Bow Wow and Omarion
don’t want you to think they’re young lads any more. The duo, who have been
working on a brand new album together, are working on more mature topics for
their debut as a group. Bow and O spoke about
this transition.
“In the past, we would make a song like we’re gonna
take this girl to the restaurant Nobu…Now it’s gonna be, we take this girl to
Nobu, then I’m gonna take her back to the Trump Towers and I’m gonna put her in
my bed and I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do to the girl when she’s in my
bed,” Bow told MTV.
He expanded on what these topics are about.
“We got a song called ‘Listen,’ which [deals with
something] I’m sure a lot of homeboys go through…It’s about when your boy
tells you, ‘Listen, your girl is no good. She’s got a kid on the side, she got
another dude on the side.’ But your homeboy is blinded by it. ‘I don’t see it.
I don’t see no kid.’ A lot of times, what breaks up a bunch of homeboy
relationships is a female. Sad to say. It’s a bunch of records we have, and
they are all different and they are all ’bout something.”
So, what else can folks expect from this album?
“We’re giving the people something they’ve been
wanting out of us: great music…We’re gonna make them have fun again, make
them wanna run to the stores, run to the clubs. The records you hear from me
and him is nothing like you hear on the radio. We gonna give them something
new. That’s why people gonna pay attention to this project come the fourth
quarter. I guarantee you this: We’re gonna own the fourth quarter.”
This time around, JD will not be working with the duo, Bow
explained.
“We had a conversation, I told him my vision, and
it’s creative differences. Jermaine has been like a brother or father figure to
me that I never had. Jermaine took me in when I was 9 years old. Everything I
learned from the business has come from Jermaine, just observing him. I learned
so much from him. Now I’m at a point in my career where I wanna become the best.
After awhile, you get tired of a person wanting to do everything for you. You
wanna prove to the world you have say so. All my career, I felt like a dog on a
leash that was trying to run free but could never be myself. Now he let that
go. I respect him for doing that. It was a big decision, it was probably hard
for him to do it, but it had to be done.”
So, what’s JD‘s take on the situation?
“I had a vision of where it should be…[Bow] and
O, they wasn’t really on it. They wanted to cater to a different crowd this
time. They getting older, and I guess they felt I was gonna keep them in the
same spot and cater to their fans — which I was. I don’t believe in fixing
something that ain’t broke. We continue to sell records like that. But
sometimes an artist feel they wanna do something different, so I felt it was
time to say, ‘OK, I’mma let them do it. Y’all got a vision, y’all done talked,
y’all two are kicking it more than me, and I’mma let y’all do your thing.’ I’m
not one to hold nobody up from what they wanna do. I got a gang of other sh– I
can be doing. I let them breathe. As young men, that’s what you need. At some
point, you gotta have that. You could see what other people be going through
and how much work it takes. This makes them think a lot harder.”
The two are still going to be friends, though. No beef is
on.
“He’s like my brother, my father. And he knows it.
The position Jermaine is in now, I’m like the player and he’s in the skybox
looking down at the game just watching. He knows what I’m gonna do and what I’m
not gonna do. He knows I know what’s smart. I wouldn’t be the rapper I knew I
was capable of being if I stayed in the position where people take charge of
Bow Wow. Just telling me the records I need to make, saying these are the records
I don’t need to make. After awhile it gets old. It’s like a child being in a
house growing up, when you reach 19, 20 years old you say, ‘Man, I gotta get a
crib. I gotta get my own space and do whatever I want.’ … It happened for the
good. No bad blood.”
Bow and O’s new album Face Off
should be expected to hit shelves in December.
