SLAINE
Interview by Heart Beat Wolf
Sub Noize is one of the hottest independent labels at this time. For independent Rap, Strange Music, Psychopathic, and Sub Noize are making big moves. You’re really lucky to be part of it.
Definitely. I have done everything and I have came up through selling mixtapes and with drug dealers, so I really don’t want to be on a major label. These muthafuckas are a bunch of old guys in an office saying what is hot and what is the next ring-tone song. With Sub Noize ain’t nobody gonna come in the studio and tell me, “We need one of these, can you make something a little happier?” Nobody is doing that shit to me! To tell you the truth with Sub Noize, they didn’t hear my album until I had it mixed and mastered and I gave it to them. The
y did not say anything like, “Why don’t you try doing a song like this!” They gave me the freedom, which is why I am cool working with them. They gave me the freedom to do the album the way that I want to do it with out any interference. I make the album the way I want to make it.
Sub Noize seems to be really pushing you with this record.
I think they are pushing me on it because I have made a really good record. In the record business when you put music out you will find something that you can really get behind. It’s about a way of life and a place where I happen to be, and there hasn’t been something like what I am doing in a while. Sometimes I feel like I went a little bit too far on this record personally and maybe I have revealed maybe a little too much, but I never wanted to hurt anyone around me in my family with what I say. I really went into my deepest and darkest on this record. I think that it’s a special record and I am so proud of it.
Who did you work with for the production?
I got some of them from New York and some of them from LA. Statik Selektah produced some of the beats. And I worked with one kid I was in the studio with who uses a lot of instruments; he produced for Juvenile and different kinds of Hip Hop from me. I told him when we sat down that I wanted to go into a different kind of direction because he had some dope sounds, but I wanted to drag him through hell. I told him, “I want to drag your sound through my world and I think it will come out great!” This kid produced about 35% of my record. We built everything from scratch. We would change melodies in mid-song and just did a lot of cool stuff. The rest of it was kind of beats that I had done where I worked with some dope producers.
What kind of fanbase do you think your music will attract? People like Juggalos or fans of Strange Music or Sub Noize artists or do you have different fans on your own?
I think those kids are gonna feel what I’m doing. At the end of the day you don’t have to be where I am from to relate to what I am talking about. A lot of those kids have a lot of the same issues as me and they can relate to that. Plus they like the Indie style and they like the aggression because that is what they are looking for. I also think the Hip Hop purest types of dudes that listen to Gangstarr, Biggie and Nas will like my stuff, because it is technically on a straight lyrical level and in my opinion is a notch above everything that is out.
Does your record have a storytelling feeling, being that you are into making films?
I think my mixtapes had that storytelling feeling already, but that was low budget. With this one, not that I have a huge budget, but I know how to go in the game as far as the direction and how to get the sound that I want on my record. This record is a movie and it is real cinematic! There is a lot of images on it and I am real excited for the people to hear it. Everyone that I have played it for has been blown away. It will be out Oct 26, 2010.
Are Special Teamz and La Coka Nostra still together? What’s going on with your group projects?
Definitely. Those are my brothers. Ill Bill has a record out with DJ Muggs and he is doing his solo thing, Everlast is doing a project right now, ED OG is working on a solo album right now. It is all perfect timing because everybody is doing their thing, but there will be another Special Teamz record and there will be another La Coka Nostra record.
Does Boston have a distinct sound or is it similar to New York Hip Hop?
I think in Boston there is a lot of difference. The sound that Boston has been associated with was kind of like the acrobatic esoteric or the back packer kind of sound because you have a lot of colleges. You have two different Boston’s. You have the neighborhood Boston and you have the college Boston. You have millions of college kids coming in every year and they don’t want dangerous acts or street acts, so they have non threatening Hip Hop so the college kids would not be afraid to go to the shows. You also had the Almighty RSO, which was the big group with Benzino and all them dudes and they had a strong hold on a lot of stuff that came out of Boston. I don’t want to say that they stopped shit from coming out, but they kind of ran shit. That was the generation before me though; that wasn’t my generation. When I came around I think I was kind of a trailblazer for a lot of stuff. Boston has never seen a White artist like me, because most of the artists that came out of Boston were non-threatening. I had to break a lot of people’s faces off who dissed me. I don’t think people had seen people who did that before who had guns and a crew. I wasn’t taking any shit from anybody and I wasn’t afraid of nobody. I was coming to get what was mine. When I came from New York with that kind of attitude people thought I was crazy, and people never knew what I might do. I might put a bullet in you, I might crack your fuckin skull open, and you didn’t want to fuck with me. I think people knew who my crew is and it ain’t nothing to play with. When I came back to Boston and started to sell like those 13,000, I did the shit with DJ Premier and put out the record. At that time after I linked up with Danny Boy and DJ Lethal we kind of laid the seeds of La Coka Nosta back in 2003. Then Everlast and Ill Bill jumped in back in 2006. Right around that time the Boston Herald, which is a major newspaper around here, did a big story about me at the same time Ben Affleck was casting a movie. He saw my story in the newspaper and had me come in to cast in his movie.
