CLASSIC PIMP C INTERVIEW(Shoutout to Cocaine Blunts!)

Original link(For you chumps who be think I be making up stories):

http://www.cocaineblunts.com/blunts/?p=744

Here is a phone interview I conducted with Chad Butler for Scratch last December (an edited version originally ran as “Dope Boy Magic” in Issue #16 Mar/April ’07). I can’t profess to have known Pimp on a personal level, but he was a completely cordial interview subject, ideal really. He opened up like few artists are willing to do, about his musical youth, the early days of UGK, and the then forthcoming Underground Kingz. In the year since he’s gained a rep for giving outlandish, often nonsensical interviews, and that’s a somewhat unfortunate legacy, in retrospect. Hopefully this level headed Q&A will help shed some light on the human behind the entertainment persona.

My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans.

Part one of the interview after the jump

Noz: How’d you first get into making beats and music?
Pimp C: I was interested in music as a youth. My father is a trumpet player. He used to play professionally with Solomon Burke and a few other reputable people. He was a blues singer also, professionally at one time. So I grew up around music. We had a Jukebox in our house when I was small and I could just push buttons and listen to 45s of old music. I came up on a lot of blues – Bobby Bland, jazz – Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, soul records from the 60’s and 70’s, the Motown sound. I was exposed to that kind of music as a youth. Ever since I could remember my people been buying me instruments, when I couldn’t even talk I had an organ.

N: So you’re classically trained more or less?
C: I wouldn’t it call it that. I never got no training ‘til I went to school. I was playing by ear. I had a drum set and I had the organ and I used to bang out. I learned early on that the white keys was, in my opinion, the “happy” keys and the black keys was the “sad keys.” That’s what I called them. Later on I would describe the black keys as the more funky keys than the white ones. I like minor notes, I like playing in that register, I enjoy the black keys. [But] I feared music at that time so I would stay away from the black keys ‘cause they were sad to me.

N: Then you went on to play in the school band?
C: Yeah, I was a Division 1 trumpet player in the band at school. That’s when you compete with the rest of the kids in your genre for status or what not. I placed Division 1 when I was real young, maybe sixth or seventh grade, and I kept that position all through school. That’s where I learned how to read music. My parents split up when I was a little kid, I was fix or six years old. My parents got two different houses and my Mom remarried when I was eight and actually my band teacher ended up being my step father. He taught me how to actually read notes. I learned B flat because that’s what the trumpet was in first and I moved on to every instrument that had a round mouthpiece. I learned several keys, because we had a thing going on back then that if you made Fs or you didn’t pass your grades, you couldn’t play [in the band]. No pass, no play. And a lot of times people’d fail and they couldn’t go and play, so they’d take me out my home instrument, which was the trumpet, and they’d give me another instrument so I could learn how to play it and fill the spot until that person was able to play again when the new report cards with come out. I played trombone, flugelhorns, I learned how to play the flute, it wasn’t that hard to do ‘cause the flute is in b flat like the trumpet. But every time I’d blow in that flute I’d get head dizzy and it’d make me want to pass out, so I wasn’t too good at the flute. I was used to playing instruments with a round mouth that you had to push pressure on. I learned on those instruments and that’s a fun time in my life. One of the most difficult instruments I ever had to play was a French horn, it’s not very easy, anybody that’s ever played that will tell you it’s not a friendly instrument. But I mastered that too, kept it moving. I also sung in the choir as a youth.

N: I was gonna say that a lot of people don’t even realize that it’s you singing on the hooks on the UGK records.
C: That shit I’m singing on them hooks is just because, a lot of times in the studio we don’t have nobody to sing on the hooks. And back then, when we was doing our early records, I didn’t have no money to pay no singer, so I had to sing ‘em. But I come from a classical background, I came up singing Italian sonnets, negro spirituals and shit of that nature. In fact I was the youngest kid in our state to get a Division 1 on a classical solo in the 9th grade. I think I still hold a record in our state.

