That was the end of the analog era. It was cassette tape at that time. There were no CDs, nobody had a cell phone. It was totally analog, two-inch tape. It was that time when the music was still very warm. You could still hear traces of Innervisions and Graham Central Station in the music because of the way it was recorded.
That entire process, the entire record, the way it was recorded, songwriting, to the art direction, that was all you? You wanna play it? How many of you know it? Oh, there we go, play it anyway.
This version is not the original version. The original version was very, very, very raw, very b-girl. The mixing engineer was Bob Power , and Bob felt it needed to be sonically a lot clearer.
I wish I had the original version. That would be cool to play. No, but it was very raw. This version has live bass, live guitar and different things stacked on top of the original loop.
The original loop is a lot rawer. You can hear the static and the imperfection of it, and it went very well with my imperfect voice. It was cool. He knew how to really round out the bass without making it overpowering, and the highs would be perfect. Just where everything sits in the mix of all of those Tribe records is very much part of that feeling. I wanted to feel that with my music too when listening back to it.
The original track is very human to me as well. It would seem your ability to connect with people came from your imperfect voice. So tremendous success very quickly, and you touched upon it briefly a couple moments ago. It happened really fast for me. The single came out on February 7, I got pregnant March , so the whole first year of my career, I was pregnant on the road. I had my baby November 18, I never felt it even once.
I was at every radio show, I performed eight months out of that year. It was a lot of hard work. I had one employee, one person in my entourage, his name is Big Mike. Big Mike went and got the food, carried me if I was too tired, got the car, drove, would fly the plane if we had to get there. Helped me pack my clothes. It was just me and him. Where is Big Mike? He stepped out. The same people I started with are the same people that are still with me now for the past [ counts ] 16 years or so.
A lot happened in that year. I had some DAs. Is that what you call it? I started working with Questlove — he was on the first album too. I went and stayed with the Roots in this house. We got in the studio and recorded everything in a room about this big all at the same time. I just loved them. I loved the jazz aspect of what they were doing. It was very familiar to me, I felt like we were from the same tribe.
Once we met, we all kind of gelled and understood each other. Do you look at the musicians you work with as an ever-expanding tribe, people who go off on sojourns and come back? So when you were first hanging out with the Roots, you said Baduizm was completed. What was it do you think that made them take you so seriously if you spent three months living and working with them? I think they just related to my feel.
Plus, I had a budget and they knew they were going to be paid too. So that was even more fun. You said you were a child of the funk earlier on in this interview, yet there was a moniker developed for this style of music as a marketing tool maybe, neo-soul. Do you remember that? Our music sounds nothing alike. You sound very proud when you say that, that you broke through and you allowed people to express themselves in a very unique, genuine way and also get signed to record companies and make a living doing music.
Kedar trusted that, and a big part of it was his taste. His taste in music was unique. Let me color that a little bit. It just seemed that for many years this idea that there could be a neo-soul music, soul being a rather young musical form….
As an artist, I never saw it fit to be my job to fit into any kind of category or label. I just have to do things that feel good. You obviously had the budget to make any record you wanted to, and you went deeper down the rabbit hole. It was the first album you worked with Jay Dee, right? It was a conscious decision, yeah, definitely.
I knew what I liked, how I wanted the music to sound, what I wanted to rock over. I knew what I wanted to write over, yeah. Because the music comes first for me. I find a place in that music. I met him through Common. Common and he were good friends and I went to Detroit because I wanted [Dilla] to be on my album. I went into his basement and his basement was about this size and every wall from floor to ceiling was records, categorized. He was a scientist.
If you opened his refrigerator, all the Coke cans were turned the same way. It looked like a graveyard. Everything was perfect. He was an engineer in school, so there were a lot of mathematical things going around in his mind at all times. Very humble. And then you went to meet this guy. He had quite a reputation back then, too. To me he was. They are so serious about what they are doing to the point where they make beats all day long.
They give out these CDs, volume one, two, three, four, five, volume That can be the difficult part, not knowing where the sample came from. Because this is just what they do. All day. Did you record the vocals there too? Did you polish them up later for release elsewhere? Sometimes he stayed, sometimes he left. So I sampled two spots in this record. Live percussion was laid over the sample.
Shakers, different things. Thank you. I remember during this time, Dilla is very, very shy. He and Madlib, they twins in that kinda way. Ah, yeah, yeah. Common and I were dating at the time.
It was funny to me. It tickled me to do that to him. But he was also a very, very sweet and humble person, generous and giving. Of course, as an artist, when he wants his own space he wants his own space, his headspace. You have to kind of give him that. He and Common were roommates at that time.
So he was like that until the very end, making beats and smoking blunts. It was good for the pain. It was a very surreal moment when we heard J Dilla died. The most ironic thing was we were all in Los Angeles recording, we had formed a new supergroup. Dre, and a guitar player named Doyle Bramhall and Jazzy Jeff. But no one was there. Get on the white bus. We jumped around a little bit there, we just jumped into New Amerykah Part One. Was that a conscious choice?
Do you want to talk about that era, Worldwide Underground. That was one of my favorite times in living. I never went home. While I was touring I had a studio on my bus and I decided to record while I was touring. Um, Queen Latifah, Bahamadia. We were collectively Freakquency and that whole album was just demo underground kind of stuff. So when we put it out, it was as an EP, though it was long enough for an album. It was a great time. Oh, because I had some babies.
