Interview by Scott Bejda
You just celebrated a huge milestone in your career, 40 years in the game. I believe you came out in the same year Too Short came out, 1983. How do you explain your longevity brother.
Well God is great, #1. In 1983 I wasn’t in the business side of it, that was just the year I actually started writing and trying to rap and wanted to call myself a rapper. You fall in love with something man and certain things that you fall in love with over time you kind of had a tendency to fall out of love with, or it could be a phase or just something you wanted to try. But rap was that thing that I just never fell out of love with. It just continued to feed me, as far as my excitement for it and then it later fed me in other ways but that’s all it was man. I think when you love something you never stop doing it and if you love it enough you hone it to where you can get pretty good at it and then once you get pretty good at it, the people start responding to it in a positive way which fuels you more and you keep doing it.
Definitely, and you haven’t stopped. I looked at the discography website and I can’t even keep up with it. It said something like 100 and something projects. Do you have any estimation how much material you have put out?
To be honest with you man, I know I’m over 50 albums because I did a concert a couple of years back called 50/40 concert and that was to celebrate releasing 50 projects in the 40 years that I have been in this. So I am somewhere over 50 projects total. Of course if you include features and all that then that’s a whole other conversation. That’s in the hundreds. It’s crazy but that’s just inspired by a lot of the cats that I grew up listening to. People like Stevie Wonder and Prince and all those guys who have way more material than that. I always say I’m chasing those guys you know and trying to get to that level.
What’s amazing about you is you never run out of stuff to say. You always have content, you always have fresh ideas and story telling ability is always A-1. How do you keep mentally sharp and how do you prevent yourself from recycling something that you did in the past?
It goes back to the love. Even though that happens, that’s human nature, I got a few songs where I said the same line over again. And one of my fans might catch it but for the most part that only represents a microscopic percent of the totality of the work. It’s all about staying observant to your surroundings and you keep pushing to do things that people have never done, and taking the risks and plus again I think me and my fan base, we play tennis with each other. I serve and then they hit it back, in terms of the energy. So when they get excited about something that I did it motivates me to try to do something else for them that’s gonna keep them excited. I know how this thing works. I know how this cycle goes where the greatest of the greats in a lot of cases they fizzle out after a while in terms of the creativity, the passion, all that and I wanted to be that guy, or one of those guys who just never, ever, does that. I can never be accused of doing something like that. I want to be that dude who just keeps coming.
Another thing you managed to do real well is the rap game has seen so many different phases, from hand over fist, to money out the trunk, to streaming and downloading and all the internet stuff, you have managed to stay relevant through all of that. What are the biggest differences from when you first started putting product out, till now. And how do you go about doing things now verses then?
I guess the glaring difference would be the digital aspect of it. We never saw that coming. That’s something that wasn’t fathomable to us. We never even thought about what new ways people would be able to consume music. It was always you gone get you some vinyl, you gone get you a cassette and then later on you gonna get you a CD. So when cassettes phased out then it was like ok well you know it’s all CD’s now, it’s a lot easier than rewinding a tape and flipping it over and all that, but I don’t think many people saw a time where CD’s would not be the thing anymore. So the digital aspect of it changed everything and there had to be an adjustment made by myself and any artist who had come from that old era so to speak. But if you want to maintain then you have to adjust to it. That would be the only difference but also with that difference, how we understand it now, it took away a vast percentage of what artists are able to earn off of their own work because of the pay disparities in streaming. So it made it to where a lot of artists aren’t making the money that they could be making. If you were selling physical product independently, the independent game was big for artists who was getting it in because you know by going through distribution companies and one stops and all that, running our own labels, we made more money per unit. Now the majority of artists are exclusively streaming and they are paying percentages of a penny per stream it’s a lot harder to generate revenue. I still do CD’s as well.
You are blessed to have a fan base of collectors. We like to have the physical produce. I would much rather hear a CD on an old school system than something on some bluetooth device. It just sounds better to me.
I agree, cuz I know even when you download you convert it to MP3 and you lose a little bit. I’m just rooted in that and there’s still a lot of people that are doing CDs. A lot of mainstream artists are still doing it so it’s not all the way out. I tell people this all the time. I don’t blame the fans because if it’s a easier more convenient way for them to get the music compared to back in the days. We had to get up, go to the record store, get the album, pay for the album, but now they can just do everything right at home on the phone. I can play the whole thing. I can pay $10 a month and hear anything I want to hear from any artist, any genre, so from the fans perspective, ok I get it. Can’t really be mad at them but for us, we didn’t have a problem because that was an experience in itself to go to the record store. We wanted to get up and go to the store because we may be going to look for something else and find something else we like. I think it took away that natural fun of being able to just dig through the albums and find what we want. It’s an experience that a lot of music fans today can’t even fathom because they never had to do that.
The mixtape game was a huge thing in Houston, of course with Screw tapes, but the mixtape thing was always a promotional tour and a lot of artists used it but it’s kind of disappeared over the last few years or so. What do you think happened to the mixtape game and is it good that they are out of here or should the mixtapes come back?
I think the mixtape game early on was a promotional tool and a way for people to get on because if you talking about that late 90’s early 2000’s mixtape game it was moreso ok whatever the hot song is on the radio I’ma spit something on that beat that everybody already knows and is familiar with and I’m gonna try my best to rip it harder than the guy who originally did the song and draw attention to myself. That built peoples names up, but I think that was moreso of a phase and that’s why it played out and people wasn’t doing it anymore. I never did that, that was never my lane. I saw a lot of people win by doing that so I never knocked it but I just was one of those people that always wanted to be on my own beats and on my own thing.
