Maybe we should think of it as Biggie's theory. "It" being what happens when a new artist tries to push their particular form of self-expression too far past Hip Hop's current boundaries only to find themselves rejected and "played out like Kwame’ and them fuckin' polka dots." Add in the fact that many artists are currently struggling to sell 300,000 albums, and the incentive for taking risks lessens even more. Apparently, Alvin "Rah Almillio" and Kintrell "Krispy Kream" Lindsey never got the memo.
The pair of New Orleans siblings, collectively known as The Knux [click here to see the video...], bring their penchant for gambling outside of the casino and into the recording booth. The fact that they have both the pedigree and familial ties to speak on the realities of what happens in Crescent City without glorifying it has not been lost on Common and music executives such as Matthew Knowles and Paul Rosenberg. In fact, it was Rosenberg, who also manages Eminem, who gave the duo their own Chic Freak imprint on Interscope. After a quick round at the roulette table, Krispy and Rah put in a call to HipHopDX to explain why this gamble won’t share the same fate as that other progressive emcee with the blond streak in his high-top fade. Do you really want to bet against them?
HipHopDX: What’s going on fellas?
Krispy Kream: We’re at Treasure Chest Casino in New Orleans. I just broke them bitches.
DX: Really, was it Keno, the craps table?
KK: Nah, I was playing Roulette and Blackjack, just breaking them hoes.
Rah Almillio: You know, we’re just trying to win this money and shit.
DX: I hope you’re not blowing all that Interscope advance money.
KK: What? Nah, my nigga, that’s gone.
RA: [Laughs] That was $100,000 all on black right there.
KK: Yeah, they got us Omar, but I had to win that back.
DX: Well your bio didn’t mention anything about gambling, but everyone usually mentions your musical chops. Is that something that runs in the family?
KK: No, me and Al are the only ones in our family that play instruments. Even our younger brother doesn’t play any instruments. But, we’ve been doing it since we were like 12. Our mom put us on to that to keep us out of trouble and stuff.
DX: What instruments do each of you play?
RA: Both of us can play anything brass.
KK: Guitar, keys and Al is learning how to play drums real good. He’s talking like he knows how to play real good, but he’s kind of wack on them drums. [Laughs] We were producers when we were real young.
RA: Our uncle was a local producer in the southeast region. Do you like New Orleans Bounce?
DX: Some of it. I’m only familiar with a little bit.
RA: He did a lot of that shit. He did stuff for Big Mike, Geto Boys and shit like that...
DX: Word, what was his name?
RA: Mel Watkins.
KK: Yeah, we learned a lot of stuff from him. He taught us how to use that [Ensoniq] ASR-10. That shit was so hard to work back then that we really didn’t learn until he got the [Akai] MP. Now we mostly do a lot of our sequencing in Reason, ProTools and Cubase.
DX: Now that more is being done digitally, how much do you mix in beat machines like the MP or the E-Mu SP-1200?
KK: The SP still has a sound to it. Let me tell you something about that hardware. MP’s still hit better than anything, as far as the kicks and that low boom. Anything made by Roland is alright. That’s where it’s at. That low 808 is one of the best sounds ever. I’ve messed with all kinds of sub sounds that distort and everything, but that Roland 808…it’s something about it man.
RA: Just like at the beginning of that Devin The Dude, “I need that boom…that boom!”
DX: What else do you draw from?
KK: We’re influenced by everything, man. We grew up playing Jazz music, but we try to take stuff from the best of every music. We went all the way into it. It’s not how you hear other niggas saying, “Yeah, I’m into that Rock shit.” That shit fucks me up when I hear a Hip Hop dude saying that shit. They’ll have a little wallet chain on their waist and I’ll be like, “Wow.”
Remember the dudes [Shop Boyz] who came out with that song “Party Like A Rock Star?” What the fuck are you talking about, Twisted Sister, nigga? This was 2007. That’s an outdated notion of what a Rock star is, and you could tell they couldn’t connect the two genres.
RA: [Laughs] We listen to everything, bruh. You don’t want to even look in our CD players. Everything from B.G. to The Rolling Stones.
DX: You’ve coined the term “Garage Hop.” How does the U.K. Garage scene factor in?
KK: With Garage, everything is done in-house. We try not to go to the studio, because we feel as the Garage artists did—the studio is almost like an institution. You can’t get creative because there’s only so much stuff in there. When you’re in the crib doing it you can use everything from pots and pans to stumps and shoestrings. You can use anything and it’s got that sound as if it was made in somebody’s garage. It’s really like that Wu-Tang shit was.
RA: Yeah, we’ll run breaks through all kind of distortion. We try just as hard to make it sound dirty as motherfukers try to make their stuff sound clean. We try to fuck it up a little bit. Even the guitars, I purposely did that in a sloppy, Garage sort of way so it sounds like we’re just jammin’ out in a garage. Hip Hop is too clean right now.
KK: Exactly. People always say they like Dr. Dre, but they never like none of the real old shit he used to do. That shit had crazy breaks during that time when he was biting Bomb Squad real hard. Nobody ever says that, but I just said it.
DX: So you’re talking about that sound from Niggaz4life?
KK: Yeah, like that shit. We rhyme over some of those beats at our shows, and sometimes we freestyle over “Straight Outta Compton.” Remember when Hip Hop was dirty? Think about RZA. RZA had all the money in the world and he still made that shit sound gritty. He was listening to Trent Reznor and all that Trip Hop stuff that came out of the UK in the mid-'90s, thinking, “Yeah, I can do this.” That’s what Gravediggaz was founded on, even though by the second album they changed. Him and Prince Paul was on some other shit.
