It's December 10, 2025, 12:56:14 PM
No Pac & BIG as he promised earlier?
Fat Joe and Jadakiss are joined by legendary rapper and producer Erick Sermon, and Sermon tells Joe and Jada about his illustrious hip hop career with EPMD alongside PMD and DJ Scratch, selling over 70 million records working with superstars like Jay-Z, Method Man, LL Cool J, and D'Angelo, the surprising way he met Redman, and his missed opportunities to get in early to sign future legends like Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., and Wu-Tang Clan. Sermon also talks about his upcoming project 'Dynamic Duos,' which features a star-studded lineup of paired legends like Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls; Prodigy and Havoc of Mobb Deep; Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg; Method Man and Redman; and Billy Danze and Lil Fame of M.O.P.
‘Everybody Ain’t Good, Nephew’: Erick Sermon Speaks His MindAs he rolls out his Dynamic Duos album series, the EPMD legend opens up about aging gracefully in rap, turning down generative AI, and the industry’s pay-to-play culture.Everyone has an opinion on the state of hip-hop; not everyone has five decades of credibility like Erick Sermon. The legendary rapper-producer is holding court in his midtown Manhattan studio, starting our nearly two-hour discussion with thoughts on why his veteran peers have aged more gracefully than succeeding generations.“They made records that was going to surpass and be able to live the test of time so they can still work forever,” he says. “This era is not going to be able to do that, and the era before, because nobody’s going to come watch you say ‘pussy, fuck, suck, bitch,’ whatever, when they’re 40-something years old. They married, they go to church, got kids, got a life. It don’t match them no more.”The man known as the “Green-Eyed Bandit” tells me that he’s been invigorated by seeing releases from veteran peers such as Clipse and the artists who were a part of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It… series. He lauds them for embarking on a hip-hop purifying mission that he’s been diligently working towards with a slew of upcoming projects, including his Dynamic Duos, Vol. 1 album, which drops tomorrow. The project features renowned duos like his own EPMD, Mobb Deep, and M.O.P., unofficial duos like Redman and Method Man and Snoop and Nate Dogg, as well as collaborations like Conway and Game, which he says are a glimpse of Dynamic Duos Vol. 2, which is set to drop early next year. The sequel will feature more duos that Sermon composed himself.He started the project during quarantine, seeking to reinvigorate the rap game and show younger artists a blueprint for rap success. “I knew it was going to have to come to something like this to where [I’m focused on], ‘How do the next five or 10 years look?’ We just trying to give you a little blueprint on what shit could be, and that hopefully y’all take that and move forward.”Anyone who matches just half of his success will have done great for themselves. He debuted in 1988 as one-third of EPMD with DJ Scratch and his partner-in-rhyme Parrish Smith, becoming one of rap’s early beloved groups with singles like “You Gots To Chill” and “Strictly Business” on their album of the same name. He’s also the co-founder and architect of the Hit Squad collective, soundscaping albums for Redman, Keith Murray, Das EFX, K-Solo, and others (doing the same for Def Squad, a spinoff group created when Sermon and Parrish first split in 1993). As a soloist, he’s known for songs like “Stay Real,” “React,” and the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Music.” He also produced Mos Def’s “Oh No” with Pharoahe Monch and Nate Dogg, Jay-Z’s “Reservoir Dogs” featuring The LOX, Beanie Sigel, and Sauce Money, and “4,3,2,1” with LL Cool J, Method Man, Redman, DMX, Canibus, and Master P.Leaning forward in his swiveling studio chair, he’s a natural storyteller, regaling me and his producer-protege BooGeyManBeats with tales of his “almosts”: living in Atlanta and having then-young artists like Usher, Ludacris, and Goodie Mobb members coming to his rim shop, and missing out on producing on Nas and Notorious BIG’s first albums. “My story is Ill, nephew. I could have had Game, I could have had 50 Cent, Rick Ross, Yung Berg, Fugees, Akon. People will be like, ‘Goddamn. Imagine if you was a label and you had all these people.’ Can you imagine that?!” he says, wonderment awash on his face.His affable nature — and cultural stature — probably helped him procure Dynamic Duo’s star-studded roster. He says he simply DMed many of the acts on the project, and aside from a Hail Mary attempt for an Outkast record, and feature requests for Dr. Dre and UGK (he was told there are no more Pimp C verses), the other attempts were successful. He produced every song on the album except Cypress Hills’ “How Do You Know,” which BoogeyMan laced.The EPMD record came from him getting the creative “itch” after the duo collaborated on Nas and Eminem’s “EPMD 2” from the Queens legend’s King’s Disease II album. For “Kill Shot,” he procured Prodigy of Mobb Deep’s vocals from a mystery person he gave a “favor to” in exchange for the verse. “I had Havoc come to the studio to [record] his verse,” Sermon recalls. “Once Havoc [did] his verse, I played him Prodigy. He left the studio, was gone for half an hour, then came back and said, ‘Where’d you get [Prodigy’s vocals] from?’ He was floored, because you got to imagine he haven’t heard his man in a long time.” And Conway and Game’s “God Mode” came from a trio track originally featuring Lil Wayne, which included two beat switches and a new verse from Conway when he heard the beat that made the album.The next album will emulate the track, eschewing well-known duos for more unpredictable collaborations; he teases a song with some lesser-heard Tupac and Biggie verses. He says he has three more projects set to drop, all about two months apart, starting in January: Dynamic Duos Vol. 2, Erick Sermon Presents BooGey Nights (where BooGey will produce tracks for artists such as Nature and 38 Spesh), and his solo album The Sermon. Of the latter, his first solo since 2019’s Vernia, he calls it “that shit that you would get from those albums of a Jay-Z or somebody,” referring to more mature lyrical content.“Everybody ain’t good, nephew,” he says. “You trying to tell me while all this shit is going on you good? Ain’t nothing going on wrong in your life? I’m going to speak about some things that’s going on that [you] might can relate to, so maybe it can help you with it. That’s what music does. Nina Simone said that every artist is obligated to tell [their] fans something that can help them. You are obligated no matter what because they’re your fans.” Bun B, Jay Electronica, Freeway, and the late Craig Mack are set to be on the project.“I really think that [with] all that I’m doing, we took our time on all of it. And I feel good because I don’t have to put myself in that system,” he says, claiming there are “packages” that he alleges labels pay to radio conglomerates for their biggest acts. “It’s a $200,000 package. There’s a $900,000 package, there’s a $1.5 million package. I don’t want to put people business in the street, but this is just the real shit. Everybody has a package. How much you pay is going to determine how big your record gets. I seen these packages. They come to all of us. They go to every label, and you can print it if you want to. It don’t matter to me,” he says.It feels like Sermon’s at the “fuck-it” stage that so many veteran entertainers reach, where they speak their truth apathetic to any consequences. But that doesn’t mean he’s out of the loop. In November, he posted an Instagram photo alongside Lyor Cohen with a caption, noting, “Today I became a partner for the future of A.I.” There was some backlash to the announcement, with some fans worried that he was poised to follow down the path of Timbaland, who is gungho about his AI-generated artist Tata Taktumi. Sermon tells me that he’s curious about generative AI, but he’ll never get to the point where it’s doing any music for him. He recalls debating a fellow producer who used AI to concoct a melody and defended their usage because they changed the lyrics: “I’m trying to figure out what’s the ‘okay’ part, that you changed the words?” Sermon asks incredulously. “These are talented producers using this in that manner. Listen man, I just ain’t there yet.”For him, the fun is in human collaboration, like his 2023 sessions with Kanye West in LA and Italy. The Chicago icon previously pushed back on Sermon’s recollection that they were working on music for a Y3 album. Sermon says regardless of where the music was meant to go, he values the time because his ailing mother passed as soon as he landed in LA, and he was comforted by Kanye. “[He] said he got the same phone call from his aunt when his moms passed away. So he says, ‘Eric, what I did was I went to work. Come to work the next day.’” The two met up the next day at Kanye’s compound in LA. “We was doing hip-hop records, rhyming and everything,” Sermon recalls. The session apparently went so well that Kanye didn’t want the magic to stop; Sermon recalls that he told Kanye he planned to spend the next day mixing Dynamic Duos, but Kanye came to where he was staying anyway to pick him up for more work. He scrolls through his phone and shows me a May 16, 2023 text that he says is from Kanye noting, “Yo I’m downstairs.”Persistence aside, Sermon says he admired not just Kanye’s skill and ingenuity as a beatmaker (“he needs no one,” Sermon asserts), but the fact that he was focusing on multiple