Cuepoint: This is great that we are all together now talking, because we all had a part in the birth of the independent hip-hop movement and worked together in the past in different junctions. So now that you guys are doing the Indie 500 record, let’s look back on those early days. Can you each tell your story about the moment that you broke into the industry?

9th Wonder: With everyone that I crossed paths with over the years, I probably had one of the most unconventional ways of breaking in. It was a new way of breaking in. This was around ‘97–98, when it was still a situation of getting demos out there, having a 12”, something physical that somebody can have to listen to, that you can hand to an A&R, or something like that. Me coming in around ’99, 2000, 2001, our version of the 12” was HipHopSite.Com or Okay Player or Sandbox Automatic. These particular sites where you could go and drag your mouse and click on something to listen to. HipHopSite.Com was probably the first place I heard (Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek’s) “Fortified Live.” I didn’t live in New York, I’m not from New York, so there wasn’t a lot of stores around North Carolina selling wax. Most stores were selling mixtapes from DJ Clue and Doo-Wop, but not selling a ton of wax that you could buy. I got into it searching for new music that way and then we thought, “Well, if people are now searching for music this way, maybe they will search for our music this way too.” So you still had a lot of the older cats, or just cats with a different mind frame that would just go to the store and pick something up. But slowly but surely you’d end up at HipHopSite. There was a generation of people coming along that would click on something. That’s where we started the Justus League and Little Brother and said, “Let’s put ourselves on the line and make a message board.” All of this stuff that was kind of like, “Why in the hell would you do that for?” So that’s kind of how I broke in, doing remixes like God’s Stepson, of course Little Brother’s The Listening album and different things with different sites. We kind of laid the foundation for every artist to break on the internet.

I had a conversation with some of the higher ups at Atlantic Records, Judy Greenwald and Craig Kallman. I was up there recently and one of the conversations we had was like “When Little Brother was on Atlantic in 2005, we really wasn’t prepared to handle you guys, because we were in a situation where we didn’t have the staff to run an ‘internet based group.’ We were basically going after fans we can’t touch or see.” In 2004, 2005 it was unheard of, but now it’s common. This is why I still have a great relationship with Julie and Craig to this day, because it wasn’t really their fault that Little Brother didn’t blow up or anything like that. It was just too early in the game for any particular major entity to be ready for us.

So that’s the long and short of how I broke in. Not only did I hear “Fortified Live” on HipHopSite, I heard Slum Village “Players,” and “Get This Money” and stuff like that. So I was like “Oh, this stuff still exists. It’s not on the radio per say, but it’s still able to be reached and its accessible, so why don’t I fall in line, if this is where you are getting the sound now.”

Talib Kweli: My story is a little more well documented than 9th’s, but just to add on to what he says, it is interesting because that era when 9th and Little Brother broke, I was becoming removed from that community. If 9th was influenced by “Fortified Live,” that was dope. But by that time I was moving into dealing with major labels and trying to have my shit on Hot 97. The OkayPlayer community supported me, but I wasn’t a part of that community. HipHopSite, 88 Hip-Hop all these sites supported me and I was aware of them, but I didn’t participate because I was very analog. I didn’t own a computer, I didn’t own a laptop. I didn’t have interest in going on a comment section or going on a board or anything. All that stuff that was happening.

I’m sitting here with NIKO IS. When he first started, he used to battle and freestyle against dudes online in the comment section. That shit is so foreign to me. The first time I got involved with anything like that I went into the comments section on OkayPlayer and I thought, “It’s OkayPlayer, these are fans, we’re all in this together.” I didn’t realize there was a new generation of kids that looked at me as something different than them, as some big artist. There was a lot of pushback, like “Kweli’s not this..” There was one kid who wanted to boycott my album on OkayPlayer because I didn’t show up to some in-store. I didn’t understand what the internet was. I didn’t understand the language of the message boards, the comment section, and jumped into it like a wild banshee, not really understanding that there is a community there that 9th just described, that have their own language, their own rules, their own way of getting heard, that’s not quite the same as what happened to me two or three years prior. It took me a couple of years to learn how to properly engage that community.

9th: Which is crazy because him saying that he wasn’t a part of that community at first, after “Fortified Live,” when we’re getting into Blackstar, Soundboming 2, Reflection Eternal and all of that stuff, and even going all the way to Quality, Rawkus became the mainstream-alternative. It was mainstream, but to the left. If I’m in the barbershop and you want to argue about Lil Jon, I’m the one who’s going to argue about Rawkus. It got to the point where it became a line in the movie Brown Sugar: “If you want to keep it real, go to Rawkus.” Rawkus became that particular entity. For us as Little Brother, we looked at it like “This is what we like, but this is also our competition. Our competition is not cats on the internet anymore. We’re not gunning for cats on the ‘net, we’re gunning for the ones that we can see that are actually out there.” And that was Kweli, Mos, Pharoahe, the High & Mighty. For Kweli, him being that close to the transition where it shifted worked for him. If you talked to someone that was from the early 90s, late 80s, trying to make that transition is a little tougher. Because they are like, “I’m really removed from this shit. I really don’t understand what’s going on, and I really can’t jump start my career again like I want to,” like the ones that figured it out, like MF Doom, Masta Ace. But Rawkus became the mainstream alternative for us. They went from HipHopSite all the way to Reflection Eternal to Quality to “Get By.” Now he’s a viable artist like 50 Cent or another mainstream artist, he’s just different. So we were like “Okay, underground is really not a tag that we really want. We want to keep our sound, but we want to be known too.”

