1) If you a Piss-Colored Jamaican-American With An Aversion To Reading All Dat Shit (i.e. Colin Powell), exit stage left.

2) If you're wondering why this post is headlined "No Blocko"
CTRL + F down to the section where J-Zone talks about the wack-ass concept of "hating".

3) This was written by someone who used to post here: Sherron Shabazz -- all around good dude who shared my reverence of Willie D, the great American Negro Poet. Good to see him still out there and J-Zone is one of my favorite rappers. Some eye opening details about his career in this little Q&A.

link: http://www.examiner.com/hip-hop-music-in-national/q-a-with-j-zone

Q&A with J-Zone
Sherron Shabazz
Hip-Hop Music Examiner

I first heard of J-Zone about ten years ago. I had never heard a single second of J-Zone’s music but I saw a CD in a store titled “Pimps Don’t Pay Taxes” and I just had to buy it. I listened to the CD from beginning to end and it was outstanding. It was a refreshing listen complete with some of the illest chopped samples you’ve ever heard, and some of the most misogynistic lyrics as well—I was instantly a fan.

J-Zone’s music was both ignorant and intelligent—imagine that. Ten years later J-Zone has retired from rap (legitimately) and penned a new book chronicling his rap career and more.

Root for the Villain: Rap, Bullsh*t, and A Celebration of Failure is an excellent read that takes readers on a rollercoaster ride through the mind of J-Zone. The term “LOL” is overused in our world of texting and Tweeting, but I literally laughed out loud several times while reading Root for the Villain.

When the opportunity arose for me to interview J-Zone I jumped at the chance. I love his music and I love his new book, Root for the Villain—it was a no-brainer. I had a spirited discussion with J-Zone that touched on everything from his favorite albums, player haters in Hip-Hop, record digging, Willie D lyrics, the passing of Heavy D, and his new book, Root for the Villain.

Enjoy.

SS: Why’d you decide to write a book and why now?

J-Zone: Well I had been writing for years. I always was a writer. I had columns in Hip-Hop magazines like Hip-Hop Connection in Britain. I wrote a monthly column for that for like 2-3 years. I wrote for HipHopDX.com, Slam Magazine and The Source. I’m a high school sports reporter in New York so that’s basically one of my jobs. Even when I had my Myspace page I wrote editorials that were really popular. I was always writing—music and writing have always been my hobbies. When the passion on the music side got weaker I started writing more. I started writing for Dante Ross’ blog 2 1/2 years ago and the feedback was good. The blog world is so fast food recycled. Every two days you have to put something up. I was writing articles that were 2000-3000 words—real pieces. I couldn’t keep up with the blogging. It’s too disposable. You post a blog on Tuesday and by Friday it’s already gone. The internet is like infinity so I said instead of trying to keep up with the blog why don’t I see if I could put these different stories in a project, like a book. I guess it’s like doing singles on iTunes verses doing an album. I was always an album based artist. I like full-length things and I like to make things into a concept and see if I can string the ideas together—I like the challenge. That’s what I did with the book. I decided to go that route and instead of blogging. I wanted to see if I could string it together into a book that’s cohesive and that was what made me do it.

SS: Explain the title of the book, Root for the Villain.

J-Zone: It’s really just about being anathema to everything we value in our society, particularly in this country. The hero is the one that everybody wants to be like but every hero has a bullsh*t side. You see these community leaders who are beacons in the community and tell you to do this, this, and that but they got 6-7 baby mommas and eight kids. You got all these rappers talking about misogyny is killing Hip-Hop and talking all this righteous sh*t and they got a bunch of baby mommas or they’re the ones selling dope. I’m taking all of my faults and putting them on the table. I’m taking all of my failures and successes and laughing about them—I own up to all my faults. My last record sold 47 copies in its first month. In Hip-Hop self deprecation is not accepted. You always want to seem invincible. The persona of rap is to seem untouchable with no faults. That’s what we’ve been taught and that’s the hero in rap, so the villain would be the guy who said, “I had three people at my last show, sh*t didn’t sell.” Instead of moping about it you find humor in it and are able laugh at it, and that’s where the celebration of failure comes from.

