Soundhustle Interview 2009 By K. Jakab
When I found out whom I would be interviewing, I almost said "No." The resumes of the two artists runs miles long, including collaborations with 2Pac, Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, etc. etc., not to mention countless shout outs in a number of rap tunes.
So, I called the west coast, overly enthused in speaking with DJ Quik and Kurupt (Young Gotti) about their new album together, The Blaqkout. The following 23-minutes proved to be the most thrilling of 2009 thus far.
Their manager, Richie answered and immediately held the receiver up to a speaker, where Quik was playing for Richie and Kurupt the original sample for "Addictive" by Truth Hurts and Rakim.
I cut a rug or two in my day to this song, up in the clubs, winding and grinding with my girls. This was an exceptional two minutes spent listening to “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai (It Looks Silky)” by Lata Mangeshkar, a.k.a. the O.G. of "Addictive."
This was just the beginning of an in-depth interview about the new album, The Blaqkout, their thoughts on the current state of hip hop, and how they intend to move the game forward.
DJ QUIK: Kinga?
Richie: Kinga, from soundhustle.com.
Quik: Sound hustle, Soudhustle.com! Sounds like the company I work for.
SH: Ya, I’m here! Is this Quik?
Quik: Ya, this is Quik right here and Kurupt is just coming into the room.
SH: Hey, whaddup, thanks for talking to me. I just got a nice behind-the-scenes of “Addictive”.
Quik: Yeah.
SH: Where did you ever find that song?
Quik: Ya, uh, I was watching a Bollywood channel on Warner, uh, Warner TV, and they let us kind of demo this channel. And I was recording — no, I was brushing my teeth! — one night, and I had it on this channel and I didn’t know what they were saying, and I went to brush my teeth, and I came back into the room because I couldn’t stop moving! There was something in there that had me and I didn’t understand it. I felt it before I heard it. And I just pushed record on my VCR like, “I gotta record this” and I watched it all the way through, and this lady was doing an Indian dance and everything and it was totally dope, and I played it back and I snapped the tape outta the vcr, took it to the studio, dumped it there, bumped the audio onto a mini-disc, put it my mini-disc recorder, sampled it to an MPC 3000, blew the bass around it, and gave the master tapes to Truth Hurts, who took it to Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre said come to the studio. I went to the studio, Dr. Dre was like, “Here’s a budget, go do what you do.” He opened up [the studio] for me, we went there we re-recorded it there, put it to analog tape, sent Dr. Dre the tape, and then he invited us to the studio about two weeks later and said, “Listen to this.” And by that time, the lyrics were done, the vocals were done, and I was… I was over the moon.
SH: You guys were also just listening to the sample, [from the new album, The BLAQKOUT] from Hey Playa Moroccan Blues?
Quik: Yes. I got that sample is from Andrew Zimmern, and his Moroccan episode of “Bizarre Foods.” I’m a fan of that show because the balls that this man must have to put some of those things in his mouth are uncanny to me. So, I’m watching it and I heard that little sound bit and I rewound it and was like “Oh my god, here we go again. Here’s another dance record!” You know, that I think will make sense. So I took it to the studio, sampled it from my DVD to my MPC, put a beat up underneath it, but this time I took a extra care and caution in getting the sample cleared. It took a long time but we got it cleared.
SH: I read that a lot of samples are taking a while to get cleared.
Quik: Ya! About three months, sometimes! And it never used to be like that!
SH: What do you think has changed?
Quik: I don’t know what’s going on but I know it’s worth the wait. Like me and Kurupt’s album would’ve came out in like February, March. It was actually gonna come out in January but we couldn’t clear “Anniversary” by Tony Toni Tone and the “Moroccan Blues.” But we kept workin’ at it until finally they said “Yes,” and we reached an agreement and the record gets to come out.
SH: You guys had the album done last summer, right?
Quik: Yeah, we started it last June and technically it was done by October. We just knocked it out and we were like, “Let’s hurry up and put out it out, and do another one.” Like, if that’s the case, if we can do this, we can turn this into a dope business. Like, we could turn out hip hop records even faster, or rap records, or whatever you want to call it. It just took a long time for the business to get the samples cleared and for everyone to be on the same page and see our vision. Now, we got the distributor behind us. This record’s coming out on my label, Mad Science, on Kurupt’s label, Pentagon, distributed by Fontana/Universal, so now we got the whole machine behind us. Now they see our vision. They see that we are ready to go out and work this eclectic record that we did — because our album is eclectic. It’s a little avant garde, a little newish. You know, we’re not doing gangster rap, we’re doing rap for all genres.