Did you ever feel from other emcees or industry people that because you guys both came in through these new, unconventional means that they would say things like “Oh, you’re an internet rapper,” like as a negative connotation because you came through that avenue?

9th: Yeah, “Internet rapper” or being a “conscious rapper,” or me being from the South, “You make New York style beats!” or “You want to keep it real,” whatever, whatever. All of that was a like a “downgrade” or negative comment. At one point, if you listen to most people talk, everybody that says more than ten words when they spit “sounds like Common,” and everybody that has a soulful voice “sounds like Bilal or D’Angelo,” everybody. That was kind of like the box they put a lot of us in. All the way to making beats on the computer. That was another thing, people were like “You make beats on a computer? What is that?!?” They used to exempt me from certain beat showcases because I made beats on my IBM Thinkpad. Now beats and computers are synonymous. Being an “internet star” — let’s take it even deeper — being a Vine star or an Instagram star, where it’s only six seconds long, that’s the new star now. Fifteen years ago, you breaking on the internet? You’re a nobody. But now you can have four million followers on IG and be “famous.”

Talib: That’s right. Labels ain’t even checking for anything else. How many followers do you have on Facebook or Twitter? Even the label based acts, they try to roll them out like they don’t have anything to do with it.

9th: Right, to try to keep that “organic” situation, like “We don’t want to break up what you have, because your internet fanbase might not like the fact that you are now associated with the machine.” They don’t understand, Instagram is the machine (laughs).

9th, let’s talk about God’s Stepson for a minute, when you remixed Nas’ God’s Son album without his permission. This was really an unconventional method of getting your beats out there at the time.

9th: I was in the business of remixing a lot of stuff, anything I could get my hands on because I lived in an area where the style of beats I was making and the type of rappers that lived around here, we were in the minority. We’re talking about 2002, 2003. We’re in the middle of crunk and a lot of stuff going on. Everybody was like “Your beats are too underground,” same story. So my roommate at the time was a DJ, and I was like “let me start taking acapellas and remixing them, because I got all these beats with nobody to put over them.” So DJ Bumrush brought me the Nas acapellas, because he had heard all of the other remixes I had done, like “I’m just curious what you will do with these.” So I just took them, and while I was doing it, the whole time I’m like, “Now this is the type of shit everybody wants to hear Nas on” (laughs). So I was just making beats, producing, but I was also a fan. And as a fan, this was what I wanted to hear Nas over, but it just so happens that I’m doing the beat as well, so it was kind of this duality thing I was going through when I did it. Once I did it, I let a few friends hear it, and then, my man Ian Davis from ABB hit me and was like ‘Yo, let’s call it God’s Stepson.” He came up with the cover and the name and I was like “Okay, alright!” Because again, I was not so deep where I am now. As artists we kind of tread lightly with the things that we choose to do, always keeping in the back of our minds, “If we put this on the internet, what is the community going to say? What’s the backlash going to be?” In 2003, I didn’t give a damn, I was like “Okay!” So we did it and the next thing you know, I start doing work with you guys, I go to Japan and there’s a thousand Japanese kids holding up the God’s Stepson CDs. It had become synonymous with how I broke into the game, more so than when I produced a Jay Z beat. People are like “You had the groundbreaking Nas remix project, God’s Stepson…” After that came Nastradoomus and all the Jay Z remix albums. That became a way to break in and I was looking at it like, “I didn’t do it to break in! (laughs). It was kind of weird. I just did it because I wanted to hear something different. It just goes to show that if you do something just from the heart or for the passion of it, you’ll get more reward than if you just try to orchestrate some shit. It never works that way. It never works.

So did Nas ever hear it, or did he ever comment on it?

9th: I think he said something about it in an article once, but other than that. But I’ve seen Nas several times, talked to him several times, but that was never a topic of conversation (laughs). It was more like “When are we going to work together,” or “I like the artist that you have,” but it was never like “Yo, that God’s Stepson shit you did awhile back, I never got a chance to totally tell you but I thought it was dope.” Man, that has never been a conversation (laughs).

I guess I have that same question with your Jay Z remix albums of The Black Album and American Gangster. Did Jay ever give you feedback on those?

9th: Same thing, and I’ve remixed two Jay Z albums. It’s never a topic of conversation. Every time I have a chance to talk to Jay, it’s never about that. It’s about sports, it’s about life. It’s never, “So did you get to check that remix album I did?” There’s been times when he came to me like “Yo that joint you did with Badu, ‘Honey,’ yo, that joint was hot.” He’ll say something to me first, but I have never been like “Yo, so uh, did you get to hear the remix album that I did….” (laughs). I’ve never ever done that.

