|
|
Interview with Bravehearts By David Friedman Bravehearts is, of course, Nas’ crew. You’ve got two rappers in the core group, Nas’ younger brother Jungle and his friend Wiz. Other than that, how would you like to introduce Bravehearts to Murder Dog readers? Wiz: We’re all about being prosperous, getting money and staying thorough, man. We don’t have to subject ourselves to doing some stupid shit or doing some shit that you won’t be looking at as thorough no more. Jungle: The Bravehearts, we’re a gang that’s been holding Nas down since day one, since he first ever started making records. And now he’s gonna put us out. We’ve been behind the scenes for all these years. Jungle and Wiz are about to finally come out. What does it mean to you that you’re coming out at last with your debut album, "Bravehearted," on Columbia Records? Has it been difficult waiting so long? Jungle: We had tons of ideas that get dated. And you get frustrated sometimes because all of your ideas go to waste and you’re getting older. You just want to come out. You see people that you knew that weren’t out, that were your friends, and then they come out and blow up or something and you’re just waiting for your turn. You want Nas to handle his business a little better than he’s doing. But he’s young and we know we’re gonna have our time. We’re finally about to do it and it feels great. Nas’ debut album, "Illmatic," came out in 1994. What have the two of you been doing for the past nine years? Jungle: Helping him make all these albums that he’s been making. Most of the songs, we’ve been helping him make them. We kept him in the game, behind the scenes, as far as choosing beats and writing lyrics. We’ve been behind the scenes and now it’s our turn. We’ve been making songs all that time too. I used to manage Nature. I got him a record deal. I took Noreaga away from Tragedy. I got him some money and made him make some real songs. I got him in his career, so now it’s my turn. Nas and Nature worked together on The Firm project, but they’ve since traded disses. Do you regret that you helped Nature out back in the day? Jungle: No, not really. I regret that I didn’t know the business as well as I should have, but I helped him. I knew that he was an artist. He wanted to blow up, but he just didn’t have what it takes to compete. So I left him before something I could do would mess up because I never really worked with nothing that went under gold. So I left Nature because he didn’t really have the burn that Noreaga had. He didn’t really have that burning desire to be an artist like Noreaga had. So I couldn’t really work with him good. It didn’t matter with me. I thought that Bravehearts had four members—Jungle, Wiz, Nas and Nashawn. Is that right? Wiz: It is. Bravehearts is a gang. We’re just the two people that are starting to round up the game. There’s about 150 to 200 members of the Braveheart gang. We’re just the two that are representing all of them rhyming. Jungle: Nas and Nashawn are gonna feature on the album. When did the Bravehearts gang start and how did the two of you get into it? Jungle: We were always tight, but we looked at each other as Bravehearts. Nas had a record deal and had to go out to all these clubs and perform in different states and go in front of all these fans and street people and ghettos and all this stuff that artists have to do. We were just with him, just laying down all the stuff that you hear in Nas’ rhymes. We were doing it for real, in the streets. We’re the Bravehearts. Anything with Nas—if he falls off, if he blows up—we’re right there. We’re the real crew. Is Nashawn working on a solo album now? Wiz: Exactly. Nashawn is the second project off the Ill Will label. He’s a soloist, definitely. He’s working real hard right now. What was it like growing up in Queensbridge? Jungle: It was so rough. Words like future didn’t even mean anything to me. I thought there was only a past and present. Future was nothing. I still can’t believe that we’re here, that we made it out of all of that. There were a lot of deaths, a lot of drug-selling, just a lot of street shit, bullets and knives and shit. We have to be strong. If Nas wouldn’t have gotten this deal, I’d probably be dead or locked up right now—if Nas would have never did his own thing in life to show us what life was about instead of just the projects. Nas and Jungle are brothers, what was Nas like as an older brother when you go back to your childhood? Jungle: He was different than me. I was more athletic. I was into sports, he was into music. When X-Clan and everybody came out, Nas used to be into the black stuff. I didn’t like that back then because I was too young to really even know what was going on. I would like the N.W.A. and real street shit. I didn’t even understand that there was an outside of the projects. And he was going outside of the projects to be somebody. I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought he was a sellout. I didn’t realize that he was gonna make all those moves and be somebody in life. I thought being somebody in life was being somebody in the hood. And he just showed me everything about life. My father wasn’t there. My mother passed away. She had to work so hard at her job to try to raise us, two boys in the hood. And it was real. It took