RA: If you listen to the album, you’ll see that we’re really trying to push the limits of Hip Hop. I know it sounds cliché when people say, “I’m on some different shit.” But, it’s not different in the sense of music as a whole; it’s different as far as being ballsy. It has a lot of balls, and we did some things that other motherfuckers definitely wouldn’t have the confidence to do. People have conflicts with certain things, or they may not know that genre of music enough to even dabble into it. We’re not like half of the producers who take a piece of a different culture and bring it to another culture which knows nothing about it, so it looks like genius.
KK: You’ve got to realize that Kanye will never be respected by the mainstream critics and stuff.
DX: You don’t think so?
KK: No, because he takes a piece, but he never takes the time to learn that shit. Just Blaze just asked him in a magazine if he ever went to search in the crates and shit. Then Kanye turned around and asked him, “Why the fuck you waste your time looking through records and stuff? I just snatch mine off the CD.” He lost the whole concept of what that man was trying to ask him.
Think about it, dog. A lot of these guys just patronize Hip Hop dudes. No matter how much money we make, and no matter how many chains and Lamborghini’s we got, they still don’t respect us. They respect people like Wyclef Jean because of all the stuff with The Fugees. To me, that was the first Hip Hop album that bent the genres. They wrote songs, and everything wasn’t talking about themselves.
That’s one thing about Hip Hop. Even artists we think are real good always talk about themselves. That’s not a song because you’re just talking about yourself and how fly you are. That’s not a song to me. That’s bullshit, and you might as well stand on the corner and boast. We write songs just how Bob Dylan wrote songs. I want people to respect Hip Hop. Those songs off The Score were songs, and it wasn’t just niggas spittin’. A lot of times Hip Hop dudes just want to sound cool instead of really writing a song. That never touches your soul.
Remember how 2Pac used to touch your soul with one of them real songs? A lot of people would say ‘Pac was a hypocrite. They didn’t understand that the man was a songwriter. He wasn’t always writing about himself, but it was definitely things that he saw. A lot of Hip Hop guys are street and ignorant and they never take the time to educate themselves. They don’t appreciate the art form like KRS-ONE said. They just do it thinking, “Okay, I’m gonna’ rap.” I’m sorry if I sound a little angry, but anytime we get with a journalist, we always try to get as much stuff out as possible.
DX: It’s cool. Ideally we’re supposed to be the outlet to get that to your audience. Earlier you talked about concepts. The three singles you have floating around, “Hard Days Night,” “Cappuccino” and “Amazing” all deal with women in some capacity.
RA: Yeah, everybody’s got relationship problems and stuff. We just talk about women because most guys’ lives are surrounded by that type of shit. We do different concepts because we’re vulnerable type of rappers. It’s not like we’re saying, “I’m a big, big pimp with 3,000 bitches. All of you do my bidding.”
KK: “And, I ain’t gotta pay ‘em.”
RA: That’s just coming from a fantasy perspective, and we don’t come from that perspective. Motherfuckers watch too many Scarface movies. We have real situations. She may have broken your heart and you really feel one way, but you’re laughing on the outside. “Amazing” is about a chick with the wrong type of dude. I don’t wanna say we’re vulnerable, but it’s just real. These are real situations that people go through on an everyday basis.
KK: We’re not trying to make ourselves sound fly on every song. Like right now it’s raining in New Orleans. It rains everyday out here, but that’s just one day. People never touch on that. You could write a song and name it today’s date and just write about whatever happened today. That’s more real than anything you could make up.
That’s what I like about Lupe’s new album. I’m not a big Lupe fan, but you’ve got to give it to the brother. He wrote some songs. Him and Common wrote some songs, and that’s what I respect about them. Lupe’s gonna be around for a while. Even after Kanye phases out, Lupe is still gonna be around. He’ll have longevity because he’s a great songwriter. He’s not a big superstar, but every artist that comes out doesn’t need to be a superstar. You’re not a failure just because you don’t sell six million albums.
DX: That honesty is rare these days. You guys make references to hand jobs and Yasmine Bleeth on “Cappuccino.” I’m not sure people have heard either of those in a while, if ever.
RA: [Laughs] Man, you have no idea. When that album drops, a lot of people’s heads are gonna get fucked up with the subject matter we’re touching on. It’s fuckin’ hilarious, dog. We have serious topics too, but it’s not done in a cheesy ass way. You can always tell when somebody’s album is set up like, “Okay this is my sad song. This one is gonna be my uplifting song, and this is my ballin’ song right here.” For this album the music was based on whatever the fuck we felt like in the morning. If a nigga started with a riff on the guitar or with some 808 drums then we ran with it. We didn’t wake up thinking, “Let’s make this type of song.” Where ever the inspiration led in the morning we followed. That’s why we did it in-house, because everything had to be natural. The album is everywhere but it’s our language.
DX: Sounds a little risky.
KK: It’s everywhere, but it’s centered. It’s like how a spider has legs everywhere, but they all connect back at the center.
DX: Given Interscope’s track record, are you surprised that they let you get away with that?
