Transcript of #2250 - Raekwon

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We're up. That's it. The chef is in the building, ladies and gentlemen. What's up? What's up? Pleasure to meet you, man. You are a part of the most iconic band in all of hip hop. There is no question. There's one Wu-Tang. There's only one Wu-Tang. Nothing else is even close. You guys were so different than every other band that ever existed. It was a giant group of you. Yeah, man. And everybody was a killer.

Fucking mob, man.

It's a crazy band, man. If you think about it, it's been a lot of hip hop duos. It's been a lot of producers and MCs. There's been a lot of people that get together in small groups. But there's only one, Wutang. There's only one group of nine assassins.

I tell niggas that all the time. It's crazy. You ain't going to get another one of these.

It's crazy that it worked because it's so hard to keep all those alphas together.

It really is crazy. To make it work, the most illest shit, some shit that I never would have thought would ever exist, it was able to exist because we tried it, but it wasn't normal.

It wasn't normal. It wasn't normal. You tried it, but it almost seems like it was just instinct. It's not like a business strategy that anybody would ever come up with. That's right.

Nine dudes and nine of the realest dudes?

Like, the rawest, realest dudes? Yeah. And it worked?

Yeah, and it worked. And it worked? I tell people all the time, it was like when Rizzo, he came with this whole philosophy of wanting to do it, it was like hitting a lot of him. He didn't know what to expect. It was more a reputation thing for us. It was like, I want to do this. And he came to block and he talked to some real dudes that really had other shit planned in their life. But hip hop was always like that backpack that we wore every day. But everybody had different plans. So he really, literally came in and started to pick motherfuckers that he felt had potential. So it's like the mob. It's like, you know You know, Lucky Luciano, prime example. He knew that motherfuckers had potential, right? He knew dudes had potential in any way. He's from a different part. He's from a different part. He's from a different part. But show what we could do right here is we can make money. So put your fucking feelings down or whatever the case may be, and let's talk about some money. And that right there, you start shaking hands across the table.

You all know you didn't really fuck with me like that, yo. I never had anything against you like that, though. But it was just something that he felt like at the end of the day, let me try this shit.

Well, Riz is a genius, and it's amazing that he was able to coordinate that Because that's often the case, with other killers. When a dude's a bad motherfucker, they always assume that everybody else doesn't like them. They always assume that everybody else is the enemy or competition. To have nine of you guys together like that as one group. I told you when I sent you a message, I said that we play Protect Your Neck. I know. Whenever we have a police escort, that's what's the most hilarious thing. So we do arena shows, we hire a police escort. So it's like fucking sirens and shit. Protect Your Neck. It's like fucking Sirens and Chin, Protect your neck. It's the perfect song to play when you're getting a police escort. Oh my God.

I know. Trust me.

These young kids that I have at the club, I was explaining Wutang clan to them the other night. I go, Do you have to understand how wild this band was. I go, When Old Dirty Bastard was in Rikers, they went to Rikers and performed in Rikers. You remember that?

Yes. How the fuck you remember that?

I told everybody. I was like, Do you know how crazy that is? You're talking about the biggest rap band in the fucking world, and they're performing in a penitentiary to one of the members who's one of the biggest fucking hip hop stars in the world who's in jail, and then you guys go into the crowd.

God bless his soul, first and foremost.

Oh, my God. Old Dirty Bastard was a classic.

Yeah, Yo Joe. Yo Joe is the funniest shit because when we came in and when we seen him, he was eating a cheeseburger laughing and shit. He remind you, he never He never was dirty. I don't even think. I never seen him eat meat like that or whatever the case may be. But we came in, he was eating a cheeseburger and shit laughing. So we was dying laughing. The people up in there, they kept telling us like, Yo, you all can't go into the crowd with everybody. We're not going to hold no responsibility if something happened. So be like, all right, now, now, now. Who you going in? Once we got on that stage, it was like, Fuck the stage. We out It was touching everybody. It was love, man. It was a lot of love. What year was that? Man, it had to be what? I say what? What? '98, '97? Wow. '98? No internet. Probably like, yeah, none of that shit.

None of that. Is there even a recording of that anywhere? No.

I don't think so.

You know how wild that video would be?

I never knew that people seen that. I don't know how the fuck you knew that shit. Oh, I heard I heard about it.

I heard about it. But they love that stuff. It was in the news back then that you guys performed in Rikers.

Yeah, man.

I was in a while ago. The '90s for hip hop. It was like people need... You have to understand. For young people, you grew up with hip hop, you're only 20 years old. I get it. But you have to understand from my perspective, in 1980, there was no hip hop. In 1992, that was all anybody gave a fuck about. That is crazy for a new art form To emerge, right? Right. There was like Sugar Hill Gang. There was some hip hop, but it wasn't the thing until the '90s. And '90s hip hop- It got big.

It got big. It got so big. I remember. It's so crazy you said that because I tell people all the time, like disco to me was hip hop before hip hop was. Disco, RnB, everything was a mixture. It was a mixture. So really When hip hop came, like you said, it came maybe, I'm going to say, '80s, '85.

It had to be '84 because I was in junior high school.

Yeah, we was young boys. So I would definitely say You heard something and it was like, oh, shit, motherfuckers, it's rhyming. The shit sound cool, though. You know what I mean? It sound cool. But really, it was a way to bring people together that was going through different shit in their life. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know what?

It was earlier than that because in 84, I was in high school. So it had to be '80. Because I was a freshman in high school in '81. So I heard Sugar Hill Gang when I lived in Jamaica Plain, which was in 1980. That was the first time I'd ever heard any hip hop. Yeah.

We said, 80? Yeah, I was 10 years old. Me, probably really gravitating to it. I probably was 12, like you said.

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The first shit that grabbed me was, like how you said, Sugar Hill Gang. Rap is the light. Rap is the light. That was the shit. Oh my God. It was everywhere. Now look, I had cousins. It was everywhere. I had cousins. I had wild cousins and shit. They was wild. They was selling drugs. They was smoking weed and sniffing coke and doing whatever they was doing. They used to live They used to live two floors above me. I used to sneak up there and shit and just be in their business, be in their world. They would be playing music. They had the record player. You see Coke on the table and weed everything. My cousins, they was cool. They was like, Yo, come in, man. We don't give a fuck. Just don't tell your mother that you was around and shit. You know what I mean? No, I ain't going to say that. I ain't going to say that. I would just be watching and I would see weed on the album covers and you know what I mean? Just motherfuckers running back and forth in the room. You know they in the shit, but they always was playing music.

A lot of the music was R&B, disco. Then the next thing you know, I heard this fucking record, Sugar Hill Gang, and I'm like, the groove was dope. I'm like, holy shit. This is what I want to be. You know what I mean? I'm looking at the whole vibe. I'm like, this is who I am right here.

It's so crazy how it emerged. I mean, it emerged purged.

Yeah, nobody expected that, bro.

Well, it was a totally new thing. There was a lot of resistance. I mean, for people that don't know, those little warning labels when you used to have CDs, that all came from Al Gore's wife.

Get the fuck out of here.

Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, she was a Democrat. She wanted to censor rap music because this was the first time anybody heard like Ice Tea, like that, 6:00 in the morning. Everybody was like, What the fuck is this? That explicit lyrics, they wanted to put a stop to it. These dumbasses, they didn't even understand it sold way more albums because that's what kids were looking for. Where's the fucking... They don't even swear.

Get this shit out of here. Once it got the label on it, it's like, I want it. Exactly.

Once the floodgates got open and kids got turned on to real hardcore hip hop, you couldn't sell the- The regular shit.

The regular shit.

Get out of here with that. There's a few guys who got through with regular shit, but it just didn't last.

No, it definitely didn't last. But like you said, though, everybody wanted the raw shit. And you got to remember at that time, it was a tough time, man. Too much shit was going on. I mean, it was to the point where it's like, in our neighborhood, we had crazy people. If they catch you at night, they'll kill you. They'd be dressed up like a fucking drag or whatever, all this makeup on. I remember one time going to the incinerator room My mom's made me go. She made me go to take out the garbage and shit. I forgot to take it out. And she came home later that day and I was laying down and she fucking smacked me in the head with a broom like, didn't I tell you to take out the fucking garbage? So now I'm going out the incinerator room, walking. It's on the same floor. And I remember when I cut the corner, I've seen a motherfucker sticking his head out, and he had his hair all while. His shit was like green and red and all this. And he had lipstick on all crazy. And His eyes was all fucking bugged out looking, and he looked at me, and I got the garbage pail with me.

And I got the garbage pair with me, and it's like, once I seen him, I just dropped the shit and ran, Mom, Mom. You know what I mean? Back then, you yell your mother name and shit. You think that that was something cool back then. She's your hero at that time. Came back, the nigga was gone. But I think if he would have caught me in that incinerator door when it was closed, he was going to probably try to run in there and probably try to fucking kill me or something. And that shit was going on back then because the drugs was crazy back then.

That's the big shift is crack. That's also in the '80s.

Before crack, you had that dope, that dope, that dope. So motherfuckers was mixing dope and coke together and getting high and shooting it. Yeah, everything. You know what I mean? It was a serious time back then, man. But that's how far to me music went back, listening to Ladies Night. You know what I mean? I had people on my store that had a candy store right on the same floor, but it wasn't a candy store. They had a bunch of Penny Candy just to make kids feel cool, but really, they were selling Coke in the back. Coke and dope, though. So all this was going on community, man. It was a serious time. It was scary times back then.

But if it's not for those scary times, you don't get the band that Wutang was. That has to emerge from an authentic experience. Absolutely. It has to. Absolutely. That's part of the appeal of it is that everybody knew that. It was part of the appeal. There's never been a genre of music like that that's so connected to the grind and poverty and crime and gh. The whole genre of music, to be authentic, you had to come from that. You couldn't be some rich kid from the suburbs that was talking about some shit you never actually experienced. We wouldn't believe you. Nobody wants to hear it, which is crazy. Right.

That's true. I mean, back then, hip hop was really an expression for the ghetto, the way that out, being that we was living in fucked up situations and nobody had shit, nobody had no fucking jobs like that. It was like, we needed something to keep us cool, keep us in a vibe mode. Back then, gangs were still relevant. We never We might have looked at ourselves as a gang. We might have looked at ourselves as a tribe that, when you're from a neighborhood and you stick to your neighborhood. You know what I mean? And that's why even back then, it was like a lot of times you would beef with people that wasn't from your neighborhood. But just because you wasn't from here. It's like, what the fuck are you doing over here? You don't live over here. Then it creates this animosity thing. And I remember for us being in an area where it was like you go up the block, up the block, stayed up the block, down the block, stay down the block. So for me, I was in the middle. So I leaned more towards up the block. But then we would go down the block just to start trouble.

