As a kid, Archie Bang had a dream to become a deejay. “I thought that was the coolest thing in the world,” he says in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. 

Bang was fascinated by the idea of scratching, cutting and “being the person that controls the party.” Nevertheless, those dreams took a backseat to Rap dreams when he walked into an electronics store. He walked in, saw the prices for turntables and said, “Okay, this is not going to happen anytime soon. I need to rethink this thing.” His aspirations shifted to emceeing. “Pens and paper are always a lot cheaper than turntables,” he adds. 

Bang says he was also inspired to begin rhyming when he saw a fellow student receive a lot of attention for his Rap skills. Incidentally, that fellow student went on to become a Ruff Ryders emcee. 

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“I was going to school with Jin,” he says. “In the school, he was like one of the prominent emcees and it was just like, ‘Whoa. This kid is nice.’ I saw the attention that he would get as far as rhyming and just controlling the crowd and everything and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m a write a rhyme.’ I went home and I wrote a rhyme…I came back and for as long as everyone else was doing it, when I came and I spit my rhyme, they thought I was doing it forever, like I didn’t just go home the previous day to write a rhyme. I haven’t looked back since.”

In April, Archie Bang spoke with HipHopDX about his work as a Rawkus Records intern. The job taught him many lessons, he said. 

“The first thing that I picked up and I never forgot, that I took with me, that I carry with me to this day, is that this is a business,” Bang said at the time. “Rawkus had one of the nicest rosters at the time, but what I thought, my genuine impression at the time, was, ‘You’re nice and that’s all it takes. I’m nice. My rhymes are ill and then that’s all it takes for me to be a Rap star.’ I learned going through that whole process that it takes a lot into making an artist and that it’s primarily a business. This is what you need to know in order to be successful in this music industry.” 

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