T.I.‘s new album is on the way. The album, set to be released in July, is a battle between alter egos as T.I. faces off against T.I.P.
With a first single out and a second single on the way, he’s having a hard time deciding when the release it.
“That’s what you call high-class problems…Not knowing when to put your second single out because your first one is doing so well. That’s a wonderful problem to have. [So] I’m not gonna rush it,” he said.
His second single features Wyclef making him a proposition.
“[He’s] basically saying, ‘Well, if you done doing your rapper thing, I got some business that I want to handle with you. Come holler at me,’ “ T.I. told MTV. “And he says he needs me to drive him, and you probably thinking in a car, [but] then you see us in a plane, in a boat, in this car, at the house, in Haiti. So basically he wants me to come to Haiti with him to handle some business, and from there we come back to Miami and we go back to our regular lives.”
The video is a bit different from others we have seen.
“I was like, ‘You know what, I think for that video, let’s find a young boy to do that, you want to get out there [with that energy], that joint is like that,’ ” Robison said. “I really want to tell stories, and the truth is for me, me and T.I. always say, ‘I’m Scorsese and he’s De Niro,’ so that’s the kind of relationship we want to build. We want it to go beyond music videos. This has a lot of pieces that you would see in the normal hip-hop video — the beautiful house, the beautiful girls, the boats — but it’s the way we’re shooing it. It’s the story behind us actually flying into Haiti with Wyclef. So we always try to do something not necessarily different from the industry but different from what we’ve done before together.”
Talk of these personalities clashing continued.
“I’m trying to show people that Tip can do what T.I. can do and T.I. can do what Tip can do, just as well…Maybe not the same way, maybe not as much, maybe not as good, but it can be done. Accept it. I say the same way you would think wearing a [fancy] shirt like this, riding in a nice big boat, riding private jets, you would think that’s T.I., but Tip is like, ‘Hell, I can do that too. Give me a shot, let me see how I like it.’ And whereas everyone may think [they’re seeing] Tip if you in Little Haiti … [or] just in the ‘hood in Harlem, chillin’ — you expect that to be Tip, but T.I. is like, ‘People got love for me around the word, I can go where I want to. Just because that ain’t what you see me do most of the time don’t mean that I can’t do it,'” he continued. “We just merging these personalities together…Trying to give them their own individuality, but at the same time make them coexist.”
The album T.I. Vs. T.I.P. is set to be released July 3.
