It’s eerie looking at vintage episodes of the Jenny Jones Show on Youtube and seeing a young Rude Jude Angelini spew venom at unsuspecting (or suspecting) guests on the daytime program. “This your man Jude,” he says in one edition. “I’m outside of Angela’s house. We’re about to creep up in there sneaky-sneak style to let her know she needs a makeover because she’s a dusty broad.” His segments were often mean-spirited, yet always funny—like watching a future shock jock still shooting in the gym.
Jude’s raunchy humor is at least part of what carries the success of his Sirius radio show, All Out Show with Rude Jude & Lord Sear. The duo not only hosts the most relevant names in Hip Hop and entertainment, but you’ll also find uproarious debates about whether it’s wrong to call a transvestite “tranny,” for example. For most people, starring on Jenny Jones and/or hosting a radio show on the station that Eminem built would be the obvious topic for a book. Not for Jude, though. When piecing together his dark autobiography, Hyena, those were two extremely uninteresting topics.
“I’m not writing about that shit,” Rude Jude tells HipHopDX in this exclusive conversation. “My life isn’t defined by Jenny Jones nor is it defined by going to work everyday and interviewing rappers. I don’t think that’s as interesting as the shit I’m doing outside of my work. If you want to hear name-dropping, go read Superhead’s book with the fucking triple spaced words and shit. Looks like she fucking wrote it with a fucking crayon. Go read her fucking book. I know how to write so I wrote something interesting. I don’t need to lean on the fact that I know some fucking rapper. I went and had drinks with a rapper. Big fucking deal. I ate a baby. Isn’t that a little more interesting.”
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Rude Jude Details Hyena
HipHopDX: Hyena is your first book. You spent five years writing it. It’s called Hyena because hyenas will laugh at you but nothing’s really funny. There are a lot of dark narratives in the book. What made you want to present your life, or the portions of your life that you remember in this manner?
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Rude Jude: Here’s the deal: I didn’t go to college. I’m really not fucking educated. If you go to the bookstore, most of the people that are writing books are college-educated. A lot of them are from middle class or upper middle class backgrounds. They know sentence structure and they understand big words and shit. That wasn’t me. I felt like that was a disadvantage to me, but then I felt like “What do I have working for me?” I have voice and life. My life was different than their life. A lot of it was dark and I wrote that. I just told the truth. My main shit was when I was writing, show don’t tell and tell the truth. That’s it. I’ll just tell you what happened. Like, “Aight, this fucking chick peed on me.” You can feel however you want about a chick peeing on you. I let anybody come up with how they feel about it but, yo, she pissed on me. I liked it. It was cool. I’d do it again.
DX: There’s another narrative in there that I’ve never heard happen before. You were hooking up with a chick one night. You thought she was on nature week. She goes to the doctor and she actually had a miscarriage.
Rude Jude: That was back in the day. I was fucking with this one broad. I pulled her from a restaurant. She was like this white girl that moved out from the country. She was running through brothers. Somehow I pulled her. She was like, “I usually don’t fuck with white dudes.” We were fucking around for a little bit and she hit me up like, “Hey man, I need you to do me a favor. I got pregnant by this ball player and I need you to take me to the abortion clinic.” I’m like, “Alright, I’ll take you to the abortion clinic.” So I stayed the night with her because I didn’t have a car. I’d been through a couple of abortions by then and I knew you couldn’t fuck for a week. They sent her home in a diaper. It’s fucked up. You can’t bang for a week. I’m like, “I’m gonna get some pussy before this shit goes down and I’m gonna cum in her” because you can fucking cum in pregnant girls and they can’t get pregnant again. That’s the fucking awesome thing about it.
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It’s the morning of the abortion. I’m trying to put the moves on her. She’s just not in the mood because she’s gotta get a fucking abortion. I was 18 years old. I was a dick. I wasn’t thinking about her feelings. I was like, “I got this.” I start kissing her titties. She’s like, “No, no, no.” I’m like, “Girl I got you. Don’t worry.” I go down on her and it tastes like fucking death; like hopelessness and fucking fish and panties. It’s awful. But here’s the deal. My old man, we was broke. So if I wasted food my dad would make me go in the fucking garbage and eat it. I’ve ate from the trash before so this is nothing. So I’m eating thinking either I’m gonna get used to this or some new shit will flow out and it’ll taste better. That shit keeps juicing up. Usually if a girl’s pussy stank, if you smash for a little bit it’ll [smell better]. It’s like a self-cleaning oven, it’ll flush itself out. But it never flushed itself out so I was like, “We gotta stop.” I go and wash up. I’m a mess. I tried to act like, “You know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this.” I don’t wanna tell her that her your fucking pussy smells like a shoe. I don’t want to tell her that.
We go to the fucking abortion clinic. It’s on the east side of town in Michigan. It’s fucking Winter time. It’s fucking gray snow, super bleek—the perfect day for an abortion. The clinic’s at a fucking grimey-ass goddamn strip mall with the fucked-up concrete, right next to a Subway. I’m sitting there in the clinic waiting for her to get her shit done. She goes inside. Everyone’s looking at me like I’m the fucking asshole. I’m like, “Dude, it wasn’t even me. It was some ball player. I’m just here for fucking moral support.” I’m flipping through the magazine and she comes out in five minutes. I told you, I’ve been through this before. It usually takes longer than five minutes. I’m like “Goddamn, what’d you do, change your mind? You gonna keep the baby?” She’s like, “Nah. I had a miscarriage.” In my head I was like, “I ate a baby. I ate a little black kid. I ate a child. I ate a fucking child, man.”