That’s how the movie thing opened up, from that article? At that time were you already in La Coka Nostra?
Yeah. It was from that article. We had just started at that time, we were just recording. It was before the Special Teamz came out. I was starting to get a buzz but I still didn’t have shit. I was living in a warehouse in Roxbury. I had all that electricity happen with the movie “Gone Baby Gone”, and then La Coka Nostra started taking off and that changed my life. I have toured around the world. I got the second movie and it straightened my life out a lot. I calmed down and am not as wild as I use to be. I got a little boy and a wife and am trying to do the right things by them. I got this opportunity and I feel if I waste this opportunity then I would be spitting on all the kids’ graves who I grew up with who are dead now and all the people behind the wall.
What were some of the rappers who really made you want to rap as a kid?
My first introduction was in the early 80s. I remember watching the kids break dancing and hearing Run DMC and the Beastie Boys—I loved that shit. Then I heard Kool Moe Dee and LL Cool J. I listened to it all! Then I started getting more into the Rakim’s and the Kool G Rap kind of stuff and then in my teenage years when I was getting fucked up I was into Nas, Biggie, Wu-Tang and Smiff-N-Wesson. Also Slick Rick was a big influence of mine in the early years.
You had a real deep East Coast influence?
Yeah, and when you say a “Boston sound”, I tried to be conscious of having my own sound on this record just like how La Coka Nostra had a different sound from Special Teamz. Why be in two groups and have a solo project if it is all going to sound the same? I am trying to establish my sound now, whether or not that becomes a Boston sound. We are only a three hour drive away from New York and that has heavily influenced the Boston sound. What is whack about Hip Hop now is people are not trying to stick to their sounds; they are just trying to sound like whatever is hot. You have dudes from New York trying to sound like they are from the South. In the Bay Area what is cool about them is at least they got their own shit. I respect that they are doing their own thing.
Do you consider yourself more like a backpack rapper or a street Gangsta rapper?
I consider myself to be more in the mold of a Nas. He is my favorite MC. I’m not saying I am as good as a Nas, but I have seen all the Gangsta shit, I seen all the drug shit. Even though I have lived through a lot of that, I am the one that is left to tell the tale. I’m more of like a street poet. I wouldn’t consider myself a backpack rapper because I never wrote a battle rap in my life. I am all about the stories. You grow as an artist and you mature into different things. Like we were talking about the political mind control things, I could rap about that in four or five years from now once I am removed from the street long enough.
As far as La Coka Nostra, how much input do you have in the group?
It started off with me and Danny. He does the visual side of things with the logos and stuff, but I think I was the first MC in it. Once Everlast and Bill came in we all worked equally with concepts. I don’t think anybody had a pecking order or a chain of command as far as the creative process. On the business side of things, obviously those guys have had more experience in the game than me and I would listen to them and ask questions. In that capacity I was being mentored by them. But I think as an MC they always appreciated that I was dope. They knew I was always spitting fire every time I got in there.
As far as your sound as a solo artist and with Special Teamz and La Coka Nostra, what is the difference?
With Special Teamz you have three people from different cultures and backgrounds and even generations because those cats are a little bit older than me. When Ed OG came out, I heard “I Gotta Have It” when I was 14 so I looked up to him as a Boston MC. Ed is a little more conscious than me in the mold of a Common or Talib, and Jay is kind of like a chameleon because he can do the grimy stuff and the conscious stuff at the same time.
Jay is Black?
