Can’t wait till they hit the NYC stop of their tour next week. link
You were 19 years old when you made 3 Feet High—and seemed so unself-conscious about the sorts of things teenage boys are normally self conscious about. Rapping about talking fish in “Tread Water,” for example…
Well, I think we were independent, but also with us being around each other, like minds help just put more confidence in what you’re doing, and you don’t feel like you need to sway away from it. And being in high school even right before, while we were even working on a lot of material, you know, we hung around a lot of really cool people, we weren’t, like, nerds or anything, but we just had our own way of thinking about things and dressing. And like I said, people around you sort of gravitate toward you because you find yourself thinking the same, trying the same things. So I mean we all love what Run-D.M.C. did or was still doing, or Rakim or all the rappers at the time. Even Public Enemy, for that matter. But we just knew that we just naturally had to come up with what we wanted to. We weren’t gonna copy or bite what someone else was doing.
How much of 3 Feet High was improvised? With a track like “Take It Off,” it sounds like you’re making it up as you go along.
Oh, definitely. Like, Prince Paul had put the beat together, and we just stood in the booth like, “What are we gonna do?” And the beat reminded us of a song by these two Philly rappers called Krown Rulers, they had a song called “Kick the Ball.” And you know, so it was the same thing, “Kick the ball!” So we was like, Yo, that beat reminded us of that song, so why don’t we do something like, “Take it off!” and we’ll be talking about certain stuff that we gotta take off, and we just took two minutes to write down different items—and we start doing it.
And on “De La Orgee,” did you brief the girls on what you wanted, or did you say, “Go for it”?
No, once again, it was something that was just a joke—that was another beat we were just playing, and we said, “What we gonna do with this particular beat?” Umm, and then I jokingly said, “Oh we should just moan and act like we’re having sex over it,” and I laughed, ha-ha—and Prince Paul was always classic for that, he would be like, “That’s it! Yeah! Do that, do that! And we’d say, “Are you serious?” Yeah! So we started doin’ it, and it just happened that friends of ours were in there at the time, and our dancers was around, and so we told them to come in the booth.
