DJ Jazzy Jeff
I definitely agree with you especially the whole mom thing because one time I said to my mom you think you’re always right and she was like yea I am and I was like I can’t believe she actually told me that because if that was anyone else you’d be like are you crazy?
My mom still thinks she knows who I need to be with. My mom will tell me how come you didn’t stay with such and such and I’m like well mom I didn’t like her. And its like is it more important for me to be happy with who I want to be happy with or who you want to be happy with.
It gets to a point where you have to get out from under your parents wing because you have to learn to make your own choices. There are a lot of things that my mother said that I was like damn she was right, but then it should have been me who made that choice.
Yea it’s your choice. What I’m trying to do with my kid is I realize you have a certain amount of time to instill views, values, and morals and after that its for him to say I’m gonna use some of this shit and some of it I’m not. So you just try in that early period in life to show em as much as you can. My pops passed away when I was ten from cancer and nobody ever told me my pop had cancer. It bugged me out because I’m in the living room right after he passed away and my brother came out and said we all knew dad was gonna die. That fucked me up and I never said shit to my moms till two years ago and I told her that was wrong. It was wrong for you to think I didn’t have enough intelligence to know something was wrong with my pops. But I understand my mom did a hell of a job raising me, but she not gonna do everything right. We all make mistakes and I understand because right now im making mistakes with my kid.
Back in the day around ‘89 I remember you guys catching a lot of flack for winning the first grammy for rap and a lot of people were saying you guys didn’t represent the hiphop that was out at the time and the grammy’s really have no street cred on top of that. With that said what do you think was the importance of accepting that award in the midst of those negative aspects and what did it mean for you guys to win a grammy?
Kenny Gamble told me when you are making history or setting trails you don’t know when you are doing it. Cats got mad at Run DMC when they did a rock record. We get mad when we don’t understand. Will and I didn’t change who we were. We did what we did and it blew up and we got nominated for a grammy and we won. The thing that I laugh about is Will got flack for being a hiphop artist doing a tv show and we got flack for selling records and crossing over. Jay-z made his living doing that. Its like the same things we caught flack for is mandatory for you to be successful today. The only thing that we did was open doors for Eve to sell millions of records and go and do a tv show or for Ice Cube, who wanted to make records and act and then go into directing. It was the shit because there was a side of me that was like they don’t care what we’re doing so for them to even acknowledge we are out here [is important] because all we’re trying to do is get acceptance. Talking to old school cats like Kool Moe Dee and Melle Mel and how they would say when we did shows we danced and dressed up and did everything because they dissed us so hard we had to show our worth and why we should be here. So with the acceptance you don’t turn that away. We got flack from the guys that were our peers not from the older guys because the older guys were like we fought like hell for acceptance and now they want to accept you don’t turn it down. They aren’t gonna accept you all the way.
You mentioned the tv show so we gotta get some questions on that. What did you think the first time you heard you guys were gonna be on a tv show?
I remember when they called Will out. We were on tour in Detroit and Will said I just got a call they want me to audition for this tv show and he jumped on a plane flew to LA and flew back the next morning. He was like yo man all these executives from NBC and Quincy Jones was there, we did it at Quincy’s crib and everyone liked it and they want to give me my own tv show. I was like wow that’s dope, but I don’t think it hit me until he recorded the pilot and we went over his house and he showed it. You think tv show I’m thinking this is a nigga with a camcorder.
Hahaha
Then I saw it and I was like oh shit? This is like Happy Days, this is some big shit and he did good. I wasn’t surprised at how well Will did ever because there is nothing that surprises me with him. Then he was like hey man they want you to do a couple spots on there and I was like nah I ain’t with that. Finally he convinced me like come on man just do it and if you like it then cool. You never really paid any attention to it because we went from performing in front of 30,000 people to 100 in a studio audience, so you don’t think there are gonna be six million people that watch you every week. You just know about the people in the audience. But it was very different because you walk down the street and you got a eighty year old white lady saying your Jazz off the Fresh Prince. They never said your Jazzy Jeff off of Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, so it gave me an understanding that tv is a different animal.