different projects at once. “He had the presidency in one corner. Kanye for president on the board, the whole nine,” he recalls. ”Then he had the people from [Asia] that was doing the [Yeezy] clothes on one. And then he had [an architect] that was making the new Kanye West store that was going to be on Sunset and Wilshire.” Sermon says that even when Kanye was seemingly occupied in another corner of the room, he’d chime in on the music.Months later, Sermon caught up with Kanye and Ty Dolla $ign at Sting’s studio in Italy. He says the tracks he heard, which later became Vultures, bore no resemblance to the traditionalist hip-hop they worked on. During dinner, he asked Kanye, “What happened to the rapping that we was doing?’ [Kanye] says, ‘Everybody stop real quick. Eric is asking where the rapping was. We got to go back in there and start putting raps down on these records.’” Sermon reflects, “He listened to me a lot to the point where people used to be like, ‘yo, Erick, you go tell him and ask him to…’ He had mad respect for me.”With over 37 years of experience, it’s hard not to respect Sermon. Toward the end of our conversation, he takes a salad out and begins eating — he’s so passionate during our talk that he forgot to eat his lunch. I leave him as he’s enjoying his meal, then prepping for another studio session with BooGey.
Album Review: Dynamic Duos, Vol. 1 by Erick SermonThe EPMD architect returns with a curatorial project that celebrates hip-hop chemistry across three decades, centering partnerships that built the genre’s collaborative foundation.If you’re unfamiliar with Erick Sermon, which the architects did a handguide to read, spent the late eighties to early nineties building EPMD into one of the most reliably funky operations in East Coast rap, the kind of duo where “Erick and Parrish Making Dollars” wasn’t just wordplay but a working blueprint for how two people from Brentwood, Long Island could turn sample-heavy beats and unbothered delivery into gold plaques and a sprawling Hit Squad collective. His solo run followed that same template: No Pressure, Double or Nothing, Music, records that leaned into rubbery basslines and unfussy funk while the rest of the industry chased whatever was next.Thirty-seven years into the job, he’s not trying to reclaim his spot or prove he can still rap circles around younger competition. Dynamic Duos positions him as the host and bandleader for a summit that maps out rap chemistry from New York to California, from late-‘80s peers who came up alongside him to ‘90s icons and a few newer voices he’s choosing to spotlight. Erick is threading together a curated argument about what makes partnerships work in rap, using his own production ear and taste to show how these combinations sound when he’s the one building the stage. “Dynamic” means constantly changing, full of energy, forceful, capable of adapting; “duo” means a pair of people or things. Erick Sermon turned 57 this year, and he’s still building records the way he did in 1988, with varied production styles that leave room for rappers to actually rap.“Look at ‘Em” with Method Man and Redman becomes an essay on what their long-running tag-team looks like in 2025. Meth’s verse is all elastic bragging about bad boy doing bad things, giving a bad name a bad name, pressing delete on your mainframe, while Redman comes through with gritty punchlines about Madagascar catalog fills, Hitchcock bellies from hip-hop, and young boys lip-syncing on TikTok. The hook is a blunt survival statement: “You thought a nigga wasn’t gon’ survive, huh?” The beat sounds like an update of the muddy, swinging groove Erick gave them on Blackout! and Def Squad records, thick drums and bass that leave room for these very recognizable voices to cut through without copying those older tracks note-for-note. The chemistry isn’t manufactured. These three have muscle memory with each other, and Erick is deliberately staging the reunion to ask what it sounds like now.“Test Me” delivers the first new EPMD song in over a decade, and the important thing is how little it strains to justify its existence. Parrish Smith’s verse is clipped and no-nonsense (“Can I think of a rhyme slicker? Think of a rhyme quicker?) sliding into Erick’s relaxed cadence over drums and bass that could have lived in 1992 but are mixed with a modern low-end thump. Erick’s not trying to out-rap Parrish or prove he’s still got it. He just drops lines about bucket hats, Timberland boots, Rolex watches, and matching chains, then hands the mic back. The song functions as proof that “dynamic duos” isn’t a loose marketing theme. He’s asking to hear what happens when two people who built a sound together decades ago step back into the same space without overthinking it.Erick’s production choices throughout the album show how he handles regional