her life. My brother is like everything to me. I look at him and he is my father, my role model. He’s everything to me. He got me out of there. Your father is a jazz musician named Olu Dara? Jungle: Yeah, but he didn’t stick around and be a dad. He was around, but he wasn’t there. My mother had to raise us. I was in the projects getting shot. I got shot before, locked up, everything. And my father wasn’t there. My mother had to go through everything by herself. My father was running around, doing him, fucking his women and just living his life. He didn’t really get into the music. He was a musician, but he didn’t really have a deal and everything until after Nas got a deal and shit. He was a freelance jazz artist. He might do some music on someone else’s album for some money. He was well-respected by Miles Davis and everybody, but he never really got on himself to become famous or rich. There were times when he didn’t even have sneaker money for us. I’d ask him for money and he’d tell me he don’t have it. I thought he was lying. My mother did everything. She was my mother and father. Growing up, she used to be disciplining me and everything. I looked at him as a like a nigga on the street. What was your family situation like, Wiz? Wiz: My family situation was like a lot of us in a small crib and shit. I was coming up. We didn’t have too much money. We didn’t have too much to eat. We had to do a lot of stealing, a lot of shoplifting and shit like that. It was kind of tough until we started selling drugs and getting a little money for ourselves. After a while, I looked at my man and he was doing the rap thing. So I just swinged on and he just helped a nigga come up. Like a lot of people who grew up in the suburbs, I’ve never needed to steal or sell drugs to get by. How do you explain that level of desperation to some of your fans who have never lived under those circumstances? Jungle: If you don’t have any money and you go home, your mother didn’t cook for weeks and she barely has money and if she does have money she spends it on herself. Now, when you go outside, your friends are sitting on the bench and a crackhead will keep coming up to them with $10. And they’ll give him $10 for a piece of crack. After a while, your hunger pain will tell you to do what he’s doing because he’s not hungry. He has clean clothes. You don’t even have to want to sell drugs, but you come outside and a basehead offers you some money for something you don’t have and you don’t have the money, you’re gonna get what they want. And you’re gonna make it happen to survive. It’s like survival tactics. It’s so hard in the ghetto. Regular life is hard, growing up. You come outside and it’s either you do it or you get done. Do or die. It’s hard to describe. Maybe you can do it, Wiz. Wiz: No. That was perfect. So, Wiz, how did you meet Jungle and Nas? Wiz: We were growing up in the hood and I was about 8. I was going to elementary school and I moved to Queensbridge and I was in third grade. I met Nas in my class. From then until now, we’ve been hanging together. I came home, met his brother and it was rap from there. Jungle: Wiz used to spend the night at my crib to eat some dinner and shit like that. He used to come to my house for food. Wiz: I used to think Jungle was rich. They had food every night, so you’d think they were rich. They’d get sneakers and bikes and shit and I used to look at it like they were rich. It was kind of like that. Even before Nas signed on with Columbia, could the two of you tell that he had the potential to be a rap superstar? Wiz: I could see it coming because he liked to perform and stuff like that. He just liked the part of performing — that aspect. I saw that in Jungle and in Nas. Jungle: My mother used to tell us all the time that we were different from everybody else. So I guess that really stayed in my brother’s mind. He really looked at himself as different from the average guy in the projects and really wanted to do something and be something in life. He always wanted to be something. I wanted to be a ballplayer. I didn’t even realize that there were other things to be besides a ballplayer or dead. The ghetto really had my heart in check inside those walls, and it didn’t have his. Nas really saw everything. He used to read a lot of books and he just knew to make moves. That’s what he wanted to be. I didn’t know to make moves like that. A lot of people in the ghetto didn’t make any moves. He did. What did it mean to the two of you when Nas wanted your input for his songwriting? Wiz: That was from the beginning. See, he had no choice almost. We used to be around and Nas was sitting there with the pen and pad and he’d get stuck. And there I go, ‘Nas, say this, say that, say that, say this.’ Even before the deal, we would sit in the crib and Nas used to come in the room and say, ‘I wrote a rhyme. How does this sound?’ And we used to be like, ‘Well, I don’t like that part, that part, that part.’ That extended to when he got a deal until now — every album. Jungle: Growing up in the house with Nas, he used to ask me all the time, ‘Jungle, how does this sound? How does this sound?’ He used to do it to me so much that I turned into the worst critic in the world. I would criticize anything I heard that was wrong. And he would come right back with better rhymes and stuff like that. So I guess that made me have the ear for rhymes and music. Now, I can listen to a young boy rap and I can tell if he’s gonna make it or not. It’s like Nas whipped me into that. And then when Nas was in the studio, he did that to me so much that I could give him a line better than I could write my own rhyme almost. I could give him those lines and say that I know if the fans hear him saying these certain words, it’s gonna definitely be a hit and definitely grab them. We did this for years. It’s been working for years and now Nas is about to put us out. So they can know that we have talent. It’s not just because we know him. We’ve been doing it for years. Has it ever bothered you that since Nas’ name is on his albums and on the concert bills, he gets all the credit? Wiz: It never bothered us because when he’s happy, we’re happy. When he did that rhyme, we rhymed. It’s like we’re undergoing it just because he’s doing it. We’re all in one. Jungle: Sometimes, I’m not gonna lie, when I found out about money, I didn’t know that that’s called publishing. I didn’t know that people are rich right now because of ideas and because I was writing for somebody that sells millions of dollars like that. That’s my brother. He held me down and everything. Look, I’m doing an interview right now. That’s why I’m happy. He could have split something or put a credit down or something. But it’s all good. So did Nas pay the two of you for your work? Jungle: He just helped me out when I needed a little help. There was never no cut the way you were really supposed to get it. I probably would be a millionaire if I had the cut. But I’ve gotta start all over now. How did you get your rap names? Wiz: They’re just names on the streets, runnin’ from cops. Jungle: They call me Jungle because that’s how wild I was. That’s how wild I’d get, like the jungle. They can’t just name me a lion, like, ‘You wild as a lion’ or ‘crazy like a tiger.’ No. I was the whole jungle. I was that wild. Wiz: I got Wiz because I’d get away from the cops while other niggas were getting locked up. Jungle: He does shit. So we would call him Grand Wizard back in the street. It’s all street shit. It’s from the street, for real. What are some of the songs that you both have helped Nas write over the years? Wiz: Name an album. Name some of your songs and let me tell you. Jungle: ‘One Mic,’ ‘I Gave You Power,’ ‘Ether.’ There’s a bunch of them. I could just keep going. Wiz: ‘The World Is Yours’—there were a lot of joints. When you see Nas go platinum, perform in front of huge crowds and do interviews on TV, how does that make you feel? Jungle: You know what it was? The MTV Music Awards had me because I wrote a lot of ‘One Mic.’ That was me. That was kind of an old song that I had that I gave to my big brother. I didn’t write it like that, though. I wrote it like street rhyme. The way he did it was beautiful. It’s the way Nas does it. That’s why I give him ideas like that — because it’s not gonna come across from me like it would come across from him. Just to see that (on) MTV, he was nominated for Video of the Year. He was the only black person nominated for Video of the Year and that was the song I wrote. That shit really had me open, man. It really let me know what I could do. What do you feel like Nas is able to bring to a song that most other rappers couldn’t? Jungle: Nas is more creative. You could say one word to Nas and he’ll have a big picture for it. Nas is way more creative than mostly every artist in the game — I’d say everybody except maybe Dre. He’s more creative than almost anybody in the game that I can think of. The Bravehearts rapped on the song "Oochie Wally" on the "QB Finest" album in 2000. Were there a lot of other appearances by the two of you rapping on songs? Jungle: Most of them are underground. The only one that really hit like that was ‘Oochie Wally.’ That was the song that Nas didn’t really tell us to rhyme about something. That was a song that we really picked our own beat and did our own thing to. We didn’t expect it to hit like that either. We just made a song for ourselves and that shit blew up. It wasn’t even supposed to be on the ‘QB’ album, but because it was so good, it blew up. What brought about you guys finally recording your debut album, "Bravehearted?" Jungle: It’s just from that ‘Oochie Wally’ song, from being on the ‘QB’ album. We were like the only people besides Nas to be noticed, that don’t never have a deal. So many people liked that song so much. I think that really got us our record deal. What was it like for you to perform "Oochie Wally" and finally emerge from being behind the scenes? Jungle: I thought everybody was gonna chant ‘We want Nas’ or something if we tried to go somewhere without him. I didn’t know what to think. But it was the total opposite. Everybody loved us. People barely asked where Nas was. We were able to perform the song everywhere without Nas. The love was great. I knew we could do this because we’re real creative. And when people hear the new music that we’ve got, they’re gonna like us. Nelly and Eminem brought out their crews, St. Lunatics and D12. Now, Nas has Bravehearts. Have you been compared to D12 and the St. Lunatics? Jungle: When we made ‘Oochie Wally,’ that’s