A lot of people are thinking I’m looking at my sh*t as failure but it’s not even that. It’s the way our society views success. We live in a society of numbers. How many Twitter followers you got? How many Facebook likes you got? How many Myspace friends you got? What were your first week sales? How many views do you have? How many downloads? That’s how we base success so when I was shopping the book around to publishers they were like, “Yo, you’re a good writer and your stories are good but you’re a commercial failure. You didn’t sell any units and nobody is going to know who you are.” So it’s like OK, if that’s what our society sees as success I guess that would make me a failure so I’m going to celebrate it . It’s really like challenging what we view as success nowadays.

SS: You put all of your music out on your own, how was it different self publishing the book?

J-Zone: The concept of it is the same. You’re putting in all of your money and all of your time. Sink or swim it all falls on your shoulders, but then again you have total control. It’s very similar to when I was pressing my first album in 1998-99. The difference is a book is a lot more tedious than music. The rewards can be greater because a book can reach a lot more people than music can but at the same time a lot of people don’t like to read . Attention spans are so short. When I was blogging I’d write 3000 words and people would look through for whatever is highlighted or italicized. It’s tough in that regard but it’s not that much different than music. You really have no help.

When things go well you can collect all the accolades but when things don’t go well you have nobody to blame. It’s not easy. In music mistakes are accepted, like in the mix down if there is a little hitch. I remember one of the songs on Wu-Tang Forever started and somebody said “What the f*ck?” then it started again. It was a mistake but everybody was like, yo, that sh*t is so dope! In writing it’s more perfection and it’s a lot more meticulous. It’s really nerve-racking when you got 67,000 words in front of you and you’re dealing with editors to get it cleaned up, and dealing with Kindle and Amazon. The process is the same, you’re trying to get people to give a f*ck when you ain’t got a lot of money to push it.

SS: In the book you said “my soul is stuck in 1990”. I feel the same way, I’m like a year older than you. I had a Twitter discussion with you a few weeks ago about L.L. Cool J’s Walking With A Panther when most people don’t even remember that one so I knew you were similar to me. Why did you feel your soul is stuck in 1990?

J-Zone: Yes! Yes, I remember that! This is a very controversial thing to talk about. You can’t talk about Hip-Hop in a barber shop because somebody is going to get shot. When you go on the message boards or the HipHopDX’s or WorldStarHipHop’s you can’t have debates about Hip-Hop. One thing I do say is a lot of guys our age are starting to say, “Ah this sh*t now is wack,” and I agree from an artistic standpoint. But it’s also not even so much it’s wack it’s just not for us. Hip-Hop is generational. My father is a bad example because he was a Hip-Hop fan, but most of the adults when we were growing up hated Hip-Hop. Parents were listening to James Brown, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis or Duke Ellington. They thought Hip-Hop was trash! They said, “Why can’t they make their own beats,” and “Why do they have to talk about women?” To us it was our sh*t. Last year I worked in a high school, Rakim’s alma mater. My supervisor was his sixth grade math teacher. For Black History Month we did a thing on Hip-Hop history and we asked 100 kids in the auditorium, “How many of you know who Rakim is?” Two people raised their hands. The greatest emcee of all-time went to this school 25 years ago, he was one of the few famous people to come out of here and nobody knew who he was. That’s when I realized that it’s generational.

You can react to life in 2011 in one of two ways. You can say f*ck that, all this sh*t is wack or you can say, these kids listen to their sh*t and I listen to mine. I’m not going to sit here and spend all my time bashing Lil’ B or Soulja Boy, but at the same time I’m not going to act like that’s what I listen to in the car just to stay relevant. No, my soul is stuck in 1990. I listen to the same f*ckin’ records I listened to when I was in junior high school. It’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe in pushing that sh*t on everybody. I believe everybody should know the history of music because in other genre’s people go back and study. In Hip-Hop kids don’t go back and study and I think that sh*t is wack. At the same time I’m not going to waste breath talking about why sh*t was better then. I’m not going to wear tight jeans and go on the latest blogs and listen to the new sh*t either. I been listening to the same f*ckin’ records for 25 years and I’m going to continue to listen to the same records for the next 25 years. My soul is stuck in 1990. That’s my era, that’s my sh*t!

