Pitchfork: I spoke to you for this same column almost five years ago now and since then, I feel like your beats have gotten a lot funkier. Was that intentional?
It’s just all about what I’m listening to at the time. I’m really on my West Coast shit, I love Cali music. Lowkey, I always did, even back in the day on SoundCloud, Papo put out this tape called Hollywood Po where we was all fucking with that shit. So I feel like we’ve always wanted to bring that back at some point. I know YL had a super deep appreciation for the West Coast shit, too, like 2001.
“Tha Chronic” and “Next Episode” are two of my favorite recent beats of yours and they both pull directly from that 2001 sound. What is it about that era of Dre beats?
It was just some shit I grew up on. Hearing songs from that album on Rap City or on the radio was super important for me. The movie soundtracks: Next Friday, The Wash. We love The Wash, man. The first song in The Wash (“On the Boulevard”) is the type of beats I’m talking about. For the last couple years, I’ve really wanted to incorporate the shit from other places I came up on on top of the Dipset and G-Unit influences that always been there. We was fucking with Cash Money. We was fucking with Snoop and Xzibit, too. It all plays into everything.
I know for me Dre beats were sort of like the gateway into the wider world of West Coast rap, in New York it wasn’t really around much. Was it similar in Jersey?
It was the opposite for me, because my mom was playing Funkadelic in the crib. So I feel like I always had an understanding of funk music. “Flash Light” was getting fucking blasted in the crib, bro. Remember Good Burger, when Kenan was trying to escape out the asylum and they had George Clinton in that bitch performing “Knee Deep”? Little things like that draw the connection. Then, when I got older I found out George Clinton really from Newark, bro.
True. It’s easy to assume he’s from California. Those Great Migration connections are real, though.
I didn’t know that growing up, but that’s our connection in Jersey to this funk shit. It’s a trip because then you go back and listen to Parliament and you’re thinking about if it is all from the perspective of him living over here. I think that’s why my beats might be naturally funky, I’ve just been getting more intentional with it.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
