MC Eiht says that his album with DJ Premier will be dropping soon.

“It’s gonna come out before the Summer ends,” MC Eiht says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX at the G­-Funk Fest in Santa Ana, CA. “Me and DJ Premier are finally finishing it up. We finally got all the paperwork ready and all the music together. We just did a cut with Bumpy Knuckles last night. It’s gonna be a fun project, and a lotta people thinking it’s gonna be like a total East Coast sound cause of Premier, but it’s a real diverse album as far as what’s expected from Eiht and DJ Premier. It’s gonna be a classic in that form with just some real underground Hip Hop. Premier is in Switzerland right now, but he’s got Pro Tools with him. Like I said, we did a cut with Bumpy Knuckles last night and he’s mixing it, so we gonna get [The Lady of] Rage on the record and then we got Xzibit and Maylay and we should be good.”

Although they won’t be appearing on his album with DJ Premier, the Compton’s Most Wanted rapper says he hopes to someday link up with some of the founding fathers from the other side of the country.

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“I would like to work with Rakim,” he says. “I would love to work with RZA, just some of those cats that are with authentic music. I’d like to work with ‘Face again, and just anybody I feel that’s trying to keep the art form of Hip Hop alive. I’d definitely get down with ’em. I’m not too much into the big names, like everybody wanna work with [Dr.] Dre or Jay Z or Kanye [West] or whatever, but people who come from my era are real about where they come from, like Chuck D. I would love to do some s**t with Chuck D, too, that would be tight. That’s why I reached out to Bumpy Knuckles, ’cause he’s always been somebody I felt was for the struggle of Hip Hop.”

While Eiht champions some of Hip Hop’s iconic artists, he also explained why he doesn’t listen to many new artists. “If you got good music I’ll take a listen,” he says. “I’m not a judge, but if it’s about money, money, strip club, strip club then it’s like, ‘Come on.’ There’s a lotta new artists out there that’s tryna follow the path of true music, just storytelling. Like Kendrick [Lamar] had one of those albums. You got a Lupe Fiasco and Schoolboy Q and them type of cats. I listen to that type of music, too, but it’s still gotta be that type of informative direction of Hip Hop. It’s gotta be some of those avenues for us to enjoy. I believe there’s gonna be a time for one of those breakout cats that’s just about Hip Hop and not about the glitz and the glam and how many females he got and how many planes he fly, but just music and trying to give to the struggling man or the working woman something to relate to. Hip Hop is about trends and I think eventually that’s what it’s gonna come back to.”

After several years and some dangerous run­-ins, MC Eiht squashed his beef with fellow Compton native DJ Quik. MC Eiht says that it’s all love when it comes to Compton.

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“I just got with [2nd II None members] KK and D downstairs, so we gonna do something,” MC Eiht says. “We just gotta keep this Compton thang going. That’s what I believe. Whether it’s with 2nd II None or Quik or Game or King T or whoever representing Compton, we just gotta keep it alive.”

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