It's long, but a good read found here

INTERVIEW: Q-TIP

7.25.04
By Devin Faraci
Contributing sources:

Q-Tip, formerly of A Tribe Called Quest, appears in the new Spike Lee movie, She Hate Me. Last week he came out to the press junket for the film, and when he came to the table I was a little worried. Tip looked a little... sleepy. And he was slow getting started with the questions. Sometimes you'll interview someone who just doesn't seem to be interested in answering anything.

Q-Tip wasn't that guy, though. He just needed a little time to warm up. And when he did get warmed up he had some really great things to say.

Q: How did you end up in this film?

Q-Tip: I auditioned and got the part.

Q: Did Spike come to you, or did your agent bring it to you?

Q-Tip: He wanted me to be in it.

Q: You sort of play the Spike Lee role in this movie.

Q-Tip: It is, it’s like the Spike Lee role.

Q: Did you ask him why he doesn’t play that role in this film?

Q-Tip: I don’t know. It was the Spike Lee role though.

Q: He’s too old to play it though.

Q-Tip: Yeah, he’s too old to play it. I was the perfect age, though.

Q: So when you’re filming on the streets of Brooklyn, who gets more attention, you or Spike?

Q-Tip: Uhhhh… That’s a good one. Spike.

Q: But you get people coming up to you too?

Q-Tip: People notice me I guess, a little bit. But Spike is the King of Brooklyn. As Christopher Walken is the King of New York, Spike is the King of Brooklyn.

Q: You have a new album coming out this fall, right? What can we expect?

Q-Tip: What I’m attempting to do with this record is to still maintain the elements of hip hop, i.e., the drum sounds, whatever, but to utilize the technology so that I can have the musicians express those sounds onstage live, but still have the virtuosity to be able to be expressive in a solo and have it make sense to the song or the show. So that hip hop is not subjugated or challenged but at the same time it’s stretching out and people are able to see musicians – young musicians – solo and express and interact, to bring that back. It’s boring to see – although I dig Ludacris – I don’t want to sit there and see him for an hour just go back and forth and his boys come in on the punchline, with the DAT playing. He’s great, I love him, but we have to come up with new ways to push it, to do something. That’s my little humble, senseless attempt to do that.

Q: Do you feel like other people are doing that too?

Q-Tip: I think there is a resurgence in that. I think there is some musicianship happening. I think what I do see that’s kind of strong is that hip hop music is taking over, but the quality of the music has dipped significantly. There are things I do enjoy, there are certain tunes that I do dig, but I feel like a lot of us are not bringing it to the performance level. I grew up in an age where going to see a show was the only chance to see somebody. You didn’t have the videos, you had the album cover and the whispers of them coming to your town. Your imagination is still intact. Today you have the video, the constant barrage of the song on Top 40 radio all the time. You see them everywhere it’s just OK, if I’m going to see you a lot, change it up. Don’t give me the same thing constantly. I want to challenge that. I want to a provocateur in that sense.

Q: This summer we have had Fahrenheit 9/11, She Hate Me, which has some strong political messages, The Manchurian Candidate, a whole bunch of other political documentaries – it seems like the movies are doing the political stuff this year, not music. I mean, there’s the Jadakiss song that has people talking, where he blames Bush for allowing 9/11 to happen, but that’s rare.

Q-Tip: I think that is because music is the big money maker in terms of production compared to gross. You make more money with music than you do with film. With film there’s starting to be more of a sprouting of independent film makers getting there stuff out there. There’s so many different routes, so many different film festivals. There are all these interesting filmmakers with commentary on what’s going on and they’re taking chances, they’re taking shots, while the music has been co-opted because of the great cash cow it is. There’s been a consolidation of all the major companies until there’s probably just three now. Everybody’s looking at the bottom line. This quarter we have to put out this, this, this, this. But with film it’s become more guerilla and it’s become more anything goes. There’s some really great stuff out there. I’m really more excited about the promise that’s coming out of cinema than for music. People are really taking their art to another level and joining it with a statement politically, which is great.

Q: Do you think that will change with the music?

Q-Tip: I hope so, but the thing about hip hop culture is that it’s a culture that follows. It’s a bandwagon culture. So the minute it becomes cool, like with P Diddy and the voting, which is great and like you said with Jadakiss and the song, now it’ll probably be cool for kids to make political statements. But they won’t necessary have the buoyance of truth embedded in it, which is what you need. You can’t skirt around it when you start stating things in your music because you have to be about what you say you are.