KK: Nah, ‘cause we got balls. I don’t know if you knew, but before this we had a deal with Matthew Knowles. He was our manager and it was like a big “Unsigned Hype” thing going on. This is how we beat them. All these Hip Hop artists always ask for more money. We didn’t ask for more money, but we did ask for all the control. We said, “Give us our own imprint deal over here, and give us all the control. We don’t want nobody telling us anything, and we’ll turn the songs in when we turn them in.” They said, “Oh, okay. Y’all don’t want more money? Alright, we’ll do that.” A lot of artists don’t get control because they want too much money up front. You’re gonna eventually get the money if you make a good album.
RA: Yeah, if you don’t ask for $10 million up front they won’t be all up in your shit. I know if I gave somebody that type of money I’d be like, “Hey, what’s the first single?” I’d be all up in their shit and make sure that I at least got my money back.
DX: There’s definitely a part of the Hip Hop audience that can relate to that feeling.
KK: I feel like in America, and I don’t know who all is on this level, but I feel like it’s time for a change. That’s why I feel [Barack] Obama. I think he’s gonna’ win the Democratic seat, and then I think he’s gonna win the election and become president. It’s time for change. This is just like the ‘60s again. We’re at war and the music’s gonna change things. All this fake music and drug dealer shit…I don’t even want to get on that shit, bruh.
DX: No, get on it.
KK: I know the journalists can feel it, because we talk to a lot of you guys and keep in touch with a lot of people. When I talk to Noah [Callahan-Bever], he’s like, “Man, y’all feel it? I feel the change. I don’t mean you guys are gonna change the world or change the game. But this change is coming with you. I don’t know if it’s going to come with you or what, but you’re going to be a part of it.” You know what I mean?
DX: Yeah. You can draw a lot of parallels between what happened in the ‘60s and what’s happening now and the change that came out of it.
KK: I think that’s why a lot of this shit doesn’t mean anything to me and Al. We ain’t worried about Benzes and all that type of shit. I’m not saying that just to say it either, because we really don’t. Al is a very enlightened brother. We’ll sit around sometimes and he’ll just bug me out with the stuff he’s on. As black people, we’ve got to be bigger than this stuff. I think Martin Luther King Jr. would probably roll over in his grave right now if he saw how we fell victim to this white man’s wealth.
I’m not racist by any means, but we glorify wealth over our families. We went through [Hurricane] Katrina, and I was just happy that none of my family members died. And I lost everything, brother…everything.
DX: A lot of people probably assume that the experience of Katrina is somehow different because you’re recording artists.
KK: Fuck that. We go through it just like everybody else.
RA: “If you don’t move your feet then we don’t eat/so we like neck to neck” just like André 3000 said. This shit ain’t a free ticket. And this is coming from two cats that have Paul Rosenberg and Interscope. You probably think this shit is off the chain right now…like we have six bitches in a Jacuzzi popping bottles of champagne. Dog, it ain’t even much like that. I don’t even care about that sort of shit. At the end of the day, the impact that we’re going to make is good for me. I’m not talking financially either, because I don’t even give a fuck if we don’t sell that much. If we have respect then I don’t really care about the sales. There’s so many ways to get money in this shit that I don’t really care about selling records. If our movement comes off the way we want it to then I’m good.
KK: Yeah, we’re good because we own our own label anyway. We got a nice chunk, so I ain’t really worried about that.
RA: People come into this trying to be superstars, when you should come in as an artist who just happens to become a superstar. Niggas come in trying to be celebrities.
KK: It’s that Paris Hilton era.
RA: Back in the ‘70s you had real artists that just happened to become celebrities based on their popularity. Now people are coming out of the gate like, “I want to be a celebrity.” Nobody does that. That’s just a bunch of people who don’t respect the craft. Don’t get me wrong, it saved a lot of niggas…
KK: No it didn’t. They always say, “This Hip Hop shit gave a lot of niggas jobs and kept a lot out of jail.” This shit doesn’t! This gives jobs to less than 10% of the niggas who would’ve ended up in jail…not even one percent. We’ve got so many rappers from New Orleans and guess what? Percentage wise, there are more people in prison in Louisiana than anywhere in the world.
RA: [Laughing] I tried to be a little positive with it, but he’s right though.
KK: I don’t even talk about that kind of shit, and me and Al caught a case and everything.
DX: It’s to the point now where prison culture affects all of us on some level. I know you don’t necessarily want to glorify it, but you two almost caught a case in 2003 as well, right?
KK: I was scared. I almost…
RA: That’s them youngsters that think like that, man. When I see these Internet haters, it just makes me think it’s a shame because they’re getting misled by these fake ass rappers on TV. They think I’m the enemy because I want to lead by a positive example and show them there’s something different out there.
DX: Why do you think it’s like that?
KK: In America, if you grow up poor, or in the hood, or whatever, some niggas would rather go to jail than get a job. These niggas will clown someone who goes to work and say, “Ah he’s a working man. I’m just gonna sell this dope.” Cats think it’s cool like, “Yeah I’ll do my time and go lay down for about 30 days.” Meanwhile, Calvin is over here at McDonald’s and you won’t give him his props? I was watching Bill Cosby’s speech [during the 2004 NAACP Awards] on YouTube, and Bill was right. Bill was kicking that knowledge man.
Do you ever notice how in the hood, when a kid tries to learn something some of the other kids try to bash him out and say, “Why are you acting white?” So, now it’s considered white if you want to educate yourself? I’m not trying to go off, but I have so many problems—not just within the Hip Hop community—I’m talking about the black community in general.
