideology fuels both his jock jams party songs and hyper-realistic class-conscious storytelling.

Why did you give away "Trunk Muzik" for free on the Internet?

When we did the mixtape, we knew we were gonna put out a free project pretty much based on nobody knowing who I was. I had a small, underground buzz prior to "Trunk Muzik"; it was just local. Also, I wanted people to be able to access the music for free, because in my opinion, if you can go get a Radiohead album for free, then what gives me the right, you know?

How much will you charge for "Trunk Muzik 0-60"?

The next record ["Trunk Muzik 0-60"] is gonna be for sale, distributed by Interscope. I think it's gonna be five bucks, or something. I was selling CDs out the trunk in Gadsden, and being that the title is "Trunk Muzik," I wanted to keep it street with a real trunk price for the album. Just to match where I'm at with it. I'm still hustling real hard.

Are you making any money from touring?

When you first go on tour, most of the work and most of the money is going to cover the cost of travel, food, hotels. After a while, after people get to know you, you start being able to charge more. I'm just now getting to the point where I'm taking some money home after the shows.

One reason "Trunk Muzik" succeeded was because most of it was produced by Will Power, and it sounded like a cohesive album. Was that cohesiveness important to you?

I'm a huge fan of concept albums, and a fan of albums produced by one or two people. Dr. Dre, or Dungeon Family, or Suave House. Triple Six Mafia. And bands, you know. A band is a band. No matter who comes in and produces, you still got those four or five musicians making that music. So the consistency of people has to give you a sound. I'm bored to death and so over picking up a mixtape or an album produced by 12 different people, and every song is so different that it has no flow. We wanted to put a project to that had flow. And honestly, I would like to do that for my whole career.

With Will Power, or are you saying with individual producers?

Individual producers. I would never lock myself down to work with any one person for the rest of my career. But as far as when I'm going to make a project, the project is consistent. Whether it be Will Power, or possibly Diplo, you know, for the next project.

Is that a possibility?

I mean, we did a record that I'm so in love with that I'm seriously considering it. Maybe just hide away, and me, Diplo and Will Power in some trailer off in the woods for the next album, just making some insane shit. But the record him and I did, is incredible. It's me, Will Power, Diplo and Jim Jonsin.

Which song is that?

The record is not out yet. It's not even gonna be coming out on "0-60," I don't think. It's gonna be coming out on the one after it. It's crazy, crazy. "0-60" has been already recorded. We took a month and change to hide away and just work on it. We went out to Miami and got some production from Jim Johnsin for it, and the record we did do with Diplo was supposed to be for "0-60," but we chopped it down to 10 to 12 records, and I don't think the Diplo song is gonna make it. But "0-60" is finished.

Do you think "Trunk Muzik" sounds better in a car or in the club?

We mixed the project ourselves in house, and we just mixed it to how we wanted to hear it. There's definitely a science to mixing, and it's a science that I don't know much about. The simplest way to say it is we just did what we felt sounded good. We were just sitting in the studio like, "Yeah, this sounds right, let's master this." In actuality, the record sounds incredible in the car, but if you were going to play it in the club next to some mastered record from Tip, there's definitely a quality difference. What we've done on "0-60," we're letting it be mixed by a professional engineer.

In "Love is Not Enough," the character you play is resentful of his girlfriend's new boyfriend because he went to college. One, is that autobiographical, and two, are you planning on going to college at any point in your life?

It's a true story. I tried to go to college. And I was resentful, definitely, based on that I was just a drop out. And I didn't chose that lifestyle. But I will say that like 60-70% of my friends who are successful didn't go to college, whether it's in the music business or even graphic design, which requires a college education. Most of the creative people I know didn't go to college. I would go to college if there was a desire to go to college. But at this point, I don't feel any desire. I went to this community college out here in Gadsden, and I hated it as much as I hated high school. So maybe it's just not for me.

Did you grow up feeling poor?

There were parts of my life where we were poor, absolutely. And there were parts of my life where my mom lived with this dude in Nashville, and we had a pretty nice apartment. But there were parts of my life where we definitely really [expletive] up. We were on food stamps really early on in life. Sleeping on the floor, with really bad roach problems at the apartments we were staying at. I grew up with a single mom and we bounced around a lot. And my mom didn't settle down with somebody that she married until years after I had left. I definitely wasn't as poor as some people I know. There were good and bad times, I guess I could say that.

Would you call Gadsden a racially integrated community?

Yes and no. There's still old folks here hanging on to [expletive], from both black and white sides. There's people 60 and 70 years old that went through everything [expletive] out here. The racial wars, everything in Birmingham, Alabama, there's still people alive from that era. It's only natural. The youth has taken such a fast-forward pace to shaking all that [expletive] off, that it's hard for the elders to digest it. They don't understand it because they didn't grow up in that world. I would say hiphop is one of the driving forces, the glue that integrated the city. It's music and car culture and fashion that mix the two in with one another. I hope to be another nail in the bridge that helps to bring the [expletive] together more. We're trying to put a voice to that.

On "Trunk Muzik" you have story songs like "Love is Not Enough," concept songs like "Speak Her Sex," and the title track, which isn't really about anything, just sort of an expression of your style and Will Power's sound. Did you have to work at developing those skill sets, or are you just naturally versatile?

I've always let the music determine how it's gonna go. When he came in with that "Trunk Muzik" synth line, that du-du-du-du-du-du, du-du-du-du-du-du — it just put that syllable play in my head. That's kind of the blessing to being an MC, is complete freedom. If you compare it graffiti, "Trunk Muzik" would be wild style. You go in and just throw paint, and it's super technical and twisted around. "Pop the Trunk" or "Love is Not Enough" would be like a painting that made perfect sense to your eyes: a tree here, a car there, a house there. There's the story, right in front of your face. I honestly didn't put that much effort into developing each style of rapping, because I don't know where a song's gonna go. I start writing, and the story starts unfolding as I'm writing it.

Do you follow your own press? And if so, are you noticing consistent misreading or misunderstanding of you and your music?

I don't follow my press at all. I know me, and if I read a million great comments, and one bad one, that one bad one will stick with me for weeks. Baby told me to let the baby go, pretty much.

At SXSW this year, you told me Gadsden's not really on the Internet. Did anything happen between then and now?

Definitely not. A lot of the younger kids who live in the nicer neighborhoods, they got computers. But even those kids aren't on the Internet that much. This town is all about getting out. They're out in their Jeeps, out in their cars, they're out on the weekend. Out at house parties. They're not really on the Internet like that. I guess it's just part of their culture. I just did a homecoming show on Saturday night. There was a torrential rain, and almost 600 people came out. The most down to earth, country-ass people you'll ever meet. And I think about 1% of them was on Twitter. For real, I tweeted about the homecoming show, and there was like 2 or 3 replies from Gadsden. Out of the 600 people who came out. And the other half didn't even come out; they thought it was cancelled because of the rain. These are just country people, man. It was awesome. The show was crazy, dog. And the after party, we went mud bogging. You know, we took trucks out at night, in the woods. My cousin got stuck out there. We had to pull him out with a chain. We had a big bonfire. Everybody was drinking Jack and beer. It was the best, man. A lot of fun.