Hip-Hop Wired: Speaking on the project, do you think it’s gotten the desired effect early on or is it still work to be done?
P: There’s always work to be done, but we basically put out this tape to service the fans. It really wasn’t about nothing but that. They’ve been waiting so long, so we had to give them something. And we didn’t want to sell ourselves short at the same time. Basically, BOOM can get big. If it does, you know… if it doesn’t, if it uses more promotion, that’s cool. If it doesn’t, we got sh*t that’s going to be big on its own coming out next.
Joon: Joon is just ready for the next sh*t to come out.
Hip-Hop Wired: Ha! I feel that. The project dons older material, but a cluster of songs have a love theme. How did you go about arcing a story out of older material?
Kent: That was actually kind of hard. We went through, like, sending each other playlist to everybody sending to one email to bringing in other people. I think it just came to… we knew which songs that we were going to use for the album, 2008. We knew which songs that we would want to put out to sell, but at the same time, we wanted to — like he said — service the fans.
We kind of wanted to crossover into, uhh… I don’t know. We kind of make — I don’t know what type of music you can describe if for, but most Black people, or people that we went to school with, aren’t accustomed to the music that we make. So, we wanted to service the streets kind of.
If you listen to most of the beats or listen to most of the content, people always say, from the reviews that I’ve read, that it kind of gets into the place where we’re talking about a lot of girls and we’re talking about a lot of weed. I mean, I don’t like to be boxed in, but coming from the West Coast, that’s what we see a lot of. And I think we were servicing our fans mainly on the West Coast.
It’s some elements that you don’t get; it’s just so West Coast. It might be a store that you’ve never been to or a person who we all went to high school with that’s just so random, and you wouldn’t appreciate it. But, I feel like we had to take care of — people tell us all the time that if you don’t got your own city, then it’s going to be hard to kind of take over the rest of the U.S.A.; let alone the world.
We were servicing our fans, but it was more of a bubble of the district that we come from in Los Angeles. I think just us focusing on that part of the world is what made everything organic the most, and it just kind of formed itself.
Hip-Hop Wired: In going through that thought process, were the songs’ concepts or production the determining factor in selecting which cuts made it?
Cream: It’s like a mixture. Sometimes, Kent will have a concept or, you know, Joon will have a concept. Sometimes Axel and Ricky — that’s THC — they’ll just have a beat and they’ll just throw it on; and we’ll just vibe on it. We don’t force music.
Kent: We’ll just go to the studio, and nobody will have sh*t. We’ll just smoke and watch f**kin’ Love & Hip Hop the whole day, and leave. I remember one time, me and P got a verse off. And Joon wrote his sh*t, and didn’t like it and stormed out the studio. But, at the end of the day we don’t force sh*t.
Joon: Man, I f**ked my car up storming out the studio too. I hit a f**king pole.
Kent: He was so mad he couldn’t get his verse out, then ended up changing the verse and you know, it still flows together. At the end of the day, we don’t ever force sh*t. We don’t force the music. We might have to force getting on stage because my voice is horse, or because Cream got a headache, but we never force the music.
