Planet Ill: What motivates you to push boundaries after 8-10 years in the business?
Big V: We look at it as the cup’s half full and not half empty. Ten years, that’s like being in the joint, you know. Everybody else is playing pro ball. And our legs are rested. I looked at it like we got more to do. Nappy Roots was just warming up. We just figured out all this shit. And now that we’re businessmen first, and pretty good artists it’s time to play the independent game. We fitna do some shit nobody seen coming. And that’s my two cents.
Ron Clutch: Me personally, I feel like Nappy Roots we still got, I know we got a decade of music but I still feel like we got a point to prove. With that title fo being the most underrated group,…We get upset about it but we’ve learned to deal with it. But I got people around me that break it down, each bar they break down the beats…they like, “Ya’ll the hottest group probably damn near ever! And then individually, ya’ll something to deal with.” But it’s like the world don’t know that and they might not ever know it. But that’s something to strive to. I told a story the other day to another interviewer but there’s an artist that we work with here in Kentucky who took vacations down to South Africa. And he told some of the locals down there that he was working with Nappy Roots and they just lost they mind. He couldn’t believe it. So I say that to say we still got a lot of ground to cover.
If it were to end right now, I wouldn’t have no complaints, but God willing it don’t end right now and we still got another … I would love to see Nappy Roots, along with Hip-Hop, take it to the level of like how Bon Jovi and them do it. How the Rock & Roll artists do it. They can be 30 or 40, 50 years old still getting on stage. Not ‘cause they have to but because they choose to. They do it at their leisure and do it when they want to. They set the standard. I think that Hip-Hop needs that. If not that, the folks that’s running Hip-Hop now, they don’t love it like we love it. They don’t understand it like we understand it.They just see numbers. We gone do it like they do Rock & Roll.
Planet Ill: Do you think Hip-Hop is afraid to grow up?
B Stille: I believe that… I don’t think that they afraid to grow up, they just afraid of what’s going to happen to them when they do grow up. I think that…Jay kinda showed you that you could still be 40somethign and still be a pop culture icon, still be cool, still have cats wanting to…still got the swag and what not. But then again, the whole world doesn’t want to grow up, let alone rap. Rap is just like a soundtrack to what’s going on in the world.
People don’t think, “Hell when I get my face donewith this tattoo guy…” People don’t care that when they turn 70 that they gone be having a lil kid on they knee like, “Grand Daddy what the hell did you do to yourface?” They don’t care about that; we don’t care about that we just live in this society . It’s not justHip-Hop, it’s society period. It’s this generation really that tomorrow doesn’t really matter; it’s only really about today. I think that rappers nowadays just want to be in the now, as opposed to being ahead of they time or be pioneers and I think Nappy Roots is kinda the balance of that. Like Clutch was saying, I don’t see, I’ve had people tell us at the shows like, “If I got to wheel ya’ll up on stage in ya’ll wheel chairs, I’mma come to ya’ll show or ya’ll gone get up to perform.” People want to see us till the end of time. From what I gather from some of our fans.
I think rappers are afraid of what’s gone happen to them when they decide to say yeah I just turned 30 and I’m proud of it. Just because the taste makers of the industry are now 19, 20 you know, tatted up and dancing and all that. And like I said there’s a place for that; ain’t nothing wrong with that. But we don’t think about longevity. And Nappy Roots, one of our first founding things that we was thinking about was longevity. Whether it’s the whole group doing 7, 8, 10 albums when we first signed to Atlantic. Then we break down into duos and then do some albums like that and then break down into solos. I mean its’ all about a longevity thing with us. We’ve been in a time capsule for the last ten years. If you look at pictures now and pictures then, it really hasn’t changed much. We not afraid to grow up. We all 30.
Skinny De Ville: I think Hip-Hop had a birthday recently. Shit’s like 38 years old in regards to when Hip-Hop actually started way back when in New York somewhere. Everybody had they own version of when they actually met Hip-Hop and that’s cool; that’s great. I think Hip-Hop is growing old and the people that love and listen to Hip-Hop are growing with it as well. So you gone have some artists that do music for the younger generation which may be right under us as Nappy Roots. You know we been in the game ten years and a lot can happen in a decade. Kids are born and kids grow old. My son is 11 now, when we first started this and I left Western and decided to go to Atlanta with Scales and sleep on his floor to make Watermelon, Chicken & Gritz, he was still in diapers. And now I got another son in diapers so in eleven years my son has seen a lot of things happen in our lives that people who are my age have grown old and like they don’t get into that shit that maybe the generation under us, like my son, likes.
So we have a lane that we created by consistently being true to ourselves and as Hip-Hop grows, so will we. And we’re not afraid to say this is our career. Our whole life mission is to make great music till we die and that’s what we love to do. And that right there will allow us to continue to grow with our fans. And we got fans that’s going into college now. They maybe didn’t know about Nappy Roots a couple years ago but they hearing about it from their older brother or somebody in college now that we tour in one of the 150 that we do a year and rocked out for.
People are constantly going into Nappy Roots and realizing, “Damn this shit is refreshing; this shit is different from what I’m hearing on the radio and I’m seeing even the shit from 4-5 years ago this shit is still refreshing and different> Right now you gone hear this new music on this Nappy Dot Org album that’s like damn. And you’re going to be like those guys are right back at it again. It’s a whole nother line of people that don’t even know what Nappy Roots means but they gone like the music. They gonna learn and grow, and they gonna go back and they’re gonna find out they had music. “10 years ago they had music? That shit’s crazy!” So we’re getting people to grow with us as well as getting new fans and Hip-Hop is like that. This is a young man’s sport but at the same time the sport is 38 years old man. So you got people that were young 20 years ago that look at Hip-Hop completely different than the people that’s just now getting on to it right now.