DX: Do you personally experience any of that?
KK: I’m from the ghetto. The ghetto, ghetto, this is New Orleans, the worst place to live in America. I’m from the block. Sometimes niggas wanna say, “Oh, there goes that nigga with them tight jeans.” I hear that shit. All you little slick niggas that wanna talk on the Internet. Play with me if you want to. You call me gay on the Internet, but you could never walk in my shoes.
RA: They would rather talk about us, than this fake ass nigga who’s never picked up a piece of crack in his life, but he’s glorifying everything you get from selling dope. They’d rather look at that cat as some type of hero. Half of these niggas talking about selling coke…if we really wanted to talk about coke, we could talk for days.
KK: I could write a fucking biography on that shit. We’re from a good hood.
DX: Is there someone who provided that same type of inspiration to go against the grain for you two?
RA: My moms. She always told us, “You live in the hood, but you don’t have to be of the hood.” My mama is from the projects, and she came up worse than us. She could’ve went down a different path, but she always had an open mind and a free spirit. I don’t know why either. It could’ve been that God just touched her that way. Our outlet was our mom and the music she brought around us. Music changed my life, and it made us want to ask, “What’s this person’s background?” It made us get into different cultures and study the world outside of New Orleans.
KK: We were so trapped, that it got to the point where we thought New York accents were just an act. Everybody in the city was thinking the accent was put on. It wasn’t until later that we found out that that’s really how they talk. But, we were so closed-minded we thought that was an act and that everything was Hollywood. Everything outside of New Orleans didn’t seem real, and what we were living seemed like real life.
This is no cliché. My moms would always say that most of the people we saw out there would be either dead or in jail. There wasn’t too many positive influences. You could count them on one hand. And, not all of them were selling drugs. Some of them just didn’t have any guidance, so they weren’t doing anything. But, that’s worse than selling dope.
DX: What all did she have you listening to during that time?
RA: Mama used to bang Prince all day. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and The Doors, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Commodores. She listened to so many different things. At first she used to just listen to music and clean the house, but then we started learning the songs.
KK: We got into jazz because of her. We used to play in a Jazz band, but we didn’t really like it that much. She used to play George Benson and stuff. It just sparked our interest.
DX: And then you branched out from there?
RA: Krispy is like an encyclopedia on everything. He used to watch The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, Vh1’s Behind the Music and then come back and tell me all about it. So there’s a lot that I learned from him because he got there before me and opened my mind up to all this stuff.
DX: What drew you in to the electronic stuff?
RA: We got into electronic music in a crazy way from selling Ecstasy at raves. This is back when black people didn’t fuck with Ex, like back in ’97. We used to go to raves and sell that shit, and then we actually started to like the music there too. That’s how we got into Electronica, Drum & Bass, Jungle and all these different styles of music. Later on we got into the culture of it, and started skating. The music just opened things up.
DX: How did your friends take to all this?
RA: Everybody we grew up with slowly saw our transformation. It went from, “Whoa they’re trippin’,” to “Damn them niggas really trippin.” Finally they were just like, “Man we lost ‘em.”
KK: [Laughing] “We lost ‘em.” It was like having a drug addict son or something.
DX: So your boys were looking at you like André 3000 back in ’99?
KK: Nah, André was on some other shit with those shoulder pads, bruh.
RA: Yeah, we didn’t come out with the electric blue wigs.
KK: That nigga was just trying to find himself though, so I can feel him.
RA: But I respect that dude though. I really love that dude, what he’s done and what he stands for. At the end of the day, he’s got to be our greatest emcee to bless a microphone. Hands down, nobody can fuck with this dude. He can hop on any subject, and he can write songs. But as far as us, nah, we definitely weren’t rocking spiked shoulder pads and shit.
DX: Then what caused such a reaction?
RA: In New Orleans you can just switch up one little thing and people will start thinking you’re bugging. That’s how small-minded some of the people are there. If you don’t have gold teeth in your mouth it’s like, “Oh, you a uppity nigga.” That’s how small the mentality is.
DX: So do you see that changing at all?
RA: Yeah, and it’s very encouraging. I know the way someone dresses is very small in the scope of things, but it matters a lot in certain parts of society. I went back for Mardi Gras and people from the hood had their skinny jeans on. I’m not talking about DipSet, skinny. I mean retro, Punk skinny like the emo kids wear.
I was like, “Wow. I know we didn’t start this. I mean, we wear Levi’s 511’s all day, but niggas wasn’t looking at us.” I came back and it was inspiring because that’s unheard of in New Orleans. The clothing is just a small part, but it means a lot in terms of the mentality. These young dudes actually had the courage to step outside the box.
That’s why I commend someone like Pharrell. He gave hood niggas a different outlet, and it gave them a chance to see something else outside of the norm. It’s just clothing, but it changed the mentality of certain people. I look on MySpace and see pictures of people that I grew up with, and I don’t even recognize them. They’ll have a red Mohawk and be skating now. I think that’s cool, because at least they’re not out there trying to shoot someone in the face. At least he’s idolizing some skate shit instead of a drug dealer. It’s also funny, and yes I will laugh, and be like, “Damn he’s on some other shit,” but it’s all good.
DX: Would you say the change is a product of the times?
