We’ve talked in the past about that three man weave style, where the next MC starts with the last word for the last MC. How did that come together?
Well, Charlemagne brought that in. He focused a lot on the original way that hip-hop sounded. What he said was that in the beginning, all groups didn’t do verse, verse, verse. They mingled with each other and they mixed rhymes. He said he wanted us to do that but not in harmony with each other. He wanted us to just trade lines with each other to make up verses. We first did that with me, Voo, and Ka. Big up my boy Ka. And after that is when A-Butta came to the group and then we did it with “2 Tons” and “Bust Mine.” But we did it for the first time in ‘95.
What do you remember most about all the college radio you guys did?
I remember getting on the train, getting 40 or a 64 ounce, and just being focused. I didn’t put anything in my way to make me not focused. When we went down to those stations,we young guys that just had something. See, in the studio, the way that Charlemagne had us trained, we were always used to having lyrics on deck. Charlemagne could drop something and we had to be ready. We knew if we could transfer the way that we freestyled in the studio to the radio then we would have something and we could do something unique on the radio. When we actually got it to transfer over to the people hearing it on college radio, it was like, ‘Oh, man!’ I remember going to Stretch and Bobbito at 4 in the morning and Redman would be there and people would have the tapes in the morning. That used to mean a lot and it still means a lot.
