Interview with G-Side (part one: CP)

My sister getting into trouble for having 2 Live Crew and I didn’t understand why. She would sneak down and dance to it when my parents were gone. She had 2 Live Crew, she had DJ Magic Mike. Those are my memories from way back.

What came after that?

I think Nas came out in 96, was that 94? Illmatic. I think that was the first time I could actually understand and breathe and… understand the impact of the music. It sent chills down my body just listening to it. How could this young cat know so much and speak so eloquently?

How old were you then?

I was fourteen. I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen years old.

Did you mostly have access to New York rap when you were at that age?

That was pretty much it. I went to store when the music dropped, that what it was all about. First thing you do, get the cd, get the plastic off of it, put the cd in, take the book out, sit in the car and listen to it. That’s one thing I miss: books.

I remember when I bought Doggystyle and it had the comic in it.

Yeah, that was a good record. That was when I was a fan. I didn’t start doing music until I was nineteen or twenty. I was at school playing football and everything. I played drums for a year, but I played football and wasn’t thinking about nothing else. But my brother, Chico, they were actually rapping, and it seemed like they were having fun. I went and bought Virtual DJ, you remember that program? I got that program, started doing beats, stopped going to class. And that’s pretty much how I started doing it first. My parents didn’t like it. My mom bought me a keyboard and she says she regretted it – but she doesn’t regret it anymore. She bought me a $600 Yamaha QS 300.

That was when you started, at nineteen – twenty hours a day?

Pretty much. It was all day everyday, then when I was younger. That’s all we did. Get high, bring some girls to the studio, get a bunch of Hennessey, get a bunch of 40′s, and just kick it and make music. Believe it or not, me and Codie G were the rappers.

How did the scene look in Alabama, when you were coming up?

There was nothing, people were like, “What the hell are you doing? Take your ass to school, get rid of this shit.” There were a couple of local groups. At Ease, J to the third. At Ease actually made it to Harlem to The Apollo, but they got booed of stage. There were three black dudes and a white guy in the group, Mike; actually the guy that got me started on doing production. That was big for us. For a long

time, man, we weren’t nobody really doing anything. We were doing all the industry stuff, we were taking our music to radio stations, they would tell us, “you gotta sound like this”, we would go back and do it, and waste time, and take it back to them, and they’d say it had to sound like something else. We were like, “fuck it, we’re just gonna make the music we wanna make”.

So when you realized that, did you have the same vision that you have today, soft, nice, beautiful melodies, hard ass drums?

Yeah. We’re actually gonna leak some of the old stuff to show you that it’s a derivative of what we were doing. Just don’t laugh at it, we were crazy. We were on some real gangsta shit back then. Calling out snitches by their government names. That was how we were living. But just growing up, being mature; we got kids now. We’re conscious of what they might hear. We’re smack dead in the middle of the street so we can’t avoid it. I deal with jackers, robbers, dopeboys, all types of people everyday, so I’m right there in it. I see everything. But I think we actually had an impact on the crime wave in Huntsville, because everybody is in the studio recording and rapping about it instead of crawling through your window. So, you know, I think we’ve had an impact.”

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