N: When did you start getting into the hip hop side of things?
C: I was already into rap by then. I heard Run rapping in December 1983. I was in Louisiana visiting my Grandmother and a friend of mine, his dad had a house next door to hers. He gave me Run for Thanksgiving. I fell in love with Run and from then on I knew I was gonna fuck with [rap], in some way shape or form. Not to get no money, I was just intrigued, I liked it, I wanted to be a part of what was going on in the movement. So from that day on I was buying records in that genre. And I was trying to study where they was coming from up there in the East with this new thing called rap. I had heard rap songs, Kurtis Blow and shit like that, but nothing had an impact on me that made me want to do it like [when] I heard Run.

N: What other shit were you listening to around that time?
C: I was listening to everything. I was trying to soak it up because I was trying to figure out what was going on with that shit. I didn’t understand how they was making that shit sound the way it was sounding. You gotta understand – back then we didn’t know words like producer or production or no shit like that. We didn’t have sense enough to know that everybody didn’t write they own raps, so we wrote our own because we thought everybody wrote theirs. We didn’t have sense enough to know that they had people called producers that actually make the music, so we made our own music because we didn’t know no better. So me being in a position where I wanted to be a rapper, I didn’t have nobody that’d make no beats for me, I was coming from a little town called Port Arthur Texas. So I had to make my own beats. It wasn’t a conscious decision that we was like “We gonna be rappers, we gonna write our own shit, we gonna be producers.” Shit we thought everybody made their own beats, ya dig?

I had been collecting records since I was a little kid, the first record I bought was Rick James Street Songs. And the second album I bought was 1999 by Prince. So I had been collecting records all through the 80s, so when it came time for rap and shit, me being a DJ and going off into that was a natural thing to do. It wasn’t a conscious decision to be a DJ. I was a music lover and I was collecting music. My dad passed records down to me, old school records. I had a library of things to dig in for samples. At some point I got into a group and I was already scratching and doing things like that because I was making beats and trying to put music together.

Every year for Christmas I’d get another piece of equipment – a drum machine, a four track here, a keyboard there.

N: What type of gear you were using?
C: We was dealing with mediocre shit. My first encounter with an electronic drum box was Synsonic Drums, my first encounter with a sampler was a Casio SK-1. But that shit was doper than a motherfucker back then. Anything you could put your voice in and make it play over and over again, that was considered to be some state of the art shit. So we went from Synsonic Drums to Rolands. At that time 808s had already went out of production, so Roland was pushing these 505s, 626s, 707s and 727s at that time. I got a 626. The sounds was kinda shitty but it was a little bit better than Synsonic Drums. And then we went from a 626 to an Alesis HR-6. And further back from that we had these little Korg drum machines, I can’t remember what they was called. It had a live ass hand clap in it, kinda sounded like Linn Drum sounds. But anyway, we fucked with all that shit, shit would come out and we’d step our game up. I’d get a piece here, a piece there, I had a little partner somebody might have a piece, this one over here might have a microphone. We’d put all that shit together and come up with something. Back then you was a cold motherfucker if you had multitrack recording on any level. I come from the era where we used to make pause mixtapes. Two tape decks and pause the tape and back up the break and make it play again. I can remember the time when we had drum machines, but samplers hadn’t come far enough for us to be able to afford one. So instead of using samplers, we had a four track recorder, my DJ, DJ DMD, he was good with his turntables. He would catch the break, but a lot of times we wouldn’t have but one of the records that we was trying to catch the break from, so what he would do was that the drums would be on track one of the four track, he’d play the break for however many bars it’d play, then he’d hit the crossfader, stop it, and hold out for another four bars or whatever what the break went, then he would come back on track two and lay it out again where he left the space. So track two and three was his loop. After that he would take tracks two and three and bounce both of them to four, combine two and three so it played as a loop. That’s how we had to do samples. We was actually catching the break like we did when the niggas in New York was at the parties and the DJ was catching the break on two records. But we didn’t have two records, so we’d do it with one record and a drum machine.

N: What was the name of the group with DMD?
C: The first group I was in with DMD was Dangerous Music Incorporated. DMI was the abbreviation.