Then they would come up the block and they would start troubling. Next thing you know before you know, we all fucking with each other. You know what I mean? So that was our way of getting to know each other is to test each other's heart. And whatever may happen was happening back then, though. But the music, believe it or not, the music was keeping a peace. Now, the music was keeping a peace because they would do block parties, right? They would do block parties, and everybody knew all these different DJs was coming from different places and going to play some music and shit. So we knew every time they did that, we knew something was going to happen at the end of the night. It was just mandatory. It was just because people from all over, different neighborhoods would come out and everything would be nice. And next thing you know, you see a motherfucker riding down the street all crazy, trying to hit motherfuckers and swinging a golf club out the window and shit, and somebody mother might have got knocked out. You know what I mean? But the music is still playing. So, yeah, that's the type of shit that, to me, that made It was fun but made it spooky, but it still was fun because it was something to remember.

It was like, go.

It was fun because you survived.

Yeah, definitely. The survival, yeah. But we were young, so we didn't care about whether we lived or died at that time. We didn't give a fuck. It was like, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. That's wild. But the music is what kept things in order for us because we always felt like that was a vessel to being calm. When you come from somewhere that's fucked up, Joe, and there's nothing there, you can't get a job because of your community, your zip code don't allow you to be like, Yo, he's hired. No, it's just too infested over there. So you You become relaxed with that mentality of saying, well, fuck it. I'm going to live off the land. I'm going to sell weed. I'm going to do whatever I think that is going to make me survive. So everything is just survival. When music always kept us calm and you always want to listen to what's the next band played. I grew up on R&B music, like disco and all that fun shit, roller-skating. I knew motherfuckers in the neighborhood that was roller-skating. We would get off of Staten Island sometimes and go to these different parks and jams in the city.

That was fun, too. That was fun times for us.

So was it Risa? Was it initially all nine guys? How did it get formed?

Well, Number one, it was Rizza, his cousin Jizzo, and his other cousin, Old Dirty Bastard, that they were super close. Now, Old Dirty Bastard and Jizza, they were from Brooklyn. Rizza Rizza was from Staten Island. We all Brooklyn babies, too, majority of us in the clan. We all resided in Staten Island, but majority of us grew up in Brooklyn. But anyway, it was those three that were close as shit. So Rizza, back then, Rizza, he had Knowledge of Self, which was being involved with the Nation of Islam, and also Jizza and Old Dirty. They were a part of the nation at that time. So they would go to a lot of rallies. This is a place where everybody go when they build, they're talking about mathematics and all of this. But it was Jizza and Old Dirty who instilled the hip hop into Rizza. Rizza was a DJ back then, but he knew how to rhyme, too. And he knew how to rhyme because of his cousins. So they had this gang called, not a gang, but they had this thing called the All In Together Now crew, which was them three. And they would run around and they would battle different guys from different cities and move around.

So some of us knew what they were about. A lot of us found out later who they were. But when Jizza and O'Dirty came to Staten Island, they came in and to hang out with their cousin. So we started to see them a little bit more and know that, Yo, I heard about your Rhymes. And Dirty, he was just a crazy motherfucker back then. He was crazy. But yeah, they had their own little thing going on. And then next thing you know, Jizz had caught a record deal. He caught a record deal, which was rare back then. If you fucking caught a record deal, that mean that you had to have relationships, you had to know where to go, You had to have some type of connects. So that's what gravitated Rizzo into wanting to do it because he's seen that his cousin was able to crack the code on making a record. So when that happened, it was almost like it magnetized Riza to be like, Yo, I got to make a record now, too. When the next thing you know, they had their movement going on. So us from the outside looking, it was like, Oh, shit.

Yo, we know them. We know they're super passionate about being in a game and doing whatever they're going to do. But we wasn't thinking that far. We just loved the music in general.

Wow. Riza is essentially the mastermind to put all the pieces together and to bring all you killers under one roof.

Absolutely.

Amazing how he saw that. Because, again, that's not something that existed. It's like Eric B and Rock Kim. There was a There's a few... Epmd. There was a few people.

You know your shit, you know your shit.

You're seeing the right people. Gangstar. There was a few people that were together, but it wasn't like you guys.

No, because that was- It was scary.

It was like, God damn, when you guys had a show, I mean, I heard stories. It It was just like you guys would show up like 300 people.

Yeah, that was some neighborhood shit. But yeah, like you said, that was so rare to see a group that come out like that. And it was really a mistake. It wasn't really designed to be that way. But when Rizza had a record situation and they tried to make him be something that he wasn't. Always the case. You know what I mean? He was like, Yo, fuck that. I don't even care about the shit at this level no more. I want to create this now, and I'm bringing in all my guys, and he just put that number together. So believe it or not, I was one of the guys that he called first because we used to hang out. I tell people all the time, Yo, I might have been Rizza was his first big fan. So I seen something in him already. I seen something. I'm like, yo, this guy really... Him and his cousins. And I'm like, yo, these motherfuckers really got talent. Not only the ability to rhyme, but they was clever. I'm talking about clever rimes. And he was mixing it with the knowledge and smart rimes, not these fucking regular Humpty Dumpty lines.

I'm talking about serious rimes. I'm like, damn, you know what I mean? Like, So this is something that I felt like I would want to go chill with them just to be in the mix and be a fly on the wall. Wasn't even thinking about being no fucking rapper. I didn't give a fuck. I just love the music, but I'm watching these motherfuckers, I'm like, something about these motherfuckers that I love. The next thing you know, when Rizzo went out there and he came back to the community, he was like, Yo, I caught a record there. So I I was there. I'm like, Let me see this shit, looking at this shit. What the fuck is? Oh, yeah, I'm looking down here like you said, the what's her name? Fine print? Yeah, the fine print and shit. I'm like, Yo, this motherfucking man, record. Holy shit, yo. Bow, Staten Allen, that's what's up. We up. But his situation didn't work out the way he wanted it to. And that's when he came back and he started to be like, Yo, chef, this is what I'm trying to do.

Well, the dangerous thing for young artists in every industry is when you have potential and you're young, you sign a fucking contract and you don't know what's going on. And then you get locked into these people. And then a lot of times you're getting fucked. And you don't even know you're getting fucked because it's mandatory. You're getting fucked, which is how they make their money. They make money I have fucking young artists who don't know any better. And by the time someone gets to a princess level, he's like, Oh, you owe me? I'm a fucking squigly line. Suck my dick. He performs as a symbol. I mean, that's why he performed as a symbol because they owned him. It's crazy. You take the most talented people in the world, and they get owned by people who provide no value, especially today. Today, it's even crazy, right? Because there is no record sales anymore. It's all gone.

Sober, baby. It's all gone.

For a young artist, it's so important that they stay independent as long as they can. Just like you're hanging off a bridge. Hang on. Yeah, that's what they do. Hang on and keep grinding. Don't sell it. Don't sign. If you sign, you're going to be fighting that shit 10 years from now. You're going to be in court 10 years from now. Yeah, you're right. Somebody's going to be getting not just 50%, but some fucking... Bill Burr was explaining this about his first comedy CD, that he got a 60/40 deal. He's like, Oh, great. 60/40 40. But it's not really 60/40 because he has to pay for all the distribution, all the printing of the CDs. Everything came out of his money. Let me ask you a question.

Let me ask you a question. Put yourself in an artist situation, Okay. You have talent, right? You have talent. Here it is. I got everything you want. You're going to have to make some sacrifices. For sure. Because you know that you may feel like, I got talent, but I don't have to read Resources. Right. Those resources come and tell you, Yo, look, I'll give you a shot. I'm going to give you a shot, but either you take this shot or you stay in the hood. What are you going to do?

You're going to take the shot. You're going to take the shot. You're going to take the shot. And I agree with everybody who takes that shot. I'm just letting them know. I'm just letting them know. You're getting fucked.

You're getting fucked. But see, it's the sacrifice that I'm trying to explain to you that every artist takes. They take that sacrifice because at the end of the day, you have to start from somewhere. So even when labels are being them, in my mind, I'm saying, yo, I get a chance to have a job, Joe. Niggas ain't never had no fucking in their life. And now we get a chance to do something that you could maybe think that you could change the world with and love. It's like you're going to go for it. So for us back then, being kids, we didn't give a fuck. We didn't care about signing. Yo, I'll sign Because what the fuck I got to lose? I haven't been through everything. I haven't been over here. I haven't been kicked out of everywhere. Fuck it. I just want to be heard. So a lot of time, the protocol is just to be heard. Yeah. To be heard, to be able to say, Yo, something happened. I don't give a fuck. A lot of artists got robbed. A lot. A lot of artists, and especially our OGs that did it before us.

You know what I mean? Sugar Hill Banks, all these different guys. They all have been manipulated to do what they had to do. But it almost gave them power, too, because they became famous. They became big. They became legendary.

There's an argument for that, but I think it should be more fair. Oh, listen, I'm with you. I'm with you on that.

But we're just talking about the sacrifice.

What you got to do. You have to do it.

Sacrifices everything.

If you're a young kid and that's step one, and now you're on the runway, okay, you got to take it. You got to take it. But It just should be more fair.

Oh, I agree. It shouldn't lock people in for life. And I'm sure later on, things worked out. And now that you proved yourself- Once they become undeniable. It's like I tell a motherfucker this. I'm like, Yo, imagine you were a hustler, Right? And you run into the Connect, and the Connect say, Yo, you're talking like you know how to move shit. I'm going to give you 50 pounds of marijuana back then. You know what I mean? Now, you may feel like at the end of the day, you can handle it. But a motherfucker tell you, Joe, I'm giving you these fucking 50 pounds. I need my money back today at this time. You could either take the 50 because you're so fucking confident or take one and say, Yo, I'd rather take my time. You know what I mean? I don't want to be in debt with you. What are you going to do?

You got to take the 50.

Oh, you? Oh, yeah. He wants to fucking get his head fucking chopped, though.

You got to take the 50. You got to know people and you got to bring everybody in and you got to share the money.

You got to know people.

You got to share the money. You got to know people. Listen, there's a lot more money.

You ain't competent in knowing what the fuck you need to know. I advise you don't take them.

You shouldn't be having that conversation if you don't know anybody. But if you know some people and you're generous, that's the thing. You got to make it worth these people's while. You got to say, Listen, we're all going to get something out of this.

Now look, that philosophy that you said is what we took on. Yes. We took that on. We said, You know what? At the end of the day, we'll take this little bit of money, but we're going to be willing to sell ourselves to get to this level because we know what we believe in. See, it all starts from what you believe. Yes. If you don't have the belief in yourself to make it happen, you're fucked.

It's a rising rides lifts all boats thing, too. And with Wutang clan, that was for sure a big thing because anybody that was associated with Wutang clan was automatically respected. Automatically, people wanted to listen. Automatically. So that just lifts everybody. But it's hard for people to see that. Everybody thinks about themselves, especially when you're struggling. When you're struggling, then you're scared. When scared, money doesn't make money. Don't make money. That's what it is. Everybody gets paranoid. No, that's when you bond together. That's when you have to find real people and stick together.

You said the key word. We got to sell that 50. You got to know your value.

We got to sell that 50. Talk to Carlos. Go down to the bodega. Let's make a deal, man. We got to make some deals.

We got 10 hours. I guess that's what Rizzo did, is that he danced with the devil for the right reason. We took some scars. We got hit.

It was a different world back then, too, in terms of the industry, because today, all you need is a social media account, Spotify, SoundCloud. You can blow up. You can blow up today. Back then, you needed the radio. You could sell mixtapes, but it's hard. You had to be some undeniable talent. We always played the video of Biggie when he was 17 on the street. Remember that video?