SS: When I was a kid my parents used to listen to late 60’s Motown stuff like Smokey Robison or The Temptations. I used to wonder why they never listened to stuff like Michael Jackson or Prince, but the stuff from the 80’s, that wasn’t their sh*t!

J-Zone: Every generation has their sh*t. A lot of people say the Hip-Hop of the 90’s was the best and I agree, but if you’re 17-years old you’re not going to think that way—you’re just not. I worked with kids in the suburbs and kids in the hood, from somebody who is around teenagers all the time, they have their sh*t, we have ours. If a 15-year old listens to Lil’ B or Soulja Boy I’m not going to bash them. I’ll be like, alright, I think that sh*t is wack, but I’m not going to tell them not to listen to it. It’s part of their socialization and their experience. When I wrote this book I didn’t spend time bashing the new sh*t because it doesn’t make sense—there is no point. Instead of doing that I’m going to celebrate the stuff for people in my age group, people who remember these records, and people who remember how these records affected them when they heard them. Instead of bashing new sh*t I’m going to focus on what made our sh*t great for our generation. Thats what I was trying to focus on.

SS: I want to ask you about sh*t being perceived as wack. The Drake Take Care album leaked a few weeks ago and some people liked it, some people hated it. The ongoing joke is that Drake is soft or whatever. A girl that I follow on Twitter asked, “Why does everybody think Drake is soft because he doesn’t rap about selling drugs?” I’m like, nah, that ain’t it. Nobody even mentioned drugs. His music is kind of soft, some people think it’s wack. The girl got really defensive, and I realized she’s like 21-years old. Drake is her sh*t. What I’m trying to say is, at what point did it become unacceptable to call sh*t wack? We were raised saying, “Yo, that sh*t is wack.”

J-Zone: That’s a great point, and that’s a point that I make throughout the book from beginning to end. When I was growing up it was called an opinion. I remember getting into a debate in high school. Obviously Tribe is a classic group and I love all their albums, but I didn’t like Midnight Marauders as much as the first two, particularly the first one. People were like, “N*gga you crazy! That’s the sh*t!” I never heard “hater” or “you’re jealous” it was just like, alright, you like People’s Instinctive Travels, we like Midnight Marauders, that’s the end of the story. I remember when Protect Ya Neck came out I was like, “This sh*t is butter, you need to listen to this!” People were like, Ol’ Dirty sounds like Busta , and yadda, yadda, yadda. Then the M.E.T.H.O.D. Man song blew up and I didn’t particularly like it, so we would always debate but at the end of the day we agreed to disagree.

Somewhere in the mid-90’s that hater sh*t came in and it became about more than music. This is my definition of a hater in 2011: If you dislike somebody’s music who is making more money than you, then you’re a hater. There are a lot of people whose music I don’t like but I don’t dislike them as people. Drake isn’t for me but I don’t dislike Drake as a person. I’m sure he’s a great guy, I don’t know him. I know better than to say I don’t like his music around anybody under the age of 30. If I do they’re going call me jealous and say I’m a hater. Why do I have to be jealous? Why can’t it be that his music is not for me? The line between an opinion and being a hater was blurred in the mid-90’s. When the Bad Boy era came in it was player hater, player hater, player hater. Some of the Bad Boy stuff I liked, some of it I didn’t and people were like, “Aw, you a player hater ‘cause you ain’t getting no money!” What does that have to do with it? I just don’t like the music .

I think with that player hater sh*t it got to the point where it wasn’t even about music, it was about status. If somebody was doing well and you didn’t like their music you were all of a sudden jealous of their success. The only people that are allowed to have opinions nowadays are like Jay-Z and Kanye West. But if J-Zone has an opinion he’s hating and old! It’s like with Ice-T and Soulja Boy. People were like, “That old ass n*gga is hating!” That Soulja Boy-Ice-T debate and working in a high school jolted me into the reality of where we are. It made me realize that I’m part of one of the first full generations of Hip-Hop kids to get old--it never happened before.

