“What do you mean?”

“It will mostly be downloads.”

“Ah, man. Some niggas still buy records, man. You still have a CD player in your ride, and you still gotta drive around bopping to your shit, right?”

DX: Yeah, and even if you have an MP3 player in the car, the quality isn’t always the same.
R: Yo, in Africa they still have cassette players in their cars. Did you know that?

DX: Wow. I guess there’s still a couple people holding on.
R: Not a couple, homie. In some of these countries there are millions of them. We don’t realize that the old shit we have here, they’ll put it over there and sell it to niggas as new shit.

DX: It sounds like the underlying themes of these conversations you have with the executives is that you tell them something and they don’t understand it until five or 10 years after the fact.
R: [Laughs] Yeah.

DX: Since you’re a fan of the five year plan, what are you working toward now?
R: As far as my five year plan, I’m keeping that to myself. But, it’s materializing. You see me in the films, now. You saw me studying with Mr. Tarantino for six years, and I want to be a movie director. When I hit that ripe age, and I think I’m getting close to that age, in the next year or two it’s gonna be there. First, I’m gonna make movies for entertainment purposes, of course. My style of Hip Hop was an invented style, and I think I can do the same with films. I think I can make films differently from those that we see now.

Some filmmakers are doing it—just like some producers were doing it when I was. They just didn’t get a chance to crack out of the box. But, there’s only a few of us. Tarantino was one of them, and that’s why I studied him. He’s making movies that are entertaining, homie—those are the [movies] that take two bags of popcorn! He’s sending motherfuckers back to that concession stand.

DX: Between the “You Can’t Stop Me” video, Afro Samurai and all the Bobby Digital artwork, there’s a heavy comic book influence. What’s your favorite?
R: I’m a Silver Surfer fan, but I was a little disappointed with how they did him in the movie. I’ll tell you a couple comics that I like that haven’t been turned into movies yet, like Rom the Spaceknight. I loved Rom. Do you know about that comic Rom the Spaceknight?

DX: Wasn’t that the cat with the big cannon on his arm?
R: Yeah, son. Yo, the story to that comic is serious, and that would be a crazy movie. Moon Knight, remember him?

DX: Nah, I haven’t heard of him.
R: They only made 20 issues, so he didn’t make it that far. That was one of my favorite comics that I used to love too. His fuckin’ costume was off the chain! And, I’m a Spiderman buff too. I used to buy any Spiderman that came out. Then there was Sub-Mariner, Ironman—I was into the old shit. Then when X-men came out I got into that. I’m talking about the old X-Men and the new one.

I love buying comics, but I kind of stopped when Image came into the business. I slowly scaled down from there, and now I still buy a few novels. I bought the [Reginald] Hudlin’s Black Panther, and I still pick up a few here and there. Now my daughter, she has about a thousand Manga comics. She doesn’t buy Marvel, Image or any of that. It’s all Manga, and she’s got over a thousand of them shits right now.

DX: I won’t even front. I kind of purposely segued into comics because that “4th Chamber” verse [click to read] about “Camouflaged chameleon, ninjas scaling your building,” has that comic book quality that makes it a favorite for us die-hard fans. But there’s a lot of your rhymes, like “Twelve Jewelz” that are so complex I don’t think a casual fan can appreciate everything you’re talking about.
R: Yeah, those aren’t just verses. Those can be written down and you just put it in your pocket as a scroll.

DX: There are a lot of obscure pop references and Five Percent knowledge in there. Could you break that first verse down?
R: Let’s go to “Twelve Jewelz.” It starts with “The preexistence of the mathematical biochemical equation,” and you almost gotta stop right there. The rhyme goes on with, “Is the manifestation of rock, plant, air, fire and water/which are in its basic formation solid, liquid and gases,” but the preexistence of the mathematical biochemical equation—what is that? What is the mathematical, biochemical equation and what is its preexistence? Our bodies are the mathematical, biochemical equation. It’s perfectly engineered. It took time to make this, yo.

DX: So it’s really a more complex version of that conversation at the beginning of “Black Jesus,” [click to read] where Ghostface is talking about everything that exists is already inside you?
R: Yeah, right. That’s a great example. There are over 60,000 miles of veins in your body. Did you know that? Continued on page 4 »