N: Now were you guys doing shows back then or just making tapes?
C: Naw man, no shows, we just in a house making demo tapes.

N: Was there no kind of a scene down there in Port Arthur?
C: Naw man, wasn’t no scene. At that time, we had the Ghetto Boys in Houston. Not the Geto Boys as you know it now, but a different Ghetto Boys.

N: The original lineup with K-9 and them.
C: Not that far back, shit. By the time I heard the Ghetto Boys they was on Makin Trouble. I didn’t really know about K-9 and them until later on in life. By the time I heard “Car Freaks” I was already in the rap game. I didn’t even know that record existed [when it came out].

N: So that didn’t even make it out there to you guys?
C: Nah, “Car Freaks” didn’t. I think that’s the only record K-9, Raheem and Jukebox was on. K-9 went to prison. So the second group was when we heard them, Makin’ Trouble. Bushwick came in, Ready Redd, Johnny C and Jukebox. Jukebox ended up going to prison after that and that’s when Scarface and Willie D came into the group.

PART II

N: So this small crew basically built up Port Arthur rap from scratch?
C: We just wanted to be a part of rap, and we happened to live in a town called Port Arthur. There were a couple of little groups before us that made demos, that wasn’t trying to make no records. They had names like The Fresh Four, which was DMD’s original group, The Hardy Boys, which was Boomtown, the video director’s group which I ended up getting in at the time. You had certain people who was getting down on the demo level. Back then DMD was at the forefront of all of that. He a little access to a little bit more studio equipment than the rest of us. He was a DJ and he was good at it. And at that time, rap was really dependent on the DJ. He could scratch, he could mix real good and he could program drums a little bit, but he couldn’t play no keyboards

N: That’s where you came into play.
C: Exactly.

N: So when did you link up with Bun B and start forming what would be come UGK?
C: That was years later. We was in Junior High School together and he was friends with a cat, Mitchell Queen, actually me and that cat was the original UGK and Bun was his buddy. A few years later, because I had been around DMD and soaked up some things from him… at one time [DMD] had stopped making music. A lot of the original dudes had stopped, they graduated from high school and either went to college or just got tired of this shit. They didn’t see no future in niggas rapping in a little town called Port Arthur. So when all those niggas quit, when Boomtown quit and DMD quit, that left me. I was the only little motherfucker that had been down with the old motherfuckers. So when everybody quit I was the last one left to make beats and do this shit. ‘Cause all the old niggas that was my leaders had stopped rapping or making beats or DJing. So that left me. I still had all the equipment that we had accumulated over the years. Them niggas didn’t want it. They was like “Fuck that rap shit, I’m goin to school or I’m goin’ to get this job.” I still was in high school, but I could scratch, I could play keyboards, I had watched DMD loop them records with that turntable. And for the most part rappers don’t know how to make their own music, so anybody in the town that was trying to get into the rap shit, they had to come to me.

So Bun was in a group with another dude and they came to me to make some music for ‘em. And that’s how they started hanging out at my spot. So I start producing for Bun’s group with the other cat and somewhere along the lines we ended up merging the two groups together. And then the same things that happened to them other niggas happened to the two niggas that was in the group with me and Bun. Them niggas just didn’t believe that it would work, man. See half of the battle with anything is believing that you can do it. They didn’t believe that they could be rappers or that they could make money or that it was serious. So when time came for them to do other careers that they thought was gonna pan out for them, they took them opportunities. And I can’t blame them for taking it. But me and Bun stuck with the shit. So when we looked up one day it wasn’t nothing but me and him. And that’s how this group was formed.

We ended up going back and taking a name that me and the first dude had formed years earlier. We had changed our name from UGK and everything. Me and Bun ended up reaching back and grabbed an old name that me and this other dude had used years ago. Wasn’t nobody using it, because wasn’t no group right there. It was just a name, it could’ve been the name of his old group. But it happened to be UGK, we took it and ran with it. And that’s how this group that you see today.