When we were kids the Spoonie Gee’s and them were older but when they got into Hip-Hop they were already in their late 20’s and early 30’s. We’re the first generation of kids that were born and raised on rap as recorded music. We’re the first generation to get old. We don’t know what it’s like to turn on Hot97 and Evil Dee, Pete Rock, Marley Marl, or Red Alert isn’t spinning on daytime radio. We don’t know what it’s like to turn on MTV and not see a Special Ed video. We’re not used to seeing these guys becoming legends. To us they’ve always been current. When you start hearing the words “legend” and “old school” to describe music that to us was new, you realize that we’re the first generation of Hip-Hop kids to start out young and grow old in Hip-Hop. What was mainstream to us is now a niche market.

SS: One of the things that made me get into your music was the production. Reading about the record digging and how you learned the SP-1200 was fascinating to me. Would you say the production part of your career was more fulfilling for you than emceeing?

J-Zone: Absolutely, absolutely. Man, the rhyming part got me out of being shy, I was a shy kid. All of the sh*t that I wanted to say to chicks but didn’t have the balls to say, J-Zone did it. It was like my evil alter-ego. To get on stage and have to perform got me out of my shell but the passion was in the music. I’m watching an old 60’s sitcom and hearing an old white guy say some nerdy sh*t, but I’m working on this song about getting my d*ck sucked and that sh*t will fit perfect and it sounds like something that wouldn’t be on a record about getting your d*ck sucked . Going out digging for records, taking 6 or 7 records and piecing them together and making something new and people would be like, “Where’d you get that loop from?” I’d be like, it’s not a loop, it’s 6 different records! I used to get a rush from that sh*t!

You’re from Chicago so Out of the Past, when I went into that place I was like oh my God! That’s one of the last places that I’ve seen in the last 10 years that embodies what the experience of digging for records is about. It’s not gentrified, it’s not cleaned up, they don’t organize the sections by drums or genres, and the records aren’t $85 dollars a piece. It’s just records! The sh*t is a mess, it’s grimy as f*ck, there’s fly paper on the ceiling and James Brown 45’s on the wall. When I went in that place I almost had a heart attack. This is what’s been missing! That was part of the production side in the 80’s and 90’s. Going to some place like that and just knowing you’re going to leave with some sh*t!

SS: I laughed when you mentioned Out of the Past Records in the book. That’s in my old hood and I haven’t been there since I was a teenager but it was vivid the way you described it in the book. I was like, “Yeah, that’s it!” It’s just funky, old, and raggedy. It’s also dangerous!

J-Zone: It’s nasty, yo. It’s a nasty, carcinogenic, rotten, funky place . Floor boards are missing, you could f*ck around trip if you don’t watch what you’re doing. When I used to dig with my father at places like Greenline Records in Queens in the late 80’s all of the spots that we used to go to looked just like that. When I went in there it felt like I was a kid again. That sh*t was the greatest experience, man, to know that in 2007 when I first went there that a place like that still exists. You couldn’t go there after dark because there’d be fifteen dudes posted up outside. I saw a pimp with a fur coat just pulling up and chilling with a walking stick. This is what I’m talking about! When you went digging for records you put your life on the line!

SS: Yeah, that area used to be Bishop Don “Magic” Juan’s stroll.

J-Zone: I didn’t know that but I did see some pimps. I saw the activity camera’s above head. Digging for records is a contact sport. I guess it’s easier to get stuff off the internet but to me that’s not digging. We risked our lives, man. I used to come home coughing up dust. I’d blow my nose and black stuff would be in the tissue. I’ve gotten chased out of joints! In the 90’s we used to go through hell to get records. We used to steal stuff. It was a rush digging for records during that time. Being 17-18 years old and doing this sh*t, a lot of people now would not relate to that.

SS: Have you ever sampled from a CD?

