RandomRapRadio.Com unearth more flavour from the golden-era airwaves with this 1991 recording of Tim Westwood’s Capital Rap Show featuring music from De La Soul, 3rd Bass and EPMD, a studio appearance from Gang Starr and, of course, plenty of Tim’s trademark Westwood-isms – listen here.
In the second part of my interview with 3rd Bass’s Pete Nice, the Prime Minister talks about the origins of his and Serch’s beef with the Beastie Boys, signing with Def Jam and touring the UK – check Part One here.
What were your thoughts when the Beastie Boys first came out on Def Jam?
“When they first came out, my room-mate at Columbia who hooked me up with Lord Scotch, SAKE, he actually went to high-school with Mike D and MCA…”
Is this where MC Disagree & The Re-Animator come into the 3rd Bass story?
“Yeah, well MC Disagree & The Re-Animator were all together with SAKE, who was Mark Pearson and who actually ended-up being our 3rd Bass road manager. So I didn’t know the Beastie Boys personally at that time, but I knew all about them from hearing stories. I mean, MC Disagree, Dan Kealy, he was very close with Ad-Rock when they were growing up in the same neighbourhood and everything. I guess the whole thing was, I don’t know if it was animosity or whatever, but Disagree and SAKE would always go to earlier clubs than even I was going to, like the Northmore and other early Hip-Hop spots in the city. I mean, they were into Hip-Hop and were white b-boys before most people were. They were like a year or two older than I was in school. So they always looked at the Beasties like, ‘Yo, those guys were into punk rock and now all of a sudden they’ve got up on Hip-Hop.’ I don’t think they really had any specific beef with the Beastie Boys, but of course throw into that them hanging out with us, the Beasties coming out first, and then the “Sons Of 3rd Bass” song we did on “The Cactus Album” kind of grew out of that. Plus, at the time me and Serch were trying to come out, their record had dropped so there was now already this perception of what a white Hip-Hop group should be about, so all these other record labels wanted us to kinda be like them and we really weren’t like that. Labels wanted us to have more of a rock edge, which is why that group the White Boys got signed around that time. Most people would listen to our records and say that we just sounded like a regular Black rap group. We took that as a compliment, but we just sounded the way we sounded and we weren’t going to change that to try and get a record deal. What’s funny, actually, is around that time Kid Rock was an emcee as well. I remember when Serch was entered into the New Music Seminar and Kid Rock was there rockin’ almost like an Evil Knievel suit with a flat-top (laughs).”
So it wasn’t really a personal beef that you had with the Beastie Boys, it was more about the indirect impact their success was having on 3rd Bass getting signed?
“It was probably as much about frustration as it was anything else. I mean, we would run into them at different clubs here and there. I remember running into MCA at Hotel Amazon once, and one time I ran into Ad-Rock at a barber-shop. But of course, Sam Sever was cool with them and also Dante Ross was boys with them from way back to. So there were just a lot of common denominators involved in the situation. Also, at the time, the Beastie Boys had left Def Jam, so that added to a lot of it as well. Like I said, I didn’t really know them. In fact, the only time I ever really had any contact with them myself was when our then manager Lyor Cohen got marrried in the Dominican Republic in 1988 and he invited all the artists. I remember Serch was dying to go but he couldn’t get out of work. But it was literally everybody; Run DMC, Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, LL, me, EPMD, Davy D, Tashan, Original Concept. It was nuts. I mean, if the planes had gone down there would have been no Def Jam (laughs). I have pictures of Flavor Flav in a yarmulke at the wedding (laughs). But that was really the only time I had any contact with the Beasties and they probably didn’t even know who I was at that time, they’d probably just heard about these couple of other white rappers.”
Serch knew the Beasties previously though, right?
“Well, the other part of the beef was, Serch knew Mike D and apparently one day Serch ran into Mike or one of the other guys, went back to his place to play some beats or whatever, and apparently Mike D was kinda clownin’ Serch and Serch definitely took offense to it.”
