With all of you in different areas (Mr. Man-NYC, Lee-NJ, Light-CA) has the distance affected your music?

Mr. Man: It’s kinda easy. I don’t think it’s a problem. If Light has a song idea or I have a song idea he sends me some music or I send him some music and we MP3 it and cut vocals like that and send it to each other and add our parts.

Light: We’re hook specialists so once the beat is hot we coming with a hook, a bridge and a intro. We not just coming on there like I got my verse, its 96 bars and its fiyah! We’re coming in and letting our soul speak and whatever we feel matches the beat harmoniously we run with it. We’re pretty heavy on each other too don’t get it twisted. But it’s been awhile were we had to say Khalyl rewrite that or Light rewrite that. That was pretty much when we were first starting and now we kinda know our zones. We fans so we still listening to 50 and everybody that’s rocking.

Mr. Man: We stay surrounded by good musicians and good artists. As a matter of fact I’m on my way to a Kweli session right now so it’s like we stay with our ear to the streets. We stay knowing exactly what’s going on and what is an influence now. It’s not like losing touch with anything. You’re not hearing records from us but we’re doing things in the background until its time for the official jump off.

Light: We blessed to come up in Brooklyn. We were running around beat boxing on the corner in ’91 and ’92 together with Mos Def and Talib. We put Mos and UTD on our first album. I think that was the first album he was ever on.

Mr. Man: And that was the first album and I don’t think the song ended up being on our first album so when he got on the second album he ended up being all over it. He was on the intro, “The Love Song” and all that. It wasn’t like Mos and Kwe were some strange dudes we didn’t know from nowhere. I went to high school with Kweli. So you got Kwe on one end and Mos on the other end who we used to just hang out with on the daily and its just natural for things to be where they are now. It’s natural for Mos to be where he is and for Kweli to be where he is and for Light to do the film work he’s doing or for me to be doing the production I’m doing. It might seem like it’s a phenomenon to people that don’t know but this is what we have been working towards since then. I was an intern at a few different record labels before I even had it in my mind to be an artist. Now years later we’re doing interviews, I remember when I was 16 or 17 I used to have to archive all the interviews for the artists at the labels I was working at. It’s a cycle of life in hiphop.

Light: I wish more rappers were together like that coming up. Everybody is representing a town but I’m a big sports fan, I see all these sport guys and if you nice at ball they putting you with the other ten nice cats. You see who’s the best and you can groom the guys who need help. The hiphop game ain’t like that homie.

Mr. Man: There’s no health plan in hiphop. You fall off the stage and break your arm that’s it.

Haha

Mr. Man: You just have a high ass hospital bill. There is no HMO.

Light: There’s no development of anything, you are on your own buddy. You are lucky if a dude come in and put you together.

How did you guys link up with Tribe and De La, would they just all be in the area?

Mr. Man: Yea all the time. It’s crew. Pos and I go way back. We have a lot of family ties and that’s how I know Pos and De La. Ali Shaheed produced on the first album so all of that is just being around that circle and you end up meeting everybody else in the circle. It started out from working with Ali and knowing Pos and everything else kind of snowballed from there. The more we are around each other the more we do records together and the more we do shows together. It just became a tight knit crew or family.

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Posted by Halftime on Sunday, May 23rd, 2004 and is filed under HIP HOP ICON SERIES.