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The Source September 93 #48The Source:But RBX,who sets shit off on "High Powered" jumped ship just as Death Row began to move into their new offices. When The Source Matty C received a fax from Disney's Hollywood Basic announcing they'd signed RBX,he called Suge. According to Suge,he'd heard of no such thing.I ask Dre about RBX..."Ehh...that's my boy,me and him are cool...I don't know." he pauses briefly. "He been having those mothafuckas running up in his ear. See it's like this,when RBX came down,that's Snoop's cousin you know..." He decides to end it there,remembering what words can do when exchanged in public. I ask if RBX's deal with Hollywood Basic is official. "Naw,legally he still with me. I'm just gonna wait to see what happens." He decides to continue. "Soon as he blew up,soon as my record came out,you got a gang of mothafuckas talkin' about what they should be doing,where they should be,what they should have. Mothafuckas that didn't give a fuck about 'im before the record came out."But isn't that what N.W.A went trough? "Naw,my shit was real. My business was fucked up. I'm not fucking over my people. Cuz I been on that side so I know what they expect and what they want. You keep the artist happy and there won't be no problems. Snoop is like my little brother yaknowwhatimsayin'? I'm just watching everybody's back. Everybody knows I've been in the industry a long time they know I know what I'm talkin about. So they listen to me. And I love them for that,because they trust my judgement."
In 1992, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic blazed in a new era of Hip-Hop. More than being the catalyst for the G-Funk era, it was the foundation upon which Death Row Records was built. It possessed an intensity, boldness and swagger that seemed to be in direct defiance of the Native Tongue movement taking place out in the East. The spokespeople for this new sound were a stable of hungry artists wanting to claim the spotlight left vacant by N.W.A. A smooth rhyming Calvin Broadus Jr. (Snoop Doggy Dogg at that time) and the booming, unorthodox style of Eric Collins (RBX) were the most talked about of these new artists. Through the rise and eventual fall of Death Row, Snoop and RBX were selected as “Most likely to blow up” by industry insiders. 15 years after their introduction, RBX and Snoop have had careers that have gone in very different directions. Despite both winning awards and being a part of platinum selling projects, RBX has remained underground while Snoop basks in the limelight. With the release of his latest project, Broken Silence, RBX looks to silence critics by demonstrating that he can still drop bombs like Hiroshima.AllHipHop.com: The intro to Broken Silence features a reporter asking you about where you have been since ’94. Do you think that the common perception is that this is your first album since The Chronic?RBX: Well actually he was being sarcastic. I don’t know if it came across like that, but some people may not know me. For those that don’t, they may think that this is my first album, but if they dig into the crates, so to speak, they will find out that it is not. AllHipHop.com: You were introduced to the world via The Chronic, has there been any talk about you appearing on Detox?RBX: Yes there has. I am in the dark about the record just like everyone else. I had a conversation with one of my folks and they said that Dre is not complete on who he is going to have on it; he is still digging through some of the songs he has, but maybe I will make it. I don’t know yet. We are going to have to wait and see. Dre is so picky that one week you might be on there and the next week you are not, so you just have to wait till it comes out to see. AllHipHop.com: You have experienced everything there is to experience in this industry, but what would you say is the most frustrating aspect of being involved in Hip-Hop right now?RBX: A lot of these industry cats don’t know the history of Hip-Hop. No one looks out for the next man. AllHipHop.com: You appear on various projects by the Visionaries and Ld and Ariano’s A Thin line, but how did you guys first connect?RBX: Ariano has a kid by one of my brother’s cousins. Ariano tried to get at my homie Quaz who was working at this studio. We met and ended up always working around each other. Since he was working with the Visionaries, one day I hollered at Key Kool and 2mex and the whole crew, and now it’s all family. Working on this project with the Visionaries was strictly Hip-Hop. Everyone would come in like it was the Terrordome. All the MCs stepped their game up. AllHipHop.com: A year ago at the Visionaries album release party, you came out and kicked a freestyle. What was that like to perform in front of your home crowd surrounded by your family?RBX: Aww man you remember that. That show was crazy. It was really good. I work really hard to get the audience tuned in. To see loved ones from Long Beach show appreciation is a good feeling. It gives me my mojo back and reminds me I have some time left and some things to do. AllHipHop.com: You state on “Echoes of My Mind” that you were disenchanted after the Death Row situation and the passing of Biggie and Pac, but then you were back on. What was it that got you back on to Hip-Hop?RBX: I still had a love for it. I would hear beats, and my mind would start wandering. I would write hooks, so I knew I still had the itch. I was just depressed and frustrated because things didn’t turn out exactly like I thought they would, but I had to just grow up and stop being a big baby, get my mojo back, and start to doing what I am supposed to be doing. AllHipHop.com: Do you think those experiences have made you a stronger artist?RBX: Oh my God, yes! At the time I was going through them, no I did not think that. I thought it’s a rap, I am through with this bullshit. As they say, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” I now actually see what I was doing wrong back then, and I have corrected my errors. I act the way I do now because of the things I have gone through. I no longer drink or party. I ain’t got time for that bullsh*t. This is what I have come to. AllHipHop.com: Snoop produces “Overdue”. What is your impression of Snoop as a producer? RBX: He is my cousin and is serious about everything he does. At first I didn’t know he was serious about production, but he sent me this track, and it was all good. AllHipHop.com: How did it come about that he would produce a track for this album but not rhyme on it?RBX: He could have rhymed on it but at the pace we were working at, he wasn’t free at the time because Snoop’s plate is full as hell. I didn’t consider it because I know his schedule, but it’s not a big deal. AllHipHop.com: What is your opinion of the state of West Coast Hip-Hop?RBX: 9-1-1. AllHipHop.com: Why do you say that?RBX: You have all of the hoods in Long Beach and you have all of the hoods in Compton, Inglewood, Watts, all of those cities, and everybody is hating on everybody. There is so much hatred that nobody can grow. If we don’t have the West accepting the West, how do we expect others to accept that the West is hard when we are disrespecting our own people? We close the door on local cats, but if someone comes from Atlanta then the door is wide open, and we can’t understand that. The difference between cats in Oakland and out here is out there they are all together. Out there they may not like each other, but they are professional and will work together to get money and after they are done in the studio they can tell each other to get the f*ck on. Out here, they just want to cut and shoot and act like they are super-duper hard. No one is trying to be professional; everyone is trying to be a thug and a gangster. The industry mutherf*ckers get mad because they are intimidated because they didn’t grow up in that sh*t. I am talking about these rich kids whose fathers own billion dollar companies. They ain’t trying to get no AK shot through their Maybach These labels water down their material by going out to the Midwest to get all their artists rather than working with artists from the West Coast. AllHipHop.com: What can we expect from the upcoming Concrete Criminals project with Ren and will producer LD be involved in the production?RBX: In a week or two that sh*t is going to be done. I am about to make fireworks pop. I am going to slow my pace because the response I am getting from Broken Silence is overwhelming. I don’t think LD will be involved. Anything that I control, LD will be a part of, but when I am not in control, I don’t want to squeeze him into a situation that he wouldn’t be comfortable with. This is going to be a bang-out, bang bang album. This album will show that I have every piece of skill that I ever had. I am still rough and grimy. We are going to say some old N.W.A type sh*t on this album that will make people go, “What the F*ck?!” Stay Tuned.