N: Being that you came from a musical family, what type of response did your Dad have when he heard you making these rap records?
C: My father wasn’t with this rap shit at first. Let me tell you why. The same syndrome them niggas [DMD, Boomtown, etc] had is the same syndrome my family had. They didn’t think that a motherfucker could eat off this shit. And my father wanted better things for me in life than he had when he was coming up. It’s natural for you to want better things for your child. And he didn’t see this shit as no stable career for me to be going into. Not that he was trying to stifle my music, because every year, when Christmas came around, a lot of times he was the one buying me the equipment that I was making this shit with. But he wanted to see me go to college and do some better things than he was able to do in life. So my old man was not with this shit. He couldn’t see that this shit was gonna win. And frankly, I can’t blame him.

But my stepfather he came to me one day. My Mom was upset that I had dropped out of school to chase this music. I done got into it with my Dad over it. But my Stepfather comes to me one day and he say “You know the problem with that rap shit? The problem with that shit is that it’s noise.” So I got defensive, because that’s what we do. “What you mean it’s noise?” He say “Naw… listen to what I’m telling you boy, that shit is noise, ain’t no music in that shit. You put some music in that shit and you might be able to get paid.” So I thought about that, right? And at this time you gotta realize that we was listening to Public Enemy, The Bomb Squad, a bunch of sound effects playing in cadence with one another. The sampling thing was going strong right then, so yeah, it sounded noisey to him. So he said “Put some music in that shit, you know you know how to read music. Put some goddamn melody in that shit and maybe you can get some money.”

N: I guess that was the birth of the UGK sound?
C: Well, I took his suggestion and I put some music in this shit. I started putting some basslines in the shit. It ain’t like I invented it, Too Short’s been playing his music for years. Niggas had music in their shit, it’s just at that time that wasn’t popular. And I told you I had an organ when I was little, I went into the closet and dusted off the old organ and I came up with something that was closer to blues and soul than what was going on at the time. Originally we had a lot of reggae influence in our music. We was mixing roots and culture samples with hip hop drums. We had the idea that that’s how we was going to take this game by storm, it really didn’t happen like that. But the last remnants of the era was a song called “Cocaine In The Back of The Ride.” which has Bob Marley samples in it.

But we ended up going in another direction. I took a different turn in my music. My music started getting influenced by what Dr. Dre was doing, with the basslines and things that was goin on with the NWA records. So you see, it’s a lot of people that was doing the same thing, putting music in the records. Dre been putting music in the records. Too Short been putting music in the record. But when he told it to me like that “get that noise out of there, make some music” I took that shit to heart and I ran with it. That’s the best advice I ever got. Later on in life I was able to thank him for that advice, before he died I was able to tell the man “You was right, man.”

N: What did he say when he started hearing your more musical productions?
C: For one thing, he could see I was getting money every week. I was a little young motherfucker playing with a big bank roll. So it made sense to him. And after the paper started rolling in, my real Father came on in. He seen this shit was serious. And then my Mother, having a business mind saw that we needed some guidance on a business level. So she stepped in. It became a family affair later on, but we had to prove that we could do it. We was already signed to Jive by the time these people got on. My Daddy got on before that. His way of doing this is by going “Hey man, let me get one of them t-shirts?” and right then I knew he would cosign me.

N: How did you go from making tapes to signing with Big Tyme?
C: Actually the tape that Big Tyme signed us on had all four of us on it, from the group that had merged together. Actually the tape was a combination of songs that we had been making for about four or five years in several different groups that Big Tyme heard. I had went to the mall one day with some motherfuckers I knew, I rolled out with a nigga named Marlon Banks and these two broads from Port Arthur in a hooptie, came to Houston and went to King’s Flea Market. We pulled up on the flea market and went up in there and this dude had a record store. And he had a sign outside the record store that he was looking for a group. So shit, I always walked around with a demo tape in my pocket ‘cause I didn’t know who I was gonna meet. So I went up to a motherfucker and played it for him. He actually wasn’t there, his wife was there, she was like “let me go get my husband,” that was Big Russell [Washington] who owned Big Tyme and that was the start of that shit.

