Albums:

Click of Respect (2003)

The Giancana Story (2002)

Roots Of Evil (1998)

Rated XXX (1996)

4,5,6 (1995)

Live and Let Die (1992)

Wanted: Dead Or Alive (1990)

Road To The Riches (1989)

Halftime: What made you move to Arizona?

Kool G. Rap: I had family out there that was number one. Number two, I was living in flushing Queens before I moved to Arizona for like six years and I’d say for a good part of the six years I wanted to move out of New York in general just because I wanted to see other shit. G Rap’s not a nigga that want to be at the place to be. I was never like that. I was never always at the clubs or shit like that. I always liked to be low key. At the time I moved to Arizona everybody was moving to Atlanta and I didn’t want to move to Atlanta where everybody was going. I wanted to do my own shit. I had heard from a member of the family who had been to Arizona and they said it was nice. They was really blowing up the shit, so I got curious and went out there and I saw it was everything they cracked it up to be. So I contacted a real estate agency out there, they took me out shopping, I found something I fell in love with and I ended up staying out there.

I heard AZ has a decent hiphop scene.

Kool G: Yea, but you know what when I moved out there hiphp was really on a small scale and I don’t think hiphop had crossed all the borders yet in 95. The nigga’s that really took hiphop across the board was Biggie, Tupac, Jigga and this was before all that. I lived there about six years [and] later on in the years hiphop really grew out there and was real big. I seen it go from one stage to another, but at the time I moved out there shit wasn’t really booming with hiphop. You would only hear certain cats like Coolio and Cee-Lo, niggas that had records that broke that market and were able to exist in Arizona.

Why do you think Tupac and Biggie left such a deep legacy behind and what is it that makes people get emotional as soon as you bring up those two?

Kool G: Biggie represented a lot of niggas and the same thing with Tupac. By those two guys feuding it was bigger than them they divided the nation. That’s why you have so many emotions behind it. It’s not a Tupac and Biggie thing, it’s an East Coast-West Coast thing, it’s a West Coast-Dirty South-NYC thing, it’s a gang related thing. It’s so many things that got mixed up between that feud that created so many emotions because these two cats, whether they realized it or not, represented so many other people.

There is a big thing now, the 20th anniversary of Scarface. Why is Scarface so significant in hiphop circles?

Kool G: Hiphop is based on the streets. The streets are always going to be related to hiphop. The Scarface movie was a reality for a lot of people. So many people are crazy about the movie Scarface because they can relate it to so many places in they hood. The movie came out in Corona’s and Jackson Height’s prime (Both in Queens). Jackson Heights was considered the drug empire of the United States at one time. All the Columbian and Dominican cats were out there and at the time the movie came out this shit was going on. So it wasn’t like a movie to me, it was like they were depicting what was going on in the hood. Along with my hood a lot of people related that to their hood. That’s why they hold the movie so dear because they seen the shit with their own eyes. The 80’s was popping for the cocaine empire. It made Al Pacino an icon in the hiphop industry because he killed that role.

We hear you’re a mob movie connoisseur. What fascinates you about them and what’s the best mob movie ever, excluding The Godfather?

Kool G: It’s the unity and the loyalty and the brilliant minds that structure this kind of organization where it would take federal agents years and years to figure shit out and put the pieces of the puzzle together to get a whole picture to understand what their dealing with. It’s not like these guys are wild at random. It took brilliant minds to make organized crime, where people can live lifetimes being a leader of a crime family and some of them never went to jail. That’s crazy to me because we was always taught you do crime it catches up with you one way or another, but some of these men die of old age in their bed. The best mob flick (in my opinion) would either be the Last Don or Once Upon A Time in America and I think Once Upon A Time in America might be a little above The Last Don.

Are you feeling the Sopranos at all?

Kool G: I feel the Sopranos, but I don’t think it’s everything people say it’s cracked up to be. I wasn’t watching the Sopranos for a minute. The shit was airing about a year and a half before I even started watching one episode. People kept talking and talking about it so I was like I gotta watch this shit, maybe there is something in this shit that I ain’t catching. I started watching it every time I caught it on cable, but the shit don’t really hit me like that. You can’t describe the Italian mafia in a TV series. It’s like a soap opera. The violence ain’t there. It’s like a watered down Goodfellas.

How did you come up with the idea for the “My Life” Video?

Kool G: To be honest I didn’t come up with the idea. The “My Life” video was Phillip Bagwell. He directed it and came up with the idea for that video. I wasn’t really satisfied with it. I had to reintroduce myself to a lot of people and that wasn’t the kind of video I was looking for. I did videos like that in a movie format since my career started. I didn’t want to do another movie script video.

But the basic idea was that you were supposed to be faking your death in that video?

Kool G: Yea, everyone is under the impression that G Rap got killed and then I show up and everyone is fucking bewildered like they seen a ghost. That’s definitely not the way I want to portray myself. A lot of niggas did certain shit [and] their life turned out to really be that way. If it was my idea I wouldn’t have portrayed myself as being dead and then pop back up on the scene like that. Slick Rick did a song about shooting niggas up and crashing into a tree and that shit really happened. For that song I was telling the label let’s get treatments from a lot of different directors and let’s go with the hot one. But Rawkus was a label that threw a dick in they mouth with the quickness. If you had a name and a little buzz behind you Rawkus was sucking a nigga, so I couldn’t really fight them. They spent close to a half million dollars doing a video that really got no airplay and [didn’t] have people going crazy. Back in the days [I had people going crazy] with the forty thousand dollar video I did for “On The Run.” His shit caught everybody.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Posted by Halftime on Wednesday, November 12th, 2003 and is filed under HIP HOP ICON SERIES.