Check part two of the interview I did a few years back with the Camp that reemerged, only to go back on the low shortly thereafter...MM: “What Hip-Hop artists did you listen to coming up?” Suede:“Well being from the Bronx, and growing up in the Bronx, we definitely are true B-boys. We came up with the Bambattas, Zulu, Melle Mel, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane. We came up in that B-boy era. That’s when Hip-Hop was Hip-Hop. The Jungle Brothers, the De La Souls, the Digable Planets…We’re basically a mixture of all of them. We’re just a mixture of all the beautiful things that was going on at that time. And we’re capitalizing off of the fact that we are original, the Bronx has always been known for original things. I don’t know man. I want to go on Oprah…I want to go on everything I can go on and let people know that…Lo, there’s something really special about us. It’s not fame or poppin’ Cristal that drives us to rap, or to know there’s a million dollar budget at the end of it all...It’s just the fact that we love music, and getting on stage performing.”
MM: “The first album had a lot of references to the blaxsploitation era. What is the direction of the second album?”
Cheeba:“We’re on the same lines, but a little more up to date. I don’t know, like last time, we was different from everything that was out. This album is different from the last, but it’s a sequel. Uptown Saturday Night, the sequel is Let’s Do It Again. So we just played around with flows a little more. A lot of different tracks, that we probably didn’t experiment with on the first joint...”
Suede:“But we kept the same producer Ski, and Jocko who did Coolie High. So it’s bringing across the same feel, but everybody matured since.Uptown Saturday Night. So, things are definitely going to be different..”
MM: “Who do you cats…Who do you hang out with? Cause when I listen to the way you rhyme and what you talk about, nobody sounds like you.”
Suede:“I don’t know if you have the album, but number 12, there’s a joint called Carnival 4 Shaw, then you got Gorilla Pimp. But, number 12, that’s Lo. That really does it for me. I agree with you, as far as us being to the left from everything in general….Where that comes from, I really don’t know. I guess it comes from our own personal personas…”
Cheeba:“Yeah, cause it definitely don’t even feel natural to bump a flow that another cat bumped already. It don’t feel right.”
Suede:“It don’t feel right to bump a flow that we feel we might have bumped in one of our previous songs.”
MM: “How did the Hip-Hop community embrace you when you first came out?”
Suede:“It’s now that we’re starting to pay attention to if we fit in this market. Cause when we first came out, we were like this is just music. So we were just putting it out as hot music, and we’ll see what happens. It’s now that we’re like, we gotta do this to appeal to these type of people...We gotta be in this situation to get to those type of people. When it first started, it was just about the music, its always been about the music. The music is everything…But, it ain’t really like that anymore. And I think that’s the difference between then, Luchini 97’, and five years later Glow. It’s like O.K, it’s not the same game anymore. You can’t just feel like O.K, we’ve got beautiful music and an image that’s different, and that’s gonna put us over the top. I guess there’s so much more sh*t that goes along with it. Where I’m having a fu*ked up time with that, because I feel that everything should always be about the music. Everything should always be about if an artist is really dope or not. Not how much money, what budget he got going behind him or nothing like that. Just the fact that he’s coming with the dopest shit.You go all out to do this. And not that you purposely say, I’m gonna be different, or I’m trying to be different, but that’s just your natural aura. And you’re doing it for the love of music, but it just doesn’t get heard.”
MM: “What do you think is missing from Hip-Hop now?”
Suede:“Originality. Me and me brother both agree on that. Originality is not being capitalized on right now.”
Cheeba:“Most Hip-Hop joints is R&B joint anyway. Like almost every joint that’s poppin’ off, is R&B’d out. Cats don’t really Hip-Hop it up no more.”
MM: “What’s been the most difficult thing you’ve experienced, leading up to this album?”
Suede: ”I think it’s been difficult based on the fact that we’ve been gone for a minute. So it’s like, everybody wants to know what happened. I guess whoever, whatever…People want to know if we still got it. Was Luchini just it, or not? Can we produce another situation where it’s going to be as big as Luchini. And that’s my thing. Anybody who was feeling Luchini, they bought the album. They knew that Luchini wasn’t just a one hit wonder type of situation. We are artists…We’re gonna do a lot of fly sh*t.”