New Papoose Interview
February 14th, 2007
East coast mixtape favorite Papoose is gearing up to release his debut album Nacirema Dream on Jive in April, the Bed-Stuy emcee sat down with Prefix Mag to discuss the album, mixtapes, and more. Here are some of the highlights:
On the DJ Drama drama:
"I feel like eventually they want to make it seem like everything we do is a crime. Hip-hop music and culture is from the streets; it belongs to the streets. Nobody should try to violate that or try to take it away from the streets. Period. This is our culture. Shout out to DJ Drama and his whole camp, man. I hope he come up out of that situation."
On 50 Shots for Sean Bell:
"Being from New York, you see this shit go on all the time. There are a lot of incidents that go unpublicized. This goes on every day. If the police ain't beatin' someone up, they shootin' 'em. It won't be the first; it won't be the last, man."
On dumbing down his lyrics for the album:
"Good music is good music, whether you commercialize it or you make it what some consider complicated. If it's hot, it's hot; if it's not, it's not. I represent real lyricism and real talent. That's what this is about. People that make you try to think that it's about something else; that's because they lack talent, that's all. They just tryin' to cover up the fact that they don't have pure talent. People be tryin' to make you think that hip-hop is about everything else except for talent. It's about how many people you shot, how much money you got. That's not the foundation of the game. This is something that certain individuals were born to do-same as basketball, baseball, or football."
On the status of the LP:
"We're aiming for early '07. On the production side, we got DJ Premier, DR Period, Focus, Pharrell, Kayne West, the list goes on. And on the feature side, we got Jadakiss. But I ain't gonna put everything out there. It ain't final 'til it's vinyl. But I'm still working, even though I have enough material for three albums."
Looks like April for Papoose.