SH: Rap certainly has evolved over the years.
Quik: It has.
SH: How do you feel about that state of rap today? Are you working with it or are you working against it?
Quik: Some of them I just don’t let them in, so if that means I’m working against them, so be it. But some records I can’t let in because we spent a lot of money and time honing and crafting our skills to just let people come in and dumb down music so much. It’s like, what are we supposed to do with all those musical chops we learned and all the crazy records we had to study like Chopin and Tchaikovsky. What do we do with that if everything is just down to a synthesizer and a drum beat and a simple hook? We thought we were supposed to keep going with creativity. Like Dr. Dre always strived to get better and his sound just snowballed into something that’s unreachable. So I’m almost offended that people wanna do the ABCDEFG records again. I didn’t think it was supposed to start over and go to teeny-bopper music that fast. But if that’s what it is, so be it. I ain’t knockin’ nobody’s hustle. I hope they can make all the money in ringtones that they can sell. Because I think that real music lasts forever and I wanna continue to do real music before I sell out and do teeny-bopper music.
SH: Well, I hope you do. So, I read that the album is scheduled to come on April 28th. Then I read that it was coming out in June.
Quik: Well, it was slated for April 28th but then again we had the sample clearance issue and it took a tailspin again. So, the next available date for it to come out this year was June 9th. It’s politics now. It’s not easy to put out a record like it used to be. It takes a lot of people and a lot of time.
SH: So the new album, Blaqkout. I gotta ask about the spelling: Blaqkout. Tell me about the spelling.
Quik: Does it seem like a play on letters? Like an anagram, or, like, goofy?
SH: I think I know why there’s a Q, but I want you to tell me.
Kurupt: Well, you know, it’s Quik and Kurupt. We threw that in there… Blaqkout. B-L-A- Q for Quik, K for Kurupt, and “OUT” — just our own little fun thing there. Everything about this album, we’re having a lot of fun with this particular project.
Quik: We’re not doing it for money; we’re not trying to put a record out before we get cold. As far as I’m concerned, hip hop left us a long time ago. We got off the bus and we weren’t scared to be nomadic for a minute. So we’re like musical nomads with this record and we let the bus leave because nine times outta ten, a new sports car gonna come along and as long as she’s got survival insurance driving that Ferrari, we’re gonna get in the car with that bitch, to paraphrase that commercial. The next bus is gonna come along, but we want to be able to have our own bus and not exclude our fans, and we’re not afraid to get new fans. It’s an eclectic record.
SH: What else can we look forward to on the record?
Quik: You can expect avant garde. “Fuck Ya’ll” is just a throwback, vintage gangster rap hip hop record. It’s not cutting edge, it’s not totally over the top; it’s kind of accessible for people who know us. It’s not really directed toward nobody. My part is personal, but I got my brothers in there and they deserve to hear me say “fuck ya’ll” and hopefully they use that to get back in the game and use that as leverage. It’s tough love. But “Moroccan Blues” is more outside of the box for us. It’s more of a business move too. We can actually get Andrew Zimmern in the video and collaborate with the Travel Channel and get different viewers. And the rest of the record is eclectic in the sense that we have more native records, like “Whatcha Wan Do” is a native record. We got this song called “Do You Know” where we sampled Rafael Saadiq’s “Anniversary” and just put an 808 beat up under it. Nothing too outside of the norm, but just good for the record. We got this song called “The Appeal” that is really insightful, sort of like a record that you are just drawn to, with like “Jaws” music. And Kurupt has this song called “9 Times Outta 10” that is just innovative, like the drum pattern has never been done before in hip hop. And I’ve heard every drum pattern that has ever been done and still came up with a new one, so I’m glad that I’m still sharp as far as finding my own niche.
I got a record called “Jupiter’s Critic in the Mind of Mars,” where it’s totally electronica and techno that’s comedy. Like, I’m not urging everybody to drink Patrone and dance, I’m just clowning about the state of hip hop today, but really light-hearted. I got no axe to grind for no hip hop artists, you know? We’re just having fun together. We’re doing music for us.
Kurupt: Yeah.
SH: It seems really fun. I played “Moroccan Blues” a million times in the last 24 hours and everyone who heard it was like, “This is DOPE.”
