Where do you guys see hip-hop going from here? You touch on it in your album, but it’s obviously not at the best place it’s been.
Pooh: I don’t know man. You can’t really say that hip-hop is “bad” right now, because whereas the quality of the music is really not where it was, as far as the money end of things, people are making more money than ever.
Phonte: It’s like if you could go back 20, 30 years and trade places with Kool Herc, and have him trade places with you, how do you think he would answer? “Man back then there was so much integrity!” Yeah nigga, but we was broke! Now cats is making money, but the music is…

It’s not about the music so much anymore. It’s a product.
Phonte: It’s definitely a product.
Pooh: It’s big business.
Phonte: We ain’t gone too far to see that yet. It is a business. As far as where it’s going, it really depends on the people. And when I say the people, I mean our generation – the hip-hop generation. It depends on where we taking it. Because it’s to the point now where it’s in the hands of people that are never gonna give a fuck about us. Real talk. So it’s like…we can’t protest Clear Channel and say “This is wrong, ya’ll shouldn’t be doing this,” and protesting these media outlets and saying that these images they’re showing is wrong. They couldn’t give a fuck…they never cared. It’s ALL about the money for them. So the change has to come from within, it has to come from us saying “look, this is a cool song in the club, but 4 o’clock in the afternoon my son is getting off the bus. Don’t play this shit.” We have to stand up for that, ‘cause aint nobody else gonna stand up for us. And it has to come from within our generation. It can’t be like how back in the early 90s, when you had C. Delores Tucker, Calvin Butts, Dionne Warwick, like all these people speaking out against hip-hop, to the young generation it just looked like, “all these old muther fuckers – whatever. Ya’ll just hatin’. Ya’ll don’t get it.” Looking back now, you can see what they were trying to stop from happening… the messenger just got in the way of the message. It takes somebody from our generation that look like, walk like, and talk like, to show the young generation, like, “yo, this hustling, this drug dealing shit – that shit is not cool. Your ass will be dead fucking with that shit. Cut that shit out.” It’s gonna take us to police ourselves.

Because the music is only one fold of the problem…all the problems just trickle through the music.
Phonte: The music feeds that. If you look at back at the 60s and 70s, where black people were going through a lot – it was the end of the civil rights movement and a lot of things were going on. You had Curtis Mayfield, Keep on Pushing and songs like, Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto. Even the group names: LTD (Love Togetherness and Devotion)…singing songs to uplift people. That said a lot…It was a community effort, and there was just more of a sense of family. Continued on page 3 »