 Kwamé | Scarface  |
I want to put my swag on and everything, but at the end of the day, we really do have to say, ‘Hey man, what’s it all about?’
The political Gods have smiled on dead prez. It’s not everyday that one of hip hop’s most thought-provoking and controversial acts gets to release an album in the perfect storm of bank bailouts, police brutality, massive layoffs, and the first black President of the United States, Barack Obama. On their third independent release, Pulse of the People (Invasion/Boss Up), the Florida/New York connection of stic.man and M-1 are still fighting the power, this time with help from producer Green Lantern and guests like Bun B, Styles P, and the legendary Chuck D of Public Enemy. Since making their classic 2000 debut, Let’s Get Free (Loud), dead prez has built with everyone from the late 2Pac’s Outlawz crew to Jay-Z. With a new album and a feature in the soundtrack to Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming film, Brooklyn’s Finest (Senator), dead prez are making more noise than ever, burnt dollar bills and all.
VIBE: This is your first album as a group since 2004’s Revolutionary But Gangsta. What have you been up to besides the various side musical projects?
stic.man: I’ve been bossing up. I’ve been building my company Boss Up. I’ve been a father to my son, who is 7 now, a husband of 16 years. I’ve been writing and producing. I’ve been very much productive, passionate, healthy, getting money and trying to participate in the things I believe in as far as community schools. I’ve even been learning a lot about the green movement and how to make it relevant to our community. Just appreciating life and recognizing that in this system there’s going to be a struggle.
M-1: A few months ago, I was actually at a youth green expo in the Bronx. I was able to add on to a discussion about going green. There was a rapper there that actually farms in upstate New York. And I’m like, Damn! I don’t farm. Not in that way. It just made me open my eyes to what’s been going on. I really relate to the green movement. As far as my personal life, I’ve been a father as well; I have two little ones. It’s fantastic, man. They ride on my back...I be tired [laughs]. I come home from tour and its great. I want to continue to lay a solid foundation. I’ve been learning a lot about that. But we still try to find ways to be a part of this culture.
S: We have also been traveling a lot. Scandinavia, Austria, Germany, all over the U.S. from Cali to Connecticut. Nonstop moving.
M: We have been able to take a temperature of what’s going on. Nobody can’t pull an okey-doke on me and tell me the temperature of Oakland, Calif.
Can you talk about the meaning behind your album title, Pulse of the People?
S: There’s a lot of shit going on right now. I think more people are feeling economic fear and the layoffs, but there are plenty of people who didn’t have anything before that. These are the people who were already getting laid off. Pulse of the People, for us, is not just those problems, but the vibration of the people. It’s what people are dealing with and going through. With this album we were trying to express that sentiment.
The entire album was recorded in over a weekend. What type of experience was it like working in the studio with Green Lantern in such a fast time?
M: It was dope. The cool thing about it was we had a chance to build with Green for about two weeks. We picked the music that we felt. And we recorded it and mastered down the project in over the span of a weekend.
S: For me it’s been liberating. I did a project similar with Young Noble called Soldier 2 Soldier. We recorded that project in two days. And I’m usually the type of person where it takes me forever to record [laughs]. I don’t think we are trying to compromise quality, just to do it fast. But it’s in the spirit of what hip hop is. We were trying to capture that moment. Sometimes you stretch it out forever and all that. We didn’t want to get in the way of good shit. The thing with Green is he’s mad humble. You know how you meet people and you don’t want to say shit, it wasn’t like that. It felt natural. He didn’t have a glass jaw.
M: The thing is, we learned the root to the best music is not to be so sensitive about things. Those that can accept that know how to grow from honesty.
On “Stimulus Plan” you talk about dealing with the current financial climate by any means necessary.
S: That’s the other point that we wanted to make—we are motivated to be our own stimulus plan. This is not a complaint song. We are stimulated by the conditions to survive. That’s the ultimate stimulus plan—the liberation struggle. You see the levels of people just trying to make ends meet just by any means necessary; some legal and others illegal because of these conditions. We are going to survive despite these conditions.
M: The songs that we have been putting out are about how strong you are. Whether or not you can take a punch. With songs like “Stimulus Plan,” you don’t plan for these things to happen. But those are good ways of measuring what’s going on out there. We hear the responses from the people.
S: And there’s a range on this album. It’s not all about Obama and the economy. It’s about people’s lives.
Speaking of Barack Obama, how often have you been asked about his election?
S: I would just like to let Obama know that we have an album coming out on June 23 called Pulse of The People [laughs]. In it he can here the sentiment of the average people who want to see America do justice for all people. I’ll even give him a free copy. And, oh yeah, Obama is tall. Yeah, that’s about it.
M: [Laughs] I’m going to tell you man, we just came from California from a place outside of L.A .called Occidental College. It’s a place where Obama took two semesters there before he moved on. Obviously he moved straight up the ladder from that particular place to where he is right now.
S: He bossed up?
M: Yeah [laughs], he knew the way. But from being on such a liberal campus it occurred to me, as we were doing a concert underneath the stars with a whole bunch of screaming teenagers, that Obama had come across progressive ideas. Obama knows what happened in southern California with the Black Panther Party. He studied it; he’s black. The ideas that we are talking about are not even new to Barack Obama. He knows what revolution is; he knows about socialism and capitalism, and all this shit. So it is what it is.
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