URB: Zumbi, what are some of the other projects you are working on?
Zumbi: This year I have a project coming out with this cat called the R. He is a Trackmasters product.
The R chops a lot of sample. It is straight Boom Bap but very soulful. He has been doing it forever and he is just starting to get on. He just did some stuff with Keisha Cole and Lil Kim. His profile is expanding as we speak. My style on the record is a little edgy and raw. Sometimes I will say stuff on a Zion I record and Amp will say, dude you can’t say that. You gotta pull that back. That’s cool because that is the branding we have put on Zion I over the years. With this I am a little bit more free and raw with the lyrics. It is very energy driven. It is straight boom-bap, rap music. The record is almost done. We have a couple more songs to knock out.
URB: Amp, going back to that project that you can’t say anything about, is it like anything you have done before?
Amp Live: No, it’s not. I am like the conductor and there are many, many, many people involved and its being done in a way that hasn’t really been done before.
URB: Going back that electro album you are working on, that electro sound appeared on the Common album with that Afrika Bambaataa sound, and it appears on this album as well. How important were Bambaataa and Kraftwerk were to making “DJ, DJ”?
Amp Live: The song “DJ, DJ”, I made that beat like a year and a half ago. It wasn’t like I was listening to them right before I made that record. They are like Run-DMC. I was listening to them in the ‘80s so that stuff has always been with me. But “DJ, DJ”, I just wanted to do a cut that represented that culture. It sounded like a high energy freestyle beat. I wanted to put a 2009 twist on it. I wasn’t going after an Afrika Bambaataa or Kraftwerk song, but I think that there are elements of them in it just because that is what I grew up on.
URB: Are you already thinking of doing another version of The Take Over?
Amp Live: Well, now that we are talking about it that might be kind of ill. We are having a lot of the music remixed, like “DJ, DJ” and “Geek to the Beat”.
URB: Speaking of another collaboration, Zion I has joined forces with Grouch in the past, are there talks about doing another project together?
Amp Live: Yes, 2010. That’s all I can say for now[laughs]
URB: Talk to me about how you developed the track for “Geek to the Beat” because that track is crazy.
Amp Live: [Laughs] That track probably started off far crazier than what it ended up. The baseline was pretty crazy on the first version, and people liked that aspect of it. I always had the conga drums, but you couldn’t stomach the beat as easily as you can now. I made the beat the little more simple. I had trouble with that song. It was hard making that hook stick. There were so many elements that I/ had to take out of that song to make it work.
URB: How did you approach writing your rhyme to that track?
Zumbi: Yeah, the first time I heard it, I was like what is this. This is on some other shit. I basically what to emulate the beat with my rhyme. It was this really primal essence to it. It sounds so tribal, so I just wanted to go with that rhyme. The drums in that song just spoke of people dancing really hard and going buck wild, so I just wanted to capture that.
URB: Have you had the experience, where he shows you a track and you think to yourself, I have no idea how I would approach that and it takes you a minute to really think of the best way to go about it?
Zumbi: I mean it happens all of the time man. I work with Amp Live; this guy makes any kind of beat, so I have just grown accustomed to trying new stuff. Growing up as an MC, I would try and rap or harmonize over anything, so I am kind of used to it, but often I get a beat that I like, but it might take me a while to get something that I like.
URB: Amp, would you say that this was the hardest track for you to make on this album?
Amp Live: No. Surprisingly, the hardest track was Caged Bird. It started off like, I don’t want to say like a T-Pain song, but it was down South with Synth elements. It was totally different. It could have been an R&B song. Then it became a Drum N Bass song. Then it became live music, and then I made this beat, I was like we should do it over this shit.
URB: Was that for part 1 or part 2?
Amp Live: That was for part 1. Part 2 came about when we were talking about a different song and the concept was so similar that we decided to combine them and make it like a story. We just sort of linked everything. I thought that Brother Ali would be perfect for that final beat for that song because his voice is so distinct.
