Murder Dog Archives


	interview with Tech n9ne by Black Dog Bone A lot of things are happening for Tech N9ne at this time. Man, all at once. And it’s a beautiful thing. Ever since I got with JCOR everything’s been goin smoothly. We finished mastering the whole album, the album’s just about done. All the posters and materials for street promotion are coming back this week. Everything is happening all at once. You’ve been putting it down for a long time. A lot of people don’t know, they didn’t get to grow with me. They don’t’ know about all the stuff I did back in Kansas City. I was surprised when I heard you signed with JCOR. How did that come about? I had met Violet Brown in ‘97. We had an MTV party at Quincy Jones’ house. Violet Brown (Wherehouse) and her homegirl Carla came. I had done a song called "Psychobitch" around that time, and they were up in QDIII’s studio listening to my music. Violet and Carla fell in love with my music. So I bonded with Violet Brown, and ever since then, every time I’d come out to LA I’d hook up with Violet. When I finished this, told Violet, and she started shoppin it. She thought David Weiner and JCOR would be a good home for me–somebody who would eat, sleep and shit Tech N9ne. That’s what I needed, cause I’m that typa artist. Has a lotta content and depth, it’s not the normal everyday shit. When did this happen? We brought it to Violet Brown in January. She got it to Dave Weiner in March. They got right back with us. It really amazed me, because they were all up on my lyrics. I always felt like nobody felt my lyrics like me, but then I got with a label where they felt it exactly like Quincy did and exactly like Violet Brown did. So I knew these are the people to be with. You want to work with people who really believe in you. Right. And they went into depth. They didn’t just listen to the beats, they knew exactly what I was speaking. That meant a lot to me. When did you start recording this album? We started recording in July, last July, with my business partner, Travis. We was steady workin, because the artist is in me. That album was my life recording. So that’s what I was doin, I was goin through shit, puttin it down on track. I was puttin together a beautiful album, and I came up with the title AngHellic because I wanted to find a word that best suited myself–the good and the bad. We presented the finished album to Violet Brown, and she presented it to JCOR. Who produced this album? There was a number of producers I worked with at home. Don Juan did ten tracks on the album, that was my main producer. Me and Don Juan been doin work for a long time. Then I brought in my old old homeboy also, who I used to do my NNUTT HOWZE shit with. His name is Icy Roc. He did three songs on the album, as a matter of fact, he had the first single on my album "It’s Alive." And I got two from a cat in Berlin, Germany. His name is Ronnz. I haven’t even met him, we did this over the Internet. He wrote me a letter before I got my deal, he’s like, I been buying your music for the longest, and I could never understand why you didn’t get really big…I also produce. And he sent me 17 tracks on CD in the mail. And it was some hardcore shit! I put two of them on my album. He’s a young cat, 20 years old, and he couldn’t believe that I actually read his letter or put his songs on the album. Which were those two songs? The two songs were "Bitch Lies" and "Who You Came To See." And one other producer I worked with–King Tech from The Wake Up Show–he did a song called "Real Killer." It’s the anti-abortion song on the album, it’s real forceful. When I heard your music I thought you’re in a world of your own. I thought you were kind of crazy. A lotta people say that about my music, that it’s crazy. But a lotta people think that in-yo-face shit is crazy because it’s not politically correct. You say the first thing that hits your brain. You don’t have a Kansas City sound or a typical Midwest sound. Did you take a lot of acid or what? It’s a little bit of that too. But it goes back to the NNUTT HOWZE. Back in ’93 after we lost that deal with Perspective, they sent us back home and made us come up with a group name. So we were NNUTT HOWZE. NNUTT HOWZE gave us the ability to do or say what we wanted to say that was really different from anybody else. To dress any kinda way or color your hair any color you wanted to. Like fuck the world, this is what we’re gonna do. That’s where Tech N9ne got that from, bein in my own world, creatin my own shit. Not tryin to be different, because different is truly myself. Diverse is me. My family didn’t listen to one kinda music. We listened to Rap, we listened to Rock, Jazz, Classical music. All that shit hit me at once. I used to dance, beat box, break dance, I used to do everything. I think all that came through in my music. NNUTT HOWZE was a group or a label or what? It was a group with Icy Roc and my brother Deyno Mack. We formed the group in ’93. That all happened in Kansas City, Missouri. You had a deal before that with Perspective Records? Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ label. You know, they do music for Janet Jackson and Prince and all that. They signed me back in ’93, we were a group called Tech N9ne, it was three of us. They flew me out here to LA and we did a 14-song album and it was terrible. They tried to hook us up with producers we didn’t know, they didn’t know our vibe. The Chronic was already out, and our music was still samples and shit from Public Enemy and shit. So it didn’t really work out. At the end of the summer of ’93 they sent us back home. They asked me if we wanted to regroup. So we went back home and we came up with the name NNUTT HOWZE. It was some crazy shit we were goin through, so we talked about the crazy shit that was in our heads. It wasn’t demonic like they said, it was just some wild shit. I think you’d be hard to market. Like someone like Esham, you’re an artist that’s doing something very different. You don’t fit into any category. To me your music is like Psychedelic Rap. I’ve heard about Esham, I gotta check him out. I heard he’s pretty dark. If you listen to my album, the images are really dark, because I’m into that shit. But the contents is truly my life, and it’s nothing satanic about my life. If drinkin and smokin and doin ecstasy and mushrooms and fuckin beautiful women is demonic, then so be it, but that’s my life. If you listen to the first song on my album, "Tormented," it’s about all the things that torment me down here on earth–money, women, liquor and drugs. Then "Real Killer" is talkin about abortion. People might think I’m talkin about killin a baby, but truly abortion is killin a baby. The dark imagery can lead a muthafucka to believe I’m on some demonic shit, but never have I ever said "hail Satan." I’m against Satan. I always said that I was a little piece of love and a pinch of demons. I take lyrics very seriously, I’m just tryin to understand where Tech N9ne is coming from. Everything that I do comes from deep within me. A long time ago somebody told me to "rap what you know, if you rap what you know you can never go wrong." If it’s fake they’re gonna know it, but if it’s real they’ll forever feel you. My personal experiences, I didn’t fabricate anything. "Suicide Letters" is truly how I felt at that time. "Cursed" is talkin about a bitch that won’t let me fuck her one on one, but she’ll let me fuck her with all these other people. I’m talkin about the Rap game. I dig deep inside myself to bring everything out on tape. This is my life recorded. I’m hopin the world gets that when they hear my shit. A lot of what I say my loved ones don’t like it. My wife, for instance, she says the shit is too real. But I’m the kinda cat that, I gotta be real with it. I have to be able to explain everything that I say. That’s one thing that I learned from the Nation of Islam a long time ago: Whatever you say, you gotta be able to back it up. I gotta be able to break that shit down, and I can break down every little piece of what I say. What kind of childhood did you have? I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. Believe it or not, my childhood was a lot lighter than my adulthood. My family loved me. My father moved to LA when I was five. He’s LAPD, so he wasn’t around. But my mom and my grandmother and my aunts and my uncles, they raised me really nice. They raised me in a Christian home. But there were some flaws in the church that I didn’t like when I got older. So I strayed away from church. My mom got married when I was 12 and she married a Muslim. My stepfather was Muslim, my mother was a hardcore Christian–so that shit didn’t mix–and I was a psycho so you couldn’t tell me nothing. I left home at 17, cause me and my stepfather didn’t get along too well. What really inspired you to start rapping? Everything. We could go back to when I was five years old when I heard my first Rap song. It was by Blow Fly, called "Rap Dirty." It drove me fuckin crazy. My uncle Ike used to sneak and play it for me, and I used to love it. After that I heard the more mainstream Sugar Hill Gang. That hit me hard. From Sugar Hill Gang, Roger Troutman and Zap hit me. After that, Soulsonic Force hit me with "Planet Rock" and it drove me fuckin crazy! I used to be a dancer, in fourth grade I’d do talent shows. In Kansas City I used to live next door to a DJ named Juice, so I used to hear the shit before it even hit the streets. I was always musically inclined, my whole family’s musical. My uncles used to beat on the table at breakfast, that’s how I learned rhythm. My mom used to take the spoon to a cup and make a "ding ding" sound that I’ll never forget. Rhythm was always in me. Most Kansas City Rap has a strong Bay Area influence. But you don’t have that sound. I had to create that. That’s something that my stepfather did teach me. When he found out I was rappin, he said, "You ain’t gonna make it in Rap. What do you have that nobody else has? You’re just one of the many." That made me say, fuck it! Let me do something other then. Let me do something that none of these other muthafuckas can do. I might rap about what you rap about, but do it in a different way. I got a lotta different shit on that album. The first song is like Rap and Rock, it’s called "Tormented." Then if you go down to songs like "Sinister Tech" it’s got like a Mobbish, more bounce backwards feel. Or something like "This Ring" is like something you’d play in your Cadillac, bang that shit down Prospect. It’s a lotta different kinda shit on there. Hopefully it’ll say that Kansas City has its own sound that nobody’s really fuckin with. It ain’t Bay, it ain’t LA, it ain’t none of that. It’s fuckin Tech N9ne.
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