And there is good music out there. It’s just harder to access it.
9th: It’s hard to access it. It’s hard to get labels to sign it. That’s what we’re trying to bring back. We talk about that all the time: trying to bring back a balance in the game. There’s only one kind of music. We’re trying to bring a balance where you not only hear your 50s or you hear all these other artists talking about whatever. And the game needs that, because that’s a part of the black community, at the same time you need to hear the other side. You need to hear real life, you need to hear family life - raising a son or a daughter…you need to hear that, too. And it’s only a couple of artist doing that and there needs to be more of that. And on the flip side, I don’t want to hear 100 artists talking about tree hugging either, and one artist talking about shooting. I wanna hear it all. There’s room in the market place for everything.

Labels aren’t really giving deals to any artist that isn’t already selling like 15-20 thousand units on their own. But if you were moving units like that, would you be that pressed to get signed?
Phonte: Niggas want the fame, that’s what it is. Niggas want fame. It’s like, niggas would rather be famous poor people than anonymous millionaires. If you’re selling 500 thousand, or 100 thousand, at $8 a pop, by yourself, through a website, or out the trunk or whatever, I mean, you do the math! That’s 800 thousand, after taxes say $400 thousand. Then after expenses, say that’s $300 grand. And you can get rich doing that. And cats think that it’s all about the money, but niggas want that fame. That’s the most powerful drug ever.
Pooh: That’s more powerful than crack, it’s more powerful than that herron, it’s more powerful than all that!
Phonte: If you walk to a nigga on the street and be like, “yo dog, I’ll give you $100 now on the street, or I can give you $10 on TRL.”
Pooh: “Oh, I’ll take that $10 on TRL!”
Phonte: “I’ll take that $10 baby, ‘cause it might lead to my own sitcom – I’m the 10 Dollar Man!” This culture man, it’s just based on being famous and being known. Because truthfully, in 2005 you don’t really need a record label, but a lot of cats choose to go that route. And speaking for the group, we chose to go that route because we felt that we’d pretty much hit the ceiling as far as we could go on the independent. And for us to really make the impact that we want to make on hip-hop and the world, we knew we had to try to do it on a major label. If you’re gonna run a race, you got to have the best shoes on.

How important has it been to have The Justus League? Because you guys are like the G-Unit of the underground!
Phonte: Yeah, but without the chains. My joint, it don’t quite spin yet, it might turn…but yeah…People want to root for somebody…so for Little Brother, we were the first ones to really break through out of the camp. So now people are looking to see who else we got. And when they look and see there’s other talented people in the crew, it makes for a better story, because at that point you go from being just a group to being a movement.