When he was in his neighborhood.

That's undeniable talent. That's the talent. If he stays alive, you can't stop that train. Absolutely. That train is running everything over. You know what I mean? There was guys like that back then. But, man, to get out there and get your name out there, you had to dance. You had to dance with that devil.

You had to work.

And that business was so dirty back then. It still is, but real dirty back then in the record selling days.

Yeah, of course. But that's what made us learn is that we had to go through those growing pains. We had to get jerk to learn how to say, that was a lesson. So everything is a lesson at the end of the day. It's like if you're willing to sacrifice yourself and your time to learn something, I would always say, go for it. Yes. Go for it.

Definitely. Go for it. It's so much better than not going for it.

Yeah, because then you're going to be sitting in the same situation and you're going to realize at the end of the day, damn, I should have took that opportunity. Really. Some people are scared of opportunities when they come. And it's like, if a person offer you an opportunity, nine times out of ten, it may not work for you the way you want it to work, but it may be an opportunity to help you. It's all about you trying to help yourself and get out there. It's like, what? Watch your scarface. And the nigga told him, he said, Yo, give you five grand. And if you fuck this up, Chico, scarface I always looked at him and said, Man, the fuck is you talking about? We built for this shit, man. You know when he lost, he lost his man in the mix. But he was able to prove to himself that I could do it. That's how I look at rap. It's like, yo, I don't give a fuck. We'll take this little bit of money, but we're going to prove to you all later on that we know what the fuck we doing.

And for young people listening to this, every chance you take where you fail, that's That's a lesson learned. That's a lesson, baby. And you just keep taking chances. Keep going. Pick yourself back up, figure out where you fucked up, and learn from that. Now you're better. That's right. Now you have more experience coming into this next thing. Just keep going. Just keep going. Just keep on, especially as artists. It's just like so many artists, they don't hit until they do. And then when they do, it's like, oh, and then people want to go back in their past stuff. Like, oh, this guy had fucking three albums before this.

Yeah. Think about it. Think about all our favorite artists out there. You know, M&M. M&m been trying to fucking get on. Rock Him, Slick Reg, all these guys. So many. They went through a lot to get on. You know what I mean? Biz Markey. Nobody wanted to fuck with Biz at first, but he finally figured the code out and was like, Yo, this is what I'm going to do. He started rocking shows in different communities. And next thing you know, people start hearing about them and you're like, Oh, shit. Yo, this guy is dope. But it's that sacrifice, man. I tell people all the time.

Got to sacrifice. It's time put in. Time put in, energy, effort, determination. You got to have some talent. Yeah, you got to have some talent. Talent is just God just gives you something or doesn't. Some people just got it. Some people, it's also like artistic families like Nas. He grew up in this intellectual, artistic family, and that's why his rimes are so good.

Yeah, his pops, man. His pops is a musician.

Yeah. Good friend of mine. Like Rewind? Yeah. That's like one of the greatest songs of any genre anybody's ever written. It's a genius song.

So crazy. I was listening to that shit yesterday. The Bullet Goes Back in the gun. Yeah.

A genius song. The whole song backwards.

You fuck with lyrics hard.

I love Nas, especially for lyrics. His lyrics are incredible. They were so good. So they were so good. Dope. And unusual like that. Just siding. I mean, the first guy to make a rap backwards and make it work perfectly. Did you ever listen to any of the shit where the Brand New Hevies got together with a bunch of rappers?

The Brand New Hevies. I know the name, but I'm trying to think of the music.

The Brand New Hevies is like a jazz band. They did a collaboration with Gangstar, Cool G Rap. Oh, yeah. A bunch of guys. Of course, yeah. Some of my favorite shit of all time.

Yeah, they was more musical, though. Like you said, they was more musical.

Have you ever heard Cool G Rap's Death Threat? Oh, my God. Jamie, play that.

You're schooling me this shit.

Play that. Find that. We got to put on the headphones for this. This is in my... Along with a bunch of Wutang. Let me hear this shit. This is in my Spotify playlist. This is Cool G-Rapp and I want to say 92. Yeah, 92. Listen this.

Something that I'm a flake, but I'm no fake nigger because I take a bitch, make them a Witcher burn I never heard this shit before.

How good is this?

One of my favorites right there.

Turn this, Chips with Small Dicks.

Nice. So good. Nice. So good. So this was on the Brand New Hebbies album? Yes.

The Brand New Hebbies did one with Gangstar. They did a bunch of different artists. Nice. Nice.

What year was this?

92. Phenomenal.

Yeah, so it was the beginning. Yeah.

I was on a road trip. I was doing a gig in Connecticut with a buddy of mine who was a comedian, and he turned me on this. You got to listen to this shit. I was like, Oh, my God. And then I I had a CD and I lost it and I couldn't find it forever. Then someone brought it up a few years back, six or seven years back, and I was like, You got to be able to find it. That's the beautiful thing about today with YouTube and so many of these platforms, people upload shit that you totally forgot about.

You forgot about it.

Tim Dogg. People forgot about Tim. Fuck Compton. Remember that?

Yeah, he was a Wild Cat, but he was around. He was good, though. He was good. He was wilding back then. Great It's shit, man. Yeah, he was wiling back then.

But Coolgie rapp, that to me was like, that defined road gigs for me in the 1990s when we were drive. That was when Cockblocking came out. I remember that? You remember that?

The Holy shit.

Oh, my God. That song is amazing.

Yeah, man. Damn. So you really pay attention to this fucking hip hop shit like that.

Yeah, hip hop was a big part of my childhood or my young adulthood. When I was driving around a lot doing comedy gigs, a lot of Getto Boys. I was a huge Getto Boys fan.

Yeah, me too.

I was playing the other day in the green room. I was playing Fuck a War for these young kids. I was like, Listen, this is a song from the 1980s about the Iraq War. This is about George Bush in the late 1980s, and it applies today. You remember Fuck a War?

Fuck a War. No. Come on.

Headphones are coming back up.

Let's go. He's fucking schooling me on shit.

I talked to Willy D. Willy D told me he wrote this in 40 minutes. Wow. Yeah, just angry. Wrote this song in 40 minutes. And this is Getto Boys in their Prime. Hello, can I speak with Bushwick?

You know that album?

Bushwick Bill.

That was my guy right there, man.

This is Bushwick, motherfucking Bill.

I'm calling you to inform me that you've been drafted into the United States military. United States once we- 91.

91. Excuse me, sir. This way.

Yeah, All right, what's up?

Look at that big phone he's got.

Yeah, I had one of those before, too. I don't give a fuck about you and all that bullshit you're stressing. Fuck a war. To explain how to kick a chin in something like this. Motherfucker war, that's how I feel. Sending them niggas to their dead as to get killed, 'cause two suckers can't agree on something. Thousand motherfuckers died for nothing. You can't pay me to join an army camp or any other motherfucking military brand. Of this shit, that goddamn state, to that bitch, America, be a soldier at four. They're putting niggas on the front line, but when it comes to getting their head, they put us way behind. I ain't getting

my God. What the fuck do I know about a grenade? All I know is the cops in my twerking. And what did that pin get stuff? Yeah. Nwa chamber. He was in the NWA chamber right there.

That shit was good.

They was publicating me thinking.

That applies today. We were all talking about what's going on right now with Gaza and Palestine, Iran. I was like, Listen to this.

See, this is why we love hip hop so much is because it was educational, too. It was giving us jewels. It was talking about things that were going on in the world, and that became the television For us, the music, the music.

Became the news, too. You need to know what was actually going on. Fuck a War tells you what's really going on.

What's going on. When I think about those Compton Boys, those NWA cats and all of that that was expressing themselves, it was like, that's what we all were facing and living amongst. Like I said, I never heard that song before. So I could tell that was made around the time when NWA was doing anything and you're hearing about all these riots and shit going on and things happening. Us living all the way on the other side of the world. It's like, what the fuck was that? But you heard it in a song and you knew it was real. You respected it. To me, those perspectives in music were important for us because we were learning as we were getting older about society. You don't think about society when you pour in in living in fucked up positions. You just think about survival. You see what I'm saying? Survival is the only thing on your mind. You're dealing with things that's in front of you that at the end of the day, you're like, damn, the fuck was that that just happened? What was this shit? But then when you heard it in rap and motherfuckers like these was talking about and all that, it's like now you was like, oh, okay, I see what the fuck is going on.

It's not just here. It's all over. It's in everywhere, every ghetto or whatever the case may be. That's what was happening. So I never heard that before, though. You just put me on some real shit. And that's one of my favorite groups right there. I love the Gettle Boys. I love the Gettle Boys. Gettle Boys is real shit right there.

The 1990s Gettle Boys era.

Crazy.

I remember the day I found out about NWA. I was teaching Taekwondo in Revere, Massachusetts, and I was at the gym riding on the stair climber. And I had just picked this cassette, and I was like, NWA, I keep hearing about this. Fuck the police was the first song I listened to. I remember I was on the stair climb and going, This is wild.

You see what I'm saying? You see what I'm saying? This is wild.

You're hearing people talk about the police. They're getting harassed. Asked by the police in a way you never heard before.

I heard them say, yeah, exactly.

Fuck the police coming straight from the underground. I was like, wow.

Coming straight from the fucking underground.

It was a totally different music. It was like they were rapping and no one was listening. It was like they were rapping for themselves, right? Yeah. They didn't give a fuck who was listening. They were rapping. They were doing it for their friends, but they were doing it to the whole world. The whole world was like, whoa. Hundred miles in running. The whole world was like, whoa.

This is crazy. Look, you had them, you had Public enemy. Oh, yeah. All of them type of guys were giving us information that was relatable in our community that they became a voice.

Krs1?

Krs1 the teacher.

That's the sound of the police.

All that shit right there to me was knowledgeable rap hip hop. I'm not even going to call it fucking rap hip hop.

Information Information. Especially, KRS1 and Public enemy. They were saying something. But it wasn't contrived.

Exactly.

It wasn't like, you see people say shit today, you just do that for claps. They were saying shit to let people know about some information that you're not aware of, and this is why you're getting fucked. This is why we're all getting fucked.

Absolutely. Come on. Come on. Even when fucking Spike Lee may do Do The Right thing. Yes. One of my favorite movies right there. That's a classic right there. Classic.

Classic. Classic. Classic.

Wow. Classic. But like you said, we were getting information. You got to remember, at the end of the day, a lot of people that coming out of the hood and just being like, I know you, you come from the hood. While I was born in Newark. Yeah, he was born in Newark. Shout out to Newark. So you've seen it.

I wouldn't exact come from the hood because I went to high school in the suburbs. I I lived in Newark. I was telling you, I lived in Newark when I was 23 for about six or seven months. And I told you my next door neighbor, he was selling dope and the police raided his house while I was there. They battering, rammed his door and everything. He had a nice Audi. I looked at I was like, How does this dude have a nice car? He was selling dope. He was selling dope, and they got him.

But he was around it, though. So he was able to...

Well, that was also the time when I was the most into hip hop, too. That was 1991. '91, I guess. 1991. That was a wild era because that's when hip hop was just exploding. Yeah, you're right. Exploding.