DX: That’s what you meant by Hyena. We’re laughing, but it ain’t really that funny.
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Rude Jude: It’s fucked up. Now I can’t even fuck her again. It was the most silent ride home ever. Then my homeboy ends up fucking her. He didn’t eat the baby so now he’s driving her car all around and going up to the basketball court in her shit. I did all this grimey stuff and my homeboy steps in and ends up getting all of her money and her car, dawg. Fucking shotout to Myron. You got her.
DX: There’s a bunch of savageness like that in this book. There’s the time you go to the strip club and met a one-armed stripper.
Rude Jude: That was up in Flint, Michigan. Flint is really poor. Flint is broke. The Midwest and the South have a different kind of broke than on the coasts. Compton is the hood but for a while it has one of the highest medians for household incomes for black communities. It’s not like that in Flint. I remember driving around and there was a fucking bombed-out house, it was burnt down, all the fucking furniture was in the front yard. It snowed on it. Kids were sledding off of the couch. It’s fucking broke out there.
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The strip club had $5 lap dances. It was literally a fucking retarded girl dancing there. She had down syndrome. She was butt naked but she had on one of those 80s Coca-Cola sweatshirts with a hip pack and shit. I didn’t get a lap dance from her. I couldn’t do that.
DX: That’s too far for Rude Jude.
Rude Jude: I know it sounds fucked-up but I just think of the smell of drool and I don’t want that on me.
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2Pac & Scarface’s Influence On Hyena
DX: There’s a lot of seriousness in the book as well. You mentioned your father earlier. There’s a story about him taking you to the dentist and you realized how important insurance is, how much it costs to make sure your kids are taken care of. Those are the narratives that linger longer for me after reading the book than, ironically, one-armed strippers and things.
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Rude Jude: I was aware of my core audience and what they would respond to. I do a Hip Hop show. I’m a shock jock on a Hip Hop channel so of course sex stories and violent stories are gonna resonate. But I also wanted to talk about that real shit: heartbreak, growing up broke, the insecurity of not having or not knowing if y’all are gonna be able to pay rent that next month and how that weighs on a person and how one develops an inferiority complex because of that. I wanted to talk about that as well. That goes back to that first point: I’m not a Yale motherfucker. I’m not that Yaley but they’re not me either so I’m gonna hit everything that I know they can’t speak on. That’s shit that regular people can relate to. I’m talking about some regular shit that regular people can relate to that really isn’t spoke on that much. Go to the bookstore. It’s like some rich motherfucker trying to find herself. I don’t give a fuck about that.
DX: Doing yoga in India.
Rude Jude: Yeah. Eat Pray Love shit. Fuck her. And the bitch is on antidepressants. That’s false advertisement. You can’t do that shit without antidepressants and you’re gonna fucking write a book? And that’s who’s winning?
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DX: People are always searching for more. We see it in Hip Hop, the idea of saying something so true that it’s real that people connect with it regardless if it’s, from a critic’s standpoint, the most “talented” way to approach it.
Rude Jude: You’re right. There’s rappers that I really admired. Scarface and 2Pac are two rappers that really stand out to me. They were able to be really concise in getting you to feel a certain way. I always point to this line from Pac: “Lately I’ve been really wanting babies so I can see a part of me that wasn’t always shady” [from “So Many Tears”]. It’s just one sentence but he’s talking about how we’re robbed of our innocence and all he wants is to get that back by seeing something of his own have that innocence. That’s some deep shit right there and he said it in a sentence. If you can make somebody feel something in the shortest amount of time, I think that’s true talent. Anybody can grab a thesaurus and use a bunch of fucking big words but can you fucking hit a person in their heart in three words?
Same with Scarface. If you listen to the fucking “Can’t Be Life” verse on that Jay Z song. It’s like every fucking line you’re like “Fuck, dude.” You’re broken down by the end of the verse. That’s what I was going for. I was going for shit like that.
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DX: Two things that surprised me were how little time you spent talking about Jenny Jones and Eminem. You’re on Shad45. You host the All Out Show with Lord Sear. I’m surprised that those two things weren’t more prominent. Do you think your core fans expected to hear more about Jenny Jones and Eminem?
Rude Jude: They wanted to hear more about that shit but fuck them. I love y’all but fuck y’all. I’m not writing about that shit. My life isn’t defined by Jenny Jones nor is it defined by going to work everyday and interviewing rappers. I don’t think that’s as interesting as the shit I’m doing outside of my work. If you want to hear name-dropping, go read Superhead’s book with the fucking triple-spaced words and shit. Looks like she fucking wrote it with a fucking crayon. Go read her fucking book. I know how to write so I wrote something interesting. I don’t need to lean on the fact that I know some fucking rapper. I went and had drinks with a rapper. Big fucking deal. I ate a baby. Isn’t that a little more interesting. I ate a fucking baby, dawg.
Rude Jude Angelini’s Hyena audiobook is currently available at HyenaGoHard.com.
