Interview: Karnival Is Pressing Play On Some “Good TV”

Time to get comfortable in your favorite chair, grab a little snack, and get ready to tune into some good TV – and no, we don’t mean television! We mean “Good TV (Episode 1),” the new single from Canadian rapper Karnival. The track takes us on a trip through a relationship with fun references to your favorite TV programs from back in the day, touching on everything from Pepsi commercials to Adventure Time. “I just hope we take enough photos before the next episode,” he muses, wanting to capture the good moments of the relationship and make the most of their time together before it’s too late. It’s a nostalgic anthem that reminds us to enjoy the present while we can, while celebrating our favorite elements of the past to see where we want to go in the future.

“The song itself is dedicated to a woman I was involved with,” Karnival tells TREMG. “At the time of writing, we were still together. She had a few years on me but I didn’t care. In the beginning, we used to sit around watching her favorite older TV shows and talk about how they just don’t make stuff like that anymore. In the song, the opening line that I rap is, ‘You remind me of the oldies, some of that good TV.’ This was my way of trying to make her more comfortable with our age gap at the time. The song goes on to tell part of the story of my relationship with that woman, but it also alludes to a larger concept at play.”

Following “Character (Episode 4)” with Jsn, “Good TV” is the latest episode of Karnival’s upcoming Good TV mixtape, which not only has a throwback TV theme, but will be releasing one song at a time leading up to its official drop in September to mimic TV episode releases. It’s a dynamic rollout idea that’s sure to keep listeners engaged, and we’ll definitely be tuning into each song release every two weeks! Sometimes we all need a little taste of the good old days, whether it’s with some nostalgic music or our old favorite shows, and you can have the best of both worlds with Good TV.

“I formed the concept for the mixtape when I realized I rarely watch TV or even stream shows anymore,” Karnival explains. “I used to stay up all night watching Adult Swim and whatever obscure stuff I could find. I consider myself an older artist considering this is my debut as a solo act, so creating the mixtape felt like a way of honoring that older version of me while helping fill in the blanks between the boy and the man. It’s a modern perspective and commentary on nostalgia, reminiscing, and realizing what seemingly small things in life had a large impact.”

You can find “Good TV (Episode 1)” on your favorite streaming services now, and connect with Karnival on Instagram and Twitter to keep up with the Good TV mixtape rollout! Keep reading for more from our Q&A with this innovative rising artist.

Hey Karnival, congrats on your new single, “Good TV (Episode 1)!” How does it feel to share the song with the world?

Hey Madison, I appreciate that! To have the song’s release date set in stone truly feels surreal. I’ve wanted to release music and art my entire life so to be releasing my second track is an incredible feeling. The song “Good TV” also represents more than just a song to me the track itself serves as an introduction to a concept mixtape of the same name (Good TV). From the moment I heard jsn.’s instrumental, I knew it would be the perfect canvas for an intro to the mixtape. To see this song become tangible and to know that I can finally reveal the plan I’ve been cooking up makes me feel so grateful.

What does “Good TV (Episode 1)” mean to you?”

“Good TV,” the song itself, is dedicated to a woman I was involved with. At the time of writing, we were still together. She had a few years on me but I didn’t care. In the beginning, we used to sit around watching her favorite older TV shows and talk about how they just don’t make stuff like that anymore. In the song, the opening line that I rap is, “You remind me of the oldies, some of that good TV.” This was my way of trying to make her more comfortable with our age gap at the time. The song goes on to tell part of the story of my relationship with that woman, but it also alludes to a larger concept at play.

The single serves as a nod to the era of broadcast television. Particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. The modern experience of a virtually unlimited amount of media to select from is a far cry from those old broadcasting days. In that era, you may have sat through a couple of shows you didn’t care for just to see a specific show that aired at a chosen time slot on a certain channel. If you missed it, there’s no telling when it may air again! This set the stage for exposure to a certain type of curated media variety. An art that has essentially been lost to time. It’s something that, looking back on, I think had a great impact on me. Personality-wise as well as artistically. It’s also my way of explaining what time I come from and my way of essentially catching up with the listener. Starting with the good old times. The “Good TV.”

