After establishing themselves as two of Battle Rap’s premier talents, Murda Mook and T-Rex are seeking Rap fame with DotMob, their group with Dutch Brown.
The group says that becoming Battle Rappers was not its goal. “We only did battle rap to keep our names [out there],” T-Rex says during an exclusive interview with HipHopDX. “Music was our first love from the beginning.”
DotMob is attempting to do what no act that has established themselves as a player in the Battle Rap circuit has been able to do: become successful in the artistic world releasing music. The trio has two projects on the way it hopes will do just that.
Its Fxck the Politics mixtape with DJ Whoo Kid is set to be released Friday (February 26). DotMob is also working on its 1999 album, which features the single “Voices.”
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The mixtape, Murda Mook says, is to get people acclimated to hearing them perform over music. T-Rex provides the project’s other objectives.
“Fxck the Politics means that we’re not sitting down and doing what ya’ll think is right,” he says. “We want to show you what Hip Hop is. It’s not what you think it is.”
Murda Mook and T-Rex Trace Their Rap Origins
Murda Mook and T-Rex say they started the DotMob when they were about 13 years old. The crew has a number of other members, including Dutch Brown.
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“DotMob is really like a family,” Murda Mook says. “It’s not like a thrown-together thing.”
As they got into the music industry, the members of the group took notes as they saw The Lox, Big L, Ma$e and others trade rhymes on New York streets.
“They were battling, but they were battling indirectly,” T-Rex says. “What we did was make it more direct. We’ve had the love for music, so when you hear good music, you’re not going to be able to deny it.”
So while crafting the forthcoming 1999, T-Rex says it is to point out the contradictory stance people often take with rap today by alluding to what the group views is a more potent Rap era.
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“Everybody’s running around like, ‘Yo. We want real music back, real Rap back. We want real lyrics back,’ but everything is saying the opposite,” he says. “You might hear someone saying they want real lyrics, but on their record you hear them saying, ‘Da, da, da, buh, buda, buh.’ But I thought you wanted real lyrics back?”
As the members of DotMob worked on advancing their careers as recording artists, they also enjoyed a surge in popularity as battle rappers. But they remained focused on their other, bigger goals.
“Battle rapping wasn’t the first love,” Murda Mook says. “Once you become successful battle rappers, if people remember the inception of what was going on from the beginning to now, there was no such thing as being a successful battle rapper because it was all fused into one thing. You battle rap. You get your name out there and get your deal. That was basically the whole vision. But since me and Rex had a big hand into making it its own lane and genre, it started turning into, ‘Are you a battle rapper or are you a musician?’ when it was never really like that before. Some of the biggest battle rappers in the world are some of the biggest rappers in the world. Jay Z and Eminem, these are the biggest artists. DMX, these are artists who sold millions of records. So when people put that stigma out there, I think it’s kind of ridiculous because this is where it came from.”
Becoming known as rappers who make high quality music is a goal the members of DotMob have had for years, long before they become Battle Rap stars.
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“We always had the intention on doing it,” Murda Mook says, “so it was one of those things like, ‘You know what, we’re going to get this done.’”