Yeah, I would say definitely '91. You had Naughty by Nature. Oh, yeah. They had emerged on the scene, like you said, Rock Kim in Big Daddy Canes.

Oh, yeah.

Easy Ees and Ice Cube.

To this day, I go to work. It's one of my favorite workout songs. What? Which one? Big Daddy King, I go to work. That's That's what I'm talking about. I'm not even talking about icons right there. Oh, my God. I got to work. He was so smooth and so fast, too. Big Daddy Cane had a very particular style. It was energetic. You heard his style. It was like your blood started pumping It started getting moving.

And see, those are the type of guys that paid the way for us to be so outspoken on a mic. When I sit here and when I think about the clan, the Wu, on how we formed, we formed Vultron, each one of us had a superpower that related back to those guys. All these guys that we're talking about today, they It was the light bulb in the house. You screw that shit on. This is what I see right now. I see Slick Rek, I see Rock Kim. I see Cube, I see fucking all these guys that paid the way for us. So the clan at that time, we were so inclined on knowing about all these guys, knowing a majority of them. We kept a piece of them in us that helped us become who we are. I tell motherfuckers all the time. I say, Yo, let me tell you something. When we came out, Naughty by Nature was the shit. They was fucking shit up on the East Coast side of things. And at that time, you had them, you had EPMD, you had Queen Latifah, Roxan Shantay, all these artists back then were blowing up.

Ll, camp front on LL, LL.

Ll was that guy.

Ll was huge. Coolgie rap, one of my favorites. I know that's one of your favorites. The Fat Boys, all these guys were just- That's right, Fat Boys. These guys was giving us so much food for thought that we knew that if we didn't come on that level, we wasn't built to be in a game at that time.

Well, there was so much high quality.

High quality, that's the word.

The level was very high. The lyrics were so good. You would hear lyrics and just go, oh.

Oh, shit. Yeah.

That was the That was the thing. That was the thing about hip hop. Listen to the lyrics, I love that. I love lyrics. Lyrics is everything. That's right. Lyrics is everything. That's what I wanted. That was the style back then. It was like the most clever guy, the most clever lyrics. It was so important. There's so many guys that just had... Everybody was battling. So it was like more and more cleverness and more and more intricacies and more and more twists of what they were saying. It was just a vibrant art form, man. How many people cheated on their significant other because of OPP? How many? You know what OPP? People were cheering. It was like a license to fuck. People were cheering. Exactly. Hip hop had so much influence on the culture, and it emerged out of nowhere. Out of nowhere, right. That's what's so crazy. Ten years ago, it doesn't exist. Boom. I mean, even rock and roll, you had the '50s, it starts to emerge, then the '60s really takes It had been around for a while. To have something like hip hop just explode and make a lot of other things look lame, especially for young kids.

Because when you hear guys like you and Ghostface and Method Man and you're dealing with real dudes who are talking about real shit, and everybody else just look lame.

That was stupid, man.

It was like they didn't even swear. It was like, you guys were wild. It was fun and it was clever. I think Riza did a genius thing by naming it Wutang clan because it connected it to this kung fu mindset.

And I know that you're big on- I know you're big on kung fu shit because I'm coming through your shrine and shit. He got all fucking Shogun warriors.

Oh, a real Samurai outfit out there.

But you know what's so crazy? I tell people is when Riza, when they was on their Wutang shit, we wasn't on that. I grew up watching more like Scarface and Mafia movies, Once Upon a Time in America. Oh, yeah. One of my favorite movies.

It's a great one. People forget about Once Upon a Time in America.

It's my fucking movie right there. That's my movie. So we were living in this... We were living around a lot of hustlers. A lot of drugs was being sold in my community at that time. When Rizad came with the whole Wu-Tang philosophy, it was almost like, yeah, we love karate flicks. We were watching, you know about the karate flicks, three o'clock, three o'clock. We come over in school, them shit's on, channel 5, all of that shit. But if you notice and you look at those karate movies, it was about a place that was filled with a lot of crime and aggressive people that were doing things that bothered other people. And you either had to protect your people or you had to make a name for yourself. Now, when you think about Wu-Tang, I'm going to just give you a quick lesson on what Wu-Tang was. Wu-tang was a school that was in Shaolin. This particular school, these niggas was crazy. They was fucked up. They got kicked the fuck out of Shaolin. Really? They got kicked out. Yo, you all bogged out. You all were wiling, you all. But these guys were very good, but they just couldn't sit in Shaolin because they had a different way of looking at shit and doing shit.

So when Risa came with the whole philosophy of it, it's this movie that's called Shaolin versus Wu-Tang, right? Check it out whenever you get a chance. So whatever was going on in that movie, he made a reality of it because really, at the end of the day, that's how we were living back in Staten Island. So we wind up changing the name and calling it Shaolin because we were the forgotten Barro. When you think about Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Manhattan, we don't really talk too much about fucking Staten Island. That bothered us. So we felt rebellious. Like, yo, you come out here, you ain't from here. You better know somebody. You're not fucking coming in the projects thinking you're going to fucking act like you're going over to your friends. I remember we used to see UFOs come through. We call them UFOs, unidentified flying objects. The fuck he doing it? Yo, follow him. We came to You know what I mean? Because we had so much to prove, but it was the same thing that was going on in the karate flicks. Like, you go to a new name. Who is this guy? Either he's coming to play you, he's coming to play you, or you're going to play him.

This is all the shit that's going on in the karate movies. The Brotherhood. Yo, oh, shit. My brother got hurt. What happened? Oh, hold up. Let's go. We got to go get back to that. We got to go figure that out. All this shit that Rizzo was thinking about at that time was a reality check for us in Staten Island. So even when he came with the name, it was almost like, yo, wow, that shit is interesting. Wutan clan, yo. And back then, he was hanging in Ghost's community, which was Stapleton. So Stapleton was a place that was maybe like 10, 15 miles away from Park Hill, where I'm from. I'm from the hill. Up there, they were selling drugs and getting crazy with it and Jamaicans and Westernians and Guyanais, and It was a melting pot. It was a melting pot of different nationalities of motherfuckers. You had the Spanish motherfuckers over here selling dope. You know what I mean? You had the white boys over here fucking doing what they doing. All these things was going on. But in Ableton, it was nothing but criminals and motherfuckers that want to fight and rob and steal.

Rizzo was hanging out there a lot. So they came up with this whole Wu-Tang mentality thing that they brought up the block to us. So when Risa came with it, it was like, oh, shit, we like that. That's dope. We see the vision of that. But it was never for us to look at it at any given time like, you're trying to portray us as some fucking ninjas or some shit. A lot of times people thought, your niggas no karate in all this shit? I don't know fucking karate, motherfucker. We don't do that. But we grew up our Our older brothers and sisters, they grew up on it. That was some early '70s shit right there. So back then, you might have had a cousin that was a martial artist. He knew the arts and shit. You looked up to him like, this motherfucker's L right here. He know the arts and shit. He know how to fight. You know your motherfucker was being back in a building with two dope them in pinches and shit. You know what I mean? Beating him with fucking laundromat hoses and shit and grabbing him and hanging them on shit.

And Back then, that was dope to see your cousins and all of them do it. But Rizzo, when he came with this philosophy, it fucked us all up. But we agreed with it right away because Wu-Tang, to them, was always something like an expression. So if you're drinking, this is Wu-Tang. You're drinking, you're over here, this is some Wu-Tang shit or whatever, because he was trying to say that we were just like them in the flicks.

It was crazy. Want to hear something crazy? Whenever I kill an elk, I go bow hunting every year. Whenever I kill elk, when I text my friend Kam, I text Wu-Tang. Whenever I kill something, I'll show you. Oh, my God.

I'll show you that that's true. I've seen some of the pictures of that.

I know, but I want to show you that that's true. I'm not making this up. It goes back years. It goes back years. This is like our tradition. Whenever I kill an elk, I'm going to find this. I'm going to find the last time I said Wutang. I text them every day, so it's going to take a second to get back into some pictures. But whenever I get one, I say Wutang, and then I send him a picture. Oh, shit.

It's crazy.

It's going to take a while because I do scroll. But this is important to show you. This is real. Come on, motherfucker. Go back and search Wutang, and it'll show you. Oh, it'll show you? Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm going to show you that. Oh, look at Jamie. Under Cam Haynes or just Wutang? Then when you find Cam Haynes, it'll show you. Oh, look at Jamie. Tell me how to do it. Here we go. See all. Here it is. Right there. Wutang.

Holy shit.

And then the elk is down.

Wow.

That was from October. But I go back five years of doing that. Every time I shoot an elk, I text Wu-Tang.

When you started hunting since you came out here?

No, I started hunting in 2012. I shot that deer, that deer, that head that's right there. That was the first animal I hunted. And then I was like, okay, that's what I'm doing. It was either for me, it was that or become a vegetarian. I watched too many of those PETA films, those animal factory farming films and torture films. I was like, fuck this. Like, either I'm going to be a vegan or I'm going to learn how to hunt. And my friend Steve Rinella took me hunting. I shot that deer. I'm like, All right, that's what I do now. And I've been doing it ever since. So I've been hunting for twelve years.

Twelve years? Yeah. So you consider yourself a marksman then?

Well, it's like I'm not really good compared to real marksman. That's like saying you're a black belt when you're not really a black belt. I go through the courses. Yeah. How good are you? I mean, I'm good for regular people. If you didn't know, you would think I'm really good. But for people that are really good? No, I'm not nearly at their level. But there's professional archers that are super accurate out to 100 yards. They could shoot a softball-sized group at 100 yards consistently.

I got a couple of homeboys who can shoot like that, though.

It's a lot of discipline. A lot of discipline.

Yeah, but they come from... They live on this side of town, too.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of bow hunting in Texas. A lot of bow hunting in Texas. It's fun.

I like it. I got to get out there one day, man. I got to...

I told you, We were talking before the show. You want to learn. I could put you on some people. It'll 100 % teach you how to do it because you're fairly close. That's an easy thing to do. We could hook it up. You would enjoy it. It's also a nice discipline to clear your mind. You set a target up in the backyard and just shoot the target. It just clears your mind because you have to really concentrate on it. And while you're doing it, you don't think about nothing else. For a guy like you, busy, so much shit going on. It's good to have a thing like that.

It's like a sport to me. It's like something to learn and master. That's important.

But it's one of those things like shooting a free throw. At that moment, you can't think of anything else other than what you're doing. If other shit gets in your head, it's like you don't have any room You got to focus. You got to push it all out and just think. And that stuff cleans your mind. It's like it flushes your mind out.

That's what it's all about at the end of the day, man. Just get a peace of mind and vibe to something different, though.

I always say that for artists, too, you should find some other thing you like to do just to give you a little break mentally from whatever you're trying to do. Exactly. You could get too close to something and lose sight of the big picture if you're all wrapped up in Because you're so stuck into one. Sometimes you need something else that you also enjoy outside of it, and then you can look at what you do. Okay, what am I doing?Different.Exactly. Maybe I should put a new wrinkle in this. Maybe I should take a new turn, mix it up.