KK: Katrina did that. Katrina forced niggas to move out and see other shit. A lot of people didn’t even come back to New Orleans. A lot of the ones who did come back weren’t even the real ignorant people—it was the ones who really loved the city and wanted to be there. The people who left saw other things and people stopped idolizing the local drug dealers. If you were a local drug dealer, you got knocked off after Katrina.
The pair of New Orleans siblings, collectively known as The Knux [click here to see the video...], bring their penchant for gambling outside of the casino and into the recording booth. The fact that they have both the pedigree and familial ties to speak on the realities of what happens in Crescent City without glorifying it has not been lost on Common and music executives such as Matthew Knowles and Paul Rosenberg. In fact, it was Rosenberg, who also manages Eminem, who gave the duo their own Chic Freak imprint on Interscope. After a quick round at the roulette table, Krispy and Rah put in a call to HipHopDX to explain why this gamble won’t share the same fate as that other progressive emcee with the blond streak in his high-top fade. Do you really want to bet against them?
HipHopDX: What’s going on fellas?
Krispy Kream: We’re at Treasure Chest Casino in New Orleans. I just broke them bitches.
DX: Really, was it Keno, the craps table?
KK: Nah, I was playing Roulette and Blackjack, just breaking them hoes.
Rah Almillio: You know, we’re just trying to win this money and shit.
DX: I hope you’re not blowing all that Interscope advance money.
KK: What? Nah, my nigga, that’s gone.
RA: [Laughs] That was $100,000 all on black right there.
KK: Yeah, they got us Omar, but I had to win that back.
DX: Well your bio didn’t mention anything about gambling, but everyone usually mentions your musical chops. Is that something that runs in the family?
KK: No, me and Al are the only ones in our family that play instruments. Even our younger brother doesn’t play any instruments. But, we’ve been doing it since we were like 12. Our mom put us on to that to keep us out of trouble and stuff.
DX: What instruments do each of you play?
RA: Both of us can play anything brass.
KK: Guitar, keys and Al is learning how to play drums real good. He’s talking like he knows how to play real good, but he’s kind of wack on them drums. [Laughs] We were producers when we were real young.
RA: Our uncle was a local producer in the southeast region. Do you like New Orleans Bounce?
DX: Some of it. I’m only familiar with a little bit.
RA: He did a lot of that shit. He did stuff for Big Mike, Geto Boys and shit like that...
DX: Word, what was his name?
RA: Mel Watkins.
KK: Yeah, we learned a lot of stuff from him. He taught us how to use that [Ensoniq] ASR-10. That shit was so hard to work back then that we really didn’t learn until he got the [Akai] MP. Now we mostly do a lot of our sequencing in Reason, ProTools and Cubase.
DX: Now that more is being done digitally, how much do you mix in beat machines like the MP or the E-Mu SP-1200?
KK: The SP still has a sound to it. Let me tell you something about that hardware. MP’s still hit better than anything, as far as the kicks and that low boom. Anything made by Roland is alright. That’s where it’s at. That low 808 is one of the best sounds ever. I’ve messed with all kinds of sub sounds that distort and everything, but that Roland 808…it’s something about it man.
RA: Just like at the beginning of that Devin The Dude, “I need that boom…that boom!”
DX: What else do you draw from?
KK: We’re influenced by everything, man. We grew up playing Jazz music, but we try to take stuff from the best of every music. We went all the way into it. It’s not how you hear other niggas saying, “Yeah, I’m into that Rock shit.” That shit fucks me up when I hear a Hip Hop dude saying that shit. They’ll have a little wallet chain on their waist and I’ll be like, “Wow.”
Remember the dudes [Shop Boyz] who came out with that song “Party Like A Rock Star?” What the fuck are you talking about, Twisted Sister, nigga? This was 2007. That’s an outdated notion of what a Rock star is, and you could tell they couldn’t connect the two genres.
RA: [Laughs] We listen to everything, bruh. You don’t want to even look in our CD players. Everything from B.G. to The Rolling Stones.
DX: You’ve coined the term “Garage Hop.” How does the U.K. Garage scene factor in?
KK: With Garage, everything is done in-house. We try not to go to the studio, because we feel as the Garage artists did—the studio is almost like an institution. You can’t get creative because there’s only so much stuff in there. When you’re in the crib doing it you can use everything from pots and pans to stumps and shoestrings. You can use anything and it’s got that sound as if it was made in somebody’s garage. It’s really like that Wu-Tang shit was.
RA: Yeah, we’ll run breaks through all kind of distortion. We try just as hard to make it sound dirty as motherfukers try to make their stuff sound clean. We try to fuck it up a little bit. Even the guitars, I purposely did that in a sloppy, Garage sort of way so it sounds like we’re just jammin’ out in a garage. Hip Hop is too clean right now.
KK: Exactly. People always say they like Dr. Dre, but they never like none of the real old shit he used to do. That shit had crazy breaks during that time when he was biting Bomb Squad real hard. Nobody ever says that, but I just said it.
DX: So you’re talking about that sound from Niggaz4life?
KK: Yeah, like that shit. We rhyme over some of those beats at our shows, and sometimes we freestyle over “Straight Outta Compton.” Remember when Hip Hop was dirty? Think about RZA. RZA had all the money in the world and he still made that shit sound gritty. He was listening to Trent Reznor and all that Trip Hop stuff that came out of the UK in the mid-'90s, thinking, “Yeah, I can do this.” That’s what Gravediggaz was founded on, even though by the second album they changed. Him and Prince Paul was on some other shit.