MC Ren Returns With RBX As Concrete Criminalshttp://www.dubcnn.com/connect/index.php?topic=158889.0
Known most for his gravelly voiced appearances on classics such as The Chronic and The Mashall Mathers LP, RBX has been moving, and in some cases frightening, crowds for over fifteen years. A Grammy award winning artist, RBX recently released a full length album titled Broken Silence and plans on following it up in 2008 with Unanimous. Even with all that solo work listeners can still expect to hear him continuing to guest on other people's work, as well. He notes "I need to holler at Em. You need to shoot that shout out. That's my dog." This week the man who describes himself as "a dormant volcano" sat down with RapReviews to discuss his storied career, how his work now differs from his work in the past, and why he's happy rappers have taken a step back from the idea of "keeping it real." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Adam Bernard: Before we even get started with the real questions I heard you just had some work done to your car.RBX: Actually I got a new radiator put in because I saw coolant leaking and I don't like coolant leaking out the car, that's not a good thing, so I have them doing some work on it. It's a big ass BMW and it can't leak. If it starts leaking that means it's gonna lead to a bigger leak and I might be out somewhere one day and that shit bust on me. It's pretty much a maintenance issue.AB: So this isn't a Pimp My Ride situation.RBX: Aw naw, it's a nice BM but no it's not getting flashed out, it's pretty much a maintenance thing and that's it. You pull up, you're leaking coolant, that's not cool. Girls lookin at you like damn, his car's leaking fluids and shit. Yeah, that's not a good look. If you can rectify it you might wanna just go ahead and get that cleaned AB: Yeah, I don't think the ladies are going to wait around after the show while you get your car fixed.RBX: You dig! That's exactly what I'm saying. "Hold on baby, let me see if I can get a jump start."AB: Moving to the subject of your music. Broken Silence is the new album. Tell me a little bit about what silence you're breaking.RBX: The silence of me not really actually having a record that I control and that I was the driving force behind without censorship from major labels or VPs who don't want you doing this, don't want you doing that, can't say this, can't say that. This is me saying what the fuck I want to say.AB: What's the average person going to learn about you from this album that they don't know already?RBX: That I'm nice. Everybody thinks I'm just a voice. (growls) But he ain't rapping, he ain't got nothing to say. That's kind of how I was in some situations when I was with some of my other cats. (growls) and then I'm gone. Motherfuckers be like "what was that?" You didn't get to really hear me rhyme, you'd just get to hear me do a little somethin something. They basically heard the voice, but now they're hearing me rap.AB: Are you saying that your being viewed as "just a voice" was almost justified back in the day?RBX: Yeah, cuz back in the day everybody had their part to play. Dre with the beat, Snoop was the young MC who got all the girls, Daz with the bang bang, Warren G had his role; Dre knew what the fuck he was doing, he incorporated all of this and I was the monster. RAWR! I was that. Listen to The Chronic and you'll see what I'm talking about.AB: How did the folks you had worked with in the past react to this really lyrical side of who you are?RBX: You know what, honestly, I have not heard one bad thing. I figured there were going to be some haters and some naysayers, but not one. My niggas was like, "we ain't surprised. We know you. We were just waiting for you to shit." I'm thinking I'm gonna get some "YEA RBX," but I've been getting "you did what we thought you was going to do." I don't get no pat on the back or nuttin. I kind of wanted to hear "you have room for improvement," but nah, "that's hot," that's all I get.AB: Taking that situation you went through, should we be looking at some of the younger MCs of today and thinking more of what they might be ten years down the line, in effect saying let's give them a few years?RBX: It's not a lesson. I ain't no rap guru godfather. If they're really into it there is an automatic progression that takes place. A lot of MCs out there can do their thing but there's not one that can knock me out the box. Right now there are some MCs out there that are hot, they're nice, but they can get knocked out. I'm one of those you can't knock out. As soon as I hear what it is I'ma fire a missile back. I can't be beat and I'm confident with that.AB: You've worked with a lot of legendary artists. With Broken Silence you have your own voice. What makes you better now than you were back in your Chronic days?RBX: I didn't know nothing then. Now I can see things a little better and clearer. Clarity is the key. Sometimes you try to help folks and I don't know what's wrong with society today, but if I had gone about all this Hollywood and gotten all the known bigwigs to do the record the first thing cats would have been saying is "oh he don't come down and work with the underground cats." When I go try to work with the underground cats the first thing they try to do is take me out to box like on some battle shit. I'm thinking in my head "what an idiot. I'm down here trying to help you, we've put this together and that's just an attempt to divide right there." There are big conflicts that I have but I get past them because I'm from the street and nobody can say nothing because I rap good and I'll smash they ass. So basically me going down into the pits was just a way to rejuvenate my whole thing and keep everything sharp and preciseAB: Over the past fifteen years what have been some of your favorite memories from all your performances and studio sessions?RBX: There was one time, I think it was Rock the Bells, I was just going on stage to watch KRS-One get down. I was NOT in performance mode, I was NOT supposed to get down, I was just up there to support my brother and somehow... Kris didn't even know I was out there, he was just doing his thing, but he did a move where he spun around and saw me. He said "what!?! Is this RBX on the stage!?!" And it was a wrap. I think there was Nas, Talib Kweli, Freestyle Fellowship and we just shit! We just shit on 16,000 motherfuckers and Kris was like "Fuck that! Turn the music off! A capella!" I jumped up on a speaker and just shit. I remember that, that was fun. I just really love what I do. AB: What do you feel has been your greatest accomplishment?RBX: Aw man, just being alive. You don't even realize that is a job. Everything, all that extra shit, it's nothing. Houses and all that shit come and go and people stressing and worrying themselves behind some material ass shit when they can just live, that's enough. Everything else can come and go, don't trip. Everyone wants the finer things but if you had a nice ass house and a BMW and all that shit but you didn't have no oxygen...AB: Good point. Finally, what do you like about what's going on in Hip-Hop today?RBX: You know what, actually, I like the fact that niggas is getting back to headbanging. It was never meant to be a physical altercation, or go get your gun and kill a nigga. You can talk about it, but c'mon now, when all that bullshit is blurted out, "we gonna keep it super real," that's when they start killing. On "Fly MC" Special Ed was talking about he was flying on his jet and kicked the bitch through the cargo hatch. Everybody knows he wasn't in a jet kicking the Queen of France through a fucking hatch, but they didn't send nobody out to fuck with Special Ed about that. It was hot, but then you couldn't do shit like that, people were like that shit ain't real and everybody's talking really really real like I'm going to come to your studio with my AK and kill you. No! Slow down, buddy. That's kind of where the problem came in. Right now rap is realizing I'ma get at you, but I ain't really trying to come and kill you and your family, homey, I'ma try and bust your head open with these verbs and that's what it was meant to be. At the end of the day I'll see you, we can smoke a blunt and have a burger together, dawg, but when I'm doing my thing in the studio I'm a monster and I'ma try to slice your whole jugular out, but it's words. There's a difference between some rap shit and some not rap shit.AB: I've noticed quite a few rappers who never had rap sheet, or who only had small ones, have been getting into a lot of trouble for starting to believe their own rhymes.RBX: Idiots. And that's what happens. I ain't gotta prove shit. Matter of fact I'm trying to live some shit down. I'm soft skinned. I ain't trying to act hard. Everybody else trying to act hard, in all honesty it's on some reverse osmosis and that's what you gotta remember. Cats that be acting like they all hard be the softest motherfuckers in the whole building. It was always the case in the streets that the cats who don't say one motherfuckin word be the most vicious motherfucker in the whole spot. All that rah rah, that's all for hype and record sales. That's bullshithttp://www.rapreviews.com/
Quote from: LOUDsilence on December 02, 2007, 09:25:43 PMhttp://www.hiphopdx.com/index/features/id.953RBX will be remembered for his lyrics alongside his manhood in Hip Hop history. A cousin of Snoop Dogg, X was the first - and one of the only artists to ever leave Death Row Records. He did so after working on The Chronic and Doggystyle and found underground success on several independent labels with pet releases before returning beside Dr. Dre at Aftermath Records in the late '90s.Though he's always been underground and always taken lengthy hiatuses, few expected RBX to reappear working alongside DJ Rhettmatic and LMNO as well as other veteran artists of the nouveau Los Angeles underground Hip Hop community. With an album Broken Silence commemorating the new side of The Narrator, RBX breaks the silence with HipHopDX about the past and future.HipHopDX: My favorite song on your album Broken Silence, beside the fact that it’s produced by Snoop, is “Overdue.” What inspired it?RBX: As an artist, I came into this Rap thing as just a kid with a dream. I never was trying to be a star. I just wanted to do what I do, and it blew up. Everything is large now. My whole world has changed. I was in the Death Row situation. Everybody thinks, “Okay, it’s beautiful and lovely, the success. You’re gonna get the nice car and the nice house.” Yeah, I have the nice car and I had the big house, but imagine the mafia being after you, ya dig? It was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Then I went underground.