That's important, man.

You know what's another cool thing about today is that it used to be thought at one point in time, I think it was like the early 2000s, that rap had... That hip hop had a shelf life and that there wouldn't be classics. You know what I mean? The Rolling Stones were still touring. They were 58 years old back then. Like, this is crazy. The Rolling Stones are back on the road. But that was a new thing. It was like old rock and roll guys out touring was a new thing. But with hip hop artists, if you weren't in now, if you weren't new now, people weren't in to see you.

When I see guys like LL and Ken and them perform and Slick Rick and Ice Cube, it gives me more leverage and more strength to want to do it because I see some of my legends still doing it today. But yeah, man, like you said, just to see a lot of guys like the Rolling Stones and Mick Jagga and them still performing. It's like, why not?

Why not? Why not?

Why do I give up on it?

But with hip hop, it wasn't really a thing for a long time. No. Older hip hop.

You didn't think that it would last. You know what I mean? So you felt like you would get a five-year run. They say any artist that was coming out back in the '90s, they was already putting a cap on how long or how far they felt you was going to go. So Even for us, we was like, Yo, hey, we do this shit for three or four years. We good. Yo, we'll be cool with that. So they always put us in a... What's the word I want to say? A box? Put us in a box to make us feel like at the end of the day, this shit is going to be here for a minute, then it's over. But seeing guys still doing it, I don't give a fuck. I listen to Billy Joe. I'm a Billy Joe fan. That's my fucking guy right there. That's hilarious. I know people would be like, get the fuck out of here.

That's hilarious. I love his old shit. Until he had that supermodel wife, then everything got real soft. You got too much good pussy. You fell in love. Too much good pussy. He got Supermodel pussy, and it's like, Uptown girl, she's been living in her Uptown world. Before that, you go back to his other shit, Owen the Good Die Young. Oh, that's a great jam. He's got some great stuff, man. Seans from an Italian restaurant. That's a great song, man. Captain Jack. Oh, Captain Jack's a great song. Billy Joe, man. But when he got older, it just became, Hey, he was changing as a human.

He in New York, too, right? Yeah. New York, it to the heart right there, right?

That guy sold out Master Square Garden like 300 times.

You see what I'm saying? Still going.

Crazy.

Still going. Yeah, still going. Those are heroes. Those are guys that we look up to that they still doing anything, man.

Yeah. It's just beautiful that hip hop is like that now because I feel like in the 2000s, it was more overseas was showing you guys love. Yeah. Like a lot of Europe. A lot of my friends that were maybe bigger in the '90s, they had to go over to Europe. To come check out hip hop.

Yeah. And I tell people all the time, being from the States, being where we from, I think they appreciate it more because they never really got a chance to grasp it as much as we did. So they come out more. Right now, today-They're more enthusiastic. They love it more. They can't believe it. But for me, I think I love performing a lot more when I go out there because they come out and they never, ever make you feel like they don't appreciate you. You know what I mean? Even to this day, it's like the clan still goes out there and makes a ton of cash. We see a lot of people, and we see young generations of kids now, too. It's like, you look in the crowd, you're like, Fuck, how old is that fucking kid? We just put him on stage, and he knew the fucking words. He might have been 17, 16 years old. He wasn't even fucking born.

Well, there's classic hip hop now. You know what I'm saying? When I was a kid, there was classic rock. You listen to Led Zeppelin, it was classic rock. Now there's classic hip hop. Wow. Which is amazing. You're right. Well, it just shows that the culture has completely accepted it as an art form. And so now young kids that get into hip hop, maybe one of their friends will be like, Hey, you ever heard of this? And then they turn them on the new stuff. Exactly. And they're like, Wow. Yeah, this is 1992.

That shit. And I think that that's how we were. We always were infatuated with the music before our time. I'm like how you just said, listening to Sugar Hill Gang. I actually had them in one of my videos before. Really? Wow. I bought them to my hood, too. So you know how that felt for me?

Oh, wow.

To have Sugar Hill Gang come out to my community. That's amazing. That was dope, though, right there, man. But yeah, man, that's why I always feel like, yo, I tell people all the time, you have to respect the people that did it before you, man, because they gave you something to dream about, to be able to instill in yourself. If you don't have that, then you're not moving the way you're supposed to be moving. I remember an old man would tell us, If you don't know where you came from, you'll never know where you're going. So having that history, that history History is an experience that sticks with you forever. You have to have that. Don't try to front on that. I think a lot of times people, they look at hip hop and they think certain things is hip hop. It's like history of hip hop is something that you got to know, man. You got to know it. You got to know it. You got to know it.

You should know it like the history of the United States. Exactly. It's something if you're an artist, that's what lit the fire. Somebody had to light the fire. And if these young guys don't know, Hey, this shit didn't even exist in 1979. It didn't even exist. That's not even long ago. And then all of a sudden, now it's everywhere. What happened? Somebody lit the fire. And if they didn't light that fire, you wouldn't have it. You wouldn't have the embers. You wouldn't have this desire to try this thing.

Exactly. Now, look what it's doing. Look what it did. It's like, Yo, one of the biggest genres of music is like... And there's a lot of times people take shots at it. Like, Y'all ain't talking negative. Y'all ain't talking this. They're not talking that. My thing to that is always like, it's no different from going to see a scary movie.

Exactly.

Jason. Exactly. This motherfuckers killing motherfuckers in the woods. I hated Kim. You know what I mean? Based on that. Heat is one of my favorite movies.

Great fucking movie. I love Heat.

De Nero.

But why is it okay to do that in a movie, but it's not okay to do that in a song? Right.

I don't understand it. It's hypocritical. It's hypocritical. It is.

It's hypocritical because they say it encourages violence. And that's the same thing they'll say about video games. Doesn't in everybody. So what's going on, really? What's going on, really, is you have a bunch of disenfranchized people that don't have any hope. And if they are around a lot of violence, maybe something will get them excited about violence. If they're not disenfranchized and they have hope, they're not inclined towards violence. It's a societal problem. It has nothing to do with the art itself. The art itself is representative of real experiences. So if you're telling people that they can't express themselves about real experiences, you're just going like this. I'm not listening. That's all you're doing.

That's how you're feeling at the end of the day.

This is these people's lived expression, which is why Wu-Tang was so good. The reason why it was so good is because it was real. No one was questioning the authenticity of anybody that was in the Wutang clan. So it's like the message that you guys were putting out, the way you were putting things out, like Wutang clan ain't nothing to fuck with. That is It was like from you to the world. And if someone doesn't like that, you don't have to listen. Exactly. You don't have to listen. But if you slap a warning sticker on it, you're just going to sell more albums.

You're going to listen to it anyway. You're going to get caught up in it anyway. Yeah, it's like, look, prime example. When we made the record Cream, right? Cream was a record that didn't have nothing to do with anything but the realness of what we were looking at. It wasn't really a song to rap to or have fun with. It was a reality. It was a picture we was trying to paint.

Cash rules everything around me.

Cash rules around me, not me. I never fucking rule you but around me. And a friend from the neighborhood, he actually came up with that acronym. But I tell people all the time, my cousin, I had a cousin from Brooklyn that he used to come to Staten Island and he sell drugs for us. And he came up with that word cream because he was like, Yo, long as I make my cream, I'm good. I'm like, What the fuck is cream? You know what I mean? He's like, Yo, cream. You ever see Tom and Jerry, the movie? And he make those big fucking sandwiches and all of that, and he splash all that cream on it. And I'm like, oh, the Tom and Jerry, the sandwiches, right? When he made the big sandwich, stuff them in your mouth and all. No, real shit. So the cream that was flashing all all over the place, he was looking at that as that's his money. Like, I just want my cream. I just want my cream. You know what I mean? So we're like, Yeah, you're going to get your cream. You sit up in a fucking spot all day.

You're going to make your cream. You're going to get it.

So who came up with the acronym?

A good friend of ours from the neighborhood. His name is Raid, right? And him and Method, man, they was real close, like brothers. So when we was in the studio right into it, he was there, and he just sat back and he just came up with cash rules, everything around me. And him and Meth, they put it together. And next thing you know, that was a hook. At that time, for me, I was still writing a lot of stories. So believe it or not, I wrote two verses for Cream. I didn't write. My rhyme never started off as I grew up on the crime side. I was writing about drug dealers in the neighborhood. Like, I know this kid by the name of Jegante. Jegante, a Teflon Dawn, what The Diamante. The Diamante's back in the days was like the five Siri Benz as for us back then. And a good friend of mine was like, Oh, that rhyme is cool. My thing is high. Why you don't like the rhyme? Everybody else like it. He was like, It's cool. I like it. So he made me go back and change it. And when I changed it, I started to think before I wrote it.

I'm like, damn. He said, We need to run about shit that's something that we could relate to that we're dealing with around what the fuck we wake up to every day. And that's when I came with, I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side.

So he just told you harder?

Yeah, he just told me to think harder. Harder. Yeah. He said, Yo, chef, you could be a little bit more creative.

Well, Cream is crazy because it became viral. Saying dollar, dollar bills, you all became viral.

But you know where I come from, the dollar-dollar bill, you all. Dollar Bill, Y'all. Dollar, dollar, dollar, Tee La Rock.

That's what he's doing.

Oh, wow. You remember that record? Yeah. Money. It takes money. Whatever he was saying back then. I haven't heard that before. That was a serious record right there. Yeah, that's an old school record right there. Fly shit, though. But yeah, Meff and them, Meff and my man Rade, they sat down and they came up with cash flow, everything around me. It was a perfect symbol of what we were trying to express that we were always trying to get money, but we were dealing with certain things in our community that we were trying to get passed first to try to make some money. It was a sacrifice. It was like, you do this shit, you might be able to get out of it alive or you might not. So that record wind up blowing up so big. It wind up being one of our biggest records, and it didn't have nothing to do with To me, it didn't feel hip hop. It just felt like real realization. Like, real shit is we need to start listening. How you just played the Gettlesboy shit. You know what I mean? You're trying to give off a message A message.

And that's what I think that people love about Wu-Tang, is that we give out messages. We give out... We like an emotional roller coaster group. We can give you the Wu-Tang clan ain't nothing to fuck with. And then we I can give you the tears where it's like, oh, shit.

Yeah.

The fuck, he's right. You know what I mean? We got to be careful. We got to look at things for real. So all I had a lot to do with being around smart guys. You know what I mean, the smartness allowed us to write the way we wanted to write. It's contagious. It was contagious back then.

That's what I'm saying about really good lyrics and high quality rap. It's contagious. Yeah. Because then everybody else's shit has to be tight, too.

Yeah. And you know, when you're coming with a group of guys that, yo, he kill it, you better come in. You have to come in and say some shit that makes sense. I give a lot of credit to our first record, Protect Your neck, and I know that's one of your favorite shit. When Inspector Dex said, I smoke on a mic like smoking Joe Frazier, the Hellraiser. Raising hell with the flavor? Yeah. That right there opened up something with all of us. I always tell Deck, I'm like, Yo, Deck, you are like a Scottie Pippen. You always going to hit if you get the ball in your hand. And he did that. He created that first verse that, you notice me, I jumped right in my honor. Yeah. Rhyms rocked it, built like Schwarzenegger. Then Mef came in. You know what I mean? Everybody like- That's what's so amazing about all All these killers, all these different voices, all these amazing lyrics all on one song. Yeah. But we wanted to show the world that each one of us had a style that was unrecked. Each one of us can paint a picture within our own way that you will love all of us.