I remember Sam Sever telling me that same story some years back when I did a short interview with him about working on “The Cactus Album”…
“Exactly. So then, obviously I’ve already got the stuff that my boys were telling me about the Beasties and then as I got closer to Serch that happened. So the situation was almost like it was destined to be (laughs). I mean, you look back on it now over the years and there was definitely some stupidity involved. I mean, when MCA passed away I was asked to write a piece for Gawker.Com (note: Requiem For A White Emcee) and I really had to think whether it was MCA or Ad-Rock that I ran into at that barber-shop that time and it actually turned out to be Ad-Rock. So I told them at Gawker that I didn’t really know MCA and had just met him a couple of times. But there was still that common link of what we did as white emcees, so I just wrote that piece based on that.”
You mentioned earlier the chip-on-the-shoulder that a lot of white emcees carried around back then. Did that ever come into play between you and Serch in terms of each of you wanting to be seen as the better emcee in the group?
“I don’t think there was really any of that between me and Serch back then. I mean, we would compete with each other more for ourselves to make better music as a group rather than going against each other. But I think other people would always bring it up more about who was the better emcee between me and Serch. That was definitely something that I felt was brought up more to some level from fans than maybe you’d hear people having similar conversations about a De La Soul or a Tribe. But that was really on a very small scale and when you have a group containing members with different styles it really just comes down to what people’s preferences are. But that’s what makes your group diverse.”
So did the Def Jam deal actually happen quite quickly once the label were aware that you and Serch were working together?
“Nah, I mean the whole thing was actually quite difficult for us. When the Beastie Boys came out we had demos going around and all these labels wanted something else that was different to what we were doing. So we actually got turned down by a lot of labels that wanted to sign us to big deals but then backed out. That happened with Arista and some other big labels. Then, we started to get more credibility and buzz around us from performing at different clubs and turning up everywhere. Plus, me and Serch both had promos playing on the radio with Red Alert, which for us back then was pretty much the ultimate. Even if you didn’t actually have a record out back then, you could still have a promo playing on the radio. I had a promo on Red Alert for my radio show and Serch had the promos for his early singles. Those were still playing, so we thought we’d made it anyway (laughs). Even if we hadn’t made a record as 3rd Bass, we were still known around New York. But we had a difficult time getting those records deals. Profile Records were looking at us and then when Dante was at Tommy Boy they made a play for us. At the time we really wanted to be on Def Jam and I think Lyor and Russell finally looked at the whole landscape and realised that the Beasties were gone. At that time, Def Jam were kinda down and it was really Public Enemy who were picking them up. I mean, LL’s “Walking With A Panther” was a dud compared to how his other albums did. So 3rd Bass definitely gave the label new blood, along with EPMD when they moved over as well. The first Slick Rick album was doing well, so along with Public Enemy, I think us and EPMD gave the label a new identity for them to build on. But at the same time, Russell was still always trying to find that one R&B act that he could be successful with which he finally got years later with Montell Jordan (laughs).”
I think Russell’s main problem with that in the late-80s was that the R&B artists he was signing like Chuck Stanley and Alyson Williams were largely making traditional soul albums, which compared to the New Jack Swing sound of the time didn’t necessarily connect with the average teenage Def Jam fan…
“Exactly. I mean, Tashan was incredible and Sam Sever was working on his first album when we were doing our first stuff for Def Jam, but it was almost like that record was too good for the time. But he did have Oran “Juice” Jones who kinda blew up with “The Rain” which was a big single. He was a classic, man. I used to love that guy (laughs). He was just such a character. I remember, we’d used Grover Washington Jr.’s horn licks on our song “Monte Hall” and he was also on Columbia. There was an event that the label did for this new record from Grover Washington and they invited us to it and Oran “Juice” Jones. I remember we all took a picture where I’m sitting in this big chair with the cigar, Grover Washington Jr. is above me and Juice is to the side of me (laughs). But Juice was always the guy to come up with the good one-liners and everything he said at the end of his record “The Rain” was definitely not scripted. He could just come up with stuff like that at any time (laughs). But that record totally blew-up in New York at the time.”
