Interview by Scott Bejda
I heard that you recently went out to California. What were you doing out there? Having fun and letting loose! We were taking magazine cover shots and photos, looking at a part of the world that we’d never seen before. We visited different cities like Vallejo, Oakland, and Sacramento, and we loved it. We had a pretty decent time out there. Black Dog was with us, doing all that picture taking.
Did Black Dog take a lot of photos of y’all? We took about 2,000 photos from beginning to end. It was basically three straight days of photo shoots.
How are Gary, Indiana, and California different from each other? Gary is smaller than Cali, but there isn’t really too much difference other than the sheer size. The same things going on in California are going on right here in Gary. The club scene is different, though. Out there, they aren’t playing the type of music we play down here. It’s more money-driven and more laid back, with people acting with more class. Down here in Gary, niggas are damn near eating off the floor.
It’s different in more ways than one. Personally, I think Gary is crazier because the city is so small and there’s nowhere to go, so beef happens every single day. Motherfuckers get killed every day down here. Gary is a city that deserves to be put on the map just like California; it needs to get as much attention as any other major city out here. The violence down here needs to be reduced, because it’s ugly!
I heard the EP and it’s insane. Is the upcoming album different from the EP? We just have way more songs that are completely off the hook. If you think the EP is tight, the album is going to blow you away. We aren’t going to come out with it unless the crowd is going to absolutely love it, because we pour raw blood, sweat, and tears into our raps.
We demand respect, we don’t demand money. Niggas out here just follow the money, but we ain’t never had shit. If we fall flat on our faces right now, we ain’t gonna give a fuck because we stay down to earth. We love who we are and we love who we are going to become. What we are going to do is completely change the game, and I mean that!
It sounds like you really have to be strong growing up in Gary. It is incredibly easy to get killed in Gary, Indiana. Nobody honors anything out here. We literally keep our funeral suits at the cleaners because that’s how quickly we might need them—you just take it out and go straight to a funeral. You truly have to be strong to survive growing up in this city.
It seems like there’s a lot of underlying tension between you and the local scene. With us, it runs much deeper than just the music industry—it’s entirely personal. We were always the ultimate underdogs. We lived in the city of the most hated, where people actively wished death on the three of us right here. When we first came into the game, a lot of people didn’t want to put up money for us. If a major concert was coming to town, the promoters would say, “We’re gonna book Ying Yang, or Twista instead”.
That’s why it’s personal with us! We have to shit on these niggas in Gary just to let them know that we are the absolute top dogs in this game. We are coming out swinging to prove something to our own city as well as to the industry.
How does your past tie into the music you’re making now? For the past twenty years, we’ve been Vice Lords—killing, robbing, stealing, being in jail, the penitentiary, and landing on the police’s most-wanted lists. Living that way didn’t bring anything into our lives except penitentiary time. Now, we’ve chosen to run with Thugged Out. We’ve built a lot of real respect now, so we just want to keep that respect, love, and energy going. That’s all we are out here trying to do.
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