RA: If you listen to the album, you’ll see that we’re really trying to push the limits of Hip Hop. I know it sounds cliché when people say, “I’m on some different shit.” But, it’s not different in the sense of music as a whole; it’s different as far as being ballsy. It has a lot of balls, and we did some things that other motherfuckers definitely wouldn’t have the confidence to do. People have conflicts with certain things, or they may not know that genre of music enough to even dabble into it. We’re not like half of the producers who take a piece of a different culture and bring it to another culture which knows nothing about it, so it looks like genius.
KK: You’ve got to realize that Kanye will never be respected by the mainstream critics and stuff.
DX: You don’t think so?
KK: No, because he takes a piece, but he never takes the time to learn that shit. Just Blaze just asked him in a magazine if he ever went to search in the crates and shit. Then Kanye turned around and asked him, “Why the fuck you waste your time looking through records and stuff? I just snatch mine off the CD.” He lost the whole concept of what that man was trying to ask him.
Think about it, dog. A lot of these guys just patronize Hip Hop dudes. No matter how much money we make, and no matter how many chains and Lamborghini’s we got, they still don’t respect us. They respect people like Wyclef Jean because of all the stuff with The Fugees. To me, that was the first Hip Hop album that bent the genres. They wrote songs, and everything wasn’t talking about themselves.
That’s one thing about Hip Hop. Even artists we think are real good always talk about themselves. That’s not a song because you’re just talking about yourself and how fly you are. That’s not a song to me. That’s bullshit, and you might as well stand on the corner and boast. We write songs just how Bob Dylan wrote songs. I want people to respect Hip Hop. Those songs off The Score were songs, and it wasn’t just niggas spittin’. A lot of times Hip Hop dudes just want to sound cool instead of really writing a song. That never touches your soul.
Remember how 2Pac used to touch your soul with one of them real songs? A lot of people would say ‘Pac was a hypocrite. They didn’t understand that the man was a songwriter. He wasn’t always writing about himself, but it was definitely things that he saw. A lot of Hip Hop guys are street and ignorant and they never take the time to educate themselves. They don’t appreciate the art form like KRS-ONE said. They just do it thinking, “Okay, I’m gonna’ rap.” I’m sorry if I sound a little angry, but anytime we get with a journalist, we always try to get as much stuff out as possible.
DX: It’s cool. Ideally we’re supposed to be the outlet to get that to your audience. Earlier you talked about concepts. The three singles you have floating around, “Hard Days Night,” “Cappuccino” and “Amazing” all deal with women in some capacity.
RA: Yeah, everybody’s got relationship problems and stuff. We just talk about women because most guys’ lives are surrounded by that type of shit. We do different concepts because we’re vulnerable type of rappers. It’s not like we’re saying, “I’m a big, big pimp with 3,000 bitches. All of you do my bidding.”
KK: “And, I ain’t gotta pay ‘em.”
RA: That’s just coming from a fantasy perspective, and we don’t come from that perspective. Motherfuckers watch too many Scarface movies. We have real situations. She may have broken your heart and you really feel one way, but you’re laughing on the outside. “Amazing” is about a chick with the wrong type of dude. I don’t wanna say we’re vulnerable, but it’s just real. These are real situations that people go through on an everyday basis.
KK: We’re not trying to make ourselves sound fly on every song. Like right now it’s raining in New Orleans. It rains everyday out here, but that’s just one day. People never touch on that. You could write a song and name it today’s date and just write about whatever happened today. That’s more real than anything you could make up.
That’s what I like about Lupe’s new album. I’m not a big Lupe fan, but you’ve got to give it to the brother. He wrote some songs. Him and Common wrote some songs, and that’s what I respect about them. Lupe’s gonna be around for a while. Even after Kanye phases out, Lupe is still gonna be around. He’ll have longevity because he’s a great songwriter. He’s not a big superstar, but every artist that comes out doesn’t need to be a superstar. You’re not a failure just because you don’t sell six million albums.
DX: That honesty is rare these days. You guys make references to hand jobs and Yasmine Bleeth on “Cappuccino.” I’m not sure people have heard either of those in a while, if ever.
RA: [Laughs] Man, you have no idea. When that album drops, a lot of people’s heads are gonna get fucked up with the subject matter we’re touching on. It’s fuckin’ hilarious, dog. We have serious topics too, but it’s not done in a cheesy ass way. You can always tell when somebody’s album is set up like, “Okay this is my sad song. This one is gonna be my uplifting song, and this is my ballin’ song right here.” For this album the music was based on whatever the fuck we felt like in the morning. If a nigga started with a riff on the guitar or with some 808 drums then we ran with it. We didn’t wake up thinking, “Let’s make this type of song.” Where ever the inspiration led in the morning we followed. That’s why we did it in-house, because everything had to be natural. The album is everywhere but it’s our language.
DX: Sounds a little risky.
KK: It’s everywhere, but it’s centered. It’s like how a spider has legs everywhere, but they all connect back at the center.
DX: Given Interscope’s track record, are you surprised that they let you get away with that?
KK: Nah, ‘cause we got balls. I don’t know if you knew, but before this we had a deal with Matthew Knowles. He was our manager and it was like a big “Unsigned Hype” thing going on. This is how we beat them. All these Hip Hop artists always ask for more money. We didn’t ask for more money, but we did ask for all the control. We said, “Give us our own imprint deal over here, and give us all the control. We don’t want nobody telling us anything, and we’ll turn the songs in when we turn them in.” They said, “Oh, okay. Y’all don’t want more money? Alright, we’ll do that.” A lot of artists don’t get control because they want too much money up front. You’re gonna eventually get the money if you make a good album.