Given the impact Russell Simmons had already had on Hip-Hop by the time 3rd Bass signed to Def Jam, what were your first impressions of him when you joined the label?
“Obviously we were impressed. I mean, Russell was Run’s brother and had already had so much success. “Krush Groove” had already come out and Russell was really on top of the genre at the time. If there was anyone you were going to roll with back then, you’d be rollin’ with Rush (laughs). You wouldn’t want to be anywhere else at the time other than with Russell. I remember, we were talking to different managers at the time and they were telling us to make sure we kept our publishing. So we spoke with Russell to try and keep our publishing and he was like, ‘Listen, I’ve got fifty percent of Run DMC’s publishing, I’ve got fifty percent of LL’s publishing, fifty percent of Public Enemy’s publishing, so why the f**k am I going to give you your publishing?’ But back then the business side was a lot different during that period when we were signed to all the big money that came later on with all the label consolidations.”
What was the working dynamic like between Russell and Lyor Cohen?
“Russell and Lyor would always play the good-cop / bad-cop routine in any given situation. I mean, they were genius together. As different as they where, with Lyor being the hard-nosed business guy and Russell always being the nice guy, Russell was definitely just as shrewd. I could just write books about episodes with those two all day long (laughs).”
The “Russell Rush” interlude on “The Cactus Album” still makes me laugh with Russell discussing the name of the group and then he starts talking about the Dickhead Six…
“That was totally live. What happened was, when I was still at school at Columbia when I first hooked-up with Serch, Russell would tell us some s**t like, ‘We’re going to put you out on some dates with Run’ or ‘We’re going to put you out on some dates with LL.’ There were always these carrots that he would stick out there. It even got to the point where I had to speak to one of the counsellors at my school to tell them I might have to take the semester off to go on tour with Run DMC (laughs). But then these things would aways fall through. We just got so frustrated, so I said to Serch, ‘Look, we’re getting so much smoke blown up our ass, I’m just going to take a little tape recorder in to the meetings and we’ll tape that s**t.’ So we would go into meetings with Bill Stephney, Russell and Lyor, and I would just have the s**t running (laughs). So I just had all these tapes of our meetings and when we were doing the album I remembered the tape of the meeting where we were coming up with the name of the group. Russell was trying to get a date with Paula Abdul for the American Music Awards at the same time we were coming up with the group name so that’s what’s on the rest of that tape which is just classic (laughs).”
Any classic Lyor memories?
“I remember, one time we were in London with Lyor at a big hotel around Piccadilly Circus. We’d come in at the time for those rave shows they used to have out there where kids would call a phone number to get the location of the party. I remember, there were these Nigerian princes who were funding and organising them and they’d promised to pay Lyor £25,000 for Public Enemy and another £5,000 for 3rd Bass. It was just a whole s**tload of money. I remember Lyor saying to them that he was bringing us over and if the authorities came after them or anything that he was getting his money either way. So what happened this time we went was the show never happened. Lyor flew us over with PE and De La Soul. I remember it vividly, because right when we went on that trip our “Steppin’ To The A.M.” video was released on Video Music Box in New York. So we weren’t actually in New York when it first hit, but that’s when our record sales really started to jump. But I remember Lyor with one of these Nigerian princes in the restaurant of the hotel we were in just going crazy like (adopts angry Israeli accent), ‘Listen you motherf**king prince, get me my f**king money or you’re going to be living in the f**king bush! The king, your father, is going to send you out to the bush by the time I’m done with you.’ Sure enough, he ended up paying Lyor even though there was no show (laughs).”
Outside of New York that “Steppin’ To The A.M.” video was largely the first visual introduction to 3rd Bass for a lot of people – where did your whole cigar, cane and suit image come from?