But I encourage it because there are some lessons to be learned in the process with the skinned knees.

Q: What do you feel like your character’s importance is in the movie?

Q-Tip: I think clearly he’s the antithesis of the main character. Whereas the main character is this traditionally studly, cut African-American smart young man and he’s studding up all these girls, my character’s kind of like the feeble, knock-kneed, low sperm count, wishful thinking geek. So I guess my purpose is to – it’s kind of actually sad. But the thing is that more people are like me than like him.

Q: How was it playing that kind of a character?

Q-Tip: It’s cool. As an actor you have to find your place in the characters given to you, and this was no different. No big deal.

Q: You hear two things all the time on the internet. One is that, whenever a rapper is up for a role in a movie, people get up in arms about that casting. The other is when someone, like Jadakiss, speaks out, people say “Why should I listen to a rapper?” Hip hop has been around over twenty years. Why is it not getting the respect that rock n’ roll got?

Q-Tip: There’s a couple of reasons. I would be naïve to say that it had nothing to do with the fact that the rappers are African-American males and the majority of this country is white. If you can hear the music and not see the face, if you can just hear the message you can have empathy, but sometimes if you see the face it becomes a different thing. We all unfortunately have a bit of racism in us,

I think the other part of is the things we endow ourselves with. Jay Z is quick to call himself a pimp. Tupac was quick to call himself a thug. L’il Kim is quick to call herself a bitch. When you start saying these things about yourself that are clearly negative, it’s going to be like a magnet. You attract those things to you. You’re going to bring all that commentary to you and what you do. Being that those images are probably the most prevalent in the form – the hustler, the pimp – it’s going to bring all the commentary. What’s going to happen is that when cats don’t get to first base, they’re going to be disgruntled. “Why is motherfuckers hatin’ on us? Knowhuyahmean? You just lucky I ain’t out robbin’ you all.” I speak on that because I’m from the same situation. I grew up right in it, watching my uncle and them squeeze off and mainline and shit, seeing hypodermic needles and hearing gunshots. I grew up in the same New York City that a lot of us did, but I just knew that I was better than all of that. I didn’t want to project any of that. I think that those things are relevant, and they are important, but there’s a tact, and there’s a creative way that you approach it.

With rock n’ roll – the thing I love about hip hop is that it’s ballsy and we’re gonna say that. But rock n’ roll has that same attitude but never the subject matter. They never touch what we touch. But I think that now we become caricatures of ourselves and we hide behind those images and those things. We already got it figured out where we feel comfortable living in places of pain, we feel comfortable existing in places of fear, we feel comfortable saying we’re pimps and wearing screwfaces because anger keeps people away. We want to keep people away because we don’t know who we are and we’re scared.

I have pimps in my family, and ever since I was little my uncles told me and my cousins that we were going to grow up to be pimps, like that was something to be proud to be. So I have a whole different viewpoint of that. You can’t even wear the style of it because you don’t understand the severity of the situation. That is a man selling a woman. It’s fucked up, but then we also have to examine why we get to this. How we get to this in these communities that we have to do this. I think that the pimping is bad, but I don’t put all of the blame on the pimp. I don’t put all of the blame on the Jay Zs or the Ja Rules or the L’il Kims. It starts to become a part of society when you’re told from the 30s and 40s that you’re boy, when your father and grandfather were called boy and spat at, all of this stuff. You’re going to believe that. You’re going to look in the mirror and think you’re a boy, think you’re a coon, think you’re a nigger. You’re going to think you’re low when those things keep being put on you. But I think part of breaking the chain is recognizing that and realizing it. And I think that a lot of us here today in 2004 doing this music, at the forefront of this culture, have enough information, traveled around the country and this world for that matter and sat with enough affluent people to investigate and to know better. And to try to be a bit more creative about what we do than to take the easy way out.

There are a lot of impressionable kids. And honestly, the biggest audience right now for hip hop is not black kids but white boys. White boys between the ages of 12 and 25, because they feel disenfranchised because they can’t relate to their mother and father or their mother and father have broken up. They have identity crises, so they relate to the African-American struggle and situation. You can’t think that you’re just making this music for a whole bunch of black kids and fuck everybody else. It’s for a whole bunch of KIDS.