URB: Talk to me a little bit about “Juicy Juice”
Amp Live: That was just supposed to be a verse cut. It barely made the album actually, which is weird. We just wanted to put it out to warm people up. We needed another song to make the album. It was the last song to be added. I made the beat, and it was just laying around and Zumbi liked it, so we went with it. Now thinking about it that track was made with the Track Pad on the PSP.
URB: I have seen you when you break that out during your show. Is that your favorite part?
Amp Live: Yeah, I love to mess with it, but our new show is like that that times 20. It makes it exciting. That is my time to speak. The tracks Pad game was hot for a second, and they just put me in there with a bunch of other producers.
URB: The subject matter of this album is very diverse. How would you compare the subject matter of this album to your previous projects?
Amp Live: I think it is a combination of all of our other projects. We wanted to be straight forward so everyone got it, and I think Zumbi was at his best.
URB: Looking at the title track from this album, you seem to be suggesting the idea of getting away from categories. Do you grow tired of being placed in a category?
Zumbi: I didn’t really write that song to apologize to the critics. Like if they don’t get it, they can kiss my culo. I feel that genres really kill music. For instance, hyphey was such a big thing out here in the bay, but once it got exposed, it just died. Why does it happen? Out in the U.K. it goes from Garage to speed Garage to minimalist breaks to Grime, all of those sub genres continue to exist and build upon one another and that’s more of what I am into doing. I feel as an artist being creative is the only thing I have and that’s what The Take Over is about.
URB: What I meant by apology is do you think the critics feel that you should apologize for not staying in a particular category?
Zumbi: Reading these comments that people put up. Everyone is a critic. It is like everyone is in a PhD program because they sit in front of their computer for hours and it is broadcasted. I was on this one website and I was reading these comments that said these guys are Cosby they shouldn’t try and be hard. If they listened to the song, they would see that we weren’t trying to be hard. They were talking about “Loose Your Head”, which talks about how the street life can get you fucked up, don’t lose your head. Just because the tone of the music has changed, doesn’t mean the message has changed. The message has pretty much remained the same throughout. The music styles are what changes. It is like people are looking at the cover and judging everything by it.
URB: Speaking of the cover, tell me a little bit about the cover art for The Take Over.
Zumbi: [laughs] word. We worked with this cat named King Kong. We wanted an artistic expression of the direction of the album, so we started talking about the cover art much earlier than we usually do. We wanted to do some Earth, Wind, and Fire, Miles Davis kind of art work. We took those two ideas and we just went from there. It is like this great spirit returning to the city. It is like an ancestral spirit returning.
URB: Tell me about your approach on “Antenna” and “Radio”
Zumbi: I wrote “Antenna” like three times. From all of the little steps we took, we saw it evolve. From Amp putting the hook in the verse to him redoing the beat two or three times to me rewriting my verse two or three times. To me it is probably the best song on the album. “Radio” was raw from the jump. It was one of the few songs that I didn’t really rewrite too. When he played the beat it was some old-school rock and roll. My idea was to talk about how music is just changing so fast, and you can’t really go back and redo what has happened before. All you can do is take what has been done in the past and flip it today. People were tired of hip-hop but there is a new thing coming. That’s why I was mentioning Jimmy Hendrix and all those other great architects and letting them know that we need that spirit back.
URB: When listening to that part of the song that’s where I thought that was the inspiration for the artwork.
Zumbi: It is that too. It is that ancestral vibe. That greatness is still here.
URB: Since you went into this album with the mindset of taking back hip-hop, how did that impact your creative process?
Amp Live: It just made us think about the roots of hip-hop. Most people think about taking it back to the hip-hop means taking it back to boom-bap hip-hop from the ‘90s, but it actually goes back further than thatn. It goes back to what you were saying about bambaataa. We wanted to use all of those elements when working on this album.
Zumbi: I think that this album is a bit cleaner; it is bigger; we have learned more about making music. It sounds more professional.
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