I was a popular dancer in high school and I saw rap from the B-boy stance when rap was being plugged up into the streetlights. When I was going to school, the COLD CRUSH BROTHERS were going to school with me. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that I started rapping, which turned into Ultramagnetic MCs.

I met Ced Gee when we were going to high school together and we formed the group. We listened to the Treacherous Three, who would use a lot of big words in their raps. They were using words nobody was using. We looked at the Treacherous Three like, This is the point of hip-hop. I want to rhyme like this. I don’t want to do the “Yes, yes y’all, ya don’t stop the body rock!” They put pen to paper. Now rap was about vocabulary. It was no longer baby rhymes.

T La Rock was one of the most high-tech rappers at that time with the technical words. I was hanging with Greg Nice. We had a chance to see everybody from the super old-school acts all the way up to Spoonie Gee, RUN-DMC and Whodini. They were all out with records before we even had a deal.

At the time there was a craze happening where everyone was using TV-show themes. So we waited for that craze to go by and that’s when rap started going heavy with the samples. It became MC Shan, Eric B. & Rakim and then Ultra. So when “Ego Trippin’” came out, that was like the third record that shocked everybody like, Wow, this is different!

We pressed up 500 copies of “Ego Trippin’.” We hit Red Alert off, and I delivered the records straight to Marley Marl’s house. I remember Big Daddy Kane was in the kitchen. That’s where Marley had his mic set up.

Marley was really open to it. He spun it on WBLS. And then I gave Chuck Chillout a copy in person. I remember me and Funkmaster Flex used to talk in his car about different rappers.

To be honest, a lot of rappers were jealous of Ultramagnetic MCs, but when “Ego Trippin’” came out, there was nothing you could do because every car had it playing up and down the block. You would hear it in every project. All you would hear is “MC’s Ultra! MC’s Ultra!” everywhere you went. I would go through the projects and people would scream and we didn’t even have a video out. I wasn’t popular on TV. I don’t know how people had a vision of knowing a person without even seeing them on social media, on Instagram. Back then it was more about the flyers and posters and people seeing you on a show with Boogie Down Productions.

If you listen to the second verse of “Ego Trippin’,” I was just making the words fit on a beat. I wasn’t trying to rhyme: “Through the scientific matter I probe for evidence/Leading melodies obtaining slight positive beams/Of the average formulation, apply mechanically.” And people didn’t even know what I was doing because the first verse of the record was more straight rap. The beat was so hot and the chorus was so dramatic that you didn’t even realize the second verse didn’t rhyme.

At that time, I liked Lakim Shabazz. I liked Latee’s “This Cut’s Got Flavor” and stuff like that. But once we were out, I tried not to follow rap in a lyrical way because I thought that if I listened to everybody’s rhymes a lot, I wouldn’t have my own originality. I used to buy funk records like Con Funk Shun because I was a dancer. I bought Undisputed Truth and Cameo. My main inspiration was Slave. That’s why Ultra’s music was like that. I didn’t grow up on jazz. I didn’t know about Ron Carter or Ronnie Laws.

When I started the Dr. Octagon project, I had so much material piled up that I had to break it up into different characters. People thought I was just being weird, but I was being a businessman. A lot of artists were stuck as just one person. They had to do a record deal with that same style again. But I had a lot of ideas. I think that’s why Parliament-Funkadelic opened my mind up. They had Brides of Funkenstein, they had Sir Nose, Funkadelic and Parliament. George Clinton broke his group up into so many different parts. So that’s what I felt like: a one-person Parliament-Funkadelic.

During that time, I tended to like the peculiar people. I liked the artists that had flows, like Fiend and Mac from No Limit. But a lot of the rappers couldn’t adapt to different sounds. That made me feel like, OK, I’m going to create a Dr. Octagon. I’m going to create a Dr. Dooom. I’m going to create a Black Elvis. But all of those characters are part of me.

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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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