East coast mixtape favorite Papoose is gearing up to release his debut album Nacirema Dream on Jive in April, the Bed-Stuy emcee sat down with Prefix Mag to discuss the album, mixtapes, and more. Here are some of the highlights:
On the DJ Drama drama:
“I feel like
eventually they want to make it seem like everything we do is a crime.
Hip-hop music and culture is from the streets; it belongs to the
streets. Nobody should try to violate that or try to take it away from
the streets. Period. This is our culture. Shout out to DJ Drama and his
whole camp, man. I hope he come up out of that situation.“
On 50 Shots for Sean Bell:
“Being from New
York, you see this shit go on all the time. There are a lot of
incidents that go unpublicized. This goes on every day. If the police
ain’t beatin’ someone up, they shootin’ ’em. It won’t be the first; it
won’t be the last, man.“
On dumbing down his lyrics for the album:
“Good music is good
music, whether you commercialize it or you make it what some consider
complicated. If it’s hot, it’s hot; if it’s not, it’s not. I represent
real lyricism and real talent. That’s what this is about. People that
make you try to think that it’s about something else; that’s because
they lack talent, that’s all. They just tryin’ to cover up the fact
that they don’t have pure talent. People be tryin’ to make you think
that hip-hop is about everything else except for talent. It’s about how
many people you shot, how much money you got. That’s not the foundation
of the game. This is something that certain individuals were born to
do-same as basketball, baseball, or football.“
On the status of the LP:
“We’re aiming for
early ’07. On the production side, we got DJ Premier, DR Period, Focus,
Pharrell, Kayne West, the list goes on. And on the feature side, we got
Jadakiss. But I ain’t gonna put everything out there. It ain’t final
’til it’s vinyl. But I’m still working, even though I have enough
material for three albums.”