So it's better to get us all now. We'll sacrifice the little look for the bigger look later. Right. And that was one of the situations where we had to dance a certain way to be like, okay, yeah, we'll take a little bit of money, but we know we're going to be able to sell. Like you said, yeah, give us those 50. We'll sell them. Now, you're telling me you don't got the money, but you got the relationships. Okay, cool. As long as you got the relationship, as long as you got the money, we're going to go out there and we're going to work to make it happen. But this is what's got to happen. And I give all the credit to Steve Drifkin. Steve was the guy that owned Loud Records back then. He was a part of RCA back then, and he believed in us. I was like, Yo, I'll give you all that deal. I'll give you all that deal. And next thing you know, when everybody started taking off, now you got Method Man over here, you got Jizz over here, you got Old Lady Bastard over here. So we did something that was so new to the world that it's like, Oh, shit.

From the outside, it felt different because it felt like a movement. Right. It's like, Wu-Tang was like a movement. Exactly. It was different. It was like it had more of gravity.

But everybody tried the boxes as a group. So even though we knew we were a group, in our minds, we looked at it, like you said, as a movement being created that would eventually spread out and hit all corners of everything. And that was the plan all the time. That was a premeditated plan because they wanted us to still be the group. It was like, no, look, we're sacrificing this and that, but we're not going to box ourselves. So by us doing that, it really paid the way for other groups and other artists and everybody to follow this blueprint. So now you have these other guys coming out and creating their own labels and bringing in artists that they wanted to do. So to me, this made hip hop a little bit more interesting because it showed that artists were starting to get more smarter, which is important. We didn't want to be just, like you said, just coming in and you sell your soul and you just stay there. No, we can't just stay there.

Is one of the hardest parts getting the right beat?

Oh, the beat is everything, bro.

Because it seems like all you guys are very prolific. Everybody can write, but But if you don't have a great beat, and how many great beats can you make? If you got an album, then another album is coming out next year, like, whoa, you got to have 16, 20 great beats, and then you got to pick from those beats, what goes with what song, and try different ways out, and you got to make sure everybody shows up at the studio. How hard was that?

The shit was real, bro. I mean, I tell people all the time, number one for us, being around so many different lyrics, lyrics guys, beats are important. I remember one time a fan asked me, he said, What's the most important thing to you, the rhyme or the beat? He fucked me up the whole day with that. I was fucked up. And I answered them. I gave him an answer probably three or four minutes later, and I was like, You know what? Nobody never asked me that. I said, The beat. I said, You know why the beat? Because the beat makes you think about what you want to say and what you want to get across. Anybody could make rimes. I can have you sit with me for fucking a month and you could be a ill fucking rapper. You, I can take you there. But to be able to have that combination factor of making a body of work or that sound that you want, you need to have the right production. So a lot of times, Wutang wrote to whatever they felt. It's like how you can listen to Protect Your Neck, and you get that energy from us.

You get a certain energy because of that production. Then you get this energy. When you get a cream, you get that. So for me, I always tell people the beat is everything Everything. And us just sitting down and waiting for Rizzo to come up with something. One thing about Rizzo, he was so clever. He had a team of guys that was around him that was assisting him to helping him come with different and he played with different things. And of course, just having his ear for music and listening to other people's stuff, he was able to isolate himself away from everything and start brainstorming for us. So it's like a... He was like the stealers back in the fucking '80s, you know what I mean? When they won four Super Bowl in a row. He was like that when Terry Bradshaw and on was playing, Lynn Swann. He was in a zone. He was really in his own way.

Especially because it became successful. Then there was a lot of motivation behind it, a lot of energy behind it. I hear what you're saying, but without the lyrics, the beat is not the same. I see from your perspective as a lyrisist and as an emcee that you would think that the beat is more important because it's important to you to get started. To get started. But damn, as a fan, you have to have those lyrics. Just the beats by themselves, that's not enough. Look.

No, no, no, no, You know how many times me and Riz will argue about that? And I would tell them like, Yo, listen, bro, it took all of us. It took, yeah, you had that. You had this, we had that.

That's what-It's a 50-50 proposition. It's always like that. I think it's more 60-40. I think it's more 60 lyrics because the thing is the lyrics are the thing that make you go, oh. A great beat makes you move your head and gets you going. But lyrics make you go, oh, shit. Like, rewind that. That's what it's like.

Well, you know me, it's fifty-fifty all the time because if I don't have nothing to give me that energy to write, then-Right, right, right, right. How can I give it to you if I don't have nothing?

It's a collaboration for sure. It's a collaboration for sure. But it's interesting That's the thing that people would think, what's more important? What's more important? Breathing or having a heartbeat? Shut the fuck up. You need both.

You need both. You have to have both.

But that's where the collaboration comes in. I had Scott Storch in here the other day. Oh, Art. Oh, yeah. I love that dude. He's so fucking talented. So out there. His glasses on, just fucking... You see him feeling the music. It's like a rare savant. There's dudes like that that are like beat machines. He just feels it. It comes into his head and he feels it and just coming out of his fingers.

He's a super talented.

Oh, so talented. I love him. But that guy is so special. To team the guy like that up with Dre or with 50 or any of these people that he collaborated with. It's like that's special.

And that's why, like I said, you know what I mean? You can't never front on the maestro. You know what I mean? I remember that DJing started it all. Let's be honest. You know what I mean? A DJ game. Scratching records. That was so important. Scratching. They created a synergy to the artist to be like, Yo, let me Let me try this. Even if you go back to, like I said, look at Quincy Jones, man. Look what the fuck he did, man. Right. Look at Frank Sinatra. Who the fuck was hearing his fucking music, man? He was so clever. He needed a vibe, though. He needed something. Who was that guy?

You ever heard Frank Sinatra when he was young? Before he was smoking all those cigarettes? It was a super high pitch voice. It's crazy.

It's crazy, right?

It's crazy. You listen to the difference like, wow, it had so much Who was the production, though? I don't know. I don't know. Somebody.

He never really got famous, I guess.

Well, I think the whole thing back then was Elvis or whoever it was. Whoever was the person that was in front. Everybody behind the scenes didn't really get that much respect. Right.

But he was a talented boy.

Who was that crazy dude that wore the wigs that shot that lady in LA? He produced all the Beatles shit. He got tried for murder, and every day in the courtroom, he'd wear a different wild wig. He created the Wall of Sound. Fuck, what's his name? He was really insane. Phil Specter. Phil Specter, back in the day, he was known for pulling guns on people. He'd pull guns on people, stick them in their mouths and shit. He was a complete a path. White guy? Yeah. And he- Oh, shit. Phil Specter. Jewish guy, I think. And he shot this lady in the mouth.

Was he Jewish?

I don't want any Jewish people mad at me. Jewish people get mad when you say someone's not Jewish and they did something terrible.

Hey, look guys, we not here to fuck with nobody. I'm just saying a little lot.

It's a talented, successful Jewish people in the entertainment business.

Be clear, man.

But that dude, he was responsible for the Wall of Sound, the Beatles. That was a big thing with him. He was known for being a guy that would change people's music. Russian-jewish, boom, nailed it.

What's up? And he was from the Bronx, right?

From the Bronx, yeah. Holy shit. Wild boy. And shot some lady, picked up some lady at a bar, took her back to his place and shot her in the mouth. Holy shit. Yeah, he would put guns in people's mouths. He was known for threatening people. You want to get out of this fucking contract and just shove a gun in your mouth. Wow. What's that? He pulled a gun on Cher. He pulled a gun on Cher.

He pulled a gun out on Cher?

Cher recalls stopping Phil Specter in his tracks when he pulled a gun on her. He pulled that shit with me. Right, right, right, right. We had this really strange relationship. You don't say. You don't say. Well, it's It's like the music business at one point in time was run entirely by gangsters. Of course. That's the story about Hendrix. The story about Hendrix is that his manager killed him. That's the conspiracy. Was that his manager killed him because it's more valuable for Hendrix to be dead His music, he's a maestro, like a one in a billion-year talent. They knew that they had all these recordings of him and they could kill him. That's why his girlfriend jumped off the top of a building. To own a master's? Yeah, to own his shit because he was going to leave his management. His bodyguard wrote a book about it years later, and it just came out, I want to say, 10 years ago? Wasn't that long ago? Whereas the bodyguard said, Yeah, the manager killed him. Killed Hendrix and threw the girlfriend off the roof.

Can they do a movie of him, too? Oh, yeah.

They did a bunch of movies on that, too. They need to do a real Wutang movie. I know Hulu had a series, but they need a real... Quentin Tarantino needs to do a Wutang.

That's me, man.

I know Quentin Tarantino. No, that's what I think. I think we talk Quentin Tarantino because he wants to do one more movie. How do he does a fucking Wutang movie? The real Wutang movie.

Tell Quentin all that, man.

It's like Hulu is great, but it has to be on Hulu. You can only get that so wild on Hulu. For it to be real, it has to be a movie.

Let me tell you something. I wrote a book, right? And inside my book, I talked about how Q-Tip, a good friend of mine, Q-Tip, he had He had me and Leonardo sit down.

Leonardo DiCaprio? Leonardo DiCaprio?

Leonardo DiCaprio, right? And I remember Q-Tip was like, Yo, set up a meeting for you and Leonardo to meet in Brooklyn at this small pizza shop, one of Leonardo's favorite spots, and he wanted to talk to you. I said, Yeah, that's what's up. So me and Leonardo, we started talking and he was like, Yo, Q-Tip was telling me that you was thinking about trying to get guys together to create a movie. I was like, Yeah, this is what I was thinking. So to make a long story short, I set up a meeting with Rizzo, myself, Leonardo's Peoples in LA. And I told Rizzo, I said, Listen, before we do this Hulu thing, which at the end of the day, it was a Rizzo's production thing or whatever he was doing, I said, I think we need to make a realistic, real-life movie of us. I said it shouldn't be nothing that we should play with because people need to know our real story. Rizzo entertained the conversation, but I don't know, for some reason, I guess he felt like he was committed to doing whatever he wanted to do with Hulu.

He might already had a deal. Yeah.

And you know, like I said, at the end of the day, the clan. Look at that. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Jamie fast with him. Jamie's the best.

It was that night, and I remember that. I wish we could have been able to sit down with him because the way I had him looking at it, it was almost like I told him, I said this would be like a slash of Goodfellers and Minnacea Society. Mixed in one to talk about our story and whatever. He was super open. He was like, Yo, chef, what we got to do? Who do we need to talk to? But at that time, Rizzo was already in pocket on what he wanted to I said, you know what? One day maybe I might get a chance to show my version of it. Because come on, how many Pablo Escobar movies we looked at? You got these guys telling it. You got the people from the community. Oh, for sure.

