Flatline: What I've always admired about you is your passion and your dedication to hip hop - I think it's unparalleled. How tired are you of certain people questioning your place in hip hop?
MC Serch: You know it's funny, those that do have a good reason and I don't question it, but I really don't get that anymore. Most people don't question my place in hip hop...most people understand what my role is and understand my position and what part I play in the culture. Most people appreciate that I am who I am. I've never kinda claimed to be anything else...my beliefs are still my beliefs. I believe this is a Black art form and Black music in a Black culture and it has to be respected. I still believe that great hip hop music is based on a great emcee saying extraordinary things over a hot beat. Those kinds of things still hold true to me and I'm very close to those kinds of beliefs. That's why, if you look at the amount of artists that we worked with at Serchlite Music, you can count them all on one hand. We don't really choose to work with a lot of artists cause we really don't feel like a lot of artists fit into that legendary status...fit into that mold of taking the legacy of hip hop to the next level. Like our early involvement with Nas, O.C. and Non Phixion - I think that speaks highly of what our belief system is and who we are.
Flatline: I've always been curious, going back to 89, what was it like getting to work with The Bomb Squad in their prime?
MC Serch: It was very interesting. I mean, those three guys - The Bomb Squad was Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee and Eric "Vietnam" Sadler. Eric was, to me, the producer. Keith was the street guy who made sure the street was gonna love it and the beat was hot - the engineer. Hank was the guy who kinda put the stamp of approval, who did the final mixing, came in and listened and then was on to other things. I loved working with Eric Sadler. It was a great pleasure being in the studio with him, watching him make "Oval Office" and "Steppin' To The A.M."...and you know, him really believing in us and what we were trying to make. He understood that it wasn't a gimmick. We were trying to make great rap records...
Flatline: ...and timeless material, that still holds up today...
MC Serch: Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.
Flatline: They were clearly eye to eye with you guys on that. You can go back and listen and it's still fresh now...
MC Serch: Yeah, it's really amazing to me, you know, that it worked out that way...as a lot of classic stuff really is. You can still listen to "Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik", you can still listen to "Nation Of Millions", you can still listen to "All For One", "The Chronic" and the first Snoop Dogg album...certain shit just resonates forever. Great music lasts forever. These producers we manage have a motto - "classic shit breaks the rules" and it's so true. That's the kind of music you wanna be around. If it's not classic and it's not really resonating to the next level then why do it? That's what was such a great part of working with The Bomb Squad in their prime - everything they were doing from 89 to 91 wound up being classic.
Flatline: Are there any plans for a 20th anniversary deluxe edition of "The Cactus Album", complete with a dvd featuring all the videos?
MC Serch: You know what, I met with someone who would love to do it. I met with a guy named Dennis Smart who handles the re-issue division for Universal and unfortunately, based on all of the legal or lack of legal on that album, I think they're very nervous about trying to make that record happen. It's definitely been spoken about and it's definitely been talked about. It's just that the early, early Def Jam legal wasn't the best legal in the world and I believe they are very worried about lawsuits and sample clearance. I think they're really concerned about what the legal is gonna cost on doing that.
Flatline: Sounds like the same kind of thing that Chuck is going through in trying to re-release "Nation Of Millions" and "Fear Of A Black Planet"...
MC Serch: I told Chuck just a while ago, if he wants to do a class action suit against Def Jam, I'm with him. You can't get an answer out of them and they don't treat you with respect. I spoke with the head of legal at Def Jam...guy looked at me...first of all, he didn't know who I was. How you gonna be head of Def Jam and you don't know who 3rd Bass is?! The modern music business doesn't really understand the value of their catalogue and they don't know how to utilize it. I tried to buy back my masters. I called and said, let me just buy back the album. I'll deal with the legal, no problem...never got a call back. Welcome to the modern music business.
Flatline: Let's talk about this new album - "M.any Y.oung L.ives A.go: The 1994 Sessions" - which is being distributed digitally. It's tracks from your second solo album that never came out, and the material is great. How come it's only surfacing now?
MC Serch: I didn't know where the masters were and I wasn't really looking for them to be honest. When I moved to Detroit in 2002, over 600 boxes from my house came with me. Me and my wife kinda got to the last of the boxes at the end of last year and I came across this heavy box. It turned out to be all the masters. So I was like, let's listen to these and what I discovered was this 25 year old emcee who was making some hot little joints. So I decided to get back into the lab and digitally remix and re-master them. I worked with DJ Mark Allen on them and his ear is just pristine. We gave it that warmth and fuzziness from 94...
Flatline: Exactly. If "Return Of The Product" was a double album, this could be the second disc...
MC Serch: Right, exactly. You nailed it right on the head of what we were trying to accomplish with the record.
Flatline: There's also the three unreleased 3rd Bass tracks on the album and they have a more mature sound to them. Do you ever wonder what the reunion album may have sounded like?
MC Serch: Yeah, unfortunately, with where Pete and I were in our lives, we just couldn't make it happen. Me, Pete and Rich were three different individuals at that time. I love the way "Out To Bat" feels and I love the way "Cats In The Cradle" feels. I just think those records have a great feeling to them. You know, it would have been fun...if, you know...if we would have had more time, if we would have had more availability. It would have been great. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.
Flatline: With 3rd Bass, and then when you went solo, you always had an outlet to perform live, whether it was on Arsenio or In Living Color. Do you think the art of performance is lost in hip hop?
MC Serch: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the whole aspect of putting a show together...currently we're working on a section of our website that's going to be called "Serchlite Certified Hip Hop". We'll have these young artists, who we feel are really high level, high quality classic hip hop...and we want to give these artists a chance to be heard and seen. I'm dealing with this artist named Mr.Wrong and we were talking about stage presence and performance. It was refreshing to actually hear that he cared about where he was gonna be on stage when a particular song came on. That is the kind of thing that is missing and lacking in hip hop and I also think it's one of the reasons why the Jay Leno's don't have rappers on that much anymore. Have a show! That's why it's so great when you see Outkast on David Letterman - they have a show, it's always a performance. Not for nothing, when Lupe Fiasco did David Letterman with Jill Scott...that's one of my favorite performances of the year.
Flatline: Is there any particular moment in your career that you're most proud of?
MC Serch: ummm...no. I mean, I'm pretty proud of all of them. They're just incredible individual moments. I think the week that Nas' album came out is a pretty proud moment, when "Illmatic" first came out. I think that week, when the album dropped was a pretty amazing week. You know what, I don't think I have any singular proud moment...they're all kinda just great levels of pride that I have for every moment. I wish different things. I wish O.C. would have been signed to a different record label when "Word...Life" came out.
Flatline: Do you have the recording bug again? Are we ever going to hear another solo album from you?
MC Serch: Yeah, I mean, I go into the studio all the time and I just worked on this project that's 100% for charity called "Peace In The Middle East". Basically, it's a project with Jewish and Palestinian artists coming together to promote peace. Matisyahu is on it and we got beats from some great Palestinian and great Jewish artists and 100% of the proceeds are going to orphanages in Palestine and Israel that take children who lost their parents in the war. So we're working on that, putting the final touches on the recording process of that album. You know, I'm always dropping a 16 here and there...I just worked with this group of emcee's in Detroit called The Kardi Boys and we're putting out their record...and, you know, just a bunch of stuff.
- Flatline for rapstation.com
No comments:
Post a Comment