The Nappy Roots, the southern soulful Hip Hop crew from the Bluegrass State better known as Kentucky is here to make a return. The strong-bonded friends had their share of ups and downs since their initiation into this hit and miss music industry. The cost of fame didn’t cost them their loyalty and to this day Fish Scales, Big V, Ron Clutch, B. Stille, and Skinny Deville, shows that they came into together and will still ride together. The first album Watermelon, Chicken, & Gritz, their major label debut from Atlantic Records went platinum and gave Nappy Roots a solidified presence in the rap game with their own uniqueness.

Having their disagreements with Atlantic for many reasons the group eventually parted ways with the label. The leave was punctuated with a five-year music hiatus. During that whole time, the group decided to take a step back and oversee where they stood in the industry. The grind has been turned around in reverse as the hustle for them now from major to indie instead of the usual indie to major. Skinny Deville catches up with HipHopDX to get in-depth and break all down to pieces. The new album The Humdinger is coming August 5^th and Skinny explains the quick “360” turn around Nappy Roots made to adjust to today’s game.

HipHopDX: Skinny it’s been five years since y'all released an album which was Wooden Leather. Fans would like to know what happened with Nappy Roots during the five year span?
Skinny DeVille: Basically a lot of things transpired between Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz and Wooden Leather, a lot of things definitely changed. We signed our deal with Atlantic Records in 1998 and our first album Watermelon, Chicken and Gritz didn’t come out until 2002. It was a lot of growth and development over the years before the first album was introduced to the world.

On the second album Wooden Leather, we got to work with you we wanted to, but we didn’t see coming was a change in the industry. A lot of labels were losing money, because albums weren’t selling so labels ended up merging. By 2004, labels was trying to get everything together and the infrastructure was still suffering with the Internet downloads and whatnot. Nappy Roots, we got caught up in that mix, in our situation we put a lot of effort and energy into that Wooden Leather album. We thought it kind of fell, because the label wasn’t as organized as we would liked them to be. In 2004, we kind of ran around with the label and we still didn’t see eye to eye. From 2003 to 2005, two years have transpired for us to get off of Atlantic Records and so now what? We talked to a couple labels, a couple were interested, a couple didn’t call us back. We decided to pursue our own situation and become independent. In 2006-2007, all that time [we] was raising kids, going fishing, touring, and still was making that great music. We just got a situation with Fontana/Universal at the top of 2008 and the new album coming called The Humdinger coming August 5th.

DX: The reason we're speaking today...
SD: Absolutely, we taking a different approach to making music. We're not gonna let major labels control us, tell us what to do. It’s our job and responsibility as artist to call the promoters, the radio stations, the local deejays. Atlantic Records did everything for us, we ain’t do nothing. When we got off we had to grind on our own. It’s like if no one is teaching you how to ride a bike, you gotta learn how to ride it yourself so you don’t fall off that bike again. For us, we had to learn how to become independent and be independent minded. We started off independent, but Atlantic Records showed us so much how the business goes as a major. That’s all we ever knew was how the majors did it. Now we trained to learn how to not sell a million and couple hundred thousand, and how to not do a $200,000 video, but a $3,000 video. You gotta really re-train your brain to rethink on a smaller scale.

DX: With all the years on the shelf, were you thinking that Atlantic was a bad home from the start?
SD: At the time yeah, we was in Kentucky going to college. When we got our deal we was in college going to school everyday, getting high, smoking, and drinking. A major label coming to Kentucky at that time it was unheard of. Nobody came to Kentucky for anything, except for the [Kentucky] Derby. At the time we had an A&R from Atlantic by the name of Mike Caren, and he said he wanted to sign us. After about three or four months with our lawyer negotiating contracts we signed the deal. Opportunity only knocks once man and that’s with anybody’s career. You either open the door and ask who it is or look through the people hole and see who is it.

DX: So basically you saying coming from the hood in the south, in the country, and everything y'all just took the opportunity and ran with it?
SD: Took the shit and ran with it, you gotta take a leap of faith sometimes in life to really get what you really want. If you want something bad enough man you gotta play on it, and as long as you got God in your corner you will never go wrong. When you start taking sex, money, and drugs before him he will take you through a nasty field. We always had the fact that we made good music keep us making music. That’s always been the main focal point of Nappy Roots is putting out good music. Continued on page 2 »