“Good TV (Episode 1)” has so many fun nostalgic lyrics, with one of our favorites being “got you boxed in like DVD.” Is there a certain lyric on the song that you’re particularly proud of?

One of my favorite lines from the intro is when I rap, “I find my quotes everywhere like I’m Virgil / We step on the scene and it gets controversial.”

I like this for multiple reasons. Virgil Abloh found ways to blur the lines between brands, ideas, and even periods to combine things that may seem initially foreign to each other. Although he’s not necessarily a figure from the 90s, his style and method of blending times made me feel like it made sense to include him. It gave me an excuse to pay homage and shout him out, as well as his tendency to write things in quotations on all kinds of objects. In the way that Virgil used that imagery to invite people to open their minds to new ways of viewing things, I hope people recognize the often layered meanings and imagery that I try to embed in my lyrics.

To add, when the girl and I would go out, and even when I go out by myself, oftentimes eventually I will get back word that someone twisted my words or that someone said something false about me behind my back. Hence, “I find my quotes everywhere like I’m Virgil….” Just as you may not want Virgil to actually write “White brick” on the outside of your white brick, I too find my “words” where they don’t belong at times.

“Good TV” is the second taste of your upcoming mixtape of the same name, due this September! You’ll be releasing a new song every two weeks like a new episode of a TV show, which is such a clever rollout – how did the TV and episode concept come about? Did that theme naturally pop up in different songs or did you consciously add it?

I appreciate you saying that! I formed the concept for the mixtape when I realized I rarely watch TV or even stream shows anymore. I used to stay up all night watching Adult Swim and whatever obscure stuff I could find. I consider myself an older artist considering this is my debut as a solo act, so creating the mixtape felt like a way of honoring that older version of me while helping fill in the blanks between the boy and the man. It’s a modern perspective and commentary on nostalgia, reminiscing, and realizing what seemingly small things in life had a large impact. With the music, I tried to generally cover all the bases in terms of the tones, topics, and events you might encounter when flipping through the channels of your broadcast TV subscription package. Maybe tonight it’s “Fight Night.” Maybe you’re watching morning cartoons. Maybe you stumbled on an old action flick on a random movie channel. Maybe you’re catching up on the news. Whatever your forte is, I tried to pack just the right amount of references and nods to that era into the songs on Good TV without overdoing it so even if you don’t catch every single reference you aren’t missing out on the whole.

As for the concept of dropping each song one at a time, I came up with that idea when the project was nearly finished. As a listener, I most appreciate albums that are cohesive and meant to be listened to from front to back. In a way, I wish I could just share the mixtape as a whole right away. I could but I won’t. I think the episode concept is cool and will help people take time with each song. I find in today’s era of consumption, things come and go week after week. I’ll see incredible albums released and most of the streams will end up being in the first few songs. In an attempt to avoid something like that I chose to release in this manner. I feel like this release schedule adheres to the current collective attention span that the social media era has helped usher in and that releasing the songs one at a time gives each track more of a chance to be fully appreciated. Strategy aside I just think it fits the theme too well to not do it.

How did you know that now was the time to get into gear and prepare your debut mixtape?

I always felt like this mixtape would be a great companion for the fall and winter seasons, so having the final song from Good TV drop in September feels right to me. I honestly meant for it to come out at an earlier time but we unfortunately ran into a situation where my mix and mastering engineer, Willie Manic, had a hard drive crash on him. We lost the project files at the time and we were fairly deep into the mixing process. Although I still had copies of the mixes, we did not have them in the format we needed and we still needed to bounce down the performance mixes, which significantly set us back. It would have begun dropping in the fall and continued throughout the winter into spring but having the last song on the tape be released in the fall still allows it to be a fall/winter mixtape in my eyes.

As you can probably tell from the music, and as stated in this interview, I feel like my first project is long overdue. I’ve been ready to share this for quite a long time, however, I needed to take the time to push it as far as I possibly could.

Which song on Good TV means the most to you?

That’s a really tough call to make because I love each song individually and I focused on trying to make a cohesive project so It’s tough to pinpoint. I’d have to say “Channel Surfing” because of how the song was written. I touch on the creation of this song in more depth on the next question, so stay tuned! The trippiest part of making “Channel Surfing” is when I freestyle “Holding on to you as our paths bend,” because I feel like my subconscious was aware of warning signs that my conscious self wasn’t receiving. A love that I shared was about to take an unexpected turn.

