So do you think the critical praise of your lyrical content may actually have hurt your commercial viability?

To a certain extent, yes. When we were about to release our first album (1993’s “Kill My Landlord”) and the label sent out the single, “Not Yet Free,” to be reviewed, hella people wrote that it was more gangsta rap from East Oakland. At first I got mad, because it seemed like they didn’t even listen to the lyrics– they just heard the beat. But what happened was people were like, “More gangsta rap from East Oakland?! I’m fixin’ to go get that!” (Laughs) So I think now, because the subject matter of our music is usually what gets talked about [in the press], the average reader gets an idea of what the music sounds like that’s totally different from what we’re about. That’s the good thing about downloading: People see people like us on MySpace and try out stuff they never would have otherwise.

When you guys ended your relationship with the Wild Pitch label, there were a few years (1994-1998) where you were outta the game for a minute. What was that period like for you?

Well, I was 24 at the time and I had a mid-life crisis. (Laughs) I was like, "I’ve been fucking doin’ this for most of my adult life!" EMI bought “Genocide & Juice” (1994) from Wild Pitch for like $500,000, and we were climbing up the charts and getting radio play. It looked like it was gonna blow up, but they bought the album and shelved it the next week. I was like, shit, I do all this stuff for all these years to get my music out there, but I’m still playing their game. I had no control over it. I’d originally gotten into hip-hop to be part of a movement, so I was like, fuck that shit.  I was comparing myself to Fred Hampton, who’d organized a thousand people in Chicago to be in the Panthers before he was 21, turning the gangs into a political organization. People like him and Huey Newton were young, so I felt like I was wasting my youth. I just stopped, then me and some friends formed an organization called the Young Comrades. That slowly turned into a study group, and I was like, if all I’m gonna do is get ideas to people, I could do this in a much better way. That’s when I went back.

I’ll never forget getting the advance CD for “Party Music” back in the summer of 2001, with the cover image of the Twin Towers exploding in flames and your finger on the button of a detonator. Was it frustrating when the events of September 11 found you guys being put back on the defensive, investigated by the Feds?

I kinda took that as an opportunity. There were very few voices of dissent out there at the time, and that unfortunate coincidence happened to me– someone who had nothing to lose and knew that the reason I got into this was to be that voice of dissent. What was frustrating was the idea that, with all the publicity that came with that controversy, our record label (indie startup Ark 75) went bankrupt before the album came out. We couldn’t even get our album in stores. Continued on page 3 »