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http://www.avclub.com/articles/prolific-producer-prince-paul-on-almost-being-fire,93798/1/

In Set List, we talk to veteran musicians about some of their most famous songs, learning about their lives and careers, and maybe hearing a good backstage anecdote or two in the process.

The artist: As the producer for De La Soul, Prince Paul’s crate-digging, sample-heavy style contributed to a sonic revolution in hip-hop. Beside his work with De La, Paul has collaborated with a who’s who of hip-hop royalty, including RZA on seminal horrorcore group Gravediggaz, and Dan The Automator on supergroup Handsome Boy Modeling School. Paul’s most recent project, Negroes On Ice, is a comedy/music hybrid that showcases the storytelling of his son, DJ P Forreal, to paint a picture of one wacky day in New York.

“Just Say Stet” (from 1986’s On Fire with Stetsasonic)
Prince Paul: “Just Say Stet” was off the first record I ever made or was ever involved with. I remember that when I recorded it for wax, we recorded at Tom Silverman’s house, who was the president of Tommy Boy Records. I remember that he told Stetsasonic that they needed to get rid of me. He thought I was grossly underprepared as a DJ because I didn’t have a stack of records with me. It just so happened that I knew the records I wanted to scratch on the album so I brought exactly just that, and he told them that they should find somebody different.

The A.V. Club: Did he ever apologize for that?

PP: Nope. I was a kid. It was my first recording experience, so I definitely remembered that. It hurt, know what I’m saying? But the irony of it is that I made him a whole lot of money after that, so go figure.

AVC: Has the experience of making that record with a live band affected the way you’ve gone about making music since?

PP: I think your first experience in everything kind of shapes and molds whatever you do in the future. It was a learning experience. It was how I learned how to sample, how I learned how to arrange a song, how I learned about the music business in general, so it was definitely my introduction. Also it taught me the brutal reality that all that glitters isn’t gold. People see TV and they see people in the studio and they’re like, “Yeah, get some more wine and champagne, and you’re laughing, and there’s girls, and you’re throwing money in the air,” and it’s far from that.

“The Magic Number” (from 1989’s 3 Feet High And Rising for De La Soul)
PP: Pos came up with the initial concept. I think the thing for me was to figure out a way to make them sound good singing on the record. There was staying in key, but then it was also trying to figure out ways to put harmonies in the vocals. That’s when I started really learning how to work with a lot of outboard gear, like pitch shifters and all the other stuff. It was just a fun record. Then I was putting all the scratches at the end, which they thought I was totally nuts for doing, because a lot of stuff had nothing to do with the song. It was just being stupid, like all the little dumb vocal scratches at the end of the song. It was fun. Anything with De La and anything on the first album, all I remember is just smiling the whole time.

“A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’” (from 1991’s De La Soul Is Dead for De La Soul)
PP: I remember the big deal about that was having Russell Simmons come in and do the vocal intro at the beginning of the song. Russell was my manager as a producer for a hot second, and he was also a manager for Stetsasonic. And I remember just how hard it was to even get him in a meeting. But after De La Soul did so well, it just took a phone call for him to come down to the studio. He was so eager and everybody wanted to be down so much, it just showed me the power of what a hit record can do for you. That, to me, was the shining moment of that song.

It was fun making it. It was uptempo and everything else, and there are a lot of layers and samples. Once again, Pos had the main loop for the song, and it was just us kind of building around that loop, but it was like, “Wow, we got Russell on here.”

AVC: Was it your idea to have Russell on?

PP: I don’t remember whose idea it was, to be honest. I think it came from the guys. Who it came from, I don’t know, but I just remember that he was real happy to be there. I was like, “Wow,” because it was hard enough to get the guy in a meeting but he was on time and ready to record. So that was kind of nice.

“Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” (from 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate for De La Soul)
PP: I remember Maseo came up with the samples. When recording the vocals, I told the guys I wanted to put the vocals through a phaser, and I remember them being kind of reluctant to the idea. I think Dave or Pos might have been a little weird on it. I was trying to convince them, like, “Yo, trust me, it’s going to be dope. Everyone does their vocals regular. The record just sits a certain way, and if we do this, it’ll just kind of make it psychedelic.” I just kind of forced my opinion on it, and it worked out. In my opinion, it sounds good the way it is.

“Diary Of A Madman” (from 1994’s 6 Feet Deep with Gravediggaz)
AVC: This is one of the only tracks on the album that wasn’t just produced by you. Did that make the process on that track different from the rest of 6 Feet Deep?