RA: Yeah, if you don’t ask for $10 million up front they won’t be all up in your shit. I know if I gave somebody that type of money I’d be like, “Hey, what’s the first single?” I’d be all up in their shit and make sure that I at least got my money back.
DX: There’s definitely a part of the Hip Hop audience that can relate to that feeling.
KK: I feel like in America, and I don’t know who all is on this level, but I feel like it’s time for a change. That’s why I feel [Barack] Obama. I think he’s gonna’ win the Democratic seat, and then I think he’s gonna win the election and become president. It’s time for change. This is just like the ‘60s again. We’re at war and the music’s gonna change things. All this fake music and drug dealer shit…I don’t even want to get on that shit, bruh.
DX: No, get on it.
KK: I know the journalists can feel it, because we talk to a lot of you guys and keep in touch with a lot of people. When I talk to Noah [Callahan-Bever], he’s like, “Man, y’all feel it? I feel the change. I don’t mean you guys are gonna change the world or change the game. But this change is coming with you. I don’t know if it’s going to come with you or what, but you’re going to be a part of it.” You know what I mean?
DX: Yeah. You can draw a lot of parallels between what happened in the ‘60s and what’s happening now and the change that came out of it.
KK: I think that’s why a lot of this shit doesn’t mean anything to me and Al. We ain’t worried about Benzes and all that type of shit. I’m not saying that just to say it either, because we really don’t. Al is a very enlightened brother. We’ll sit around sometimes and he’ll just bug me out with the stuff he’s on. As black people, we’ve got to be bigger than this stuff. I think Martin Luther King Jr. would probably roll over in his grave right now if he saw how we fell victim to this white man’s wealth.
I’m not racist by any means, but we glorify wealth over our families. We went through [Hurricane] Katrina, and I was just happy that none of my family members died. And I lost everything, brother…everything.
DX: A lot of people probably assume that the experience of Katrina is somehow different because you’re recording artists.
KK: Fuck that. We go through it just like everybody else.
RA: “If you don’t move your feet then we don’t eat/so we like neck to neck” just like André 3000 said. This shit ain’t a free ticket. And this is coming from two cats that have Paul Rosenberg and Interscope. You probably think this shit is off the chain right now…like we have six bitches in a Jacuzzi popping bottles of champagne. Dog, it ain’t even much like that. I don’t even care about that sort of shit. At the end of the day, the impact that we’re going to make is good for me. I’m not talking financially either, because I don’t even give a fuck if we don’t sell that much. If we have respect then I don’t really care about the sales. There’s so many ways to get money in this shit that I don’t really care about selling records. If our movement comes off the way we want it to then I’m good.
KK: Yeah, we’re good because we own our own label anyway. We got a nice chunk, so I ain’t really worried about that.
RA: People come into this trying to be superstars, when you should come in as an artist who just happens to become a superstar. Niggas come in trying to be celebrities.
KK: It’s that Paris Hilton era.
RA: Back in the ‘70s you had real artists that just happened to become celebrities based on their popularity. Now people are coming out of the gate like, “I want to be a celebrity.” Nobody does that. That’s just a bunch of people who don’t respect the craft. Don’t get me wrong, it saved a lot of niggas…
KK: No it didn’t. They always say, “This Hip Hop shit gave a lot of niggas jobs and kept a lot out of jail.” This shit doesn’t! This gives jobs to less than 10% of the niggas who would’ve ended up in jail…not even one percent. We’ve got so many rappers from New Orleans and guess what? Percentage wise, there are more people in prison in Louisiana than anywhere in the world.
RA: [Laughing] I tried to be a little positive with it, but he’s right though.
KK: I don’t even talk about that kind of shit, and me and Al caught a case and everything.
DX: It’s to the point now where prison culture affects all of us on some level. I know you don’t necessarily want to glorify it, but you two almost caught a case in 2003 as well, right?
KK: I was scared. I almost…
RA: That’s them youngsters that think like that, man. When I see these Internet haters, it just makes me think it’s a shame because they’re getting misled by these fake ass rappers on TV. They think I’m the enemy because I want to lead by a positive example and show them there’s something different out there.
DX: Why do you think it’s like that?
KK: In America, if you grow up poor, or in the hood, or whatever, some niggas would rather go to jail than get a job. These niggas will clown someone who goes to work and say, “Ah he’s a working man. I’m just gonna sell this dope.” Cats think it’s cool like, “Yeah I’ll do my time and go lay down for about 30 days.” Meanwhile, Calvin is over here at McDonald’s and you won’t give him his props? I was watching Bill Cosby’s speech [during the 2004 NAACP Awards] on YouTube, and Bill was right. Bill was kicking that knowledge man.
Do you ever notice how in the hood, when a kid tries to learn something some of the other kids try to bash him out and say, “Why are you acting white?” So, now it’s considered white if you want to educate yourself? I’m not trying to go off, but I have so many problems—not just within the Hip Hop community—I’m talking about the black community in general.
DX: Do you personally experience any of that?