To this day, I search for and strive to set the conditions that allowed me the headspace to create a song like “Channel Surfing” because I feel like creating it gave me access to emotions and feelings I wasn’t consciously tapped into or prepared for at the time. This makes me that much more intrigued with writing and freestyling because I don’t know what I might excavate from my psyche if I just keep working at it.

A runner-up could be “Fight Night” because I kept feeling like it could be pushed just a little further and I just kept working it. I knew I wanted to add cuts and I was planning on trying to figure it out myself in FL Studio however I came across Verse Osmo’s work and what he was able to execute with his turntable work went beyond my vision! Even after Verse’s contribution, which by all metrics should have been more than enough, I still felt in my gut that something was missing so I kept searching. While working on things for Good TV, I’d often have TV shows playing on low in the background, and when I heard Matthew Perry’s character Chandler on Friends say “God, that’s good TV,” I immediately knew I had the last piece of the puzzle. I spliced it in right after Verse’s turntable solo and it worked perfectly in my opinion. So, gun to my head, I’d probably say one of those two depending on the given day. Today, though, it happens to be “Channel Surfing.”

Which songs on Good TV took the longest and shortest amount of time to make?

I am very private about my recording process to the point where I don’t even want an engineer present if I’m doing vocals, so I had to learn how to record my own rapping and singing. I also had to figure out how to put together a rough mix decent enough to get my vision across to a mix engineer who could then do the song justice. As the album took shape while I was learning how to do these things myself the process is all a blur. There were times when I was less efficient with actually using the mics properly and recording. There were also times when I was freestyling and/or writing and recording without being fully sure if the takes would even be usable for Willie.

What I can say is that although “Channel Surfing” is the longest song on the album, it came to me the easiest. It almost feels like I didn’t even write it myself. That song seemed to just pour out of me because I had a lot on my mind that I needed to get out in some way. It was one of the times where I was in the zone and I was aware of it, and I was racing to complete the song before that zone had run its course.

I got the beat from noisebynuno and had been focused on trying to do it justice. I had a loose plan for what to talk about, but funny enough, for whatever reason I loaded up another beat first and said all of what I had planned to rap about on “Channel Surfing” on that other first beat. After finishing the first song, I ended up loading up the “Channel Surfing” beat with a fresh mind. A clean slate. So I started with how I was feeling, “I’m getting blessed, still depressed, can’t convince myself that I’m on time….” and it just snowballed. At this time I was recording in a very chaotic studio environment where the other tenants had zero respect for others. The best way I can illustrate this is that someone once played a saxophone in the hallway while I was trying to record, and did not understand why this was an unreasonable thing to do.

Anyways, after completing the second verse, I had to break up a fight in the hallway and rush back into the complete the third verse. That day, I had completed two songs and went home feeling like a champion. At a later day, I came back to the studio to do the rough mix. Before I got started on the mix, I was just jamming along to the beat with my electric guitar because I was so enamored with noisebynuno’s production. (To this day, the “Channel Surfing” beat is one of my favorite beats I’ve ever heard). In order to hear my guitar playback over the song, the recording track had to be live. I kept doing different guitar solos over it for fun and ended up pulling together two of my favorite segments to form the solo that made it on the final track. I loved that I found a way to fit in a guitar solo without it feeling forced. Although it was a decent amount of work, I often feel it is my best song and I have yet to have a creation process go as smoothly as it did for “Channel Surfing.”

The song that took the longest to really for me to complete was “Crossovers” because I had to make the second beat out of the first half of the song. Jsn sent me a beat snippet and the end had this outro that I wanted flipped into a full beat. I ended up just doing it myself by flipping the outro sample and the intro drums. I knew for that song I wanted to just go at it and rap the whole way through. The first half came together rather easily but I ended up overthinking everything I said in the second half. I kept trying to rewrite it and approach it differently, but I still just really liked the flow from the OG verse. After some toiling and experimentation, I began trying to just rearrange some of the lines in my Pro Tools vocal session and I literally just drag-and-dropped some lines around to where I felt they fit best. After doing this, I felt the sequencing of the verse improved a lot and the song was then complete. When I finished writing that song, I had officially finished all of the lyrics for the project, which made making that final stride all the better.