and era-specific elements without turning them into a disjointed compilation. When he brings West Coast fixtures into his universe, he adjusts the tempo and drum feel but keeps his fingerprints visible. “Like That” has Snoop and Nate Dogg gliding over a groove built for grown-club cruising, with Ricco Barrino carrying a hook about being stuck gazing at a woman’s body. Snoop’s verses hit the familiar player talk, but the beat keeps things swinging at a head-nod speed that feels like Erick’s East Coast snap meeting G-funk lean. “The City” with Tha Dogg Pound turns into a Compton and South Central panorama, Daz and Kurupt dropping Crenshaw references, Nipsey Hussle shoutouts, lowrider imagery, and South Central lingo over drums that knock harder than the more laid-back feel on “Like That.”Cypress Hill on “How Do You Know” brings B-Real’s nasal, machine-gun cadence and Sen Dog’s gruff counterweight over thick drums and psychedelic edges. The hook is just B-Real repeating a simple question, “How do you know where I’m at when you haven’t been where I’ve been?” until it feels like a challenge aimed at anyone who wants to question three decades of staying relevant. Erick layers keys, guitars, and vocal chops so you can tell an Erick beat from the first bar, but he’s not forcing every song to sound identical. The bounce shifts, the bass movement changes, the samples pull from different pockets of funk and soul, but the thread holding it together is his ability to make all these voices feel like they belong on the same record.The album uses elder statesmen’s voices to talk about the present in ways that feel blunt and easy to follow. “How Long” with Public Enemy gives you Chuck D asking how long it takes for truth to get taken down or drowned out, turning social media algorithms and speech policing into something direct: “How long before this gets taken down?/How long before my words hit the ground?” Flavor Flav ad-libs pepper the track, and the beat marches forward with the kind of urgency that makes Chuck’s lines about digital syphilis and brave new words land without needing extra explanation. He’s not giving a lecture. He’s naming the problem and asking a question.“God Mode” brings Conway the Machine and The Game together, and the contrast between Conway’s usual dense wordplay—blow leaving a pretty bitch with a snot nose, picassos hanging on condo walls, fans moshing like rock shows—and The Game’s usual martyr talk about being the last gangsta rapper alive works because Erick laces them with a dark, direct beat. The hook repeats the phrase “I’m in God mode” over a loop that doesn’t try to do too much, lets both rappers flex and posture. Conway’s verse is technically sharper, but The Game’s complaints about new rappers making the spot hot and his own staying power (“I’ma be here after the earth gone”) fit the album’s larger argument about longevity. Erick is using his platform to let voices from different eras and regions know that they’re still here, they’re still hungry, and the bars and beats carry that weight.The joy and looseness in the record come through without turning into vague nostalgia. “Back 2 the Party” with Salt-N-Pepa should be the easiest song to mess up by bringing two legends trying to recreate block-party energy in 2025, but it works because the groove pulls from late-‘80s/early-‘90s DNA without sounding stuck there. The hook is straight: “Back to the party/Taking it back/When people partied.” Salt and Pep’s verses talk about rooftop jams, Latin Quarter memories, skate parties, and shaking off lockdown years without pretending the world is simple. The drums swing at the right speed, the bassline leans into a two-step, and the structure feels like a chant people already know, even though it’s new. “Sidewalk Executives” suggest Erick is letting Billy Danse and Lil’ Fame do what they do best: turn street codes into anthems.Erick keeps himself in the spotlight without dominating it. His own verses slip in and out. With “Test Me,” he’s trading bars with Parrish; on “Look at ‘Em,” he’s letting Meth and Redman run the show, but he never shrinks into pure producer mode. His presence anchors songs that could otherwise feel like one-off features. He’s not trying to sound like what’s currently on the radio, but he’s also not pretending 1992 was the last good year for rap. There are moments when the duo idea is more cosmetic than essential, but the album’s standard remains consistent throughout. Parrish’s line on “Test Me”—“Draw a line in the sand like ‘Crossover,’ you get the picture”—captures what this whole album is doing: showing you the boundary, daring you to cross it, and reminding you these partnerships still have the muscle to back it up.Solid (★★★½☆)Favorite Track(s): “Look at ‘Em,” “Test Me,” “How Long”
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