In addition to releasing music you have become an author. You have books and comic books out now right?
Yeah man I dropped two books. I started my first book during the pandemic. I thought what better time than now to do that. Then I followed up with my second book which was basically just a peak into my writing process and the meanings and the reasons to a lot of songs I wrote. And then a couple of years back a homey of mine who does production for me, my homey Dolla Bill, he reached out about a comic book because one of the beats he did for me was based on this story that I rapped on one of my projects. He said man that would be a dope comic book and I was like hey man if you can put it together put it together and he did and it came out dope. So now we are in the process of doing the second comic book which is The Annihilation of the Evil Machine, which was an album I dropped.
That’s amazing. Your ability as a writer is uncanny but what do you like about books and comics and stuff like that? How does that compare to what you do as a rapper? Is it something totally different?
It’s easier for me because I don’t have to do anything as far as the comic books because it’s already written and done. Most of the work to be honest with you falls in the hands of the animator. He draws and puts everything together and then they just place snippets of lyrics that are suitable.
I just got the new Spice 1 album, Platinum OG 2. You are featured on that project alongside artists like Snoop Dogg and of course DJ Premier is on there, what’s it like to be on that record with a west coast legend like Spice 1.
First of all shout out to Spice 1 just for including me on this project. It was an honor for me, being a fan of Spice 1, somebody who I always listened to back in the 90’s. He is in my opinion so underrated as a rapper, as a skilled artist, as a creative artist, because people get so caught up in his gangsta rap, but yeah he was skilled as a gangsta rapper too. I just wanted to represent the best that I could for him. For me, that’s another accolade that I can add to whatever my list of accomplishments are and another great name that I could add to the list of the people that I’ve been blessed to work with.
It’s hard to keep up with all of your output. I know you dropped Audio Optics and I believe Seven Hour Block. Am I missing anything recently?
Naw you caught up. Seven Hour Block is the latest project. Shout out to my homey Tragic out there in Canada, I did a song with Lowkey out of Sacramento who used to run with Brotha Lynch and he was working with Tragic in Canada, and they reached out to me to do a song. So I did a feature with them and then the feature turned into Tragic saying hey man I’d love to produce a whole project for you. So we hit it off and kicked it. I flew up to Canada and we did the project and Seven Hour Block turned out so good that we did another one. I went back up there later in the year last year and we got another one that’s even better than Seven Hour Block.
I don’t even know how you do it but would it be fair to say that sometimes you are in competition with yourself? Like man that last album was so dope I gotta try to come doper on this one. How am I gonna do that?
Yeah man absolutely. That’s exactly what it is because everything ties back in to the fans. So I’m competing with myself 100% but the reason why I am competing with myself is because I am competing to destroy whatever notions that my own fan base might have about my last project.
The South Park Coalition is one of the oldest crews in hip hop. I think you guys started in 1987 right? And it’s grown from a few members to dozens and dozens of people maybe hundreds around the world. It went from South Park to around the globe. Tell us a little about the history of the SPC and how it survived this long.
Man it’s so crazy because you know I planned to start a rap clique. I can’t lie and act like I was trying to start it because I saw this vision of this thing getting big. I never saw that, I just wanted to have something that me and the homeys could call ourselves and that’s what it was. Me and a few of my brothers who went to school with me, it was just a handful of us at the time, it didn’t really start to grow legs until Gangsta NIP and AC Chill and Murder One and Klondike Kat came along in the same year, this was all in late 1987 and as time went on we got Dope E and not long after that you got Point Blank and Grimm and PSK 13 and all these different people so within a three year span man we was solid, we were rooted. And when NIP signed with Rap-A-Lot and then The Terrorists followed, that was the springboard that pushed us world wide. We had a name locally, wasn’t no internet to promote and push itself outside of the city of Houston, much less the state but locally yeah our name was ringing but when NIP signed to Rap-A-Lot and he put us on his record, we got that exposure. We were feature on that classic album South Park Psycho and that blew the SPC up on that underground level like that.
And you are still going today. All of you have got a dope video out right now, “Bettin’ On Me.” Is this from an upcoming album?
Yessir absolutely. We have an SPC album ready to drop. It’s been ready over a year, we just kept pushing it back but we plan on releasing it within the next couple of months. We just felt like it was time to do it as a collective. We really dropped the ball in terms of not taking advantage of the peak popularity that we had in the 90’s. We should have dropped an SPC album back then but for whatever reason we didn’t. But I’m of the belief just like a lot of the other guys in the clique, as long as you’re vertical it’s never too late. So we just decided to go ahead and put it together. It’ll be coming real soon.
You have been doing a lot of dope interviews. I know you did K-Rino Radio and now you are doing the Underground Dialogue podcast. Tell us about your podcast.
When we stopped doing K-Rino Radio, Covid shut down the radio station KPFT, so we weren’t going to the station to do the shows live. So what happened was every show started doing it via remote, pre-recorded sending the shows in to the website. I did that for about a year but a lot of politics started to take place with the station. They were moving our shows around and we couldn’t lock in and really promote with a fan base if they are moving your time slot every time you look up. We had a lot of love from the prisons and all that and they kept moving us. So I let the radio show go and right as I was doing that my homey and co-host on the podcast reached out and he had a whole office and a whole set up with a podcast room so we just transferred over to doing the podcast.
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