Going back to standout lyrics, the line “my biggest fear is to be average” definitely jumps out as one that can describe your artistic journey as a whole – how do you push through times when you doubt yourself to go beyond average?

Just keep creating/working. Fear will give you a million reasons why something isn’t going to work, but just doing the work consistently will show you the answers. It also helps to have a support system. Good TV’s mix and master engineer, Willie Manic, also happens to be one of my favorite artists, so talking with him about some of the tracks is invaluable and it literally saved some of the songs. I nearly deleted “Reruns (Episode 11)” because I’m incredibly harsh on my work, but it is now one of my favorite tracks on the project. So even if it seems like everything is against you, even your own thoughts, just follow your gut because it knows the best way forward.

Songs like “Channel Surfing” go deep into mental health and heavy situations in such an intriguing way – is it hard for you to be that vulnerable in your music, or is it cathartic?

I love this question. At times, especially the first handful of times I listened to it fresh, the song can be difficult for me to hear. At other times, I listen to it and I just geek out and get so hyped because I can’t believe I was able to execute something like that. Noisebynuno provided the absolute perfect canvas for how I was feeling and how I still feel to this day. It is really scary to let people into my mind like that and I do worry about the stigma that comes with mental health struggles, but I know for a fact people relate to this. People at all levels of society. I also think I can’t expect anything from listeners if I’m not willing to give them a piece of my soul in return. It’s definitely hard to be vulnerable to this extent but I’m hoping it can help someone get through similar times and similar struggles if they don’t have an outlet like I do with music.

Between the TV theme and the classic hip-hop influence, Good TV is a throwback in the best ways possible! If you could bring back one thing from the “old” entertainment scene, whether it’s in the TV or music industry, which would you choose and why?

Concert DVDs!! There are so many massive tours taking place and I feel like compiling the best performances for some kind of DVD or Blu Ray would be such a great thing to provide for fans who attend the show, and especially fans who can’t. It feels like such a lost opportunity. Some of my favorite pieces of media are my RHCP Live At Slane Castle DVD and my Up In Smoke Tour DVD with Dre, Snoop, Eminem, and Ice Cube!

Also please put music videos and music talk shows back on MTV.

If you made a TV show inspired by the Good TV mixtape, what would the plot be?

That’s a great question and it’s honestly funny that you ask this, because I’ve never really thought about this. I did consider doing a continuous video series alongside the songs but ultimately decided I wanted the music to speak for itself. Also, I just don’t think I could fully execute the vision for that at this level of my career.

That being said, I would likely do something akin to The Vince Staples Show on Netflix, except with a white kid from Canada at the start of a rap career. In a manner similar to what’s seen on The Vince Staples Show, it would loosely mirror my life and see me running into outlandish scenarios on a regular basis and displays how I manage to navigate them. (For context, in one episode, Vince goes to bank to get a loan and while there, a friend of his shows up and robs the bank. For me, a scenario might be growing up and messing with security and the new kid in the friend group gets apprehended. We need to find a way to free him before the cops arrive.)

What can your fans look forward to in the rest of 2024?

I’m really looking forward to going through the journey of each release over the weeks with the listeners. They can look forward to some shows as I’m preparing to perform the songs as soon as the opportunity strikes. I’m aiming to get in some collaborations as well that I can’t speak on yet, but hopefully we can get them across the finish line before the year closes!

Is there anything else you’d like to mention or say to your fans that the questions didn’t touch on?

I want to thank: jsn., and noisebynuno for providing some incredible production. Haly Marcotte for providing her vocals. Verse Osmo for nailing his feature. Willie Manic for bringing the vision to life with his mixing and mastering work. Drownhaze for the artwork for “Character” and Cracklez for the mixtape’s frontside and backside artwork.

Good TV the mixtape would not have been possible without their contributions.

I also wanted to thank you for your writing and contributions to journalism. Thank you for helping me communicate the idea behind the tape in this format! Best of luck, cheers!

By Madison Murray
Featured Image: Courtesy of Karnival