It could still be made. So it could still be made. A hundred %. Just because there's a Hulu, that doesn't mean shit. But I think that at the end of the day, God willing, we will really give you guys another taste of really how we really see it. I think it would be hugely successful. I think for music, from a movie rather, perspective.

Would you rather see it as a movie? A movie. Or you do it on Netflix where you can get wild.

Netflix has shit like Ozark. They get wild on Netflix. You can get wild. That's how it has to be. It has to be griny. It has to be- That's how you want it, right? It can't be in any way, ABC After School, specialified. You know what I'm saying? It can't be cleaned up through a filter. It has to be good, too. It has to be good narrative. It has to be set up. The scenes have to be set up because it's very hard to take an insane career of nine of the best MCs to get together under one mastermind with all these genius talents, and they form this movement. When you're going to condense that to two hours? Yeah.

You have to have a really good writer. See, that was one of Lizzie's beefs right there. He was like, Yo, Ray, blah, blah, blah. But I think it could be done. That's what I said. I said, Yo, look, come on now. I said, People do it all the time. I said, Yo, look at, prime example, look at NWA. I thought NWA movie was dope. You know what I mean? Straight out of Compton. I thought they did a good job. But that was Dre and Cube. I'm sure you always going to have somebody around that be like, Yo, now that ain't it. But it was so realistic that when I seen And I was like, all right, I get it. Riz even said, this is more for the younger generation to gravitate to. And once everybody loved it, they loved it. So it was like, okay, you all love it. We love you all for loving it.

It's great. It's great. But hear me out. Opening of the movie, Rikers. Opening of the movie, you guys show up at Rikers to do the concert. We're old daddy Bastors inside. That's the opening of the movie. That's the opening of the movie.

You want all the real gritty. You want the gritty.

But that just get everybody on the hook right away. And then you bring them back to the beginning. Right after that. You put the year, whatever it was.

And that's how you make movies. You pick all the greatest moments, and then you start showing them threading. Right.

Yes. That's a no-brainer for a Wu-Tang movie. You start with Rikers. You start with Rikers, which is what year was that? '95? What year When did... What year was the Old Dirty Bastard and Rikers concert with Wu-Tang?

I was about to say, Look up that.

And what year did you guys start? What was the very first year?

We started in late '92.

So you start the movie with Rykers, and then you bring it back to '92. Back to '92. That's what it is. That's what it is. I mean, just think about the incredible amount of talent, not just Rapp building. Jizz is a world champion caliber chess player. 99, 2000 or so? '99, 2000? Yeah, I got an interview Rizza talking about it. And doesn't Jizz have some degree in physics?

Smart motherfucker, man.

Doesn't he have some crazy degree?

Smart. He's like a- Look that up, please.

So just that alone in the movie is like, come on, this is real?

Just that. This is something people was looking forward to looking at.

Yeah. Think of a movie like that. Think of a movie starts up with the gates opening and you guys going in, put all your belongings in the basket, the whole shit, getting frisked, checking everybody down, the guy reading you the rules, the warden telling you, do not go into the crowd. Do not do that. Yeah, Yeah. Okay. Cool. We got you.

Yeah.

Wow. Think about it. That's the beginning of the movie. That's an incredible opening for a movie. And it really happened. This isn't bullshit. This isn't a bunch of dorks sitting around a table coming up with some nonsense. This is some shit that you lived through. That would be an incredible opening for a movie.

It's just so even credible, even more on how we connected, because like I said, everybody come from almost the same poverty bullshit, but everybody had different philosophies on how they felt their lives was going into. I tell people all the time, my neighborhood was about making money. Ghost neighborhood was about taking money. You know what I mean? Taking shit from you. Jizzr being one of the MCs that could have been down with the juice crew. You know what I mean? You know who the fuck the Juice Crew is. He turned it down. It's like they was the hottest shit back then. Master Ace, Biz, Caine, Cool J-Rat. All these dope MCs, they asked me, Yo, we want you to come and get down with us. He's like, No, you know what? No. All these things I remember yesterday. You turned down the Juice Crew. He was like, I love the Juice Crew, but I just was in this chamber right here. Us with Old Dirty, Old Dirty always wanted to be like Biz, Biz Malk. He had that personality, that charisma, that energy. So like you said, these are the things that I wanted to see.

Each individual, and Like I said, shout out Hulu, man, for doing a great job. But I do agree like you, we need another movie where it really defines who we are. Rizk, that was his side of how he wanted to tell it.

It's a great story. It's fine. The Hulu thing is fine. But I think there's something missing, and I think the something missing is a movie. It's got to be a movie. It's got to be a big screen, big thing, and it could be done.

I heard it first, man. I heard it first. I didn't have to argue with my brothers about it.

Just imagine when ODB does, Baby, I got your money. Oh, my God. Come on. Imagine that, and that becomes this massive hit.

Massive hit. You know he had the most hits on Out of All Of Us, right?

He was so fucking talented, man, and so real. You remember when he was on MTV and they started talking about, What are you going to give? Where are you going to give your money? He was like, I give my money to nobody.

He was like, you're going to give back? He was like, no. I remember that shit. Everybody was crying.

Everybody loved It was so real because it was so real. It wasn't like, well, I think it's really important that we establish some a community fund. Shut the fuck up. He was just having fun.

He was like, you make nothing. You know what I mean? But we always gave back in our own ways. Of course.

Well, by existing, you give back. By existing, you inspire others. By existing, how many rap careers, how many hip hop careers were inspired by Wutang clan and all the members? Countless. Countless. So many.

I I'm going to say that we definitely had a piece of watching the new generation grow and build their arc the way we built ours. That's important to reflect on that. Back then, like you said, nobody wasn't giving motherfuckers this money. We was the first group that ever had a million dollar video.

Wow.

I remember that day me and Rizk was coming up with the storyboard. What video was that? Triumf. Wow. We did the Triumf shit. We came up with all this shit. He was like, This shit is going to cost a million dollars. You're like, What the fuck? It's a million dollars. Do it. You When at that time, you know videos. Is this it? Oh, let me hear this. Yeah. This is with my guy Brett Ratner. By sworms of killer bees. The first jump. They have been seen approaching from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. See the bees coming through and shit.

As we will be bringing you up to the minute information.

This just ends. Police are reporting that there's a man on top of a skyscraper ready to jump. I'm told that he is possibly old, dirty. Remember, of the Wutang clan. The police suspect that there could be some connection between this old dirty man and the killer bees. Old Dirty Man. I perform atomically. Socroties philosophies and hypotheses. Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries. Lyrically perform arm robbery. Flee with the lottery. Possibly they spotted me. Battles guard show Exposing when my bend hits tremendous. Ultraviolet, shine, blind forensics. I inspect view through the future, see, millennium. Killer B's soul, 50 gold, 60 platinum. Shackling the matches with drastic rap tactics. Graphic displays, melting steel like Blacksmiths. Blacksmiths, Takes me back to the function. Heads by the score, take flight inside of war. Ticks hit the floor, diehard fans demand more. Behold the BOLD Soulja, control the globe slowly. Proceeds the BOLD, swing his source like Is it weird looking back now?

Does it feel almost surreal that you guys did it?

A little bit to me, yeah.

It has to.

Yeah, to me, for sure. I mean, I I always believed in my group, man. I mean, these guys is, like you said, very talented, very talented. Sometimes we don't know our power when we come together, but we might be the only group that stuck together so long because we all feed off each other every time. So to be able to reflect back when we was in our prime, it was like we still didn't even give our best. It was almost like, okay, yeah, we're going to do it because we have to not do it because we're all in a happy vibe, a happy moment. A lot of times we made great things happen out of nothing under pressure. Might have been turbulence in the room, might have been an argument that happened that day. But we still managed to come out with something great out of that whole time of that moment.

That's what's incredible is that through all the disputes, you guys still stay together. Because there's no way you're going to have nine dudes and not have disputes.

Exactly.

Especially nine alphas, nine killers.

It's hard, man. It's hard because everybody has an opinion, and you want to respect everybody's opinion. But it made me think about sports, and it made me think about how coaches and people outside of the group were so important. See, how we were designed, we huddled up, but we never really had people around us to push the narrative more to show us our true power. So we made a lot of mistakes of being great, but still handling the business a little bit different from if we would have had some Some coaches. Some guidance. Some guidance.

The problem was back then, no one knew what was going on.

Nobody knew.

Because it was so fresh. It was so new. The whole genre had only existed for six or seven years. So it was It was emerging, and it was chaotic, and it was so exciting, but there wasn't a lot of experts in how to manage it. It's like today, a young artist could come to a guy like you and say, Hey, what should I do? Help me out. What's the path that you think that I should take? And you could give them real advice, where back then, who knew?

Who knew Wutai was going to work?

They would have told you that's not going to work. They would say, You can't get nine dudes. That's How are you doing that? But it worked. But it worked. It didn't just work. It accelerated everybody. It amplified all the voices. That's what was so crazy about it. It didn't just work. It worked better than being by yourself.

I tell people all the time. The clan, I think we all got better based on us as a collective. A hundred %. Nobody couldn't have done it by themselves and be great.

Iron sharpens iron. That's right. And that's what it is.

Still sharp and still.

That's right. You guys had so many killers together. There's no way it couldn't be great. That's what's incredible. It's so hard for people to do that. That's why it's never been done before, which is amazing. If you think about the history of hip hop, how many artists have come up, and not one group has come together and made like, Oh, they're just like Wutang. Not one. Not one.

Even when it comes to sales, and each one of us was blessed to be able to go platinum and gold. But we talk about that. Sometimes when we all are together, we laugh and we say, damn, no other groups did what we did. Like, come with guys that everybody in the group went gold and platinum and this and that. And I couldn't name one person. They was like, Yo, name one person. Name one group that did what we did at that level back then. I couldn't name it. You know what I mean?

Because- Well, the Kettle Boys branched out. Scarface, obviously, went on to have a massive career. Did you see his little tiny desk performance? Oh, yeah. Fucking incredible. Yeah. Fucking incredible.

Yeah. That's one of my greatest friends, too, man.

And so different than anything else. The way he did it, he adapted the lyrics to the environment. Yeah. Oh, it was incredible. Incredible.

Scarface is a real guy, too, man.

One of the all-timers. One of the all-time greats.

All-time greats. Adam, coming to your show yet?

I haven't yet. No, I'd love to have him on. I love that dude. I You had Willy on. I think that there's so many amazing talents that came out of that '90s hip hop era. For a young guy coming up, someone who's interested in a career in it now, it's imperative that you go back. Go back. You have to. You got to explore the classics. You got to see what started this whole thing. You got to put yourself in this mindset. It's hard to imagine my experience of it because you're not going to be able to have it. It's always been around. But for me, it was like when it came around, it was this totally new thing. It was totally new sound, totally new avenue of music that existed. Everybody was like, wow, and all the young people were excited. Everybody was excited like, This is crazy. This is so different than everything else. For the people that are making a career in it now, I know there's a tendency to think you're the fucking man and everything else sucks, I'm telling you, you got to abandon that. Abandon that thinking. Go back and educate yourself because it's free.

It's free. Just get on YouTube, get on Spotify, educate yourself. There's so much classic shit from the '90s that you're missing.

