DX: Last year, Nelson George gave “How to Kill a Rapper” so much love. He said his only beef was that younger, more mainstream artists didn’t make records like that. Any thoughts?
CG: To me it’s…
MM: I got this one, Craig. You know what it is? It’s the ignorance of the audience right now. It seems like the dumber the subject is, the more you’ll sell. The more ignorant, the stupider and the less [coherent] it is, the more likely it is that people will jump on it. I think “How to Kill a Rapper” is too intelligent. It doesn’t seem like the most intelligent concept, or the smartest thing to talk about, but even that’s too intelligent.

Look at songs like [Hurricane Chris'] “A Bay Bay,” and stuff like that—that’s people’s IQ level. In rap right now, if you talk about something too intelligent, that’s clouding up the brain. If it’s something stupid, or it has a one-syllable chorus, it seems like people are all over it. People are more ignorant now than they’ve ever been.
CG: I agree 100%. People would rather get silly these days.

DX: Wouldn’t you say that’s true of society in general, not just Hip Hop?
MM: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s not our fault as a people, because education is not there for us. Most of the people are kind of dumb. College niggas can’t be rappers, man.

DX: I almost forgot. When you mentioned “the machine” earlier, what does it take to change that part of our culture?
CG: Stop complaining and support real Hip Hop. I understand everybody’s going to download albums, or what have you, but if you really like it buy it. What happened to the days of buying an album and reading liner notes? We need to get back to that.
MM: That’s too intelligent, baby. [Laughs]
CG: [Laughs] I guess we’ll just have to make a DVD with the liner notes, thank you’s and all the credits. I’ma do a little Smack DVD with only the album credits

DX: [Laughs] Or you might just have to put it on MySpace.
MM: Yeah, there you go. Just throw all the album credits on MySpace.