DX: How difficult is it to tell a story with instrumentals?
88-Keys: I told you, it took me like a year and a half now! [Laughs] It’s pretty difficult, but once I got through the first four or five joints that I made, I won’t say that it's less difficult, but I knew how to approach it. Well that would make it less difficult, right? Yeah. What an idiot. I definitely didn’t breeze through it, I’ll tell you that much. Each joint was fine-tuned, I tried to be as creative as possible. I stayed away from looping anything, which has been me since I got on the MPC 3000 anyway, I don’t loop anything, really. I’ve got a song called, “Nice guys finish last.” The hook is saying, (sings) “Be nice to her, be nice to her.” I’m making the beat tell the story, then everything else is instrumental. But everything is in a chronological order, so you see how the story develops and unfolds. You know what happens at the end, but it’s how he gets there that’s kind of interesting. I think after this album comes out, a lot of people will fuck with me, on some, “88-Keys is a producer. 88-Keys got ill beats. 88-Keys can put an album together. 88-Keys’ concepts are ill.” “Straight up grit, I’m strictly stupendous!” to quote my man Diamond D.

DX: What made you take on that theme?
88-Keys: I thought, “What gives me pleasure?” So I thought, Polo clothes, blue label of course, give me pleasure, when I’m out coppin’. Making beats bring me pleasure. Money. I’m like, “Boom! I know what gives me pleasure! Pussy!” So as soon as that thought came into my head, I’m like, “Okay. I’m scrapping all the other beats I had made for my album so far, and I’m starting with this one. This is the first beat for my album.” And I just stayed on it.

So I’m like, “This song is going to be about pussy somehow. I’ve got to flip it, I don’t know how, but it’s got to be about pussy.” So I left that one alone, and I went to another record to try to make a new song, a new beat. All of a sudden, the words on the album were jumping out at me. I don’t know if I was horny that day or what, but I just started hearing a bunch of vaginal references again. So I made another beat, chopped it up, and the beat came out ill. I kind of tailored it to talk about the vagina in some way, shape or form. Then I did another one like that that jumped out at me, and I’m like, “Hmm, I’m starting to notice a pattern here.” It wasn’t even a story yet, I just had four beats about skins. Then eventually, I was getting more and more ideas, and shaping them and taking stabs at it, pun intended. Nah let me chill, ‘cause I’m married, my wife’ll kick my ass when she reads this. You see how I got thrown off? See, the power. That’s what The Death of Adam’s about! Stuff like that is on my album, all unintentional. Eventually, my album started to take life, a shape of its own. I started to learn a lot of things about myself, and making beats and tailoring stuff to get it as good as I could possibly make it, like beats and songs, and eventually putting an album together.

DX: It seems like you’re three degrees of separation from every artist; you’ve mentioned cats in conversation with me, and I’m wondering, “How does he even know him?”
88-Keys: I met a lot of my—and I don’t use this term loosely—I met a lot of my heroes that I looked up to in the music industry from selling records. Between me buying my first records to linking up with John Carrero, I was like his employee, so I started doing Roosevelt Record Conventions with him. I started meeting people there. I started interning at a studio around my way in Long Island, I became an assistant engineer just from my will to learn. I met Busta over there, Das EFX, LL Cool J. People were coming through, I eventually started making beats. This doesn’t apply back then, because I was nowhere near where I am now, but I’m pretty laid back, I’m pretty chill, I’m easy to get along with, I’m easy to talk to. I don’t really have a lot of inhibitions. Me meeting Busta Rhymes for the first time—and this is when Leaders of the New School were already hitting—I was his assistant engineer on the Coming album. So he was already a huge star, and his persona and his presence and stuff was like, “Oh shoot, you really are a star.” But I wasn’t on some quiet shit, like a little mouse in the corner. I was just introducing myself. I guess in the back of my mind, knowing I’m eventually going to be in the industry, and even though Busta Rhymes to this day is way higher up on the ladder and food chain than I am, I still consider him my peer. So I just kept myself grounded, and just started looking at these stars and celebrities and heroes as regular people during the day job. So my pollying game is pretty sick [laughs], considering back then I didn’t really have a lot of ammo. I had a lot of beats to back myself up, but I didn’t have any platinum records or anything. But I could approach Puffy and talk to him, or whoever I met back then, to this day. I met a lot of people in my youth, and through those people, running around with them, maybe hitting the road or the studio with some cats, and meeting other cats. I met Erykah Badu before she came out, D’Angelo before he came out, I met them at The Roots' sessions. Continued on page 4 »