“Overdue” is to let all my cats out there that’s doing things or just doing their music, and for whatever reason they didn’t blow up…“Overdue” is all my perseverance over the negative. It’s to stand up on my own two. In this rap industry. It’s not written, but this rap industry is like sororities, ya dig? I wouldn’t say fraternities, ‘cause that would be men. These people don’t act like men. They come off so hard with their personas, but on the interior, they act like women and girls. I’m not a part of any fraternity or sorority. I’m just one on an island. “Overdue” is my testimonial that if you stick to what you firmly believe in, and stay true to yourself, you can do it. I should have said this a while ago, but I was unable to ‘cause Suge [Knight] wouldn’t let me, and then there were other individuals that was blockin’, and now it’s overdue.DX: You waited for turn, in ’92 with Death Row and again in ’96 with Aftermath. When you see all these artists in bigger artists’ entourages today, waiting for their turn, would you discourage them?RBX: It worries me for them. They have probably been sprinkled with pixie dust and cinnamon spice, and that’s just not what it is. I think if somebody would have told me when I first started The Chronic what I would have gone through, I probably would not have gone down that road. But I’m so far down the road now, it’s too late to turn back. I feel sorry for them.DX: This album really impressed me because you’re working with people like LMNO and DJ Rhettmatic – underground veterans. When you were placed in this ideal situation in ’91, ’92, albeit pixie dust, what kind of awareness did you have of the Los Angeles underground?RBX: That’s all I know. I didn’t have any idea of the mainstream. That’s what threw me for a loop. I came up with The Good Life Café. That is Medusa, Myka 9, Aceyalone, Ganja K, P.E.A.C.E. All of those cats I just mentioned, any emcee that’s rapping today, they would split them. These are my peers at the time. That’s I knew was underground. So for me to work [LMNO], it’s only a throwback to where I started – my roots.DX: You’re four or five albums deep. Why now are we seeing this?RBX: I just think I’ve grown as a person and evolving as an artist. I grew up in the streets. I’m not a gang-banger. A gangster, maybe. Thuggish, yeah. But a gang-banger is something I’m not, and I’m not gonna put that face on like I’m out there smackin’ fools upside they head for havin’ on the wrong color. I’m not gonna perpetrate that fraud. That’s not me. But if you’re gonna run up on me and disrespect me in any kind of way, that’s when you’ve lost. That’s the hard edge of it. The main thing is, I wanted to come with a whole new sound and a whole new dynamic, if you will. These guys helped get me back in the studio and helped me get my mojo back. To help my out, I said I’m gonna have [these guys] on my record to give them a boost.DX: These guys have carved their niches, which might differ from yours, outside of L.A. or The Good Life. Have you already felt new ears hearing your music as a result of this?RBX: Yes. I am. I was at The Magic Show. This cat was a booth selling leather coats for a company called Iron Lions. I gave him a CD, just doing my thing. The brother called me back a week later, saying, “Brother, I had no idea. I knew you had a powerful voice, but I had no idea you had lyrics.” I was boxed in as a monster who comes in to clean up everything after everybody on the track. I’m the finisher. That’s still my role, but we have to go past that.DX: Speaking of lyrics, you say, “I’m cousin of a Steeler, brother of a Raider.” Cool line on the surface, what’s it mean?RBX: In Long Beach, there’s two gangs. There’s the Rolling 20 Crips, which wear Pittsburgh Steelers [merchandise] and there’s the Insane Crips, which wear Raiders [merchandise]. My brother is from Rolling 20s, but all my cousins are from the rival gang [The Insane Crips]. It’s a contradiction for me. I’m staying down with my brother ‘cause I am my brother’s keeper, but it puts me at odds with my cousins. It’s a daily struggle. I don’t get shot at. I don’t get tripped on, ‘cause I’m well-respected in my neighborhood, but there’s a tension there. These are rival gangs. That’s what I mean.DX: What you just told me is something I didn’t know. But on top of it, those NFL teams are both homonyms. Steelers steal and Raiders raid, as in street action. Even Cam’ron, on his first album said, “I know a bunch of stealers, and they not from Pittsburgh.”RBX: Yeah! It’s a way crazy twist. Sometimes I do things and God be in control. We think we in control, but God is still in control. Sometimes I do things, sit back and listen and say, “Wow. Whoa!” It’s one of things. A Steeler and a Raider are the same thing.DX: Looking at a record like “Sunshine” or “Mama’s Crying,” your music has always been tinged with West Indian influence. Where does that come from?RBX: I have bunch of cousins, and my sister as well, who have married cats from The West Indies. My nephew’s pops is from the Bahamas; I’m always around him. Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, this is my family. They all have accents. They got a lot of respect for me and vice-versa. It’s just been a natural progression, because that’s what I listen to. One of my aces back in the days, Bigga B, rest in peace – he was responsible for starting Loud Records and signing Xzibit and The Alkaholiks – that’s all he played: Dancehall, Ragamuffin, Roots. That’s become part of me. I’m not fakin’ nothin’.DX: I remember buying No Mercy, No Remorse back in 1999 or 2000. It was two EPs. What was the thinking behind that?RBX: I don’t even really remember. At that time, to be quite honest with you, I was in jail. One of my partners called me and said, “Listen man, you’ve got a bunch of music out here. You don’t need to sit.” I was being stubborn in jail too. I was fighting. Sometimes I just need to calm down. I be fighting too damn much, whether fisticuffs or demons. The guy said, “I’ll pay your fines off, we’ll get you out of there and get you to your classes.” I fought that for two weeks and then I said, “Go ‘head man, make it happen. I’m tired of eating sandwiches and cookies.” He made something happen; that was something he did. After that record came out, I went into real deep hiatus, just tryin’ to get it together. Then I started slowly emerging out of the darkness, and becoming myself again. It was a depressing time. I didn’t wanna keep bumping heads with Suge. I’m just one man. I don’t have the resources or the money to keep fighting these people, but for some strange reason, I just keep fighting.DX: You were one of the first artists Dr. Dre signed to Aftermath. How do you think the label would have been different had he released you or King Tee before Eminem? How close was it?RBX: It was a curse and it was a blessing. I don’t know why I get in situations like that. It was good ‘cause Dr. Dre was my partner, and I never had a problem with Dre at Death Row. As a matter of fact, Suge used to come in trippin’, and I used to look at Dre and he’d look at me like, “Here this motherfucker go.” When we got to Aftermath, I knew it was good ‘cause there was no more of that B.S. But new stress came in ‘cause now Dre had to prove himself and reinvent himself as Dr. Dre the entity [outside of] Death Row. He didn’t want to go down the same road he just came down; that’s why he came out with “Been There, Done That.”I got into the twist ‘cause I was still getting up to do the music we did at Death Row. That’s where my mindstate was. Dre didn’t really want that. He wanted to step away for a minute, if not forever. At the time, I wasn’t able to go anywhere else but bang bang. I’m just telling you the truth. That’s when me and Dre became at odds. I was still going out in Compton or wherever, and I would see Suge. And we would bang. I was in the paint with him. We used to bang, bang. I didn’t know it at the time, but every time I’d get into it with Suge, he would make trouble for Dre. He couldn’t get at me, so he’d go and mess with Dre. He’d be calling Dre, or just making things miserable. Dre wasn’t telling me this. I needed to go calm down on deep hiatus and get my things together and stop fighting so much.DX: You’re famous for spitting the same verse twice on two different songs. A.G. has been called out on this two. What’s your reasoning behind it?RBX: A lot of people do weird shit on their records that you don’t know about. A lot of guys have “666” in a design that you can’t tell. One of my weird things is…if the verse is hot, I wanna rewind it selektah and bring it back! [in Jamaican accent]. It’s a remixed, re-edited version. On this album…I’m gonna be quite honest with you, the same lyrics are just an oversight. We just said, “Fuck it.” We gotta give the critics something to talk about. We’re just feeding the haters. I’m gonna do it again just to let you know that you ain’t said shit.DX: I feel like “Stranded on Death Row” was the west coast answer to Marley Marl’s “The Symphony.” Tell me about that record, and was it really a battle of scrapping it out for top spot on Death Row?RBX: To be quite honest with you, at that time, it was the terror dome. We was all pitbulls. [The Lady of Rage], I’m not gonna call her no bitch, but she was the lady pitbull. She would’ve chopped your ass the fuck up! She was so tight. You had to have a certain level of skill to even get Rage took at you. The first time she met me, she was looking at me like, “Dre done signed you? Can you spit?” I was looking like a dweeb, man. I was broke, I had just got off work, my glasses was broken with tape on them. When she heard me get down, all that respect came. Then she talked to me. Before then, I couldn’t even get Rage to say hi to me. It was the terror dome. You had to be writing, or cats was on your head instantly.DX: Do you perform much?RBX: Man, I would love to. When I fell out of the loop, I feel out of the loop with everything. I really don’t know no promoters. I don’t know too many cats. I’m hard to get to meet now – not that I’m scarred or wounded. Just most times, people are on that bullshit or got a certain angle they workin’. I don’t really be talkin’ to people. to answer your question, yes, I would love to.To learn more visit: Myspace.com/RBXBrokenSilenceProp LOUDsilence for the interview^^^^^^^
