Drect recently spoke with HipHopDX about changes in his relationship with his former Grind Time business partners. While Drect says he remains friendly with Lush One, his relationship with Madd Illz is strained.
“I don’t talk to [Madd Illz],” Drect said in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. “I don’t know if you saw, I told Organik and them that I’d battle [Illz] at ‘Battle of the Bay 6.’…Madd Illz asked for like $20,000, so that’s why it’s not going down. But I don’t talk to him at all, like I said, I don’t hate nobody. I mean it’s business. Business is business. You separate that from personal, but I don’t really talk to him. He’s the Dame Dash to my Jay Z.
“As far as Lush One goes, he’s cool,” Drect added. “I think we have a friendship of sorts. Lush is with King of the Dot, and as far as I know, he’s conformable there. We’ve talked about possibly collaborating on something at some point in time, but there’s no projected date or there’s no real status on that. But yeah, we’re cool. We’re cordial. I mean, that’s my man. Lush is cool.”
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When Madd Illz spoke with HipHopDX in April, he said he was being sued by his former partner Drect. When asked about this, Drect addressed the legal matter.
“I feel like things are going a little bit slowly, but I just have so much to do, and that wasn’t really focus number one,” Drect said. “It was just that I sought legal advice, and after hearing the ins and out and understanding everything that happened, it just felt like, I should be the one to control in the Grind Time channel. I tried to be cool about it, but it just doesn’t make sense at the end of the day. There’s already been some stuff that happened, involving Madd Illz and the YouTube channel that we couldn’t really make any sense of. So we kind of think that in his hands, it’s doing more damage than it is good.
“With certain YouTube accounts you’re able to do certain things and through our Rap Grid account, which is a pretty high ranking YouTube channel, we’re able to set certain types of monetization things and stuff like that,” Drect continued. “I started a documentary series called ‘Behind The Battles.’ And with ‘Behind The Battles,’ I included people’s battle highlights, and we reached out to people and we told them, ‘Look, if you have a problem with this, just let us know.’ We’ve had King of the Dot footage, URL footage, but it sends them a notification through they YouTube that basically says, ‘Ay, they’re using this footage, boom boom boom.’ We just gotta check off a couple things, and that’s the end of it. Madd Illz saw these notifications and immediately started calling battlers and saying, ‘Drect’s trying to get video taken off YouTube.’ So I got a bunch of people calling me.
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“I was actually with Hollow [Da Don], right after [Madd Illz] called him,” Drect said. “And Hollow’s like, ‘Yo, Madd Illz says my battle’s in danger getting taken off YouTube.’ I’m like, ‘The fuck? What is he talking about?’ Come to find out, that’s what he was talking about. All the extra stuff is just crazy, man. He could have sent me an email. But I’m not really worried about it because I know the situation, but I’m just worried about dragging people into it and misleading them, that don’t really know what’s going on. So all that extra stuff is just, it’s petty and it’s stupid to me. I don’t got time for that.”
Drect Explains Grind Time Fallout With Lush One And Madd Illz
Lush One’s recent King of the Dot event was titled “Battle of the Bay 6,” an event series that Lush created when he was still with Drect and Grind Time.
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Drect has said that Lush One created the “Battle of the Bay” series and sometimes invested money he could not recover into the event series.
“I mean, I don’t think there’s any way he could have recouped ’cause that man put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into making events happen ’cause he just felt that strongly about his coast and Battle Rap,” Drect said. “So that’s another reason why I always saluted Lush. Some people they have certain problems with Lush, but at the end of the day, the company that I was at the head of, that man literally put his blood, sweat and tears into making things happen. And you know, I really appreciated that. I don’t know. I just have a love and appreciation for what he did. I think that’s why we maintain a relationship to this day.”
Drect also acknowledged that the “Battle of the Bay” series led to some arguments within the company.
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“Lush was throwing an event and Madd Illz was kind of like, ‘Yo, we’re not really structured as a company. We should be taking a percentage out of these events,'” Drect said. “And I agreed, and we wanted to do that with everybody, but it wasn’t working with everybody across the board, ’cause we just couldn’t get everybody on the same page. So many people, so much new bullshit popping up. I guess Lush had an event, ‘Battle of the Bay 3’ or something, maybe 2. I think it was 3, I guess he had pocketed money and Madd Illz was like, ‘Yo, we gotta talk to Lush. We gotta go after him.’ And I think at that point in time, I was kind of stand offish. I was thinking to myself like, ‘Damn, Lush put however much, I don’t know, let’s say $20,000-$30,000, he found out a way to come up with that. That’s money me and [Madd Illz] didn’t come up with.’
“I feel like all that business has to be handled before the fact, because after the fact it’s just an argument,” Drect continued. “I just felt like, [Lush One] put his own money into the event. Yeah, he sponsored it himself. You can’t Debo him for money back. I just thought moving forward we should kind of establish that, but just so many bumps in the Grind Time road, so many different people doing crazy shit that we just…I’m not going to say we never got around to it. The conversation came about, but we didn’t really get any results from it. But at the end of the day, with Kap [Kallous] [Poison] Pen and Lush putting in a lot of money, you can’t really eat off people like that,’ cause it looks a certain way, especially when they’re already doing so much for you.”
Drect is now focusing on his new Battle Rap League, EBA.
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“I have an investor,” Drect said. “We’re working on the first event. I actually did a promo event. I just did it so we could really gauge how the footage would come out, how we would do some post production, what new things we could drop on top of the videos. That was the purpose of that. There was no real super big battles, however, there is a newer emcee that I’m going to include in EBA that kind of got his shot against an opponent with a name at that battle. So really it served as a platform for the newer emcee. It served as our test run to what we’re going to do with the footage. And people will see when we put it out, I’m thinking about making kind of like a tutorial video on top of the battle video to kind of show all the differences [between] what we’re doing with EBA and everything else. It should be dope.”
RELATED: Lush One Explains Fall Out With Grind Time & Mad Illz
