I kind of remember a friend of mine saying, like, you guys should make a rap record. You know, because we were already making punk records. We were a punk band. And I kind of thought, that's crazy.
Americans are always mortified when I tell them this, but in England, it's a tradition to put your plaques and photographs and awards and gold records and stuff in your bathroom. I don't know why.
I don't rely on my figure to sell records.
I started buying ill, obscure records, and then I saw Portishead and Air live, and my mouth was on the ground.
I always say to people that I left hip-hop in '97, meaning that I departed from listening to predominately hip-hop and just started really getting into records from the late '60s, early '70s. And once I made that change, I realized how much great music was made back in the day, and it started to become apparent how much we've lost in music.
Like with me, like around '97, for Christmas my parents bought me an MPC 2000 sampler and a little eight-track cassette recorder. And I started sampling records and, you know, producing hip-hop beats. And it got to the point where I realized - I innately realized that the music I liked the most was made by people that played instruments.
Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.
I don't see any of my records as any more or less conceptual than the others, and I don't really plan some overall idea in advance. The songs all get written under the umbrella of a certain time in your life, and it's natural to find themes that repeat within these periods.
I know a lot of people who make records, and when you meet them, it's not their personality or they're not what you're expecting. But El-P is exactly what you'd expect.
Actually freestyle really comes from 'Planet Rock'. If you listen to all the freestyle records you'll hear that they are based on 'Planet Rock'. All the Miami Bass records are based upon Planet Rock.