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/features/id.953RBX will be remembered for his lyrics alongside his manhood in Hip Hop history. A cousin of Snoop Dogg, X was the first - and one of the only artists to ever leave Death Row Records. He did so after working on The Chronic and Doggystyle and found underground success on several independent labels with pet releases before returning beside Dr. Dre at Aftermath Records in the late '90s.Though he's always been underground and always taken lengthy hiatuses, few expected RBX to reappear working alongside DJ Rhettmatic and LMNO as well as other veteran artists of the nouveau Los Angeles underground Hip Hop community. With an album Broken Silence commemorating the new side of The Narrator, RBX breaks the silence with HipHopDX about the past and future.HipHopDX: My favorite song on your album Broken Silence, beside the fact that it’s produced by Snoop, is “Overdue.” What inspired it?RBX: As an artist, I came into this Rap thing as just a kid with a dream. I never was trying to be a star. I just wanted to do what I do, and it blew up. Everything is large now. My whole world has changed. I was in the Death Row situation. Everybody thinks, “Okay, it’s beautiful and lovely, the success. You’re gonna get the nice car and the nice house.” Yeah, I have the nice car and I had the big house, but imagine the mafia being after you, ya dig? It was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Then I went underground.“Overdue” is to let all my cats out there that’s doing things or just doing their music, and for whatever reason they didn’t blow up…“Overdue” is all my perseverance over the negative. It’s to stand up on my own two. In this rap industry. It’s not written, but this rap industry is like sororities, ya dig? I wouldn’t say fraternities, ‘cause that would be men. These people don’t act like men. They come off so hard with their personas, but on the interior, they act like women and girls. I’m not a part of any fraternity or sorority. I’m just one on an island. “Overdue” is my testimonial that if you stick to what you firmly believe in, and stay true to yourself, you can do it. I should have said this a while ago, but I was unable to ‘cause Suge [Knight] wouldn’t let me, and then there were other individuals that was blockin’, and now it’s overdue.DX: You waited for turn, in ’92 with Death Row and again in ’96 with Aftermath. When you see all these artists in bigger artists’ entourages today, waiting for their turn, would you discourage them?RBX: It worries me for them. They have probably been sprinkled with pixie dust and cinnamon spice, and that’s just not what it is. I think if somebody would have told me when I first started The Chronic what I would have gone through, I probably would not have gone down that road. But I’m so far down the road now, it’s too late to turn back. I feel sorry for them.DX: This album really impressed me because you’re working with people like LMNO and DJ Rhettmatic – underground veterans. When you were placed in this ideal situation in ’91, ’92, albeit pixie dust, what kind of awareness did you have of the Los Angeles underground?RBX: That’s all I know. I didn’t have any idea of the mainstream. That’s what threw me for a loop. I came up with The Good Life Café. That is Medusa, Myka 9, Aceyalone, Ganja K, P.E.A.C.E. All of those cats I just mentioned, any emcee that’s rapping today, they would split them. These are my peers at the time. That’s I knew was underground. So for me to work [LMNO], it’s only a throwback to where I started – my roots.DX: You’re four or five albums deep. Why now are we seeing this?RBX: I just think I’ve grown as a person and evolving as an artist. I grew up in the streets. I’m not a gang-banger. A gangster, maybe. Thuggish, yeah. But a gang-banger is something I’m not, and I’m not gonna put that face on like I’m out there smackin’ fools upside they head for havin’ on the wrong color. I’m not gonna perpetrate that fraud. That’s not me. But if you’re gonna run up on me and disrespect me in any kind of way, that’s when you’ve lost. That’s the hard edge of it. The main thing is, I wanted to come with a whole new sound and a whole new dynamic, if you will. These guys helped get me back in the studio and helped me get my mojo back. To help my out, I said I’m gonna have [these guys] on my record to give them a boost.DX: These guys have carved their niches, which might differ from yours, outside of L.A. or The Good Life. Have you already felt new ears hearing your music as a result of this?RBX: Yes. I am. I was at The Magic Show. This cat was a booth selling leather coats for a company called Iron Lions. I gave him a CD, just doing my thing. The brother called me back a week later, saying, “Brother, I had no idea. I knew you had a powerful voice, but I had no idea you had lyrics.” I was boxed in as a monster who comes in to clean up everything after everybody on the track. I’m the finisher. That’s still my role, but we have to go past that.DX: Speaking of lyrics, you say, “I’m cousin of a Steeler, brother of a Raider.” Cool line on the surface, what’s it mean?RBX: In Long Beach, there’s two gangs. There’s the Rolling 20 Crips, which wear Pittsburgh Steelers [merchandise] and there’s the Insane Crips, which wear Raiders [merchandise]. My brother is from Rolling 20s, but all my cousins are from the rival gang [The Insane Crips]. It’s a contradiction for me. I’m staying down with my brother ‘cause I am my brother’s keeper, but it puts me at odds with my cousins. It’s a daily struggle. I don’t get shot at. I don’t get tripped on, ‘cause I’m well-respected in my neighborhood, but there’s a tension there. These are rival gangs. That’s what I mean.DX: What you just told me is something I didn’t know. But on top of it, those NFL teams are both homonyms. Steelers steal and Raiders raid, as in street action. Even Cam’ron, on his first album said, “I know a bunch of stealers, and they not from Pittsburgh.”RBX: Yeah! It’s a way crazy twist. Sometimes I do things and God be in control. We think we in control, but God is still in control. Sometimes I do things, sit back and listen and say, “Wow. Whoa!” It’s one of things. A Steeler and a Raider are the same thing.DX: Looking at a record like “Sunshine” or “Mama’s Crying,” your music has always been tinged with West Indian influence. Where does that come from?RBX: I have bunch of cousins, and my sister as well, who have married cats from The West Indies. My nephew’s pops is from the Bahamas; I’m always around him. Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, this is my family. They all have accents. They got a lot of respect for me and vice-versa. It’s just been a natural progression, because that’s what I listen to. One of my aces back in the days, Bigga B, rest in peace – he was responsible for starting Loud Records and signing Xzibit and The Alkaholiks – that’s all he played: Dancehall, Ragamuffin, Roots. That’s become part of me. I’m not fakin’ nothin’.DX: I remember buying No Mercy, No Remorse back in 1999 or 2000. It was two EPs. What was the thinking behind that?RBX: I don’t even really remember. At that time, to be quite honest with you, I was in jail. One of my partners called me and said, “Listen man, you’ve got a bunch of music out here. You don’t need to sit.” I was being stubborn in jail too. I was fighting. Sometimes I just need to calm down. I be fighting too damn much, whether fisticuffs or demons. The guy said, “I’ll pay your fines off, we’ll get you out of there and get you to your classes.” I fought that for two weeks and then I said, “Go ‘head man, make it happen. I’m tired of eating sandwiches and cookies.” He made something happen; that was something he did. After that record came out, I went into real deep hiatus, just tryin’ to get it together. Then I started slowly emerging out of the darkness, and becoming myself again. It was a depressing time. I didn’t wanna keep bumping heads with Suge. I’m just one man. I don’t have the resources or the money to keep fighting these people, but for some strange reason, I just keep fighting.DX: You were one of the first artists Dr. Dre signed to Aftermath. How do you think the label would have been different had he released you or King Tee before Eminem? How close was it?RBX: It was a curse and it was a blessing. I don’t know why I get in situations like that. It was good ‘cause Dr. Dre was my partner, and I never had a problem with Dre at Death Row. As a matter of fact, Suge used to come in trippin’, and I used to look at Dre and he’d look at me like, “Here this motherfucker go.” When we got to Aftermath, I knew it was good ‘cause there was no more of that B.S. But new stress came in ‘cause now Dre had to prove himself and reinvent himself as Dr. Dre the entity [outside of] Death Row. He didn’t want to go down the same road he just came down; that’s why he came out with “Been There, Done That.”I got into the twist ‘cause I was still getting up to do the music we did at Death Row. That’s where my mindstate was. Dre didn’t really want that. He wanted to step away for a minute, if not forever. At the time, I wasn’t able to go anywhere else but bang bang. I’m just telling you the truth. That’s when me and Dre became at odds. I was still going out in Compton or wherever, and I would see Suge. And we would bang. I was in the paint with him. We used to bang, bang. I didn’t know it at the time, but every time I’d get into it with Suge, he would make trouble for Dre. He couldn’t get at me, so he’d go and mess with Dre. He’d be calling Dre, or just making things miserable. Dre wasn’t telling me this. I needed to go calm down on deep hiatus and get my things together and stop fighting so much.DX: You’re famous for spitting the same verse twice on two different songs. A.G. has been called out on this two. What’s your reasoning behind it?RBX: A lot of people do weird shit on their records that you don’t know about. A lot of guys have “666” in a design that you can’t tell. One of my weird things is…if the verse is hot, I wanna rewind it selektah and bring it back! [in Jamaican accent]. It’s a remixed, re-edited version. On this album…I’m gonna be quite honest with you, the same lyrics are just an oversight. We just said, “Fuck it.” We gotta give the critics something to talk about. We’re just feeding the haters. I’m gonna do it again just to let you know that you ain’t said shit.DX: I feel like “Stranded on Death Row” was the west coast answer to Marley Marl’s “The Symphony.” Tell me about that record, and was it really a battle of scrapping it out for top spot on Death Row?RBX: To be quite honest with you, at that time, it was the terror dome. We was all pitbulls. [The Lady of Rage], I’m not gonna call her no bitch, but she was the lady pitbull. She would’ve chopped your ass the fuck up! She was so tight. You had to have a certain level of skill to even get Rage took at you. The first time she met me, she was looking at me like, “Dre done signed you? Can you spit?” I was looking like a dweeb, man. I was broke, I had just got off work, my glasses was broken with tape on them. When she heard me get down, all that respect came. Then she talked to me. Before then, I couldn’t even get Rage to say hi to me. It was the terror dome. You had to be writing, or cats was on your head instantly.DX: Do you perform much?RBX: Man, I would love to. When I fell out of the loop, I feel out of the loop with everything. I really don’t know no promoters. I don’t know too many cats. I’m hard to get to meet now – not that I’m scarred or wounded. Just most times, people are on that bullshit or got a certain angle they workin’. I don’t really be talkin’ to people. to answer your question, yes, I would love to.To learn more visit: Myspace.com/RBXBrokenSilence
http://www.ballerstatus.com/article/features/2008/06/4839/Go check that interview out....
I wish Ruthless or whoever owns the footage and recordings drop a mega DVD collection of everything NWA<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/oZ9ozr3DGxQ&rel" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/oZ9ozr3DGxQ&rel</a>http://youtube.com/watch?v=oZ9ozr3DGxQ
Dr. Dre in the Studio22 used & new available from $7.25http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Dre-Studio-Aftermath-Notorious/dp/0976773554/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214912624&sr=1-5Detox,2006 and beyond...