KK: I’m from the ghetto. The ghetto, ghetto, this is New Orleans, the worst place to live in America. I’m from the block. Sometimes niggas wanna say, “Oh, there goes that nigga with them tight jeans.” I hear that shit. All you little slick niggas that wanna talk on the Internet. Play with me if you want to. You call me gay on the Internet, but you could never walk in my shoes.
RA: They would rather talk about us, than this fake ass nigga who’s never picked up a piece of crack in his life, but he’s glorifying everything you get from selling dope. They’d rather look at that cat as some type of hero. Half of these niggas talking about selling coke…if we really wanted to talk about coke, we could talk for days.
KK: I could write a fucking biography on that shit. We’re from a good hood.
DX: Is there someone who provided that same type of inspiration to go against the grain for you two?
RA: My moms. She always told us, “You live in the hood, but you don’t have to be of the hood.” My mama is from the projects, and she came up worse than us. She could’ve went down a different path, but she always had an open mind and a free spirit. I don’t know why either. It could’ve been that God just touched her that way. Our outlet was our mom and the music she brought around us. Music changed my life, and it made us want to ask, “What’s this person’s background?” It made us get into different cultures and study the world outside of New Orleans.
KK: We were so trapped, that it got to the point where we thought New York accents were just an act. Everybody in the city was thinking the accent was put on. It wasn’t until later that we found out that that’s really how they talk. But, we were so closed-minded we thought that was an act and that everything was Hollywood. Everything outside of New Orleans didn’t seem real, and what we were living seemed like real life.
This is no cliché. My moms would always say that most of the people we saw out there would be either dead or in jail. There wasn’t too many positive influences. You could count them on one hand. And, not all of them were selling drugs. Some of them just didn’t have any guidance, so they weren’t doing anything. But, that’s worse than selling dope.
DX: What all did she have you listening to during that time?
RA: Mama used to bang Prince all day. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and The Doors, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Commodores. She listened to so many different things. At first she used to just listen to music and clean the house, but then we started learning the songs.
KK: We got into jazz because of her. We used to play in a Jazz band, but we didn’t really like it that much. She used to play George Benson and stuff. It just sparked our interest.
DX: And then you branched out from there?
RA: Krispy is like an encyclopedia on everything. He used to watch The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, Vh1’s Behind the Music and then come back and tell me all about it. So there’s a lot that I learned from him because he got there before me and opened my mind up to all this stuff.
DX: What drew you in to the electronic stuff?
RA: We got into electronic music in a crazy way from selling Ecstasy at raves. This is back when black people didn’t fuck with Ex, like back in ’97. We used to go to raves and sell that shit, and then we actually started to like the music there too. That’s how we got into Electronica, Drum & Bass, Jungle and all these different styles of music. Later on we got into the culture of it, and started skating. The music just opened things up.
DX: How did your friends take to all this?
RA: Everybody we grew up with slowly saw our transformation. It went from, “Whoa they’re trippin’,” to “Damn them niggas really trippin.” Finally they were just like, “Man we lost ‘em.”
KK: [Laughing] “We lost ‘em.” It was like having a drug addict son or something.
DX: So your boys were looking at you like André 3000 back in ’99?
KK: Nah, André was on some other shit with those shoulder pads, bruh.
RA: Yeah, we didn’t come out with the electric blue wigs.
KK: That nigga was just trying to find himself though, so I can feel him.
RA: But I respect that dude though. I really love that dude, what he’s done and what he stands for. At the end of the day, he’s got to be our greatest emcee to bless a microphone. Hands down, nobody can fuck with this dude. He can hop on any subject, and he can write songs. But as far as us, nah, we definitely weren’t rocking spiked shoulder pads and shit.
DX: Then what caused such a reaction?
RA: In New Orleans you can just switch up one little thing and people will start thinking you’re bugging. That’s how small-minded some of the people are there. If you don’t have gold teeth in your mouth it’s like, “Oh, you a uppity nigga.” That’s how small the mentality is.
DX: So do you see that changing at all?
RA: Yeah, and it’s very encouraging. I know the way someone dresses is very small in the scope of things, but it matters a lot in certain parts of society. I went back for Mardi Gras and people from the hood had their skinny jeans on. I’m not talking about DipSet, skinny. I mean retro, Punk skinny like the emo kids wear.
I was like, “Wow. I know we didn’t start this. I mean, we wear Levi’s 511’s all day, but niggas wasn’t looking at us.” I came back and it was inspiring because that’s unheard of in New Orleans. The clothing is just a small part, but it means a lot in terms of the mentality. These young dudes actually had the courage to step outside the box.
That’s why I commend someone like Pharrell. He gave hood niggas a different outlet, and it gave them a chance to see something else outside of the norm. It’s just clothing, but it changed the mentality of certain people. I look on MySpace and see pictures of people that I grew up with, and I don’t even recognize them. They’ll have a red Mohawk and be skating now. I think that’s cool, because at least they’re not out there trying to shoot someone in the face. At least he’s idolizing some skate shit instead of a drug dealer. It’s also funny, and yes I will laugh, and be like, “Damn he’s on some other shit,” but it’s all good.
DX: Would you say the change is a product of the times?
KK: Katrina did that. Katrina forced niggas to move out and see other shit. A lot of people didn’t even come back to New Orleans. A lot of the ones who did come back weren’t even the real ignorant people—it was the ones who really loved the city and wanted to be there. The people who left saw other things and people stopped idolizing the local drug dealers. If you were a local drug dealer, you got knocked off after Katrina.