You both have had albums with major labels in the past. I’m sure there are perks to having the machine behind you in promoting your music, but also the downside of not having complete creative control. Can you talk about that a bit?

9th: To be honest, I can say that I have only been signed to a major label once, Atlantic Records. I can honestly say that we’ve never had that album. Little Brother turned in The Minstrel Show album done.

Talib: I never had that problem either.

9th: There was never an A&R saying “Oh, you should do a joint with this producer, or you should do a song with this rapper.” It was kind of like we were stuck in our ways. We had The Listening done before Beni B even signed us (to ABB Records) and by the time Atlantic had heard The Minstrel Show, it was done in its entirety, skits and everything. We were like “This is it.” They were looking at us across the table like, “This is it?” “Yeah, this is it.” The only thing that we changed was the title. The original title for The Minstrel Show was going to be called Nigga Music. They were like, “Noooo, we can’t do that.” Even the idea of The Minstrel Show, they were like, “Uhhhh, are you sure you want to name it this?” And we’re like “That is what we want to name it.” We knew there was going to be ripples, but we were like “Fuck it.” This is how we came in, but we’re not changing for anybody. We never had that problem. Now, did we not get the support from different TV stations or whatever it was because of what we named it or how we sounded? Maybe so.

Talib: It’s not just the TV stations, from my experience. I agree with 9th, fans have a misconception. They read these things on the internet. There’s a story on the internet about some guy who had a meeting with some label and how they told him there was a conspiracy in hip-hop to destroy the black community. It’s not as sinister as that. But it’s almost like the Ice-T quote, “Freedom of speech, just watch what you say.” If you have a strong heart and mind as an artist, there’s no way that they can change what you create. But in the building, are they going to support it at that label? No they won’t. It’s in their programming and how they see music. They hear the new 9th Wonder project and they’re like “Can I play this for DJ Oompa-Loompa at the strip club? He’s not going to like it, so I don’t know what to do with this.” And then their thought process stops right there. That permeates the building if you don’t have a good product manager or someone in the building who has a lot of power who really has your back. Besides Rawkus, I never had that in my career and I’ve been signed to many major labels. I’ve been duped and bamboozled into thinking that someone was going to have my back when the building didn’t. The label didn’t support it. So they’ll give you the money and you make what you want and they won’t fuck with you creatively. If you’re not handing them singles that they personally — and some idiot A&R dude or some idiot radio promo dude doesn’t know what to do with — then your project will not get treated well. My wife is a DJ, so I’ve seen the emails and heard the conversations where some promo guy who is supposed to be working my record will come to her with everyone else’s records on the label except for mine. She’ll ask them, “Didn’t you just get that new Talib Kweli,” and he’ll be like “Yeah, but you know, that’s that underground shit. We need you to play this new whatever…”

This kind of goes back to the Angel Diaz piece with his argument about Talib Kweli and Lupe Fiasco songs not being good for barbecues. I hear what he is saying about there being a time and a place for “real hip-hop” records and for party records. But the big hole in that argument is that the barbecue is going to end. Nobody is going to give a fuck about that fleeting barbecue in ten years. For someone like you guys, when you are making music with integrity, it’s going to last so much longer in the hearts and minds of your fans than the temporarily hot songs you might hear at a barbecue. Where are the die hard Plies fans? Where are the people that really ride for Mims in 2015? These guys had huge hits but now everyone is like “on to the next one.” There has to be some value in making the music that you want to make, rather than making the music the system expects of you.

9th: Those particular writers, what they talk about, they are fans of all of us. Whether it be at a barbecue or a bar mitzvah, whatever it is, they are fans of all of us. What they don’t understand is, if he puts Kweli, Lupe, myself and all of us on the side of the fence that is “conscious” or whatever, not only do we not like it, but the ones he proclaims to be championing, they don’t like it either. I just told one of my students this. Outside of the boxes that they put us in, there are only six or seven rappers that don’t use the same airport terminals that I use, maybe. We’re all on the same planes, we’re all on the same airports, we all deal with the same artists, we all deal with the same agents, we all deal with same bloggers, we all deal with the same people. Other than like seven or eight rappers and even in that we are probably one degree separated.

Talib: Right.

9th: It’s the fans that want to compartmentalize and put us in different boxes. I have respect for Drake. I have respect for Future. I have respect for these artists that they think we are not like. What he doesn’t understand is that those artists are fans of us. What a lot of people don’t understand is that people equate the things that I do, the things that Kweli does, the things that Pharoahe Monch and all of these artists that are supposed to be conscious, people equate that to not being wealthy or not having money or not being able to sit down at these same restaurants that these other cats say down in. If me and Kweli go down to St. Louis and put out a Tweet, some club in St. Louis is going to want to give us a table and a bottle. They think that that is not our world or that is not going to happen. Or on the flipside, they also think cats like Future, T.I. who are put in a box of “trap” or whatever, are not political, that they don’t have a political mindset. “Why is this rapper at the Million Man March. I expect to see Common there, but didn’t expect to see Jeezy!” What kind of shit is that? That is the real crux of that article. “I can’t have fun listening to Kweli, but I can have fun listening to this.”