“I mean, it kinda came from the days when I was hangin’ out with Blake (Lord Scotch). He gave me the name Prime Minister when we were hanging-out at the Albee Square Mall. We always used to hang-out at this jewellery store K & I Jewelers which I think Biz Mark mentions in “Albee Square Mall” a couple times. Big Daddy Kane would be at the Albee Square Mall as well. So I think Blake kinda looked at me as being a white Kane kind of character, so that persona was pretty much from before I was even with Serch. Then when first did the “Steppin’ To The A.M.” video with Lionel Martin from Video Music Box, he definitely picked up on that and was like, ‘Yo, I’ve got this huge chair, so you can sit in the chair like it’s a throne with your cane’ and it really just took off from there. I mean, I was smoking cigars anyway. And with the whole cane thing, when people would ask me why I needed the cane I’d tell them, ‘Yo, I got shot in the leg when I was a kid’ and all kinds of different s**t which was fun (laughs). Actually, I remember we did one show in Scotland and sometimes Flavor Flav would tell us to ask him to come out during our set. So at this particular show, he wanted to come out after we’d done “The Gas Face”. So we introduce Flav, people go nuts, and he comes out like, ‘Yo Pete! I was at this store today. Now, you’ve got your cane and that’s fly, but check this s**t out, man.’ He takes out this thing that looks like a cane, hits it on the stage and it turns into a little chair (laughs). He sits on it and is like, ‘Look at this Pete!’ and then goes into his whole ‘Yeaaah boy!’ thing and the crowd just loses it (laughs). But I will say, my favourite moment onstage was probably in England when the Poll Tax was around. I was like, ‘F**k Margaret Thatcher! I’m the Prime Minister!’ and the whole crowd was going nuts (laughs). That’s probably as political as we got at that time (laughs).”
I think 3rd Bass was political to some extent just by your mere presence in Hip-Hop at the time as two white emcees in a Black-dominated artform…
“The other thing that I think people totally overlooked was that we were really the first integrated group as well because it wasn’t like Daddy Rich was just our show deejay or something, he was actually a member of the group. Hurricane was the Beastie Boys deejay for shows and stuff but he wasn’t actually in the group. But that’s actually a funny story too because our first deejay for 3rd Bass was this kid called DJ White Knight. Serch knew this guy DJ Holiday who was well known in New York but ended-up going to Tennessee. Serch went down to visit him and he met White Knight there who was definitely a nice deejay. Serch comes back from Tennessee and is like, ‘Yo Pete, I’ve got our deejay.’ He didn’t talk to me about it or anything and I’m like, ‘Are you f**kin’ kidding me? You’re going to bring this kid back from Tennessee and he’s all of a sudden our deejay?!’ Now Rich at the time, he was was at school in Farmingdale out on Long Island, so he really wasn’t available. But I was trying to get to him to be our deejay and join the group. So Knight shows-up after leaving Tennessee to live with Serch. I’m just beside myself and we were in the studio at the time and I’m like, ‘What the f**k is going on here?’ Sure enough though, I like Knight, he starts growing on us and I’m totally down with him (laughs). He’s doing cuts in the studio, we did a couple of early performances, he’s in the “Steppin’ To The A.M.” video in the back of the car. He did one of our first photo-shoots with us. It was almost like he was the fifth Beatle or something (laughs). But it turns out, him and Serch had some sort of falling out. Knight was living with Serch and his girl, some s**t happened and next thing I know they kinda split-up and Knight’s heading back to Tennessee (laughs). So Serch brought him in and Serch took him out (laughs). I was as baffled when he left as when he came. So that’s a bit of 3rd Bass trivia for you (laughs). But after that happened, that’s when I told Rich that we wanted him. We had already produced the first album but Rich did those early tours with us and then when we got into the second album Rich was involved with the production.”
I still have tapes of your appearances on Tim Westwood’s Capital Rap Show from 3rd Bass’s visits to the UK – what do you remember of being on-air with Tim in London?