Those were my projects. I was breastfeeding and pushing baby strollers and home schooling and wiping tears and putting calamine lotion on poison ivy, you know? Yeah, I have a lot of help, really good help. My mom, my grandmothers, and a really good friend of mine, Sheeka, who my kids really love a lot. So in between the release of Worldwide Underground and the starting of the process to record New Amerykah Part One , things changed at Motown, right? Yeah, Kedar was gone by then.
Sylvia Rhone came in, the legendary Sylvia Rhone. That was her lane. So I started doing that and one song turned into 50, 50 turned into , turned into songs. I would do this all day, every day, writing songs. Take it to different frequencies, get into the shower to record it.
I was just impressed with that. This was different vocal effects and sound effects, I would start experimenting with those things. At that time I met Mike Chavarria. It was just where I wanted to be, I wanted to be in hyperspace. I still wanted to have an analog feel, but I wanted to be in hyperspace. Mike Chav helped me take it there.
I would just email him the track I did in GarageBand, and he would tweak it in the studio. All the imperfections and distortion, mic distortion and wrong preamps and everything I was doing, he just kept it like that and added his stuff to it. I split it into two parts because it was way too long for a 57, minute CD. I just had so much to say, and I wanted to say it all. So we split it into two parts and released it some time apart. Or did you meet them all?
You met them all prior to them sending the music to you? We all have similar taste in music and at the same time we bring new things.
I think by that time, they trusted my taste and what I wanted to do. They were OK with that. It was a big leap for someone like Dilla who was known as the hip-hop guy, but here he was producing with you, stretching out quite a bit.
It seemed as if he came into his own in a lot of ways making those beats and they were on a very successful record. He allowed me to be a part of it. It was the kind of stuff I liked, and he was gracious enough to allow me to be a part of it.
Did you feel the same way working with this crop of producers on New Amerykah? So he makes a great variety. That blew my mind. You do good impersonations. And you say hip-hop is bigger than religion and bigger than the government and dedicating the song to Dilla. Am I reading too much into it? No, that sounds right. The whole thing. Taking more chances, evolving. Evolving is very important for me. Yeah, she tried to. But when it came out — one came out in , one came out in — that was the beginning of the decline.
Everything crashed. Just keeping it out there, keeping myself motivated, keeping my fan base entertained, my cult following moving.
Keeping people interested because I thought what we were doing was very important. Whenever I decide to put out a video, I put it out no matter what album it is. I think music is timeless. So whenever I want to bring something back to life, I put a visual to it and put it out for people to enjoy it, give it another face, another turn.
That was all guerrilla shooting, all that stuff. We just did what we want and put it out. What did she say after you were on every news broadcast in America after the video first came out? Can I be honest? Should I? On the second part of New Amerykah , you dug so far back into the analog crates that you had to take a Dilla beat off of a cassette, which is the only way it existed.
Then to go back to what we were talking about early on, go through what must have been an incredibly frustrating process trying to negotiate the release of the music, find the sample and all that. And it did, we found it. One of the samples I had to get cleared via Twitter. Flying Lotus took the song and put a visual to it. Flying Lotus, who came through this Academy as a participant, are you really working on an album with him? He just freaks them a lot differently. His airspace is a little higher, frequency-wise.
Faster, more percussive, lots more percussive. More drums. He does what Dilla and Madlib do, takes voices and trumpets and samples of things and turns them into instruments. We feel the same way. His aunt is Alice Coltrane , the wife of the late John Coltrane, she also passed away. So he has a very jazz influence, but it comes out like that, he colors it like that. I have a couple of tracks from our album. I can only play a little bit, though.
Once you have a lot in common as people, you figure around all that stuff, the genres and titles and all that kind of stuff. Thundercat plays on everything that Lotus does. It was easy. You mentioned Muddy Waters earlier. Sometime mid-way during his career the people at Cadet decided it would be a good idea for Muddy Waters to do his blues over kidna psychedelic rock music.
In doing so, he created a couple of incredible albums, which he hated. No one told you to collaborate with Madlib, no one told you to collaborate with 9th Wonder, Flying Lotus. Will this new record with Lotus come out through Universal? We might put it out on our own label because we have a whole new way of selling music now.
And this is the label that produced the New Amerykah albums and distributed through Universal? When you can control the frequency of the music, you have a lot more control over the sheep or the people, the way they think, the way they feel. You can do whatever you want. I tour for most of my career. I tour more than I record. We have our own way of getting records out, our own social networks, our Facebooks and Twitters.
Those are huge networks and when we go to record labels now, we come in with those networks, not just as an artist or a brand. We come with a network, a following, a tribe of people who are already in place. It seems like your network is pretty strong. I just said Motown folded. Then they started denying it. But I think they want to resurrect the modern Motown.
But did that instance make you think about your influence and how quickly something you say or do is picked up on? That and the video we were talking about? At the same time, during PMS, I just express myself.
I remember one time Solange said she had too much NyQuil and passed out at the airport. They said something about she overdosed. Yeah, I pay attention to it and I think at one time, we even timed to see how fast something would go onto the blogs. So in the same regard, do you think about the platform for up-and-coming producers that you collaborate with?
You could work with any producer you want, yet you choose to give an opportunity to up-and-coming producers. And it just so happens that the people on the other side of that reap great rewards. Sometimes, depending on the budget. But the reward is mine, really. I feel honored. Dilla, Karriem Riggins, these guys are very, very brilliant musicians. Sometimes people use the word legend lightly, but you do refer to him. How many people know the name Karriem Riggins, the drummer?
This is a legendary cat, and probably most people who know him know him as a jazz drummer. But you gave him an opportunity to produce on New Amerykah Part One. I call him the clean Dilla. Dilla is very dirty and the frequency has a certain bottom velocity to it.
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