Only a few years in the making, LA’s La Coka Nostra gets ready to set out on tour and also drop their well awaited debut album entitled A Brand You Can Trust. Everlast, Danny Boy, DJ Lethal, Slaine and Ill BIll are well accomplished musicians with successful previous projects—House of Pain, Soul Assassins, Cypress Hill, Limp Bizkit—who have come together to bring their brand of rock-inflected hip-hop to a sea of auto-tune imposters. We spoke with 1/5 of the group, Everlast, who told us about what we can expect…
What do you feel about La Coka Nostra’s debut album finally coming out?
It took us awhile to get it together, you know? ‘Cause everybody’s got their solo things. I have my band that I put out a record with, so it took us a long time to get in the same room and really get the record together as a whole. Plus we released an album’s worth of stuff free online to help keep people interested.
What can we be expecting from A Brand You Can Trust?
There’s a little more to say on the record than some of the songs we put out. Some of the songs we’ve put out have been just kinda like us sayin’ wild shit, you know what I mean? Like not necessarily based in reality. This album has a lot more reality based ideas and songs. There’s some political stuff and just some stuff that is more poignant about life, but the tone and the production and where we’re comin’ form lyrically and stylistically is pretty much what we been settin’ up. We called the album A Brand You Can Trust because we feel like we’re putting out a sound that we longed for that wasn’t around in hip hop that much.
So is that what LCN is contributing to the state of hip hop right now? Something that was missing?
Well as far as I’m concerned, I mean yeah. I wanted to make sounds and songs for tastes that I felt like weren’t being catered to. A little bit of rock edge, not rock, but rock edge. I miss a little bit of the more ’90s style and production definitely…and there’s no auto-tune on our record.
What was it like working with Snoop on the album?
Well Snoop is my dude, I had written a song for his last album, like a country song. I wrote and produced it for him and prior to that he had asked me to go to Dublin and do a surprise performance of “Jump Around”. We’re dudes like that so when I called and said “Hey man we wanna have you on the La Coka record” it wasn’t even a question. The same with the few collaborations we do have on the record, like Bun B too. He was also a friend and a fan, we were hanging out one night at the studio and just kinda threw a beat on and everything came together. La Coka doesn’t necessarily go out lookin’ for people to do songs with ‘cause there’s three of us as it is rappin’ on the regular. But B-Real’s family, Sick Jacken is family, Bun, Immortal Technique and Snoop are all dudes that are as far as I’m concerned, they are La Coka Nostra, they’re apart of the whole thing. I mean it is a group, but I look at it as something bigger than that, as a collective of a bunch of dudes who are tryin’ to you know, get on the same page on something that is, uh I don’t wanna say creditable like nothing else is creditable, but I just mean something of quality. Something that we all can stand behind like “Yeah, I like that, that’s a hot jam.”
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