Q: Do you think that because white kids make up such a big part of the hip hop audience that these kids will grow up and in ten years have a better understanding of the black experience, or is it going to be a lot of white kids growing up thinking pimps, hos, hustlas?

Q-Tip: I think that a lot of white kids will probably grow up eventually with not necessarily understanding of it but a familiarity with it. But it’s one thing to be familiar with something and another to be able to really understand it. I think that a lot of the artists just present one dimension. I think it’s good that people want to find out about each other, and I even think it’s good that a kid can feel disenfranchised and put on a DMX record and somehow feel, I don’t know, strong or start to feel something and not just be dormant.

But I feel like there has to be more of a caretaker attitude with the artists, because I feel like hip hop is becoming like an actor who is a one trick pony. He always does the same thing, the tear will come out of the right in the third act of every film. We all get it and we know. The same thing with hip hop and the culture, we have to take it and be just a bit more responsible. Just a little bit. And maybe a bit more creative how we say things.

Q: But do you think that if someone tries to present a more positive thing they’ll just be laughed at?

Q-Tip: I don’t think that. I think that if you believe you people will believe you. There’s not a lot of leaders, there’s not a lot of people who are brave enough to stand up and say what they really feel and take chances. There needs to be more of that, especially in this culture because hip hop is a very brave culture. It started in the South Bronx in the 70s when we didn’t have nothing. We didn’t have instruments, we couldn’t afford instruments, we had to use turntables. We had to make do with what we had. Out of it came something really beautiful and great and I love it. But I hate to see what it’s become.

You have to see where it’s been to take it forward and to have a respect for that. I think that in a weird way it draws into what the film is about. When you deal with family, like at the end of the third act, when you see Jack with his children and their mothers, you’re kind of looking at a new bluepring of a millennium family. Albeit you may not take the same course of being an executive at a Fortune 500 company and your ex-girlfriend has to be a hot lesbian with a hot lesbian girlfriend. It may not be like that, but the end result could be pretty prevalent in this country and abroad, and we have to be prepared to accept change and we have to be prepared for being different. Because we already are in a weird way, we don’t all have to fall into the same stereotypes and structures and dogmatic principals, we could break it. I think that this is just a peek into that.

We’re seeing it more in film, more commentary and a little bit of suggestion to that, and hopefully that will run concurrently with music.
[This message was edited Sun Jul 25 21:14:11 2004 by psykosoul]

glad to know that he speaks better than he spells/writes.

Tessa said:

Oh have a know that U know there are tons of other musicians who spell and write funny 2. *hint* *hint*

psykosoul said:

Dap.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Great article, my fave quotes:

"What I’m attempting to do with this record is to still maintain the elements of hip hop, i.e., the drum sounds, whatever, but to utilize the technology so that I can have the musicians express those sounds onstage live, but still have the virtuosity to be able to be expressive in a solo and have it make sense to the song or the show. So that hip hop is not subjugated or challenged but at the same time it’s stretching out and people are able to see musicians – young musicians – solo and express and interact, to bring that back. It’s boring to see – although I dig Ludacris – I don’t want to sit there and see him for an hour just go back and forth and his boys come in on the punchline, with the DAT playing."

"I think what I do see that’s kind of strong is that hip hop music is taking over, but the quality of the music has dipped significantly."

"I think the other part of is the things we endow ourselves with. Jay Z is quick to call himself a pimp. Tupac was quick to call himself a thug. L’il Kim is quick to call herself a bitch. When you start saying these things about yourself that are clearly negative, it’s going to be like a magnet. You attract those things to you."

"But I feel like there has to be more of a caretaker attitude with the artists, because I feel like hip hop is becoming like an actor who is a one trick pony. He always does the same thing, the tear will come out of the right in the third act of every film. We all get it and we know. The same thing with hip hop and the culture, we have to take it and be just a bit more responsible. Just a little bit. And maybe a bit more creative how we say things."

"It started in the South Bronx in the 70s when we didn’t have nothing. We didn’t have instruments, we couldn’t afford instruments, we had to use turntables. We had to make do with what we had. Out of it came something really beautiful and great and I love it. But I hate to see what it’s become."

Thanks for the post.

tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...rmusic.htm

GreatArticle! Thanks, Psyko!!

I love Kamal Fareed

What an intelligent interview. Thanx baby