By Odeisel

Souls of Mischief is much more than a group; it’s a family. The lead group of the larger Hiero collective are brothers by way of life, and rappers by trade. While many groups scream “forever” and break like the atoms of Main Source, Hiero has been together from before ’93 and seemingly ’till infinity like Buzz Light Year. In that time Hip-Hop has had it’s ups and downs but the group has maintained continuity as a unit, even while growing individually as young men.  2009 found them back in effect with a brand new album helmed by legendary guru Prince Paul. Planet Ill sat down with the boys from the bay and chopped it up on a myriad of issues. Illness ensued.

Planet Ill: Prince Paul is the architect behind a lot of great moments in Hip-Hop, particularly with De La Soul.  What led you to bring him on to the project?

Opio: Prince Paul is someone who we’ve admired and definitely enjoyed his work. From the beginning; the Stetsasonic days. Especially during the De La Soul/Native Tongue era. To have the opportunity to work with Prince Paul is a great thing. The way that it happened was, I was on tour with the Handsome Boy Modeling School, promoting my solo record and of course he was on that tour. We were talking and building and he said, “you know I always been a fan of Souls of Mischief and I want to do a record with you guys.” He was really serious and adamant about it.  He told me that early in the tour; we were on the road for at least a month or so and he would constantly tell me, “Yo, don’t forget, I want to work with Souls of Mischief.”

So when I came back and told all my brothers in Souls of Mischief it was a no brainer, they were like, “Hell Yeah!” We had a meeting we met later on when we were on tour with Hiero, we sat down and talked about the specifics of the record and what exactly he wanted to see. That solidified it and made it official.  After we had that meeting then we started to make the plans to rent the house and get all the specs together to get the album completed.

Planet Ill: What did he do for your music? What was the difference between working with him and your normal production?

Opio: Our usual production team is Hiero so that was a different aspect right there, but he really was producing songs.  A lot of guys are beat makers; they make a beat, send you a file, transaction done.  He was like, “I imagine this, what do you think?” It was give and take when we were building the project. That brought it out of most of us. We had a lot more dialogue with Paul.

Planet Ill: What does it mean to be a part of Hiero?

A-Plus: Hiero is not like a group.  We’re family. We grew up together Hip-Hop, B-Boying since we were kids.  We’d be friends and family if there wasn’t Hip-Hop, but it was just something that we had in common that we cultivated as youngsters together. It’s family, not a group it’s hard to explain but that’s just how it is. If we weren’t doing music these are still my brothers.

Tajai: I agree with A-Plus. We all came into this, to adulthood, to the game, puberty, all that stuff together man.  It’s not like we sit around like “I’m in Hiero.” Even like Souls of Mischief, we’re a group within Hiero. We have the same relationship but it’s like Souls of Mischief, this is my musical group. It’s who we are; it’s deeper than a musical connection.

Planet Ill: You’re all intelligent guys and Hip-Hop was not your last or only option.  Why do you continue to do it?

Opio: We’re going to do music forever, even in the garage for ourselves at 65, you know? Lots of members of Hiero do do other things.  Tajai is working on a second degree; he already got his first one from Stamford, graduated with honors.  Phesto got tenure at the agency he works for, you know, everybody’s doing something different.  Music is just something we gon’ do anyway, but it’s not like we don’t do different things. There’s probably a few of us where music is all we do, but we engineer our own projects.

How many people are in high school and have the opportunity to have a record deal?  We were like, “Hell yeah!”  We couldn’t at that point, imagine ourselves 15-16 years later getting interviewed for our new record, that wasn’t in our minds, we just rode the wave and took it how it came our way and ended up here. We’re still young men, there’s a lot of stuff to do musically and in other aspects of life.

Tajai: We were presented with this incredible opportunity early on, straight out of high school, so there wasn’t really any decision for us. We got our record deal when we were in high school. But in the middle of all this we graduated from college.

Opio: Kids still identify with us 20 years later because we make everything music. Our thing isn’t like “I’m an emcee and I’m in the industry and I’m so hard, and there’s all the haters…we don’t get down like that.

Planet Ill: Soul of Mischief, and in fact many acts from the Bay have been independent way before the current trend. What made you hip that being independent made you better off than being in the major label system?

A-Plus: We had the label experience. When we got dropped from Jive, we still had labels that wanted to sign us. We were just out from a major label experience at that time. So we brainstormed about what we could do. Being from the Bay, which doesn’t have a big industry for main stream records; no offices or companies out there, it’s been an independent movement out there for as long as we can remember.

Too $hort used to bring cassette tapes to school in 1982, so the independent sphere was already there, it was already a feasible option for us. At the time when we were wondering what we were gonna do, for sure we weren’t going to sign with another motherfucking label.

We were really young and it was a really sour experience. It was the first time in our lives we had really had experience with those types of people.  We were used to dealing with ourselves and people such as ourselves and weren’t really dealing with bold faced liars to your face so it wasn’t really a question of dealing with the labels that wanted to sign us.  It was just a natural progression.