“I remember Tim had the late-night show on Capital Radio at that time and we used to go up there with this guy from Def Jam in the UK called Trenton. I just remember going up there late-night after we’d been running around all day with Serch going nuts and Tim would end almost every line he said by saying ‘Respect!’ So it just became a running joke between me and Serch where we would imitate Tim Westwood all the time (laughs). Then we’d get back to the States and hear is tapes back home and there was somewhere that used to list his charts in New York and we’d see we’d made it onto his charts and be happy about that. But Tim was was always very receptive to what we were doing and gracious enough to have us on his show so we always got along well with him.”
With it being sixteen years today since the untimely 1997 passing of Biggie Smalls, Radio One’s Tim Westwood has dug in his vaults for footage of the BK legend’s 1995 London performance at Hammersmith Palais alongside Puffy.
More vintage footage from Tim Westwood’s archives featuring a behind-the-scenes look at Public Enemy’s visit to London as part of 1987’s Def Jam Tour – lookout for appearances from LL Cool J and the UK’s She-Rockers plus some priceless interaction between Chuck and Flav.
Tim Westwood dusts-off more old-school footage from his short-lived “N-Sign Radio” TV show featuring Philly duo Cash Money & Marvelous performing their 1988 single “Find An Ugly Woman”.
More vintage footage from Tim Westwood in the form of this 1988 interview with Biz Markie on the UK deejay’s short-lived cult late-night TV show N-Sign Radio – lookout for the priceless demonstration of the infamous Biz Dance.
1988 footage of the UK’s Demon Boyz performing their classics “Northside” and “Rougher Than An Animal” on Tim Westwood’s late-night N-Sign Radio television show.
Tim Westwood digs in his Capital Radio vaults to dust off this vintage 1990 performance from the legendary Ultramagnetic MC’s at London’s Dingwalls venue.
“Bad Meaning Good” is a documentary put together by current Radio 1 ‘big dog’ Tim Westwood which originally aired in 1987 on BBC TV here in the UK – at the time the film was shown it was ground-breaking to see British Hip-Hop figures such as London Posse, Cookie Crew and Crazy Noddy on mainstream television – vintage footage alert!
Questlove of The Roots speaks to Tim Westwood about the group’s early days and where they find inspiration – must have been pretty annoying constantly being called “Questlover” by Big Tim though.
Tim Westwood builds with the Wally Champ in this entertaining interview prior to Wu-Tang’s recent show in London – try not to get too distracted by Westwood’s facial expressions during this clip…
Back in the very early 90s High Wycombe’s MCM made his name as part of the pivotal UK Hip-Hop group Caveman, a crew also comprising of producer The Principle and turntable technician DJ Diamond J. The trio dropped their classic debut album “Positive Reaction” in 1991, a seemingly effortless blend of funky jazz-based samples and youthfully energetic yet reflective rhymes, including timeless singles such as the upbeat “Victory” and the commercially successful “I’m Ready”.
1992 saw the release of the group’s second album “The Whole Nine Yards…” which showcased the crew taking a slightly harder musical direction that didn’t sit comfortably with some Caveman fans.
The remainder of the decade was a relatively quiet period for MCM, with sporadic single releases such as “I Got Soul” and “Power Moves” proving the British wordsmith still had the skills to pay the bills but not being followed up by the full-length solo effort many were hoping for.
Now in 2011, MCM finally unleashes the project that was shelved back in 1995 due to label politics and industry setbacks. “The Gospel (1994 – 2011) – The Missing Gems Of MCM” is an immense 32-track collection that, as its title suggests, includes those lost mid-90s bangers as well as more recently recorded material, with production coming from Phi-Life Cypher’s DJ Nappa, former Demon Boyz member DJ Devastate and, of course, M himself.
Here the veteran of the UK rap scene talks about the early Caveman days, his memories of appearing on Tim Westwood’s infamous Capital Rap Show, and the reasons for deciding to release “The Gospel” at this particular moment in time.
So let’s take it all the way back – when did you first become interested in Hip-Hop?
