DX: So have you and Papoose kept a relationship?
KGR: Yeah, we did. Even when Papoose started running and doing his own thing he was working with D/R Period and needed me to do a feature on one of his records. We used to all be click together, that’s why I got a record with Papoose [“Thug Connection”] besides the one I did with him on my album. On the single that D/R Period put out, it was the flipside of [Papoose’s] “Alphabetical Slaughter.”

DX: Staying in that late ‘90s/turn of the century period of time frame, after Roots Of Evil you got down with Rawkus Records. It then took like 3 years to finally get your next album, The Giancana Story, officially out in stores in 2002. So I just have to ask, looking back now do you regret signing with Rawkus?
KGR: I mean, I don’t really regret signing with ‘em but I just think it was a situation that obviously just didn’t happen for either one of us. It went bad for G Rap and then it went bad for Rawkus too.

DX: Obviously the situation with Rawkus slowed down your release cycle, but why has there been just that one full-length solo G Rap release thusfar in the 21st century?
KGR: I mean just ‘cause when people started basing [what I could] bring to their company on Soundscan numbers they [weren’t] as quick to jump at G Rap.

DX: So you tried to go to other labels after Rawkus just to see what’s up and they was frontin’ on you?
KGR: Yeah, of course. And it wasn’t nothing unexpected to me. I been in the game 20 years and I already know how the game go.

DX: Speaking of how the game go, or how its gone of late, I know you gotta feel like a stranger in a strange land when you look out over the current Hip Hop landscape and see so few true blue lyricists?
KGR: Oh hell yeah, definitely! I feel like that now, I’m lost.

DX: What’s G Rap’s response when he’s watching 106 & Park?
KGR: [Laughs] You know what, I don’t even really watch shit like that to be honest with you. I might watch it once in awhile just so I can always keep an eye and an ear open to what’s going on, but for the most part I don’t live in that world. And it’s not that I don’t live in the present, it’s just that I don’t fuck with that part of the present state of Hip Hop. Dudes started doing this thing for money instead of the love of Hip Hop, and I don’t fuck with them cats.