PP: What people don’t understand about “Diary Of A Madman,” and what I haven’t totally explained until now, is that the sample came from RNS, who was RZA’s homeboy. So he got credit for production, but he really was never in the studio. So he had the sample, and in order for us to use it we had to give him credit. I went and programmed the beat, arranged all the vocals, recorded the vocals, put the skits in the front and the back. So in essence, I’m really the producer. RZA got credit because he was RNS’ homeboy. Technically, I produced that whole record. If you ask probably any of them, I don’t think they can dispute exactly what I just said.

I didn’t really care about credit back then. I was like, “I don’t care. I just want this record to come out.” I was just so excited about putting the group together and having a record out that I did a lot of things, business-wise, wrong. All the writing credits and stuff I split equally when I should have gotten more writing credit as far as music is concerned. I should have got a bigger cut, but you know, it all worked out in the end somehow.

AVC: How much effort did you put into shifting the sound for that cut in contrast to others on the album?

PP: To me, it was really no different, because, aside from “Graveyard Chamber” and maybe a few other songs, I was really hands-on. If you look at the percentage of work I put into “Diary Of A Madman” in comparison to the other guys as far as production is concerned, it was probably like 90 percent. In comparison to all the other songs, I did probably about the same, if not more. I was always open for people to collaborate and add stuff and whatever else, but I babied everything, except for maybe “Graveyard Chamber.”

6 Feet Deep was live instrumentation we had had, and RZA had pieced it together and sampled it on his ASR at the time, so he definitely did the bulk of that, if not all of it, aside from us playing the instruments and then looping it. There was probably a couple more. Poetic had something to do with one of them, and this guy Mr. Sime, and Frukwan did one. That was just my baby from front to back—the first album. The second album I had very little to do with.

“Holy Calamity (Bear Witness II)” (from 1999’s So… How’s Your Girl? with Handsome Boy Modeling School)
AVC: What was the relationship between this song and “Bear Witness” (from Dr. Octagonecologyst)? Was it always intended to be a sequel to that song?

PP: It conceptually started out as a sequel to that song. But to give full credit, DJ Shadow came in and really did that thing from top to bottom. That was his baby: all the cutting, all the programming. We just added our two cents in, to be totally honest, so credit should totally be given to DJ Shadow.

AVC: Was that true of the other collaborations on So… How’s Your Girl?

PP: No, not at all. The other songs on So… How’s Your Girl? were strictly me and Automator. That’s just one isolated song where Shadow was really excited to come and work with us and said he had an idea. So we were like, “Cool, let’s do it.”

“What U Got (The Demo)” (feat. Breezly Brewin) (from 1999’s A Prince Among Thieves)
PP: The beat for that one was originally a demo I had made for a group called Horror City that never really materialized, like, I was never able to get the guys a deal. That was probably ’95 when I made the demo. So I took the hook and the beat from that song because it applied, and put it on A Prince Among Thieves and had Breeze and my man Sha rhyme on it. It was a beat that I really didn’t want to let go because I thought it was really cool, and I didn’t want to just kind of let it get lost. It worked out, and I had my man Superstar, who was kind of an Amityville legend as far as MCs go—he’s been rhyming since the early ’80s or even the late ’70s—do the hook on there. That’s more or less how that one came about.

AVC: So that beat works because it fits the demo theme. How much of the rest of the production on that album changed to fit the lyrical themes of the broader story?

PP: That one, the hook happened to work for that particular song. But initially, for the rest of the album, I just told MCs what to rhyme about. It was like “This is the concept, rhyme about the concept.” I lucked out because they figured it out. They understood it and were able to write toward that, and then I would just produce the song around that, whether it was the hook or sound effects or whatever other arrangement to make it work in the story.

“No Sex (In The Champagne Room)” (from 1999’s Bigger & Blacker for Chris Rock)
AVC: This track has a lot more overt production than the other bits on that album. Was there any reason that particular track got that treatment?

PP: It was more or less because we were trying to, not mimic, but vibe out. Baz Luhrmann did this song we were kind of biting off of. That song was just him talking, the way Chris is talking, on the beat. We couldn’t really jeopardize the integrity of the production, because if we’re going to mimic something, or do the vibe of it, if we make it lesser than what the original is, it’s like a poor copy. So we had to keep it similar to what that was. That Baz Luhrmann song was actually a big radio song at the time, so that was kind of our rendition. It doesn’t sound like it, but conceptually we did the same thing. We wanted something we knew might be a video, or we knew if we lucked out might get played on the radio, which it did in some places. So we didn’t want to make it too cheesy.





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