“Basically I grew up around music. All my brothers were into music like jazz, revival, feel-good music. I grew up with it and have always been into it. I started off as a jazz dancer when I was too young to go out (laughs). Then at around 12, 13, my cousin Smally Small was well into Hip-Hop, Diamond J as well. Those guys were really influential to me at the time. I used to listen to a lot of pirate radio stations and I was hearing Schoolly D, Run DMC and really getting a feel for what this Hip-Hop stuff was all about. Then all of a sudden I found myself writing rhymes (laughs). That was basically how things started to come together.”
At what point did Caveman officially become a group?
“We used to go to Diamond J’s house and he’d have his decks set-up just cutting up on the ones and twos and we’d all be playing around with the rapping. Then about three years after that I went to college and was still heavily into rhyming. I used to try and study (laughs) but people used to think I was some sort of nutter because all I used to do was walk around listening to my headphones. Then I met this girl called Viv who told me she knew a guy called Robbie who she thought I should meet up with as he was really into his music as well. Robbie was in Aylesbury at the time and he became better known to people as The Principle. So I went to his house to meet up with him and he was playing me the instrumentals he’d made that would become tracks like “Victory”. I went away, wrote some rhymes, came back and he was like ‘Yeah! I like this’ and that was really the birth of Caveman. I then got Diamond J involved and it all started from there. Robbie sent the tracks to Profile Records and they liked it. We were expecting a demo contract at first, but the people at the label were like ‘Forget that! We like this!’ and that’s how we got signed to the label.”
Was there much of a Hip-Hop scene in High Wycombe or was it literally just you guys?
“No, no, you had Surveillance, which was Mighty Marl J’s crew, you had Plus One, there were loads of crews doing Hip-Hop at the time in Wycombe.”
As a group of outsiders was it hard for you to break into the London rap scene at the time when you started performing etc?
“When we started to do shows around London and go to jams we made sure that people knew we were serious about the music. But at the same time, because we were from High Wycombe some people did look at us a certain way. But that also helped us stand out because we were just doing what we felt, we weren’t really concerned so much about what was going on in London. It was kinda difficult, but at the same time we did also get a lot of love during those early days.”
In the very early-90s a lot of British Hip-Hop had a very militant identity and musically was very hardcore with the whole Britcore sound. The music of Caveman was immediately different as you were using a lot of jazz and soul samples that led to comparisons being made between the group and what was happening at the time Stateside with acts like Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest. What did you make of that?
“We were influenced by Tribe, The 45 King, all those guys, so musically there was an element of that, but lyrically I was just rapping how I felt really. I wasn’t really that experienced, even though I’d been writing rhymes since I was 13, 14-years-old. But it still had an impact, which was the most important thing to us. We did get a lot of comparisons being made to Stateside artists because of the music we were sampling and some people said that we were trying to be American, but we really weren’t going out of our way to fit in like that. We were just doing us.”
A lot of people remember your regular radio appearances on Tim Westwood’s Capital Rap Show back in the early-90s. What are some of the memories that stand out for you from that experience?
“It was mad. I remember we’d just done the Gang Starr show in London at The Forum and Guru came up to the station and was telling us how they’d been starting their European shows with Caveman’s “I’m Ready”. That was a really good feeling. That made me realise that what we were doing was really making a contribution to the music. We had a lot of fun with Tim on the phone lines. I remember one time Chuck D was on the show and I was just listening in and he mentioned that he’d heard our stuff and liked what we were doing and I was just like ‘What??!! Yo!!!!’. Chuck D was one of my favourite emcees at the time, so to hear him say something like that about us was incredible. Those are the real memories I have of our time on Tim’s show, personal things like that. None of what happened on those shows was pre-planned, it was all organic, it was all Hip-Hop. Another great moment was when we did a full freestyle session on the show with the whole Caveman crew up there rhyming. That was brilliant. The most beautiful thing now is when I speak to people and they have their memories of listening to the show while we were up there and they remember certain things that happened and they’re telling me how the show was a huge part of their school days and things like that. It’s a beautiful feeling to have that shared history with people.”
Caveman’s second album 1992’s “The Whole Nine Yards…” had a harder musical edge to it than the group’s debut – was that a conscious decision?