At the same time we weren’t done with the music yet. It’s still music before industry so the music is the foundation.

Tajai: He said it best you know?  It’s not industry music it’s music industry. If you get your foundation straight then whatever you build on top of it is going to be aight even in turbulent times.

Planet Ill: The Bay is starkly different from LA in terms of West Coast music.  What are some of the differences?

Opio: We’re as far from LA as a New Yorker is from Florida. Well maybe not Florida, maybe North Carolina. LA is vast and spread out. It isn’t really a well planned out city so it’s sprawled urban but it was built in the middle of the desert, The Bay we have the ports, so it’s a mixture of culture; a crazy mixture of culture.  LA’s got a mixture of culture because of Hollywood, but it’s a mixture of all sorts of people that are there for the same thing.  And I’m not talking about the people that’s from there, just the city culture.

We got that nature outdoors aspect; we got the pimping aspect which is really deep up here.  We don’t got that gangbanging; it was never a question as to whether I was gonna be a blood or a crip and I don’t even think many kids up here even think about that. It’s just different; we have a rich history which includes the Panthers and the Hippies. If you look at the epicenter of all of these world-wide movements as far as the Black Power movements and really all of the equality movements including some of the Hippie movements man, that’s all the Bay. It’s really all Oakland and ‘Frisco; it’s not Los Angeles it’s not Sacramento and that’s not to diss them cities. It’s like because we have that interfacing of all these different cultures, ideas pop out and abound and an eclectic kind of mixture of human being comes out.

You look at the people out here; none of our styles is the same. You look at us compared to Too $hort, compared to Zion I, compared to D-Lo, compared to Digital Undergroud.  Compare that to Tony Toni Tone. None of that music is the same.  Period. It’s not like you got “Oh that’s Bay Area style.” It’s all funky, it all slaps cause we like to drive out here. But aside from that it’s vastly different from other regions.  I think the Bay is really like a Detroit or Atlanta or Brooklyn than LA.

Planet Ill: Do you think as veterans it’s your charge to bring the youth up in the game?

A-Plus: I don’t think it’s so much that we’re veterans, we been repping the same as new booties.  We been talking the same exact shit that we talking from then. It’s pretty much the same Souls of Mischief formula, we just come in and talk a little shit and show that we can rap good. I think maybe because we’re older that people can say that because we’re veterans, but that’s not really our aim or our focus. We rappin’ showing our skills, same as ever.

Phesto: We were raised by Rakim, G Rap, Kane, KRS, you know? These kids is being raised on Cheetos and kid’s meals. We were raised on real rap, like  oh shit let me rewind this song ten times before I even go to the next song. I don’t think Rakim was like “Yo, the new booties gotta understand.” He was just kinda like I gotta teach it, I’m a poor righteous teacher he was like whatever, I’mma put it out there. And that’s how we are too. If you listen to our old records and our new records, it’s straight tutorials on how to rap. I seen people copy the entire blueprint and make whole careers out of just a portion of that blueprint. That’s what we had been programmed to do as dudes who were raised up from the old school through the golden era and those are sort of what we looking at. Our bar is set so high, it’s like let’s keep the bar up there.

We keep lowering the bar as society, not just musically, if you look at the retarded shit that’s on TV and radio right now, the bar is subterranean.  It’s not even on the ground. Cats on the top 10 rap lists are all worse than Vanilla Ice and Young MC and Hammer.  And that’s not to diss them, but it’s like skills don’t matter and all we’re trying to do is represent.

Souls of Mischief ain’t never had a target as far as like new or old. It was more in terms of if you wasn’t being creative or you weren’t really pushing the envelope, and there are new cats out here that are pushing the envelope. We’re not saying if you’re new that somehow, by default, you’re wack. But if you just copycatting off other people’s styles and just never bringing nothing new, and never advancing this Hip-Hop that we have like how we try to do and like how other cats that came before us and after us tried to do that’s what we have a problem with. It just totally degrades the music and the total Hip-Hop consciousness in general, which is a powerful consciousness that we don’t want to see lessened in any way.

Opio: And that’s not to speak on any of the different genres within Hip-Hop itself, because Hip-Hop has come a long way and there’s many kinds of Hip-Hop being made.  My whole thing is that within each one of those sub-genres, there’s creative people and there’s some wack ass shit. We’re just anti- not being creative.

Tajai: It’s a different set of values and there are a lot of youngsters that have the values.  If you look at a cat like Skyzoo or Cassidy or Fabolous or any of them dudes, they are real emcees, you know they really spittin’; they really put time an effort into their raps, so it’s not a generational thing at all, it’s a quality thing.

The skits were just for entertainment purposes only we weren’t trying to rag on anyone it just adds some comedy to the record. As far as our zest towards emceeing, we’re serious about this shit. Not taking ourselves hella serious as people, but serious about our craft; it’s what we do. Dudes are getting passes right now and I just don’t get it.

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