J-Zone: I probably have at some point. I’m not anti that. A dope beat is a dope beat; I don’t care where you get it from. I’ve sampled sh*t off YouTube. The best experience was always going out and getting your fingers dusty. At that time there were so many limitations on technology you had to work, but the work was part of the fun. When I used to make demo’s I couldn’t afford a two inch reel-to-reel so we had to record right to the cassette with the drum machine playing and me rapping over it. I had to rhyme the whole song. There was no punching-in and no editing. But it made you better. I had to rehearse for day and days to get it right so I could breeze through it and not f*ck up. ‘Cause if I f*cked up I had to do it over and I only had an hour of studio time—that’s all I could afford. Instead of getting three songs done I could only get one or two done if I wasn’t sharp. The SP-1200, ten seconds of memory, how are we going to make this work? We gotta speed the records way the f*ck up to fit samples in there and slow them back down—that’s what gave them that sound.

I teach a music course now and all of our studios are fully equipped. I don’t even know how to use the sh*t in there. The kids know the equipment better than me. Everything is top of the line, state of the art. When I teach my class I bring my equipment to school so the kids can learn the old way. Some of the kids are talking about deejaying and all they have at the school is virtual sh*t. I brought in my Technics and said we’re going to learn on vinyl first just to see how to do it. You don’t have to go out and use vinyl but it pays to learn how to use it, because that was how it originally started. I feel like when you work with limitations in technology it kind of enhances the skill. It just makes sh*t a little more fun and growing up in that era that’s really what it was about. You made the equipment work for you, not vice versa.

SS: Do you remember how you found the sample to The Bum-Bitch Ballad?

J-Zone: Yeah I do. I used to go the Salvation Army and buy a lot of dollar bin records. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on records. I used to get these RCA Victor French records. They were sh*tty records that no other producers wanted to use. A lot of those records were slow, dreary string records. One day I decided to play the entire record on 45 to see if I could find anything. I just found the loop on 45 pitched way up to plus-8. I just found it, sitting right there. I don’t even remember what record it was. It was some random sh*tty dinner music from the 50’s.

SS: In the book you mentioned that The Bomb Squad were the greatest producers in rap history. I hear the influence in your music. Can you explain why they’re the best?

J-Zone: Because they took a live band approach to sampling. When you listen to old Funk, Jazz, Soul, R&B, or Rock records no two bars are exactly the same. They’re constantly moving and changing. They have solos and breakdowns. With Hip-Hop a lot of it was sequence based. You have three sequences, the intro, the part they rhymed to and the chorus. You had three or four sequences in a 1200 and you arranged them in a song mode. With The Bomb Squad, they were using sequencers and drum machines but it was almost like they were playing sh*t by hand. It was almost like band style, they were improvising and freestyling. So many samples were coming in and out that it blew my mind--Leaders of the New School’s first album was the same way. It’s like a jazz band was playing but they’re all playing samplers. That’s what it sounded like to me, and I thought that was ill. The way they sequenced sh*t was so much more in-depth than what everybody else was doing.

SS: I loved the Willie D Bald Head Hoes reference in the beginning of chapter 23. I know you said Tim Dog’s Penicillin on Wax is your all-time favorite album but where would you rank Willie D’s Controversy?

J-Zone: I love it. I love Controversy but I’m going to go a little further and different and say I’m more into I’m Goin’ Out Like A Soldier, just because he took so many more risks on that album. Controversy came out when I was just getting into rap so I didn’t discover it until years later. I remember seeing Rodney King on TV and he just got his ass whooped for the entire world to see. He was like, “Can we all just get along?” and I was like, come on man! Are you serious? Who paid you to say that sh*t? I felt bad for saying that and all of a sudden Willie D comes out with Rodney K and I was like, Oh sh*t! To come out with that sh*t at that time? He was like, “They need to beat his ass some mo’!” “You talking ‘bout stop the violence/And n*ggas can’t even sh*t in silence!” He was talking about Paula Abdul on that album, he had the diss tracks, and he had The Clean Up Man. Controversy was great but I felt that on I’m Goin’ Out Like A Soldier he showed that he’s extreme, over the top, loud, and funny but he’s also very politically aware.