So he put the money up and we started going to the studio and recording every week, trying to get it going. I figured we in the big time now, lets go and get some producers that know what they doing, but everybody we went to get with fucked us out our money. The studios were fuckin’ us out our money, the producers were fuckin us out our money, givin’ us trash and when we looked around we didn’t have no more money. So Big Tyme, not having no more money came to us and said “What you wanna do – we either gonna stop recording or we gonna sell this goddamn dope and keep going to the studio every weekend?” We didn’t have no choice, so we started hustling. But not to buy cars and not to buy clothes. We started hustling to go to the studio. We’d hustle all week and at the end of the week we’d go to the studio every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And we did that until we got the record done. And you gotta understand this work was being sold in Port Arthur, not in Houston, he didn’t have nowhere to sell in Houston so the work would come from Houston to Port Arthur. And everybody had a job to do. Bun was in transportation, I was in packaging. The other motherfucker was in delivery. And we made that shit work and go the money to put us through the studio and get the record done.

Everything was cool until the record got done and the motherfucker hit. That’s when this nigga [Russell] started talking like he was our boss. Like, “nigga we all sold crack to get this goddamn record done, what the fuck is you talking about about? You fitta give it us this little percentage over here and you fittin to take the largest [percentage] when we all risked our motherfucking lives to put this shit together.” That was the breaking point with us and Russell. We all hustled to put that shit down, and we felt like we all should’ve had ownership in this shit.

N: You should’ve been equal partners.

C: Exactly and he was a few years older than us and he had a few people influencing him. He wasn’t that much older than us, he was 23 years old. I was 16 or 17. He was our OG at the time, a 23 year old OG. So he made a lot of mistakes. He had a lot of people in his ear telling him what to do or whatever, how to handle us. And instead of him going by what his heart and his head told him to do, he went with what people was telling him. ‘Cause he felt they had his best interest at heart. In all honesty and all fairness, I can’t blame Russell for all the mistakes that he made. He was young. We all was young. But that’s what made us move around from Big Tyme Records.

PART III

N: So you left Big Tyme to go to Jive…

C: Well, actually, the first album on Jive was Big Tyme/Jive. [Russell] went and signed a deal with Jive and Jive, being true to their name, [had] a clause in their contract that said that if you don’t want to deliver for your original label no more you can take the option to cut out the middle man. So that’s how Big Tyme Records got cut up out of the deal. ‘Cause we exercised our option and got him up out of there. ‘Cause there was a lot of money that wasn’t being accounted for. And goddammit we wanted some of it. We felt like we should’ve had ownership in Big Tyme. Which is water under the bridge now. If you’re gonna print that then you gotta print that we alright with Russell, we cool. I see him from time to time, he alright. He was young, he didn’t know.

N: About the first album, you guys changed up a lot of the beats and the lyrics from the original Southern Way tape on Big Tyme. Was that the label’s decision?

C: The Southern Way was an EP. When it finally came out on Jive it was a full length album called Too Hard To Swallow. I didn’t have nothing to do with them changes that they made to them songs. In fact I wasn’t even in the studio when they was fucking with them records. They took samples out, some of them because they felt like they was too expensive, some of them because shit didn’t clear. It all got fucked up, and in my opinion, that shit is garbage. I don’t even listen to that shit. You remove the sample, man, especially back then, each song was based heavily on samples. You remove the sample, you remove the essence of the song. When they took them samples out and they let them other people touch that shit and fuck with my music when I wasn’t there it got watered down. With lyrics if you’re talking about “Tell Me Something Good,” it’s possible that the lyrics didn’t clear. That song got tore the fuck up. When we lost the Isley Brothers sample that song fell apart. Let me tell you what they did man, they let the motherfuckers at the studio we was recording at, they went and cut a side deal with them motherfuckers and they thought they was some motherfuckin producers. They let them motherfuckers change our music and paid them under the table to do it. And they gave ‘em production credit on the shit. Ain’t that a bitch? But that’s how the game was going back then, it’ll go down like that now. Let a record label have some of your lyrics and that shit ain’t right, they’ll send somebody in there to produce around your shit. At the end of the day it’s just record company business, but they end up fucking up the project doing that shit.

