URB: So you’re on The Great Hangover Tour; you did a couple of dates a little while ago and you’re getting back on the road with them in a couple of weeks. How’d you wind up on that?
88-KEYS: Man, luck. Good luck [laughs]. Basically Kid Cudi and I were friends and I had the pleasure of meeting Asher Roth a couple of months before the tour started, and come to find out it turned out he appreciated my contribution to the music industry. You know, more notably hip-hop, like Mos Def’s first two albums and the Black Star album and stuff like that. So yeah, I’m pretty sure they put out the word to the William Morris agency, who approached me at the time to get onboard with their company, and yeah. There as a big waiting period between when my manager and I found out that they were kind of sniffing me out to the time when we actually had the meeting, maybe like four months went by. Then eventually we had the meeting and Cara Lewis is one of the higher-ups over there, there was a lot of things about me that she hadn’t known, and when she found out she was pretty impressed with my resume and who I was and just me as a person, so she kind of just tossed this at me and proposed it, and you know made sure it was cool with the guys–the headlining acts–and all systems were go. So I wound up on the tour, and blew my voice out the first night.
URB: Damn, really?
88-KEYS: Yeah, Boston was crazy.
URB: Is that the highlight of the tour so far?
88-KEYS: Yeah, Boston was crazy. Out of every show, Boston was the ultimate craziness. Like let’s say Boston was 10, every place else was 9, and New York was about a 7 or so. Because, unfortunately, that’s New York for you.
URB: When I heard about the Asher Roth/Kid Cudi tour, then saw that you were attached to the bill, I thought it was interesting. Asher panders to a lot of college kids and all that and Cudi came up on the Internet and has a relatively young fan base, and your material–on the last album–you talk about sex and girls and all that stuff that college-aged kids love to hear. But, at the same time, there’s the other aspect when you go deeper into the album, you touch on stuff like STD’s and childbirth and the pains of relationships. Do you avoid that kind of stuff at the live show or keep it in there?
88-KEYS: Oh nah. I keep it all in there because, little does anybody know, or maybe the true fans figured it out, well, the selling point of the album, like I get on stage and say that the album’s about sex. Which it is. But it’s way deeper than that. Like I’m trying to instill moral values back into young society, which seems to be lost or just nonexistent almost. There are so many females, so many young people out here, having children or being impregnated or getting females pregnant, and not following through with the traditional family values. Not to say that’s the “right way” to do it, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to have a child with someone whom you’re in love with, who you plan on being with for the rest of your life, as opposed to starting it with getting someone pregnant, then eventually you wind up having a high school relationship with them.
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