He is half Black and half White, which is funny because you have Ed on one side and me on the other, and Jay like a chameleon. He could go with either one of us. It is more of an old school sound. DJ Premier produced our first single. It is really like a pure Hip Hop record with beats, rhymes and a DJ. With La Coka everybody has a similar background because we were the rowdy White dudes that would fuck you up. I think there is a little more of a political element that is going on with La Coka Nostra, and at the same time it is on some rowdy shit. You ain’t gonna see a mosh pit at a Special Teamz show, but you will see a mosh pit at a La Coka Nostra show. It has heavier rifts and more of a “punch you in the face” style. With my solo stuff, which you will hear on my album, it’s like when you are hanging out with your boys and you are fuckin around with each other drinking and joking you are one way, but when you go home you have to deal with the weight of the world and you are alone. You have to deal with your thoughts, you are thinking about life and it takes on a different tone. My approach is still very lyrical as that is my bread and butter, but the beats are really hard. It is very personal. It’s like an autobiography and I wanted to make a time piece that my son could listen to in 25 years from now and understand where his dad came from. This is who he was, and this is how he made it out. I made this record like it would be the last record that I ever made. I hope it is not, but I wanted to make sure that I documented it. I wanted to close the door on some of these demons in my life and move forward onto the next project. It is called “The World with no Skies”.
That’s a dark title. What does it mean to you?
What that means is I have been in the position where you are close to death and you feel like your life is flashing in front of your eyes. To me that is what this album is. It is my life flashing before my eyes. I feel when you are in that place you are existing in a place where there is a world with no skies. You are in a place somewhere in between life and death.
When you say dark what does dark mean to you?
Dark to me and dark to other people might be a little different because I am used to living in the dark. This album has a lot of colors and textures on it. In the beginning of the album I don’t believe in anything. I am reckless: step on your throat and don’t give a fuck about anything. During the course of the album it explores everything in my life from dreams to nightmares. Then later in the album going into having my son and trying to hold things together with my wife. Then after having our baby boy I start to discover that there is something bigger than us and I start seeing stuff in a different way. From there when I am wrapping up the album it is like where I go from there and what I am taking from these experiences. I think there is a maturity that goes from one end of the album to the next. What I mean by dark, I am referring to the sound-scapes. It is a real aggressive up tempo record. It is not slow. At times it is like being in a nightmare that keeps switching visions, like when you will be in one place and then you are in another place and you don’t know how you got there.
What about the music? Is it a lot of keyboards or more sample oriented?
I spent hundreds of hours tweaking every song, creating layers, and I built a lot of the stuff out of my head. Only half the album has samples but the other half has all beats built from scratch.
Are you are happy with the sound you got? Do you feel it is different from other albums out there?
Yeah! My record doesn’t sound like anything out there. I think it is going to be one of those records where people are either going to love it or hate it at first. I think the people that hate it at first might end up loving it later because it’s different from what people are use to hearing. At the same time it still pays homage to that Soul Assassin sound from the early 90s that I really love. Especially the single because it is probably the lightest sounding song on the album and the most fun record on the album. It’s kind of like a throw back to the Jump Around, Cypress Hill, House of Pain era.
You have had a lot of difficult experiences in your life. I wonder how you survived all the drugs. A lot of people wouldn’t have.
A lot of us didn’t. I have more friends in the graveyard than you would believe and a lot in jail too.
What really made you go in that direction in your life?
I think it was the environment. It started off with drinking like with everybody, and the hard stuff was there like angel dust, coke, acid, and everything. With the heroin that is what a lot of my friends died from, but I like to go fast and not slow, so heroin and me didn’t go together good. We got a lot of people in my city that have a bad appetite for drugs in general. Cocaine and angel dust got me pretty good.
What do you think is going on in America? It’s like this whole Western civilization is at the brink of crashing.
It is scary, because really the legal drugs are just as bad as the drugs on the street. 71% of the country is hooked on drugs. That is not like coke and heroin, but it includes coke and heroin. I am talking about shit like Xanax and all that shit is just as bad. I take that now still and it is not the kind of drug that will put you out of commission, but it is hard to get off of. A lot of drugs I think are coming from the government to control your mind. When you think of it, why does anyone need to take a drug when they are depressed? It’s just part of life. For years people have dealt with depression and anxiety and that is normal shit that everybody has, you don’t need to take a drug for that. If you go to the doctor they put you on these drugs because these drug companies pay them to do that. It is all a big fucking racket and everybody is on drugs.
