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By James Shahan   Photography by Josh Behan

05/15/08 :: URB web

Honesty. We all ask for it and yet are seldom prepared for its wrath. Perhaps that's why it seems as though many prefer simply to do without it altogether. Whether young or old, an on-screen attorney or a real-life attorney, everybody is guilty of at least one dishonest moment--probably daily. Luckily, there are two men out there who aren’t afraid to tell it like it is: Prolyphic and Reanimator, MC and producer, respectively. URB.com got a chance to sit down with these two in order to learn more about their new album, The Ugly Truth, and why being honest is always more trying than deceit.

URB: When you guys first got together, I know that Sage thought that you would suit each others’ sounds very well and work together very well. What was the initial period of collaborating like?
Prolyphic: Well, seeing that Reanimator was in Chicago, it was mostly me and Sage meeting up. I would record stuff...I would send Reanimator and Sage the acapellas and Reanimator would kind of remix it almost. I would tell him the BPM and he would remix it and we just kinda took it from there. We started off kinda slow to see how, to see if it would work. And then I think right after the first couple of songs, Sage was excited about it and I think both of us were kind of on board.
Reanimator: Yeah, the first couple were basically just, I would get the acapella and then after a while, it was more back and forth where, I would make the beats first and then Prolyphic would record and write lyrics over it. I think a lot of the songs were probably written after we started working, so Prolyphic kind of knew my style at least.

“Survive Another Winter,” the first single off the record, talks a lot about people who will embark on this journey for fortune and fame and a lot of them will come out here to California for that purpose. What made the focus of the song more West Coast or Los Angeles than, say, New York?
P: I wrote it in the winter of 2005. I started writing it and a lot of the kids, a lot of the dudes that I knew around here, thought that the East Coast scene was kinda dead because no one was really supporting unknown, independent hip-hop artists. You know, unless you were a big name, you weren’t really drawing any crowds and nobody really wanted to come to any shows and hear what anybody had to say, so everybody thought that the ticket was that if you went out West, you would get more of a reception but I was still here. I just talked about how I survived without having to compromise myself. A lot of people move to New York City as well, but I picked California for the opposite extreme. It’s winter here and it’s summer there; to have that contrast.

Is the idea of an ugly truth an overall theme of the album? That there’s a core ugly truth in the world at large or is it more “the truth about the industry, the truth about myself, the truth about...”
P: [There was a] period of time where I just cut a lot of people out of my life. I sent a couple emails out to people and the headline of it, before I thought of the song, was “The Ugly Truth.” A lot of that feeling went into those songs. The truth is not easy. As much as people want to be honest, there’s not a lot of honesty going on in the world nowadays because it’s not what people wanna hear. People wanna hear what they wanna hear and even if you tell them something, sometimes they even twist it to make it what they wanted to hear. It’s so tough to be honest and truthful, like, 100%, all the time and a lot of times, it’s not pretty. That’s the reason why it’s so difficult to be honest and truthful.

Who are the artists that made you guys want to start doing what you do?
R: I’d probably have to say Dr. Dre. I always liked how he took samples and how he could layer beats over it and have them line up real nicely and all the beats were real tight but still had break beats and samples in there...his more NWA stuff.
P: I don’t really know. There’s a lot of people I like to listen to that inspire me but there’s no one [where] I really wanted to be like, “I want to be like him.” When I started to see guys like Slug and Sage...I guess it would be those guys. I love Rakim, I love KRS, but I’ve never, like, “Yeah, I wanna be like those guys.” I never really thought like that. Even when I saw Slug and all those guys, I didn’t want to be them. I was already writing so I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ll give this a chance. Maybe I’ll just see how people react to what the fuck I gotta say, you know?”

Are there any questions that either of you ever wanted to ask each other?
P: I don’t really know. Reanimator, do you love cooking?
R: Yeah...yeah.
P: Nice!

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