CPO July 2008 interview ^^^Direct Video link^^^
CPO interview Slammin Video Mag Vol.2 1990<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/O2aHcxjCLVE&rel" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/O2aHcxjCLVE&rel</a>Download link;http://www.mediafire.com/?8wy9tgz1ndt
CPO interview in Hip Hop Connection October 1990. #21 LL Cool J cover.Tales from the dark sideAT SIX FOOT TWO INCES AND 25 STONE,Rapper Lil’ Nation is appropriately named.“Almost as large as many small countries,” he’s as intimidating as his rhymes, as big as CPO’s beats.Another native of the city of Compton, Lil’ Nation gave up a six year life of crime at the age of 18,and – like his long time friend MC Ren – decided to go into music. CPO’s debut on Capitol, ‘To Hell And Black’, is another braze embodiment of West Coast gangster lifestyle,and with tracks titled ‘Homicide’, ‘Gangsta Melody’, and ‘Ballad of a Menace’,you’re left in no doubts of the content before the needle’s hit the deck.Produced by Ren, it’s a grinding, 10-track soundtrack to street violence– nothing new, but another chapter in the annals of realism rap that contrasts so starkly with East Coast consciousness.How did the name CPO – Capitol Punishment Organization – come about? “We where sitting around talking about how we where not down with oppression, not down white supremacy,” he explains.“Oppression was the main thing – the biggest wrong that we could think of,we needed the biggest pain we could think of – capitol punishment of that wrong.So the Capitol Punishment Organization was born.” Lil’ Nation kept telling Ren he could Rap, but the NWA emcee refused to believe him.Until one day, Ren accidently heard one of Lil’ Nation’s tracks – “Ren started producing me that day!” he exclaims. On the whole, ‘To Hell And Black’ is a measured but funky affair, with only a couple of tracks matching the aggression of the lyrics.To the churning backbeats, Lil’ Nation fires his incendiary raps in uncompromising terms.“I consider it fun to smoke a nigger with a gun” and “With no hesitation I put a gun to your head and blast it” (’Gangsta Melody’) That song in particular is a musical incarnation of life here in Compton,” he says.“You won’t have a problem shooting me, I won’t have a problem shooting you – it’s that simple.Compton is not nice place to live, it’s not even a nice place to visit at some times.I think that people are starting to believe that Compton is a tourist spot!But every night somebody gets killed. It’s a real hard life.” Lil’ Nation acknowledges that CPO’s graphic portrayal of street life is at odds with the positivity of likes of KRS-One, but says;“People from the East Coast – like KRS-One – are speaking knowledge, speaking politics, which are things we don’t know, but things should know. What we’re doing on this side is speaking about what we do know, which is living in a violent environment.There are conflicts, but there’s truth in what we do.” The track ‘CPOsis’ is, he explains, “the musical incarnation of CPO”, relating an implacable theory about dealing with white supremacy.“If the Aryan Nation comes up against CPO, they’ll be coming up dead,” he says.“I think we’re starting to confront white supremacy on a head to head basis.The only way we’re going to get rid of oppression in any shape, form or fashion is to deal with it– abolish it – by some type of confrontation, a violent confrontation.Hopefully, it won’t have to be a physical confrontation, and hopefully we can just do it with words.” But do you really believe your lyrics are a good way towards verbal reconciliation?“I think so. To me, you got to get people to listen.Once you can talk to them about whatever you want to talk to them about.I think this is the first step towards some kind of movement.” So are you saying your records are positive?“I think something controversial is going to come out of my records, I don’t think anything positive will happen.I’m trying to stir the public up to the point where they have to confront me, and ask what’s going on, so I can let them know.” Violence and revolution aren’t curious bedfellows, but Lil’ Nation must be an eternal optimist to believe the established order will view his efforts as progressive. He’ll get the attention, sure, but as for anything else…? Would he like to remain part of the growing Ruthless family?“Oh definitely! Capitol are just distributing it, but it’s out on Ren Records.I like where Ruthless started out, I like how it started out, and where it’s going.” As well as his right hand man, DJ Train, Lil’ Nation also worked with the group FOE on ‘To Hell And Black’.Look out for their own release soon, again on Ren Records.
CPO; To Hell and Black review Hip Hop Connection October 1990,issue 21. LL Cool J cover
Rare stuff from CPO’s debut you should check out:-Ballad Of A Menace (Homicidal Theme Remix) Super dope!Produced by MC Ren, Co-Produced by Young Deehttp://www.zshare.net/audio/28818341f9568b/-This beat is funky (Mo better Funky Remix) also super dope!http://www.zshare.net/audio/28818255c30db6/Produced by MC Ren-The Movement (Remix)http://www.zshare.net/audio/2881816b498f16/Produced by MC RenThese songs appears on promo singles from the album.BONUS;EA-Ski featuring MC Ren and CPO; The Format From EA-Ski´s Past and Presenthttp://www.mediafire.com/?1x0cd2gnly2Gangsta Funk (ft. E-40, B-Legit, CPO Boss Hogg & Mike Marshall) (Past & Present)http://www.mediafire.com/?7j04jz0jby5EA-Ski featuring MC Ren and CPO; The Format From EA-Ski´s Past and Presenthttp://www.mediafire.com/?1x0cd2gnly2Prime - Pray Ave. (ft. Big Wy, CPO Boss Hogg, and Bokey) [Produced by Dae One]http://www.dubcnm.com/audio/2007/december/prime_ft._big_wy_cpo_boss_hogg_and_bokey-pray_ave-(dubcnn).mp3E-A-Ski (ft. CPO Boss Hogg) - Bag Of Chipshttp://download.yousendit.com/152CB2556AA16CC5Sip of the Ducehttp://www.amazon.com/Sip-Duce/dp/B000003BYG/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1198449117&sr=1-110 used & new available from $2.9811 Prodigy Of A Nigga.mp3 featuring CPO produced by Torture Chamber (He don´t rap on it,just some talking in the end.)http://www.mediafire.com/?gnws6mvryyt
The Video for 'Ballad Of A Mencace' featuring MC Ren<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/UxmHIRvxR9c" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/UxmHIRvxR9c</a>
CPO’s resume:www.discogs.com/artist/C.P.O.?anv=CPOwww.discogs.com/artist/DJ+Trainwww.discogs.com/artist/MC+RenDiscogs.com ain’t a complete data base, but it is a start.Be sure to also check the Vault on this site.http://www.dubcnn.com/connect/index.php?topic=94395.0
INTERVIEW FROM THA SHACK WITH TOMICA WRIGHT:http://www.eazy-ecpt.com/compton/index.php?topic=10718.0Tomica Wright: I cannot confirm 50 –60 unreleased tracks by Eazy. Completed or started. But it is possible there were that many tracks submitted. Some songs were completed; some songs with scratch vocals and some just concepts.Tha Shack: Are the remaining tracks in Ruthless’s possession? If so, how many? If not, who has them?Tomica Wright: Some tracks are in Ruthless’s possession, the master copies of at least 8 songs are missing. Majority of the unreleased material was used for the last two Eazy –E projects. We are not certain who has our property.Tha Shack: In an article published by GQ magazine in 1995, it mentions, “Shortly after Eazy’s death, police locked the doors to Ruthless Records to protect tapes and videos, which were beginning to disappear.” Is this true? If so, does this include Eazy-E unreleased material, and what was recovered if any?Tomica Wright: It is true that shortly after Eric passed Ruthless Records doors were on lockdown, no one was allowed to enter the premises. The missing tracks have not been recovered.Tha Shack: Did Ruthless keep a record log of masters owned prior to Eazy’s death?Tomica Wright: Yes, of completed work.Tha Shack: I’ll just mention a few unreleased items. Please tell me anything that comes to mind, any updates, etc.:Tha Shack: Eazy has mentioned in interviews that he did a song with Guns N’ Roses.Tomica Wright: Yes, we only have a rough copy of the song, which was not completed. Good track!Tha Shack: Eazy has mentioned doing a song called “Yellow Brick Road to Compton”. A positive song for Compton that was agreed upon with the mayor of Compton in order for Eazy to shoot the “Real Compton City Gs” video. Any update on this one?Tomica Wright: I am aware of the working title, rough ideas and some scratch vocals were laid, but song was not completed.Tha Shack: “Everything I Luv” Snippet was supposedly posted on Eazy’s 1-900 hotline.Tomica Wright: We only have a cassette copy of the song. Not completedTha Shack: There were rumors that the SleepWalkers track on Bone’s Collection vol. 2 originally had a longer Eazy verse dissing Dre and Snoop. Will we ever get to hear the original?Tomica Wright: The original version of the song did include Eazy’s vocals, which were erased in a session with Bone. Not sure if the verse dissed Dre or Snoop.Tha Shack: What was the name of the Eazy-E track that was to be on the “Dark Blue” Soundtrack?Tomica Wright: It was supposed to be one of the songs, which was used for the “Impact of a Legend” project. “Dark Blue” was supposed to come out before the “Impact of a Legend” project. Unfortunately, the project kept getting pushed back, so we just licensed music for the movie. The movie didn’t pull enough demand as a theatrical release to warrant a soundtrack. It had a better response DVD.ha Shack: Was the album “Str8 Off Tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton vol. 2” ever completed? If not, how come we have seen release dates for it?Tomica Wright: Originally, this was the working title for a double album. Eric wanted to release. (”Str8 Off “Tha Streetz of Muthaphukkin Compton” Vol 1 and 2). Since he was taking so long to release another project after “Dre187 It’s On”. He had a good amount of songs, concepts and ideas laid out and started, but not everything was completed. Not sure why volume 2 release dates appeared.Tha Shack: Does/Did Ruthless own any unreleased N.W.A. tracks?Tomica Wright: To my knowledge no. Masters old masters would be property of EMI, but if you are referring to just the music (tracks) None that I am aware of.MY SOURCE:http://www.eazy-ecpt.com/compton/index.php?topic=10718.0
to work on some verses for Detox. This occurred within the last 2 weeks or so.