Quik: Thank you.
SH: You mentioned before, it seems that not enough artists are producing albums for the fun of it, rather than for the monetary gain. Would you agree with that? That artists are making more commercial stuff that is sellable and will appeal to a small demographic. I feel as though you guys are pushing the boundaries with this album.
Quik: Ya, I totally agree with you. There are records that I’ve bought that I don’t know why I bought them. Do I want to hear someone bragging about their money to me all day now, if I’m a hip hop fan? Unless I want to bite their style, it sounds like decadence to me — like rubbing my face in their bling-bling. Like, is this what it is? I got successful from telling stories, and finding music to fit these stories that didn’t bore you, like, hood stories. Now you’ve got people rapping about being executives. If you’re gonna rap about being executives, it’s cool, but what happened to when the exec’s were never a part of the music? Like the executives were the business and the ARTIST was the music! Like Run-DMC, they didn’t rap about ballin’ out and running the record company, they were doing music they loved. They got coerced to do records like “Walk this way” [with Aerosmith] by the powers that be. Like, we don’t make music from the heart no more. But some people actually make music just to live out their fantasies. I’m glad that played out. I’m happy that you couldn’t rap about bling-bling when you were broke. You eventually rapped yourself into a career. [It would have been like] raping the game. Like stealing. We can rap about having fun again. We went light-hearted on the lyrics. But we’re not stressin’ about the state of hip hop on this record. We back to music.
SH: Why did you and Kurupt choose to work together? Why just you two?
Kurupt: We were working on “Ego Trippin’” at the time, with Snoop, and we were all trying to get Quik back in the game. So many people were waiting for him.
Quik: [background] I had retired!
Kurupt: Then Quik came to me with a great idea and was like, “we could do a project together.” A solo album.
Quik: Kurupt was working on three things – now, this is multi-tasking – Kurupt was on tour with Snoop, working on his album “Street Lights,” AND working on Blaqkout with me and knocked out Blaqkout in just a few months! This is retarded!
Kurupt: We finished the album in record time. I was like “Just tell me where and when to be.” And whenever I wasn’t on tour, he told me when he’d be in the studio. He got the beat, I come in, lay it on, the next time I hear the record it’s whole different thing, and that’s the good thing about working with Quik is he puts his heart into it. You lay your part and you get done and in a couple days or a week you hear a whole different record. A classic record with your lyrics involved. Quik’s just a good product manager in putting these things together. That’s how fast it was. We kept it so professional; we took extra time for the samples. And that’s how we came up with the project and finished it in record time.
SH: I really like the love you obviously have for Quik.
Kurupt: Well, you know. I grew up to Quik’s music as well, so this is very important to me because working with Quik is a privilege and you gotta take it as so. Anything with Quik enhances my game as well, helps me to be better in this music industry and in this game, as well. I learned a lot from an executive standpoint as well – how he got his albums done, how he’s working it – and he brought people who was gonna be working on my albums as well to the table, so we got more than just music together. And that’s part of our magic, is our respect for each other and our respect for the game that we are both involved in, and each of our attributes.
SH: Quik said in an interview that you, Kurupt, have grown as an artist. Would you agree with that?
Kurupt: Well, I’ve been in the game since ’92 and I’ve made a lot of mistakes that were well-deserved because it taught me to be the person I am today. I’ve learned a lot, a great deal in this business, and I never stop learning. Like I said, Quik taught me so much and I’m still learning as I go.
K: Well, I gotta tell you that your flow is bananas so far on the tracks I’ve heard and I can’t wait for this album to finally drop. Is there anything else you want to say about BLAQKOUT?
Kurupt: Get ready for a real treat. This isn’t your average record and hopefully fans will enjoy it and it will gain some new fans. Everybody just have a ball with it. We worked really hard on it. It took a lot of concentration dedication and we made this for our enjoyment and to step away from the clichés in the regular records you be hearing –
Quik: It’s hard to do!
Kurupt: — and to step outta the box, which is difficult because once you have a fan base it’s hard to step out of it. Some people will enjoy some records and some might not enjoy some records but hopefully they’ll enjoy the whole project as we did.
SH: They will. And I can’t wait to enjoy the rest of the album. Thank you guys so much.
Quik: Thanks, Kinga.
SH: Thank you guys so much. Good luck.
Quik: Thank you. Enjoy.
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