They make a bigger deal out of it than it really is. ‘Cause beef been goin’ on since Busy Bee or MC Shan, since KRS-One [click to read] and “The Bridge Is Over,” since Run-DMC, back in the days, Roxanne Shante, everybody had beef. N.W.A. had beef. Bone Thugs [N’ Harmony] [click to read] had beef with [Tha] Dogg Pound [click to read]. Uncle Luke [click to read] and Tim Dog [had beef] with Snoop [Dogg] and [Dr.] Dre. That shit’s been goin’ on. Nowadays, everybody just puts the magnifying glass on it in the wake of the untimely demises of Biggie and 2Pac. Since that happened, everybody just goes overboard with the beef shit in the media. People don’t understand, 10 out of 10 times, it’s the media, magazines and people that really fuel the fire in these shits.

DX: You just ran through a grocery list of Hip Hop history. You’re this mainstream artist that studied his lessons. Do you think Hip Hop as an institution gives you enough credit for things like that information right there?
G: Nah. I don’t think nobody really understands what I’ve done in Hip Hop with my career. From the early stages till now, I’m anywhere from five to 10 years gone from Hip Hop. [They'll appreciate me when] my whole beard is gray, then people will look back, they’ll understand, they’ll respect what I did, but I don’t do it for the respect of people, man.

I think if you look at some of my accolades that I cherish in Hip Hop…I withstood, [I’m attached] to one of the biggest beefs in Hip Hop history. If you think about the biggest beefs in history, the only one that was bigger than mines, killed two of my favorite rap artists. Beef with me and 50 was just as big as Biggie and 2Pac’s in terms of that type of war. It was shootouts, and it was diss records, and I went to his house on some crazy, dumb shit, and I did what I did, and the only thing that didn’t come out of that beef was that neither one of us got killed. But that was a big beef, and I annihilated [G-Unit] as a group. Their record is coming out soon, and they ‘bout to catch a brick; their [single] ain’t even got 500 spins, and “Game’s Pain” is damn near 4,000 on paying homage. So that right there – “300 Bars,” the longest fuckin’ mixtape diss – the longest diss song ever recorded in Hip Hop history; you could play it like the shit’s three minutes. I got BDS spins on “300 Bars And Runnin’;” it was on the radio. People was takin’ out [the curses] – if you played “300 Bars” on your radio station, that means there was three artists, three songs that wasn’t getting played at all in that point in time. That shit was big, man.

I’m a product of Dr. Dre. I appreciate everything he did for me. I haven’t really been around him. I spoke to Dr. Dre recently, but I have really been around him to chill or record in years, but just being around him those first few years gave me enough to last me my whole career as far as creativity and how to make these classic albums become movies. People won’t respect me till after, but that’s fine with me, ‘cause that’s not what I do it for, I do it ‘cause love doin’ it, and once I get tired of doing it, then I won’t do it no more.

DX: You’ve got Common on the album. His work with T.I. was groundbreaking, so I'm curious about this union. Tell me about this collaboration…
G: Common’s one of my favorite emcees of all-time. Like I said, this album, I figured it to be my last album, ‘cause I recorded with the people that I wanted to record with, that I always wanted to record with, and that I recorded with in the past that I really love. Like, [I] got Nas on the album on a song called “Letter To The King.” We just both wrote 16 bar letters to Dr. Martin Luther King. Continued on page 3 »