when we were compared, definitely. But those guys are way older than me and Wiz. They’re a bunch of old men. I don’t know if they can even swing with us on stage, in the street or on record — anything. They don’t have our persona. It’s like clowns versus fuckin’ boxers or something. Those guys are like clowns compared to us. What’s the difference between what people get out of Nas’ albums and what they’re going to hear when they pick up the "Bravehearted" LP? Wiz: Oh, man, it’s totally different. There’s a big difference. Nas, when he writes music, he’s thinking about educating you and he’s thinking about coming across as sort of a professor street person. Jungle: Nas is like having fun at school and we’re like going to that cut out party. We’re the cut out party at somebody’s house on school hours and Nas is a nice day at school. That’s the difference between us. What were you going for as far as the sound and style of the "Bravehearted" album? Wiz: We’re trying to make it as live and down to earth as possible, just because that’s what we do every day. We’re regular people. It’s not far-fetched like when you see some artists where they’ve got this and they do this and they do this. And it’s far-fetched because you’ll see them in real life and they won’t be doing that. We want to keep reality of everyday living and bring it to the forefront. Jungle: Just to let people know how we are, how we think, I’m a guy. I’m a nigga. I’m a man. I like to make songs about women. I think men should make songs about women and women should make songs about men because that’s music. That’s what music is. That’s how people are supposed to make music. When men sing for men, it doesn’t really sell that much and people don’t really give a fuck. When women sing for women, yeah, OK. But when they do it the other way, it’s just big songs. So I get a lot of big songs that way. Your first single is called "Situations" and it features Nas and Jully Black. What can you tell me about the song? Wiz: We just let that out just because we needed to let something go. It’s a different sound from what everybody else is doing. It’s for the girls, but it’s a different sound. Basically, it’s like what we do every day and our perspective on how women is. Jungle: It’s about little different situations of how I used to deal with my chick, about one of my old girls. Do you guys like most of the women you meet? Jungle: All kinds of women—white, black, yellow. It don’t matter, as long as you’re beautiful. Wiz: As long as you’re born a woman, we are all right. Fat, skinny, tall, short. If you’re a woman, (even) a midget, we’re gonna rock. What are some of the other songs on the "Bravehearted" album? Jungle: I like the song called ‘Jungle & Wiz.’ We’re cuttin’ our names off in the hook with turntables and shit. Wiz: It’s like a throwback hip-hop style. Jungle: I like this song we’ve got, ‘Ain’t No Love.’ It’s telling people about how you might think that we’re some happy go lucky, rappin’ ass niggas. But ain’t no muthafuckin’ love. I’ll beat the shit out of somebody coming around me like that. I ain’t that muthafuckin’ friendly. There’s ‘Fantasia’ about this shorty I met. There’s ‘In and Out.’ There’s a lot of joints I like. Wiz: We’ve got a joint called ‘Would You?’ We’re talking about situations where if certain things were to go down, like you get jumped... You might be the person who never got jumped before or you might be the person that never got in a fight. You might be the person who had a relationship and had nobody ever interfere in the relationship — like a guy that your girl might think he’s cute. Or she might flirt with him. What would you do? Would you kill him? It’s called ‘Would You?’ I like that one personally. We’ve got a song called ‘Scared Money (Don’t Make No Money)’ talking about if you don’t sacrifice, you’re just gonna lose. That’s with anything. So we’re just bringing situations and thoughts to people’s heads on the album and making them think about who’s giving it to them like that. You’ve got Ryan Perfect, Nashawn, Nas, Lake and Blitz making guest appearances on your album. Then you’ve got production by L.E.S. and Salaam Remi, plus a number of self-produced tracks. What do you hope fans get out of the album when they pick it up? Wiz: We’re trying to make a statement with this album. I hope they get a fun album. I want you to have fun with it. Just click it on and let it fuck with your head. And if that’s what you want to go through every day, keep poppin’ it on. The girls, on that perspective, we’re really going hard at our ladies. Ladies run the world and there are more women than men. Jungle: In the entertainment business, ladies love hanging up pictures and stuff. Ladies buy more CDs than guys. I like to sign girls autographs and have a bunch of girls chasing after me after shows, not no niggas! Wiz: We want to bring the party to you, we want to bring the drama and we want to bring the good times. Pick up that Braveheart album. Jungle: We give out a lot of slang. Guys like 50 Cent taking words like ‘wanksta’ from us. We’re gonna show everybody that we’re in the front of this muthafucka. It’s taken a minute for us to come out, but we’re gonna pop off. Everybody’s gonna know all these niggas have been following and bitin’ off of us. |
BG |