N.W.A recording Approach To Danger<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/VJ9-V_pPWY0&hl=en" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/VJ9-V_pPWY0&hl=en</a>
Day of the Dre One nation under a G thang Jonathan GoldPosted Sep 30, 1993 12:00 AMhttp://www.rollingstone.com/artists/drdre/articles/story/5937496/cover_story_day_of_the_dreLeimert Park is the intellectual center of African American life in Los Angeles -- jazz clubs, coffeehouses, bookstores, art galleries, a theater in a fine old movie palace, the restaurants that draw people from all over town. Neatly suited Muslims stand on the street corners, offering newsletters and bean pies for sale. Reggae blasts on the record shops. Hip-hop blasts from the cars. Here, in an Ozzie and Harriet-like Leimert Park neighborhood just a few blocks from the swank black-owned mansions of Windsor Hills, rap star Dr. Dre, wearing a black Ben Davis shirt, baggy pants and a marijuana-leaf baseball cap that advertises his best-selling album The Chronic, shrugs himself into the driver's seat of a black '64 Chevrolet Impala convertible and reaches under the dash. Suddenly, the parked car leans sharply to one side, the right body panel striking the asphalt with a violent thunk. Just as abruptly, it rights itself, and the front end of the car begins to hop up and down just as you've seen it do a thousand times on MTV. Dre glances back at his entourage with the classic "Look, no hands" smirk of a guy who has always been Mom's favorite, and the Impala rears like a spooked stallion. A tall man wearing a black Dodgers cap snorts and shakes his head "Damn," he says. "Nigga can't get enough of that shit."Dr. Dre -- the ex-N.W.A member whose Chronic LP, eight months in the Billboard Top 10, is already the most popular hardcore rap album in history (2 million and counting), with a huge crossover audience -- is directing, producing and starring in his third video for The Chronic, which will see him through his extensive fall tour. He also produced, performed and co-wrote the song "Let Me Ride," on which this video is based. However you look at it, Dre is carrying a lot of hyphens today.A full-on film crew, the kind you'd expect to see doing second-unit work on Terminator III or something, follows his every move with a giant camera crane and a phalanx of big lights. Dre finishes the take, springs out of the car and wanders over to the truck for a video playback of the scene. He peers in the direction of Interscope Records co-head Jimmy Iovine, who smiles and waves. Dre is apparently in control and Iovine is pleased."There aren't three people like him in the music business," Iovine says, stabbing the air with his forefinger. "He can rap, he can produce ... and he can direct a video with humor. Do you know how hard that is? Famous movie directors can't do that."Dre, who signs his checks Andre Young and who is the chief architect of what is known as West Coast gangsta rap, is an enigma: Though he created one of the most profitable genres in rock & roll, he is better known for his out-of-control episodes than for his absolute control in the studio, better known for his criminal record than for his many platinum records. Mentions of Dre in the Los Angeles Times, his hometown paper, tend to include the phrase "surrendered to police," and he is perhaps the first recording artist since Sly Stone whose name shows up almost as often on the police-report page as it does in the entertainment section. Plenty of newsprint has been devoted to his thuggishness, relatively less to his artistry --which may be on a par with Phil Spector's or Quincy Jones'.Gangsta rap tends to be a producer's medium: The talent on Dre's million-selling albums has included a pal of his cousin's, his girlfriend and a former buddy, Eazy-E, who intended to finance Dre's records instead of rap on them. Record-industry buzz has it a sure bet that the upcoming record he's producing for his kid brother's best friend, Snoop Doggy Dogg, will be the first debut album to premiere at the top of the charts. From Snoop's cameos on The Chronic and from his rap on the theme song for last year's Larry Fishburne vehicle Deep Cover, Snoop's lazy, vicious drawl has become one of the most familiar voices in rap. Dre's records make you bounce even as they scare you with their intensity.The Dre sound is clean but edgy, deeply funky, featuring slow, big-bottomed, slightly dirty beats and powered by guitar and bass work that is not sampled but recreated in the studio, so that -- unlike East Coast rap productions -- the fidelity of the final product is not inflected by the fidelity of scratchy R&B records that have been played too many times. It is Dre's production work -- on Eazy-E, on N.W.A, on rap legend D.O.C., on Pomona group Above the Law, on Snoop Doggy Dogg, on himself -- that made gangsta rap among the most vital pop genres to come along in the last few years ... and, not incidentally, set hundreds of thousands of 12-year-old white kids to talking about niggaz, bitches and hos, 12-year-olds who may not even know what a G thang is.Check out the junior high school around the corner, where the video shoot continues -- lights, screens, music, people and dozens of hopping lowrider cars, chugging, smoke-spewing old relics burnished to a high shine, bounding and rebounding higher and higher, tossing their passengers about like so many extremely urban cowboys. If you peek into the trunk of any these cars, you will see 14 car batteries hooked up in series and a row of hydraulic motors mounted where you'd expect to see the spare tire, but you'd better get out of the way when it starts to jump. One of these cars bounds so high that its owners operate it from the outside with a stalk-mounted remote control device as if it were a Revell model -- instant whiplash --and the crowd scatters when the car lurches sideways after a particularly wicked bounce.Pounding P-Funk-derived hip-hop beats boil out from the bank of speakers a few yards away, and a camera-equipped helicopter circles closely overhead. Dre stands on the front seat of his convertible, glorying in the noise, surveying his flock as if he were the grand marshal of a parade, and he crosses his arms in smug satisfaction.An assistant director hands him a megaphone. Apparently Dre is now obliged to direct. "I don't know," Dre the auteur says. "I guess everybody should do their own thing and shit."The beat starts up, Dre mimes rapping along with the tape, cars jiggle, Snoop Doggy Dogg sleepily bobs his head, and all around are men and women, Mexicans and blacks and even a few white guys, dancing, holding car-club insignia aloft, throwing gang signs both real and pretend, passing around piss yellow bottles of malt liquor that seem to bob like zeppelins above the crowd. Over to one side, a craps game is going on; make-out couples writhe here and there.It's kind of groovy out here under the golden late-afternoon sun, free barbeque, dancing to the ambling music, feeling like just another boy in the hood. This is the sort of idyllic, Arcadian vision of inner-city Los Angeles that everybody wants desperately to exist, were crooked C's and flashed eight-treys are less signifier than signified, where ancient convertibles bounce around the playground like fleas on a hot griddle. Abruptly, the music grinds to a halt."Hey, hey," an assistant director barks through a megaphone. "I've just been told that nothing we shot is usable, because y'all were throwing gang signs. MTV won't play anything with gang signs. And if y'all want to throw them, you'll have to go home."Everything is silent for a moment, and you can feel the tension in the crowd, the good times threatening to implode. Then the music starts up again even louder than before, a couple of people start to dance, and the anger dissolves into relief. No more gang signs, no more today.Iovine nervously checks his watch. "See that kid over there?" he asks nobody in particular, gesturing toward a boy scampering on the basketball court. "That's my 12-year-old nephew from Staten Island. You couldn't get more white and suburban than him. But Dre's record is all the kid listens to. When you sell this many albums, they are not all going to the South Bronx.""It's my business to know these things," Interscope's promotion director Marc Benesch says later, "and there's no difference between the people that are going out and buying the Dre album and people that are buying Guns n' Roses."To get to Dr. Dre's house, you speed west from Hollywood, past the miniature golf courses, past the replica of a French chateau that hovers over the freeway like a mirage, out over the hills at the west end of the San Fernando Valley into a dusty Western scrub-land where the old Tom Mix films used to be shot. Dre's oversize French colonial is located deep in this landscape of greasewood and brand-new condominium complexes, behind the well-guarded gate of an exclusive residential community. Dre lives among doctors and attorneys and prosperous Valley businessmen on a street of million-dollar homes.Like any West Valley homeowner, when Dre gets home, he parks his car in the garage, hangs up his jacket and settles back with a glass of nicely chilled white zinfandel, listening to the twilight crickets and lounging in a patio chair by the pool. Dre has been playing hooky today, installing an aquarium in his house and tooling around nearby mountain roads in his Ferrari while his mastering guy was wondering where he was and, across town, the musicians were watching Cosby reruns in the recording-studio lounge. The video for "Let Me Ride" is far from finished, and Interscope is whining for the half-finished album by Snoop Dogg, and there's a lot to be done for the once-postponed Chronic tour with Onyx and Run-D.M.C., which is now less than a month away from starting."I can remember when I was just like about 4 years old in Compton," Dre says, gazing out at the moon, "and my mother would have me stack 45s, stack about 10 of them, and when one would finish, the next record would drop. Do you remember those old record players that played 45s? It was like I was DJ'ing for the house, picking out certain songs and stacking them so this song would go after that song. I would go to sleep with headphones on, listening to music. My mom and my pop -- they would have music so loud, loud enough to shake the walls."I've got a son, Marcel," Dre continues, "not even 3 years old, but he gets in one of those roller chairs at the studio and pulls himself to the board and starts fucking with the knobs, rocking his head and shit. He don't even know what he's doing, he's just been watching me, but he has crazy rhythm for a 2-year-old."The music is just in me now, you know. That's the only thing I can say. People ask me how I come up with these hits, and I can only say that I know what I like, and I'm quick to tell a motherfucker what I don't like and know what people like