But it was six new songs that was added to [Too Hard To Swallow] and one of those songs was “Pocket Full of Stones.” And in my opinion that’s the savior of that album.

N: Nowadays what’s the process behind making a UGK song?

C: We not stuck to no style, we not stuck to one way of doing things. We go with the flow. Songs happen different ways. Sometimes I might have the hook first, sometimes Bun might have the hook first. Sometimes I have the beat and the beat is sitting around for two or three years before we even get to it. It’s a couple of songs on this new album that we’ve been fucking with since ’96. Our thing is this, if it ain’t ready we don’t put it out, we put it on the side and come back to it. Some songs come together real fast, in one or two nights. Some songs take two years. Some take six years. It depends on the song and what’s going on.

N: I noticed that there’s a lot of outside production on the new album. Why did you go outside the core UGK production team for this?
C: Ain’t no UGK production team, it’s me and it was NO Joe that came in on Ridin’ Dirty. It ain’t like it’s a whole bunch of mystery motherfuckers. Back then we was doing our own records because we didn’t have no budget to go out and get reputable producers. That’s a luxury that we never got to experience as rappers. We never got to work with the Swizz Beats and the Jazze Phas. I’ve been down with Jazze for years and years, but we never had money to go deal with real producers. That’s something that we never got to taste in our career. I think that every artist should have the opportunity to work with some people that they respect. That’s the whole reason I did the Pimpiilation record, because I had never done a record that I didn’t produce myself. I wanted to do some songs with other people. If you listen to it, you’ll know I didn’t produce none of it. Only song I produced was “Havin’ Thangs” and that’s because it was a remake from Big Mike’s shit. We’ve never been able to fuck with other producers, that’s something we wanted to do with ourselves. Call that a selfish move, but that’s something that we wanted to do. And I think that it’s a mistake when one producer or two producers dominate a whole album and be greedy and not try to go out and work with other people, because you never gonna see what’s gonna happen. Yeah sure, we make mistakes sometimes when we go outside of our comfort zone, but sometimes we make beautiful music that wouldn’t have gotten made if I would’ve just hogged all the production time. As artists we wanted to do that. As men we wanted to experience that.

N: On that note, how’d the joint with G Rap and Kane come about?
C: I used to want to be Big Daddy Kane. We used to idolize Kool G rap and the Juice Crew All Stars. We were raised up on original East Coast rap music, just like everybody else was. They were people that we respect and look up to as OGs in the game. I felt like I wanted to make a song with them people before my career was over and this is the time to do it. Marley Marl is the original motherfucker that put the 808 in a record and made it go boom. He’s the original dun dada with this beat making shit. Make no mistake, he’s the truth. It just so happens that my manager was real close with him and I got the opportunity to meet Marley Marl and he sent me some beats. I was sitting around listening to ‘em and he had a couple of remakes of some old shit on there and it just all came together. It’s one of the last songs of the album that came together. That’s just paying homage to the foundation of this shit. When I see Kool DJ Red Alert in New York, I bow down to him. I never got a chance to meet Kool Herc, but when I do meet him I want an autograph. These motherfuckers is the real OGs of this shit. And I got a lot of respect for them. It was a pleasure and an honor to do a song with those guys. We reaching back and bringing some history up so these youngsters gonna see what’s going on. If you don’t know where you came from how the fuck you gonna know where you going?

N: I feel like a lot of the New York heads aren’t even putting the legends on their records these days.
C: It’s ironic that some boys from Texas had to be the ones to reach back and grab Marley Marl and grab Big Daddy Kane and Kool G Rap and put them on in ’07. Ain’t that some shit? Seems kind of odd that some motherfuckers from Texas had done that. But back then, nobody was trippin’ on where a motherfucker was from. Remember Rakim said “it ain’t where you from, it’s where you at?” That’s the era I come from. I’m an 80’s baby. All these new young motherfuckers is the ones tripping on where a motherfucker from or what coast the music come from or all this little ho ass shit. Niggas say they got beef but it look like pork to me.