And all we were doing really was just, like you said, just expression. Being in the studio, smoking a lot of weed. And a lot of times when we were smoking and just vibing, it's like we were mentioning things that, like today, like prime example, I own a cannabis business in Newark called Hashtory. You know what I mean? So you're representing us. We said in rimes like, Can it be all so simple? I want to have me a fat yard and enough land to go and plant my own sass crops. But for now, it was just a big dream. So we spoke things into existence that at the end of the day, now, as I sit here and I'm an owner of a cannabis business, I'm like, wow, he was talking about things. My first joint in it went gold. I put it on my mother's living room wall. We did that. So we were saying things that meant so much to us back then, but still dreaming of it being a reality. The next thing you know, it happens. How you said, Jizz are being so intelligent and talking about science and meth, talking about certain things.

Now, today, he's in the movie world and Rizza is a director. These were the things that were going through our minds as we were just smoking and listening to production and just saying, Yo, what the right next? Where do we want to go? And I think that that is important as an artist is to dream and be Be creative. Don't sit in one box. That's the shit that just be driving me crazy a lot. With hip hop today, it's like, it's just sounding too fucking repetition. Let's make it bigger. Let's take it over here, over here, over here. But sometimes it's just sitting in one fucking box where it's like, yo, come on. It's not just that. It's about opening up the doors for everybody to be able to see so many sides. Now it just seems like the hip hop shit is just being controlled by one person that's saying, Yo, we want you all to stay right there. We want you to talk, ignorant. We want you to not grow.

We want you to just-Whatever they think is going to sell.

Why is that the case?

I don't get it. The same reason why they were trying to take the Rizza and change him and turn him into something he's not. People always do that. They do that in comedy. They do that in podcasting. They do that in music. There's always is some executive that thinks they know better, and they're going to mold you and shape you and change you. And this is what we're going to do. We're going to hire an image team. It's all just bullshit. It's non-artists interfering with art. That's what it is. It's when you have middlemen. You have these people that profit off of your talent, and they think they're going to steer it in a way that's going to be the most profitable. They don't give a fuck if you're earnestly and honestly expressing yourself. That doesn't mean anything to them. They just want you to stay in that box because that's the box they're selling. And once it sells once, they don't want you to change it up. Remember when Ice T started a fucking heavy metal band?

Oh, my God. Yeah.

Ice T, who played a cop on TV for like fucking 30 years, he had a song called Cop killer. Body Count, and everybody wanted him to be the rapper. And Ice D was like, I'm going to do a hardcore album. It was like, what?

I'm a motherfucking cop kill.

It's like, what is this? What is this? This is crazy. But it's like, he just didn't listen. He's like, I don't give a fuck what you say. I'm going to do what I want to do. This is what I want to do now. Exactly. And you have to give an artist that ability to do that. They have to be able to change it up anytime they want, because whatever got them to the dance is going to keep them dancing. And they might dance to the beat of a different song, but it's going to be the same person, that same creative force that created whatever you liked in the beginning. Well, you probably like this new direction they're going to go in, too, because it's going to be just as good. You're just like we all like different. Like you were saying, you We both like Billy Joel. We both like Cool G rap. It's very different. You wouldn't want to see the two of them at a concert together. But that's what you have to give room for an artist. And these executives and these people that are profiting off of art without being creative, their input is always terrible.

It's always terrible because they don't have a vision. They don't really... Unless you're like a Rick Rubin, like one of those cats. It's just like super eccentric, weirdo, genius dude who just knows what he likes and go, Hold on, hold on. Do that again. Stop that. Stop, stop, stop. Do it again. Do it that way. Okay, can you make it echo? Exactly. Give me an echo.

But he's working with you because he sees something.

Right. He's barefoot and shit and fucking doing yoga. One of the geniuses. Super weirdo. A Scott Storch type character. Yeah, those guys- These guys be great in their own way, though. They're artists, though. That's different. But when you get these suits and the suits get involved and they know that, oh, we made... Raquan sold a a million and seven hundred thousand CDs doing it like this. So this is what we want from this one, too. We want it to be the exact same way. We want to do it like that. Do it like that again. What's this new thing you're doing? What's this new thing where you talking about discipline? No, no, no, no, no, It's a great fucking song with great lyrics.

It goes back to, like I said, like, yo, this shit became knowledge to us, man.

Yes.

That's what I miss about hip hop is the knowledge factor, the raising our kids to be smarter and not hiding anything from them. Like you said, once you put that warning stick on there, don't look at it. They're going to look at it anyway. So why not let them see for what it is and then say, Yo, look, you can make these choices, but you go that way, you know what you're getting. You go this way, you know what you're getting.

I think all it takes is someone today to do what you guys were doing and blow up, and then everybody would want to do it that way. If someone today became this genius lyrisist It was like, pointing out things in society and became a huge artist.

But you think that music is still... Do you think the radio will play it?

I don't think the radio means Jack shit anymore. I think what means something now is people sharing it. That's what means something.

How do they get it out there, though.

Someone put it on Spotify, put it on SoundCloud, put it on YouTube. Someone sees it, someone hears it. You send it to somebody, they send it to 10 people, and then it goes viral. That's what it's all about now. I think it's just be undeniable. Be undeniable. Have some shit where you listen to it, you go, oh.

Be confident. Yeah.

And you have your friends like, You got to listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to this. Listen to first lines. First lines. Yeah. Listen to that shit.

Oh my God. That's how we always sold it anyway.

Oh my God. Yeah. Come out of the gate with a fucking haymaker.

Boom. This is what we do, though. See, damn, you're talking like how I feel about my album I'm about to drop. When is it coming out? I feel that way. Well, you know shit. I just been working on this documentary right for the Purple Tate. Let me just be honest with you, take you back. I've been working on... Only Built for Cuban Links is my What's Going On album, my thriller album that I made 30 years ago. This year, 2025, it'll be 30 years. So what we done One was we went back and decided to do a documentary about it, a real-life film. So it's called the Purple Tate Files, because remind you, Only Built for Cuban Links was the name of the album. But being that I came with it as a cassette, everybody started to call this album The Purple Tate. So now we came back and we decided to do me and my team from my camp. The clan, of course, is the clan. But this is something that was my intellectual property that I said, Yo, you know what? Me and my guy sat down. My team sat down and said, Yo, you need to do a documentary about this album because you can make 50 albums.

People are still going to talk about Only Built for Cuban Lynx. So I said, damn, you know what? You're right. So what I did was I said, you know what? Let me invest in it and tell the story of what helped us inspire that album, what helped us be a part of the culture and how it still allows me to still exist today. If you see a lot of these guys today in the game, they still wear Cuban link chains. You know what I mean? Who would have ever thought that I'm calling my album Only Built for Cuban Link, niggas? Everybody named Mother is wearing Cuban link chains today, 30 years later. So that's been something that I've been working on. And believe it or not, we've been working on it for 10 years. So I got over 50 influential people people that was in my life that was affected by that album to be a part of this documentary. So now this is all in the making. We didn't actually go out there and start pitching it yet. We're finally getting ready to do it right now as we speak. As we speak, once the new year kick in and all that, we will be ready to go out there and position ourselves to go do a deal with a network with this project.

It's going to be ill. It's a great idea. You know what I mean? So my thing is to talk about it in a way to where the way we made the album, all the experiences, all the things that we went through, and eventually that that would wind up becoming a movie later on. Because the storyboard of how I talk about it is going to blow people's minds because it's like, damn, this is what you was going through. This is how your mindset was. Because I just want people to know that that album was made because I love hip hop, man, and I We were in a position to make something golden that at that time I was already thinking cinematic. I was already in my Scorsese mindset because when I came in a clan, I was like, I don't do all the karate shit. I don't know how to rhyme like that. I don't even know about drugs and hustlers and trying to get from here to there and turn my life around for the positive. We talk about this in a documentary and we go through some of the songs. Like I said, I got some of my guys that we had conflictions with some artists out there like Biggie back then.

Everybody thought we had a beef. It becomes interesting, but the bottom line is that's what I've been working on alongside with working on some other music. So I just said, let me get this done the right way first, and then I'm going to drop some new music. So I got a definitely new album getting ready to come out.

Where is that going to come out, you think?

The new album, I say probably between second quarter right now. I never even mentioned the name of the album, but I'll mention it on your show. The name of the album is going to be called The Emperor's New Clothes. You ever heard that Dutch folk tale, The Emperor's New Clothes? You're familiar with it?

The Emperor Wears No Clothes.

That's going to be the name of it because I feel like the status quo today, everybody follows bullshit. Nobody wants to be genuine no more. Nobody wants to call out shit that makes sense. It's like, oh, if you believe it, I'm supposed to believe it. I'm not supposed to believe nothing that don't feel like what it's supposed to be to me. Goes back to like you said, and I'm listening to everything you're saying about, you have to do it from this way. Fuck that. Fuck radio. Whatever is going to stop you from being you. You know what I mean? So this is the same mindset that I'm thinking with my hip hop, my new album that's coming. Like, yo, I'm not going to let you tell me that this is not what people still love. You know what I mean? I don't care. I know what I know from coming up as a kid who loved hip hop and what inspired me. So I'm going to have a ball this year, man. I got a lot of great things that I want to give the world. But yeah, that's going to be the name of my new album.

People still love it. And I'm telling you, these young kids that I have at the Comedy mothership, when I play them, 1990s hip hop, they go, oh. They love it. They just don't know yet. Yeah. They just don't know.

And we I can't afford them because they wasn't alive probably at that time.

Also, they got so much shit coming their way. Exactly. They're getting inundated by all these new artists, all these new TikToks.

There's so much shit going on.

There's so much shit going on.

There's so much going on. But I always say that it's always a lane for people that love music. You know what I mean? I don't care. It's like you could be 50. Today, I'm sitting here as a 55-year-old man that still have that kid in them to love what helped me be who I am today. So I'm still at my best when it comes to making music. Like today, the chef is more of an architect artist now. I don't consider myself a gangster rapper or a funny rapper. I'm an architect rapper because I like to reflect on things about growth and development. When people hear this album, they're going to be like, damn, like, yo, he still fucking got I tell people all the time, don't ever think we're going to lose that shit. That's like sitting here and saying, Mike Tyson can't fight. When you know at the end of the day, he ain't lose a fucking bit when it comes to how he feels that passion for boxing or whatever. I feel the same way with my music. So get ready. But then, like I said, the name of the album is called The Emperor's New Clothes.

Check for that shit.

I'm ready. Listen, brother, thank you very much for being here. It was a real honor. Of course. Real pleasure.

You're my guy, man.

Thank you. And thank you for everything you guys have done over the years. I've been endlessly entertained by Wu-Tang clan for a long fucking time. There you go. And I hope somebody listens to this and makes that fucking movie. Make that movie.

Do it. Well, we're going to make It's going to make it happen.

Do it the right way.

We're going to figure it out.

I wish I made movies. I wish I was a moviemaker because I would make it that way. I'd open up with that fucking Riker scene.

Listen, Joe, it's never too late for us to do what the fuck we want to do.

Never too late. Never too late. Never too late. Thank you, sir.

Love you. Love you, too.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it, sir. Bye, brother..