By Odeisel

Kentucky is known for many things, but Hip-Hop is not one of them. Or at least it wasn’t until the Nappy Roots came on the scene. The group put Kentucky on the rap map with such conviction it garnered them their own holiday.

After legitimate major label success, the group pounds the independent circuit, delivering music for their fans and newcomers alike. With an extensive catalog of quality music under their belt, their next project seeks to merge forces with the legendary Dungeon Family, as Organized Noize produces new disk Nappy Dot Org. Planet Ill sat down with the group to talk history, music and their latest adventures. Here is part 1 nappyrootscut1

Planet Ill: Organized Noize has done classic work with Goodie Mobb and Outkast. Did you look at that track record and take it as a challenge?

Skinny De Ville: That kinda is going to bring you to another level anyway. It’s like playing Duke first game You gotta get ready. So you definitely don’t want to get blown out you want to at least make the score close and you want to play to win anyway.

We kind of looked at it as an opportunity to be mentioned and put up there with the greats as far as the songs that they’ve done because their discography is amazing as well. And so we just kind of wanted to establish ourselves as part of that discography and make sure that we show and prove. I think we did that on this album.

Planet Ill: Everybody’s got their range of where they come from. As far as Hip-Hop and what it means to you, how does Kentucky factor in?

Skinny De Ville: Kentucky plays a big part, man. I think all of us have a strong love and affection for where we kinda came from. And that’s the roots part of our name, Nappy Roots. You never forget where you came from. You can always take that with you wherever you live. Right now I currently live in Atlanta but I have so much love for where I was brought up I have so many memories. And we try to put the Kentucky lifestyle in our music in every project we do.  We try to bring Kentucky with us. Kentucky held us down from day one. They always supported the Nappy Roots. Every city, every state has a couple people that don’t like what you do because you’re successful. But for the most part 98.9% of the people of the state of Kentucky always supported the Nappy Roots and that’s how we got our own holiday on September 16^th.

When we came out, we made so much noise about Hip-Hop and so much noise about Kentucky and we’re repping Hip-Hop from Kentucky which is a country kind of point of view and so they gave us our own holiday because we repped Kentucky so hard. And so now every year we’re trying to do a big to do about September 16^th we go to the schools to talk to the kids about staying in school and going to school. But if it wasn’t for Kentucky holding us down, we wouldn’t have the sound that we have right now, even though we do travel and do other things.

We record a lot of our projects in Atlanta but we brought Kentucky to Atlanta. We didn’t try to be nobody else but Nappy Roots from Kentucky We never tried to be anybody from any other set; any other area of the country. We knew that if we stood true to what we did and how we was brought up and how we was raised, that that would shine through more than anything.

Planet Ill: You came out with a bang but you got one thing in your catalog that was a little slept on. You dropped The Humdinger in 2008 and many feel people slept on that album and that the lead single threw off the perception of the album. How do you take it when some of you best work gets ignored because of a song?

Skinny De Ville: We’re probably the most underrated group in Hip-Hop. To me that’s better than being the most wackest group in Hip-Hop. It might not be the most overrated but I’d rather be underrated than overrated any day. If people don’t know about Nappy Roots it’s because they not hip to what we do. We been dropping music; it’s almost like where YOU been at?

We keep dropping music every year, whether it’s online or whether it’s via mainstream, but we got off Atlantic Records in 2005 and when we got off Atlantic records, we purposely got off Atlantic; we didn’t get dropped. We said,”You know what? This shit ain’t working for us and we want to be in more in control of our destiny.” So we decided to go independent.

So independent sometimes don’t mean you’re going to be as famous as you’re used to be. But you can be just as successful. And because we didn’t really sell as many records as people thought we did on Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz, we still made more money and had a better success rate because we still toured we were still able to get to our fans. Even though we didn’t sell a million records on The Humdinger, people who knew about it knew about it. For us, “Good Day” was a great record for us.

Greg Street got behind it, Interscope got behind it. That was pretty much a record we sold to Greg Street through Interscope. We ended up putting it back on our album anyway because it was on our first independent mixtape that came out before The Humdinger.  So it wasn’t that we were doing something different, we were doing us and we just thought at the time, that wasn’t the best representation to just come back out of the blue, without trying to represent anybody let’s give something back to the people and let’s get the kids involved.

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