to play in their cars."Dre takes a pull at the wine and puts his glass down on the table."When I was older," Dre says, "and I DJ'ed at [the Los Angeles dance club] Eve After Dark, I would put together this mix shelf, lots of oldies, Martha and the Vandellas and stuff like that, and where normally you go to a club and the DJs play all the hit records back to back, I used to put on a serious show. People would come from everywhere just to see Dr. Dre on the wheels of steel."A little later, I used to take Ice Cube up to Skateland in Compton -- he was in a group with my cousin at the time -- and I would tell him that with this crowd you'd better get up and rock, because if you didn't, they'd throw these full cups at your ass. I would have Cube and my cousin change the words to certain songs -- like 'My Adidas' became 'My Penis' -- and the crowd would get going, and I'd be mixing. That was the dope."Inside the house, someone has turned on the stereo, and out in the yard, it is loud, deafening like sitting in the front row at a Megadeth concert, enough to make the fillings rattle inside your teeth before Dre has it turned down."Do your neighbors ever complain?" I ask.Dre thinks for a moment. "They try to," he says, "but I slam the door in their face. I paid a mil-plus for this house, so I figure I can do whatever the fuck I want to do in it."He gestures to either side, where the leviathan luxury homes crowd in like so many Levittown tract houses. "As far as I'm concerned," he says, "this house right here is the only house on the block."What's important in hip-hop is to capture the pop moment, to cop the right attitudes from your peers and the right records from your mom's record collection, then put them together with the right beats. Nothing else really matters, not verbal virtuosity or deftness on the turntables, neither 48-track studios nor high-tech production skills.Dre, tall, round cheeked and in his late 20s, a founding member of N.W.A, was until last year the house producer for Eazy-E's Ruthless Records, and seven out of the eight albums he produced for the label between the end of 1983 and the middle of 1981 went platinum. Ruthless used to be called hoodlum Motown: Gangsta rap, the funky, breathtakingly vulgar street sound inspired by the gang-infested Los Angeles suburb Compton, is the most successful California export since the Stealth bomber, and N.W.A are acknowledged as the Sex Pistols of rap. Dre pretty much singlehandedly steered Ruthless from the first gangsta single, Eazy-E's "Boyz-n-the-Hood," J.J. Fad's simple-minded novelty hit "Supersonic" and N.W.A's "Fuck the Police" to a hip-hop diva album for a girlfriend, Michel'le, and the ghetto Gotterdammerung of N.W.A's Niggaz4life, which shocked America when it topped the pop charts. Dre caught the moment pretty well.Many observers thought gangsta rap had reached its pinnacle with the brilliant though unlistenable Niggaz4life, where side one includes a song in which a common vulgar epithet for African American is repeated nearly 100 times in the course of three minutes and where the misogynist tenor of the second side may be summed up by the titles of the first two tracks: "To Kill a Hooker" and "One Less Bitch." Inspired by N.W.A, Ice-T, 2Pac and various other California rappers wrote so many songs about killing policemen that the subject threatened to become a subgenre as pervasive in hip-hop as the she-done-him-wrong ballad is in Nashville pop.After breaking with Ruthless over what he perceived as severe underpayment for seven platinum albums, Dre was seen by many outsiders as living out the violence that previously he had only rapped about. Rap TV-show host Dee Barnes filed a yet-unresolved multimillion-dollar assault suit against Dre after he allegedly slammed her against the wall of a Hollywood nightclub a couple of years ago. "I was in the wrong," he angrily told me not long after the incident, "but it's not like I broke the bitch's arm."Comments like these propelled Dre to No. 1 on hip-hop feminists' hit list as well the Billboard ones, and the merry gangsta banter on The Chronic, which refers to a potent strain of marijuana, is not precisely redemptive. Even the most politically correct of hip-hop fans may occasionally, to their horror, find themselves humming such undeniable Dre hooks as "Bitches ain't shit but hos and trix," giggling when the women in his videos get sprayed with malt liquor by a couple of G's, even if they recoil at the constant gunplay and the reflexive homophobia. On Dre tracks from "Boyz-n-the-Hood" to "Let Me Ride," life is truly nothing but a G thang, a constant B-boy house party where male bonding is the rule, women are attractive nuisances, and enemies are something to wave guns at from a safe distance. Dre dismisses concerns about sexism and ultraviolence as so much media paranoia.Last year part of his house burned down in a conflagration that injured two firefighters. Later he was arrested by mounted police in a New Orleans hotel lobby after a fracas that allegedly resulted in the battery of an officer. His former colleague Eazy-E sued him under federal racketeering laws -- the suit was recently dismissed for the third time by a U.S. district court judge. Then Dre was convicted (misdemeanor assault) of breaking the jaw of an aspiring record producer, shackled with a tracking device and sentenced to house arrest.Dre has perfectly rational explanations for most of these incidents, and he seems believable when he tells you that his part in each of them was minor at best, but it is clear that for Dre, 1992 was a lost year of John Lennon-like proportions."I needed a record to come out," Dre says. "I was broke. I didn't receive one fuckin' quarter in the year of '92, because Ruthless spent the year trying to figure out ways not to pay me so that I'd come back on my hands and knees. If I had to go back home living with my mom, that wasn't going to happen."When called for a response, Jerry Heller, the general manager of Ruthless and the white man satirized in the 'Dre Day' video, rustled some papers and pulled out Dre's 1099 tax form for the year. In 1992, Heller claims, Dre received $85,603.81 from Ruthless. Still, when Dre thinks about Ruthless, his face contorts with rage."I went to a lot of record companies, tried even to get a little production work to pay for rent and shoes," Dre says, "but nobody wanted to take a chance on me because of all that legal shit, all the cease-and-desist letters -- Ruthless did anything and everything they could to fuck me up, and I have hate for everybody there. Then at Interscope, I talked to Jimmy Iovine a lot, and he is like the smartest motherfucker in the business; I came to him with the album, the artwork, the concepts for the videos, everything and Jimmy made it happen."Dre got the label, Death Row, he'd always wanted, the money to run it and carte blanche to make all the albums he wanted."I did record The Chronic in 1992," Dre says. "The year was not a total loss." Like this and like that and like this and a ...It is a truth universally acknowledged that a rapper in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a posse.There are Hugg and Nate Dogg and Kurupt around Dre, and a rapper who calls himself That Nigga Daz, also preteen Lil' Malik, a peculiarly coifed woman named Rage and Dre's younger brother Warren G, who just signed a solo deal with DefJam. Over there on the couch, playing Nintendo, that's D Ruff: David Ruffin Jr., the Detroit-born son of the late Temptations singer, who's come to California to make himself a star. D Ruff's friend Tony Green is Dre's bass player, a world-class R&B pro.Suge Knight, it is known, is a first among equals, the soft-spoken CEO of Death Row, a former professional football player who looks every bit the part. Suge partially subsidized the Chronic album with monies he received from his ownership of certain publishing rights to the 14-million-selling Vanilla Ice LP, which would mark that artist's sole contribution to the art of hardcore rap.The guy in the hat is Ricky Rouse, a guitarist with a quick temper and some of the dandyish flair of Jimi Hendrix; Malik is the compact, heavily muscled bodyguard who speaks in carefully measured tones; the D.O.C. is a large, graceful man who was once among the world's best rappers -- he played the English language the way Itzhak Perlman plays a Strad -- until his career was cut short by a freak automobile accident that crushed his throat and left him unable to rap.The most famous member of the Death Row entourage is Snoop Doggy Dogg, a tall, slender young man with milk-chocolate skin and cornrows as thick as cobs, who is Robin to Dre's Batman, Boswell to his Johnson, Gilligan to Dre's Skipper. Impossible to take your eyes off of, Snoop is as endearingly awkward in front of a camera as a 10-year-old forced to model his new Sunday-school suit in front of all the aunties. Where Dre is aloof and unapproachable in public, children swarm around Snoop as if he were driving an ice-cream truck. Snoop wrote the rhymes for --and rapped on -- about 60 percent of The Chronic.How eagerly anticipated is Snoop's album Doggystyle? Two weeks before the album is scheduled to hit the streets, Dre refuses to let even Iovine listen to more than two songs outside of the studio, and the tenacious Compton bootleggers have been stymied in their quest to pry loose more than a few rhymes, but every hip-hop fan you talk to already knows the names of the album tracks by heart: "Who Am I," "Gin and Juice," "Death After Visualizing Eternity," "G's Up, Hos Down."The answer to the musical question "Who Am I," the first single from Doggystyle, turns out to be "the nigga with the biggest nuts," which may be a little closer to Beavis and Butt-Head than to the defiant acts of African American self-assertion postulated by hip-hop theorists. Snoop is this year's version of the teenage B-boy Everyman, not a suave fellow insinuating his prowess with the ladies, but a G just like you.And as he perches on a stool inside a darkened studio utility room, taking in a whispered drawl and inhaling chicken wings from a bucket like a man who hasn't eaten for a week, Snoop does indeed seem more like the cutup in the back of your algebra class than the gangsta feared by millions."Everybody wants to know something about Snoop," Snoop says. "What is it about Snoop? What makes Snoop click? It's cool being a mystery."Snoop peels back the flesh from a wing: "I wasn't no gangster-ass type of nigga to be starting no shit, but there's just all kinds of little ghetto stuff that's easy for a young black man to get into. The hard-ass gangbanger life ain't the bomb at all, period. The other day I was looking at an old picture from back when I used to play Pop Warner football, and like of 28 homies on the team, 12 are dead, seven are in the penitentiary, three of them are smoked out, and only me and Warren G are successful. I love my