N: What do you think causes that divide in hip hop?
C: What causes a motherfucker to just straight up be a hater on these streets? What causes a motherfucker that you went to school with your whole life to want to shoot you and rob you? Jealous, envy, greed, wicked men, deceitful hearts, females with penises. Bitch ass niggas is what causes this shit. I remember a time when being a rapper was the thing to be, a rapper was an upstanding citizen, a cool cat. You had to be a cool motherfucker to rap. You had to be a cool motherfucker to wear that dookie rope chain and come around. You remember the pictures of Eric B & Rakim? Them niggas was cool motherfuckers. You had to be to get on a record. Just to touch the microphone you had to be a cold motherfucker. Now a person say “rapper” they think of a fugazi motherfucker, a fraud. A motherfucker that lies and talks about shit he ain’t never done. We done let so many fake motherfuckers come into this game and have embraced so much fraud shit and have gave awards and put crowns on so many pussy motherfuckers that to be a rapper now it ain’t even the thing to be. A rapper ain’t no upstanding citizen, a nigga gotta check your credibility. Back then, by the time you saw a rapper on a record, he already had paid his dues in the street. That motherfucker had already been tested or he wouldn’t even bubble to the top. Now it seems like the buster niggas get on earlier than the real niggas do. And that’s why there’s so much hate and envy in the game. Any time you put pussy into the equation you gonna have a pussy ass environment and a fucked up system of doing things. That’s why I see there’s so much division. Let me tell you something man, I don’t hear certain motherfuckers tripping off coasts man. If niggas having money I don’t hear them dissing the south. I was just on the phone with Cam’ron. Cam’ron ain’t trippin on the south. Cam’ron’s opening up a record company in the south. I don’t hear him complaining. I don’t hear Jay-Z on his record dissing the south. I don’t hear Fat Joe dissing the south, in fact I see Fat Joe embracing our sound. I don’t hear Scarface on records talking shit about the west coast. I don’t hear real niggas on the west coast like WC or Ice Cube dissing the east or the south. It be pussy motherfuckers with this bullshit. They keep saying “You niggas fucking up hip hop.” Man let me tell you something, everytime a man spit a rap, don’t make them records hip hop records, we making country rap tunes down here. And everybody want to be mad at D4L and Dem Franchize Boys. Guess what man? What’s the difference between them records and [Rappin’ Duke’s] “Da Ha Da Ha”?

N: It’s just party music.
C: Exactly. What’s the difference man? What you so mad about? We need different genres of this music so that it can keep expanding and so that it can stay at the forefront and we can keep eating. It’s got to change. Everything can’t be ice water and cool, everything can’t be hardcore all the time, everything can’t be one tempo. We need different genres of this thing called rap. Mary J. Blige is just as much hip hop as Notorious BIG as King Tee was as Rodney O and Joe Cooley.

N: Is there anything else you want add?
C: That I’m just happy to still be in this game that we call rap. After so many years I’m glad to still have a position in this shit. I want to use my influence to bring some positive things to this game. We’ve done enough tearing down on our own, let’s bring something positive to this shit. Let’s get back to the music instead of all the bickering and arguing about where a motherfucker is from. Just represent your hood to the fullest and everything gonna be alright. I’m down here, I’m gonna represent mine. If you mad about something, say you mad, we can’t keep guessing who you talking about. And goddammit we can either sit down and talk it out or do whatever it is you feel like you wanna do. We oughta be able to sit down and talk about anything as men. You can’t make up with no dead man. If people got problems out there reach out to that man and talk to him.

And to all the producers out there – you all kinda stuck in the style, you need to get up off the hand clap and the snare drum and the double time hi hats. That’s my motherfuckin formula, get up on your own shit. Bring some originality to the game and we can all ride on.