You are a person who has intelligence and an understanding. There are so many people like you who can’t get it together. I know people all over the world who don’t even have a third grade education and don’t have much money, but they are more healthy and strong and have a deeper understanding of life than people in a high civilization like America and Europe with all of the wealth and education.
If you really want to get down to it, it comes down to a disease. Alcoholism and drug addiction is a disease as much as anything. I spent a lot of time in detox and it crosses all racial lines and economic lines. There are poor kids who are dope fiends and there are rich kids who are dope fiends. There are teachers who are crack heads. It is a disease like cancer and anybody can get it. The more I study it, I know I am not cured of all my shit. I wish I was, but sometimes the pain of life becomes hard. When you are a little kid growing up in the situations that I grew up in, everybody in your crew has some type of fucked up situation going on at home. Their father isn’t there or their mother is addicted to drugs or whatever, we all had those issues and drugs seemed like a good way to fuckin forget about shit and to numb yourself from the pain that life brings. Once you do go down that road, you could be 13 or even younger like the ten year olds in my neighborhood that are dope fiends, but once you start going down that road then comes all the violence that comes with that life. You have dudes who hustle drugs and have to get paid and then you have people who get killed over money issues and drugs and houses get robbed because drug addicts need money because of their habits. That’s when the jail terms start. Then when they get out of jail they are institutionalized and they become worse criminals than before. There is crime going on everywhere and if you even want to survive you have to be willing to fuckin hurt the next man because this dude might hurt you. You always have to have your eyes watching and you can never trust everybody. A lot of it starts with the drugs.
I hear that you are going to have a child. How do you feel about your child coming into a world like this?
I already have a son that is two years old right now and my worst fear is for him to go through the stuff that I went through. I try to be a loving father and be home and take care of my son, but obviously what I do for a living keeps me on the road a lot. I just spent the whole day with him today and yesterday I took him to this little thing and we played. His mother is very stable and she doesn’t drink or anything like that. It starts with setting a good example in the home. As an individual I probably won’t be a candidate for father of the year, but I disagree. I look at it like I have been through a lot of shit and I think that has made me a better person and a better role model as a parent. I know all of the dangerous shit out there. When I talk to my son, he is not old enough for me to talk like that yet, but when he is I will let him know the real deal. He ain’t gonna be able to lie to me because I know all the shit and you can’t bullshit a bullshitter. As corny as it sounds, I think a lot of that shit comes from your soul. A lot of us, from not being loved and having bad family situations. If you put kids in a good family situation and you give them love and confidence and are lucky enough to remove them from certain kinds of environments, then things should be alright.
The worst drugs we have now are the internet, Television and video games. All those mind controlling devices make you weak.
From the drugs to what they put in the water, to television say things are one way when they are really another way. There has been a revolution across the world as long as history is documented: when people come into power that power corrupts, and the people always rise against that. But now the people in power are so brilliant at what they do. What they do now is they have changed the game without us even knowing it and have us doing everything for them. We are being oppressed without even knowing it. You are holding a cell phone in your hand and you are staring into it all day long. The signal is fucking with your brain. I am doing it right now. We do it out of convenience and business. We go on Twitter or Myspace and say what we are doing, “Right now I’m about to go here, I just did this, I’m going there.” We don’t even carry around cash because we all have cards that document what we buy and where we are. We carry around tracking devices in our pockets. It’s crazy because there are cameras everywhere. If there should be time for a revolution it should be right now, but it has all been done so brilliantly I don’t see any revolution coming.
The people don’t even know who the enemy is.
There is not going to be a revolution because the people don’t know. They made it so that the people are on drugs and they are happy to go right along with the way things are. It makes it easy for the people in power. You might have the power struggle at the top with the whole illuminati, but we are all just pawns in that.
Do you feel depressed when you think of this situation?