homies, but damn, I don't want to stay down there with y'all."When he was only a couple of weeks out of high school in Long Beach, Snoop was sent up after a drug bust, and he spent three years in and out of jail. He came to the realization that rapping might be a more profitable endeavor than crime. His first single with Dre, from the Deep Cover soundtrack, included the chorus "187 [murder] on an undercover cop," rapped with perhaps a bit more gusto than one might expect, and the single spent several months on the rap charts."Now I do all right," Snoop says. "I feel like I'm one of the power speakers, like a Malcolm X figure now. But you know, a lot of times little white kids come up to me, and it makes me feel damn good and even better because it's the feeling of a straight ghetto man finally proving his stuff to the whole society. Sometimes I ask them if they really listen to the tape, and they know every word. I'm not prejudiced in my rap, I just kick the rhymes."One of the places from which Dre's posse has been ejected in the course of recording the Snoop album is a large, comfortable studio complex in the deep San Fernando Valley, the kind of place where the mixing boards stretch into the middle distance, where the couches are real leather, where platinum albums from Thriller dot the walls. A freaky drum track pumps from the giant studio speakers, and Dre, headphones on, hunches over his turntables as intently as a neurosurgeon, surrounded by hundreds of records: Three Times Dope, early Funkadelic, Prince's Dirty Mind, even a tattered Jim Croce LP.Listening to a Dre beat take shape in the studio is like watching a snowball roll downhill in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, taking on mass as it goes. Dre may find something he likes from an old drum break, loop it and gradually replace each part with a better tom-tom sound, a kick-drum sound he adores, until the beat bears the same relationship to the original that the Incredible Hulk does to Bill Bixby.A bass player wanders in, unpacks his instrument and pops a funky two-note bass line over the beat, then leaves to watch CNN, though his two notes keep looping into infinity. A smiling guy in a striped jersey plays a nasty one-fingered melody on an old Mini-Moog synthesizer that's been obsolete since 1982, and Dre scratches in a sort of surfadelic munching noise, and then from his well-stocked Akai MPC60 sample comes a shriek, a spare piano chord, an ejaculation from the first Beastie's record -- "Let me clear my throat" -- and the many-layered groove is happening, bumping, breathing, almost loud enough to see.Snoop floats into the room. He closes his eyes as if in a dream and extends both hands toward Dre, palms downward. Dre holds out his hands, and Snoop grazes his fingertips with a butterfly flourish, caught up in the ecstasy of the beat. Somebody hands Snoop a yellow legal pad. The rapper wanders over to the main mixing console, fishes a skinny joint out of his pocket and tenderly fires it up. He inhales deeply. He picks up a pencil and scribbles a couple of words before he decides to draw instead, and he fills the sheet in front of him with thick, black lines. He looks around the room for something more interesting to do than draw, and his sly canine leer settles on a visitor to the studio."You like this beat?" Snoop asks. "Think it's going to work? I think I'm going to call this one 'Eat a Dick,' about all the punk-ass niggaz who ain't down with the Row."Daz and Snoop, who have heard this before, convulse into laughter.Daz and Snoop and Kurupt slouch over their legal pads, peeking over each others' shoulders like the kids cheating on an exam. Daz gets to practice his new rap in a back corner away from the others; Kurupt wheels his chair over toward Snoop and says, "I've got the shit, man. I've got the crazy shit." Snoop listens to his friend rap for a bit, shrugs and goes back to his own rhyme. Kurupt is crushed. Dre comes in from the lounge, twists a few knobs on the Moog and comes up with the synthesizer sound so familiar from The Chronic, almost on pitch but not quite, sliding a bit between notes.The people in the crowded control room bob their heads to the beat in unison, the way baby pelicans do in nature films just before their parents regurgitate a fish. It's too funky in here. Dre puts his feet up on the console."Everybody who walks has something he or she can do in the studio," Dre says. "Every person walking has some kind of talent that they can get on tape. I can take anybody who reads this magazine and make a hit record on him. You don't have to rap. You can do anything. You can go into the studio and talk. I can take a fuckin' 3-year-old and make a hit record on him. God has blessed me with this gift."Sometimes it feels good for me to be able to mold an artist and get him a hit record and to show him something that was inside of him that he didn't know about. It feels good to me. Everybody in the business has called me to try and do some tracks, but I can't see myself doing anything for somebody who already has money, you know. I get more joy out of getting somebody like Snoop. And it excites the shit out of me to see the reaction on a new artist's face when he gets asked for his first autograph. I tell Snoop all the time: He is going to be the biggest shit, Snoop is going to be the biggest thing to black people since the straightening comb."Tomorrow, Dre will throw away this Doggy Dogg beat and start on another."Did you see," Dre asks, "all those reels that are in the studio?"They are unavoidable, piled up as thickly as an adobe wall."There's 35 or 36 reels of Snoop in there," Dre says. "Each reel holds three songs. So far, I have five that I like. That's just a small example of how ... how deep I'm going into this album. I feel that the tracks that I'm doing for him right now are the future of the funk."I've never heard the perfect hip-hop album, but I'd like to make one. The Chronic is about the closest. Public Enemy's Nation of Millions was dope as hell. Eric B and Rakim, their first album, I really liked a lot, and Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded was def."It is suggested N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton is a pretty good album, too."To this day," Dre says, "I can't stand that album. I threw that thing together in six weeks so we could have something to sell out of the trunk."Still, Straight Outta Compton codified the myth of the urban black gangsta and sold that myth to America."People are always telling me my records are violent," Dre says, "that they say bad things about women, but those are the topics they bring up themselves. This is the stuff they want to write about. They don't want to talk about the good shit because that doesn't interest them, and it's not going to interest their readers. A lot of the motherfuckers in the media are big hypocrites, you know what I'm saying? If I'm promoting violence, they're promoting it just as much as I am by focusing on it in the article. That really bugs me out -- you know, if it weren't going on, I couldn't talk about it. I mean, you will never hear me rapping about Martians coming down and killing motherfuckers, because it's not happening. And who came up with that term gangsta rap anyway?""Dre," I say. "You did.""Oh, maybe so." Dre says. "Never mind, then."[From Issue 666 — September 30, 1993]
Producer is an inadequate label for Andre “Dr. Dre” Young. In addition to personally changing hip-hop’s sound at least three time, first with N.W.A, then with his solo debut, The Chronic (Deathrow/Interscope, 1992), and then again with [Chronic 2001] (Aftermath/Interscope, 1999), he’s also shepherded three of rap’s biggest stars, ever- Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent- to pop superstardom. While Dr. Dre, 43, is a cultural force and a kingmaker, in his heart, he’s still a producer; from the fury of N.W.A’s 1988 “—- tha Police,” to the serpentine funk of his 1992 “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” to the tongue-in-cheek charm of Eminem’s 1999 “My Name Is” and the irresistible bump of 50 Cent’s 2003 “In da Club,” his music defines at least one, if not two generations. In July, Dre check in from– where else?– the studio, where he’s currently “three-fourths the way done” with his long, long-awaited Detox.What were you doing in 1993?Dr. Dre: Working on Snoop’s introduction album, Doggystyle.You’ve had many hits, but you’ve also made stars of other artists. Luck, or labor?The luck comes in by just meeting these people. These guys are talented as shit. They make me look good, you know what I mean? Once the luck passes, the labor comes in– and it’s definitely a lot of work.Producing music, developing talent– do you draw on the same skill set?It’s different. The music doesn’t talk back [laughs].What’s the key to your track record?I don’t take any shorts. I don’t say, “Okay, it’s good enough.” I try to get exactly what I’m hearing in my head to the tape, and I won’t let it move until then. In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I’m not.Nineteen ninety-three was also the year after The Chronic. Did you anticipate the overwhelming response?To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure. Before I got with Interscope, I recorded the entire album, artwork and everything and went into almost every label, and everybody was slamming doors on my, talking about, “This isn’t hip-hop; you’re using live instruments.” It had me second-guessing myself. I remember being on my balcony with Nate Dogg, listening to my record like, Is this shit good or not? I had no idea it would do what it did.Do you see that as your defining effort?I don’t feel like I’ve made my best record yet. The Marshall Mathers LP got the closest, but I don’t feel like I’ve hit that thing just 100 percent perfect, from the first note to the last note. I always use Quincy Jones as an example– he didn’t make his biggest record until he was 50 and he started when he was 14. So I feel like I have a lot of room to get that thing done.Is “100 percent” achievable?I’m not sure. But it’s definitely going to be a fun ride trying.http://www.xxlmag.com/online/?p=23851Also, the interviewer made a post on another web site and said that Dre said the Grow up song was a mistake and shouldn't have leaked."I interviewed him - briefly - today for this Vibe piece and in ending with the standard "so what are you up to now?" he mentioned he was 3/4ths the way through Detox (hey - his words, not mine) and I brought up the Bishop Lamont song and he told me, "yeah, that wasn't supposed to leak" and called it a "mistake" which I thought meant "the song just wasn't where it needed to be." So if people think it's weak, it sounds like D.R.E. would agree."http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/printthread.php?Cat=0&Board=crates&main=1141893&type=thread
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