“It was sort of a conscious decision because we didn’t really want to get labelled as just doing one thing with the whole jazz rap stuff. But because a lot of people caught such a vibe from “Positive Reaction” it was hard for them to take us doing something a little different to what they’d heard before. But looking back there are still some good moments on that second album.”
After Caveman split there was talk of you dropping a solo album but it didn’t ever materialise – why was that?
“Well basically, BMG were going to take it up and then when the album was finished they didn’t bother with it. Maybe they were expecting another “I’m Ready”? I really don’t know. But I’m a music guy so I’m always going to make music that reflects what’s in my heart at the time. So although the album might not have been what they were expecting, it definitely reflected where I was at in 1995. Things had happened within the group and everyone was just really starting to go their separate ways. Principle became a Muslim, Diamond was doing his own stuff, so sadly the group just kinda fizzled out. But straight after the Caveman thing I started working on “The Gospel”. If it had come out at the time that would have been great, but actually now, I think it’s a blessing that it didn’t because the growth that I’ve experienced in those subsequent years, from having kids, losing my mum, becoming a grown man, all of that’s gone into the music and made a better project than the one I would’ve put out in the 90s. “Positive Reaction” was a very personal album, but I was still living at home at my mum’s when we made it. “The Gospel” is again very personal, but it draws on a lot more life experience for its inspiraton.”
So why did you finally decide to release “The Gospel” now?
“It was just one of those things where I met up with a friend of a friend who is in the industry and it started from there. The only reason why I hadn’t done anything with it before is that I couldn’t find anyone to work with who could really see my vision and respect what I was doing as an artist. It seemed like everyone I was speaking to about putting the album out was really just looking to make a quick buck. I’ve never wanted to work with people like that because at the first sign of some new trend they could just shelve your project and leave you stranded. I didn’t want to get involved with certain people because they really weren’t serious about the music. I still have the same love for the music as I did back when I first came out with Caveman, nothing has changed as far as that’s concerned. So if i’m going to work with you, I need to know you share that same love for quality music.”
With the recent talk of “Grown Man Rap” becoming something of Hip-Hop sub-genre it definitely seems like the project is coming out at an ideal time…
“I think that’s what the music industry needs right now because everything is being force fed to you. There are people out there who do want to hear some real music. To be honest, whether three people hear my album and say ‘That’s the sh*t!’ or a million people say it, either way it doesn’t bother me as long as I’m happy with it. Right now, I’ve got total control of this project and I’ve made sure that I’m happy with it. It’s a good mix of the tracks that would’ve been on the original release and also more recent material that shows growth lyrically but musically is still grounded in that real Hip-Hop sound.”
A lot has changed since your early days in terms of how artists promote themselves and new projects etc. Has that come as something of a culture shock to you with this new project?
“Well, I just let the guy I’m working with deal with all of that and I concentrate on the music (laughs). But I’m on Facebook, MySpace, things like that. Really, I’m not one for talking, I just like to let the music speak for itself. But I also understand that you have to put yourself out there nowadays to let people see what you’re doing. But I’m really just that same person I was all those years ago with Caveman, just all about good tunes, collecting breaks and making music. But overall, I think the internet is a blessing and a curse. I mean, it’s great that you can go out there and add Dr. Dre and Kanye West as friends, but I don’t really have a large interest in that. I just try to deal with the music and let the people behind me promote the project.”
So can we expect more music from MCM following the release of “The Gospel”?
“Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do next. My main purpose at the moment is to get “The Gospel” out there and help get some warmth back into music and then whatever comes from that is what comes from it. Hopefully people will enjoy the project and it’ll make them aware that there are still people out there recording real music. I know that Caveman gets a lot of love for what we did back in the day, and of course I appreciate that love, but I really want people to see what I still have to offer today.”
Ryan Proctor
“The Gospel (1994 – 2011) – The Missing Gems Of MCM” will be released digitally in June.
Old To The New - Ryan Proctor's Beats, Rhymes & Hip-Hop Nostalgia 