Yeah, because you have choices where you could think about it or not. I think twenty of us can sit around and talk about and there is stuff about it all over the internet, but it doesn’t matter because there is such a strong hold on the media and everything else that they will make you look like a crazy person. They just knock it down and there is nothing you can do about it. The revolution has to be fought on such a higher level. It could almost not even come from the people because the way that they have designed it, it is scary. You think of the technology that has happened within just the past ten to fifteen years. imagine what it will be like when my son is my age. Who knows what shit is going to be going on. There is a billion stars in the sky and everything in the sky is consistent with each other. There is stars, planets, asteroids and solar systems and you are telling me that there are not millions of other planets and we are not knowing about a bunch or them or are not in contact with some of them. I’m not even talking on some sci-fi shit because that is real. Everything else in the universe is consistent except for us? Except for human beings? There is life on millions of other planets.
Do you put your life experiences into your music?
I try to personalize everything in my music. I think I wasn’t shown love by my parents and I don’t want to sound like a “boo hoo” story. I think my mother loved me very much, but she had issues that she was dealing with. I do put in stuff that reflects my reality and what is going on in my life. It is a choice as far as accepting everything for what it is or trying to change this whole matrix that we are living in right now, but I don’t know how to do that. Of course I have political ideas, but really what I do artistically I try to personalize and talk about what is going on around me that reflects my reality.
When you were in New York coming from Boston, were you already doing a lot of Rap?
My first love was Rap and not films. I loved movies when I was a kid, but I started writing rhymes the first time I heard a Beastie Boys record. In my neighborhood where I grew up nobody really rapped like that. I grew up in a racially segregated neighborhood in Boston. There were a lot of race wars and race riots. The Blacks and the Whites were at each others’ throats. To be a White rapper wasn’t a good look. I wasn’t never on the streets rappin with my friends or nothing like that until I moved to New York. When I moved to New York I got sober for a year and cleaned up and went to college. Then I got fucked up again when I went to New York and I got kicked out of school for beating up the doorman. I really started doing Rap in New York and use to go to open mics. MC Shan was my first manager. I started making Hip Hop music about fifteen years ago. I moved backed to Boston because of my girl. If it wasn’t for her I would be dead or in jail right now. I have been with her for 18 years since we were only 14 years old. She lived in New York with me and she hated living in New York, so I moved back to Boston with her. I had been rhyming for five years and moved back to Boston and thought that this was it and I ain’t gonna rap. I was sitting down with major labels with MC Shan and had some offers, but instead I came back to Boston and me and Shan kind of fell out. When I got back here all my friends were bad drug addicts and shit was worse from when we were teenagers. I fell back into that trap. I even lost my girl in the meantime. She had to leave me because I was so fucked up. Then I went to detox. After that it became the springboard for what my first two mixtapes was about, which was going on a three day bender.
That sounds like a horror story. I can’t imagine how you survived all that madness.
I could go to 700 spots in the city for an AA meeting, and each one would be filled with hundreds of people. Those are just the people that are actually clean, sober, and doing well. If I drive around and go into different neighborhoods and in every bar room they are all full too. I can get drugs in five minutes too. I could hang up the phone with you and get drugs just like that.
After you went back to Boston did you record?
I didn’t have anybody to invest in me, so I had local drug dealers and bookies invest in me to go to the studio. The studio was like $50 an hour and I didn’t have any money. People always knew I could rap. When I came back it was like “Man, this dude can rap!” But I got in some fucked up situations too where dudes have gone in the studio with guns trying to get my masters after I had a falling out with them. They held the dude up at gunpoint who owned the studio to get all of my masters, but that is a whole other story. It was all these obstacles that I had to make it through before I could get anything out. Finally I got my first mixtape out. Danny Boy from House of Pain introduced me to DJ Lethal, and he signed me to a production deal. I went and recorded with him and a lot of those tracks are on my first one called “The White Man is the Devil Volume One”. I pressed up 50 copies of that. I gave them to five different drug dealers and the next day all those guys were calling me back saying they needed more. That turned into a hundred and eventually 15,000.
That’s amazing!
And at the same time I started this group with Ed OG and Jaysaun called Special Teamz. They had already started working on a group and they were looking for somebody else and it turned out to be me. It was kind of cool because we grew up in the era in Boston where it was racially charged and Ed is Black from Roxbury and Jaysaun is half Black and half White. We made this group and we knocked down a lot of walls between the racial tension in the city. You had the backpack groups and you had the street groups and the street groups were hating on whatever and there was a lot of tension on the Hip Hop scene. When we put together that group we ended a lot of that tension and kind of brought the people together locally.
