what they should be doing. The only artist that’s doing phenomenal on the label is Beyonce. Now that Three 6 Mafia won an Oscar I’m sure Sony will start paying attention to them. Now Sony will spend money on them and be like, “Oh, we love you.” But them niggas have been putting it down for so long and only now is Sony looking. Sony should have been looking at them a long time ago. [Sony] don’t respect nobody unless you’re Beyonce or maybe Nas. Nas has criticized Sony in the past. Right. He got problems with them but he gets more respect off of seniority. I mean it probably ain’t all peaches and cream for him like he wants it to be but for the most part him and Beyonce are cool. So now you don’t have to deal with the A&R’s at Sony picking your music. How did the new single with Lyfe come about? We shot the video for “What it Do” and did an uncut video. Then we were getting ready to shoot the video for “I’m a Baller” and halfway through is when I was starting to leave Sony. There were only about three or four people who knew I was leaving Sony so everyone was pushing “I’m a Baller.” When I got over to Asylum tried to get “I’m a Baller” and push it to DJs but everyone was like, “I got this from Sony 3 months ago.” That was a big record. My first performance of the song scared me because when I went out there everyone in the audience already knew the words to the song. Warner Brothers decided they wanted to go with “Ghetto Mindstate” and I was kind of shocked. I was a little skeptical because it wasn’t a club record but it was testing well with programmers. So I just said fuck it, let’s go with it. I’ve always wanted to do music with Lyfe. I had heard about him before he had even got out of jail. I don’t put an artist on [a record] because they’re hot. I put people on my songs that I can feel. Was the switching of labels the reason your album leaked? I had to pay [Sony] two million dollars to leave, to take my album with me and buy myself out of contract. Right after I left somebody leaked the album. Usually your label sends out two or three singles but I was starting to notice that when I visited radio stations the DJs had the whole CD. This was three or four months before the album is supposed to come out. It was frustrating dealing with that and the beef I was going through, and that shit just pissed me off. I just said fuck rap for a minute. I’m not gonna put out an album that everyone has. I don’t even know how many people got the album. But when I’m out in the streets people were still telling me to put out the album and that they were going to buy it anyway. So I go back in 30
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the studio and do 18 more songs to put on the album. The first single, “Ghetto Mindstate,” appears to be a break away from the type of music you usually do. No, On the Leprechaun I had a song called “Gotta be Me.” I had a song called “The Biz” about the rap business. On Underground Legend I had “What I Been Through,” “I Should Have Listened,” and “It’s A Fact.” I’ve had a lot of songs that ain’t got shit to do with the club because everyone don’t wanna hear about that and jewelry. That’s the fucked up thing about the rap game, man. Your first look is what you are. That’s all people see you as. What separates this album from your last albums? It’s more mature. Most of the time my albums are done one right after the other. This one has a more mature sound because there is a three year break in between recording. I take more risks on this album by trying different tracks and different rhyme schemes. What’s your response to the critics that don’t think you’re lyrically up to par or that you’re too commercial? There’s two types of rappers: rappers that sit around and see how many big words they can rhyme, and those that have more of a conversational flow. My type of style is the conversational flow because when I rap it feels like I’m telling you a story. Before my albums, when I was underground, I was known for straight freestyling. I was spitting off the top of my dome what I was living and how I was feeling, but when you get into making records, it’s different. There’s a difference between making a battle record and a hit song. My whole thing is, everybody’s got their own way of telling a story and this is mine. I’m more of a storyteller. Critics are funny. I’ve bought at least six trash albums in the last year because some magazine said it was a classic. So the critics will praise the garbage and trash good shit. Take Ice Cube’s last album. I read some bad reviews on it but when I listened to that shit that bitch was jamming. He was rapping about what’s going on in the world right now and that shit was hard. These magazines and critics just show too much favoritism. It’s not even about the music anymore. What’s it like stepping back into the Houston rap scene? You came out on your own and the kind of fell back and then Swishahouse pretty much was on top of Houston after that. What is your place now in the Houston rap scene? Yeah. What people don’t realize is I didn’t take a break by choice. Plus, even though I didn’t have an album out I was on a lot of independent shit.