Interview with G-Side (part two: ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova)
(Check out part one, with CP of Block Beattaz / Slow Motion Soundz here first…! This interview was done in Malmö, Sweden, when G-Side were promoting The One… Cohesive in February last year. CP is back in Sweden right now actually, networking and selling beats. @alabama187 got some footage when he went over the bridge to Denmark, we’ll see what’s up with that in a minute. For now, enjoy this.)
“Have you noticed a difference in crowd response since when you dropped Cohesive?
ST 2 Lettaz: To me, the Cohesive album is a better album to perform. When we did our first album we were still studio artists, we had never really performed. The shows we did do in Alabama were not good venues for concerts, we were on shitty P.A. systems so we didn’t really know how to perform. The more we got on the road with Huntsville International and Starshipz And Rocketz we learned what worked and how to make songs that are better for performing. I think with Cohesive we have performed pretty much the whole damn album.
Yung Clova: On our first go around we might have had 50 people in the club. On the second go around we picked up more venues and we had more people in that spot.
When you think of hiphop you normally think… the Bronx and ciphers and what not. What were your first memories of hiphop in Alabama?
ST: It was what fed to us through videos and radio. There weren’t any ciphers going on my block. We’re from Alabama, so what we would get was whatever was on YO! MTV Raps or Rap City. And there was the bootleg man who would go around and sell tapes and CD’s out of his trunk. That’s where you would get the new shit. If it wasn’t from him you’d get it from some mom-and-pop shop. We used to go and buy CD’s because of what was on the cover. You didn’t know who it was or how dope it was but you’d just go ahead and take that chance.
YC: Or they had block parties… a lot of house parties… so a lot of people were playing music in their cars as they were driving through the neighborhood, so you might hear something that you like, and you’d be like, “Oh, that sounds dope”, and then you’d try to find it.
How did you start rapping?
ST: With me, I heard Ice Cream Man by Master P, I saw the video and heard it on the radio, and it hit me. I knew what I was gonna be for the rest of my life. I’d hear some guys on the corner freestyling or whatever, but I’d be off to the side in my own little world, just trying to hone my skills and get better.
YC: I started from my cousin, he freestyled all the time, playing around. And one day I just felt like taking it to another level.
ST: We had a mutual friend who stayed on us. He was older than us and the rapper on the block, who had actually put out CD’s. I heard about Clova and he heard about me and we just linked up one day after school.
YC: He’d always bring us together and be like: “Let me hear what y’all got”.
ST: When we went to college we started to throw our own parties. We performed, because there was nobody that was gonna throw a show and pay us for it. That’s where we learned the skills of performing, doing it ourselves and performing.
Tell us about the song Blackout.
ST: The day we were set to come to Europe our state was hit with over a hundred tornadoes. It’s the worst natural disaster to ever hit our state. We were fortunate to still make it out, our flight still got delayed, we missed Bergen, Norway. But we were fortunate enough to make it out.
YC: My flight actually got canceled. As I was going up, everything was black, no lights on, no gas stores, nothing. The tornado had torn up one of the cities I was going through really bad. All the cars were thrown to side of the road for all long as you could see. Luckily I made it home. As soon as I made it home the ligths came on in my house.
Page 1 of 2 | Next page