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First he got the White boy. Then he added the bulletproof guy. Now the legendary Dr. Dre has inducted more all-stars into the Aftermath family. You sucker MCs better run for cover. Their arsenal is more awesome than yours.
The Ambassador Hotel has been quiet for a minute; she’s been standing silent in the mad static that is Los Angeles since 1989. It’s the place where a man named Sirhan Sirhan squeezed a trigger back in 1968. Robert Kennedy was running for his own set of White House keys. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated two months earlier and Bobby was set to revive the dream that his big brother John Fitzgerald kicked off earlier in the decade. JFK’s dream would fade back in ’63 as he rode, down in Texas, with his drop top dropped.
Hip-hop luminaries like Dr. Dre, Busta Rhymes, Eve and the highly anticipated Compton MC The Game—believe it or not—have been shot here too (for this here magazine). Dre knows of drive-bys, but he prefers drive-time radio.
Aftermath Records, his company, is his focus. Busta Rhymes has joined; Eve is back in the fold, The Game is set to blow. The new Aftermath is alive and well and Dre is President. Here’s what the commander in chief and his joint chiefs of staff have to say about their revolution.
Bussa-Bus Down
Busta Rhymes on Aftermath. Do you feel like this is some kind of rebirth?
It’s definitely a rebirth. It kinda feels like, when you’re playing the game—whatever game—and you’ve got different levels and shit, and you get to the grandmaster level. You get an opportunity to see certain moves that could be made in a chess game—and it don’t matter how many times or how long you’ve been playing this chess game—you figure out a new way to conquer the challenge.
First you leave J Records, and then your girl Rah Digga bounces. Is your personal good fortune the end of Flip Mode?
First of all, there isn’t an end of Flip Mode, and second of all, I’m a loyal dude. I’m an extremist when it comes to being committed. So in terms of the Rah Digga situation, number one, I wouldn’t want something that means a lot to me to not be close to me. When I left Elektra it was the same situation—everybody came with me. Leave J Records, everybody gotta come with me. The rap game’s flushing out the bullshitters and all the unnecessary muthafuckas that have been in it for a while.
What do you mean by flushing?
Like just the way that the whole industry is changing, with the firing of bosses and executives, the letting go of a lot of artists on labels, ’cause they’re not really serving a purpose, they ain’t really making the money, they’re not really selling records. This flushing has been a long time coming.
So your relationship with [J Records honcho] Clive Davis is… in the toilet?
No, not at all. Me and Clive—our relationship is good. It’s just that their structure ain’t set up to deal with my kind of hip-hop music. I’ve been in the business for a long time; I understand how to nip shit in the bud to avoid wasting as much time as I might have in the past. I value time a lot more than I did years ago ’cause I understand the importance of every millisecond.
How many milliseconds did it take for you to make the jump to Aftermath?
Me and Dre, whenever we hooked up we’d talk about the possibility of being on the same team. We then had the opportunity to work on the Genesis album together; once we got in the studio I had four or five days to get as many joints from him that I could get. He had a couple of movies at the time—Training Day and The Wash—I was shooting Halloween: Resurrection… so it turned out that we could only work three or four days together. So I slept in the studio.
Anyways, Mike Lynn [A&R] is like Dre’s right hand—he’s the point person that we deal with at the ’Math. Mike Lynn was real instrumental in making this whole thing come together. From Genesis to this point we always maintained communication and kept it open.
That must’ve been a painful process with the contracts.
It was about six, seven months. With me, it was a painful process in itself because it was time being lost over technicalities; that’s really trivial bullshit at the end of the day.
How did your last record do?
I think I did about 700,000. So that kinda thing brings out the beast out of a ***** like me, man. Now there’s no way to go other than to smash everything.
Smash everything, meaning...
Coming out, doing what you gotta do and not compromising the value of the thing in the slightest way, ’cause at that point you’re left with no choice. The fact that Aftermath is my new home speaks for itself.
When are you coming out?
I’m scheduled for July, a hot summer jump-off.
So production on the album is gonna be all Dre or what?
Nah, a lot of these muthafuckas don’t even got a name. That’s something that I’ve always been good at: I fuck with the dudes who are on some straight-starving, stomach-chewing on they back… and then I fuck with the A-list, high-caliber producers too.
Are your hip-hop contemporaries shocked by your Aftermath power move?
Nobody saw this coming—I mean, six, seven months ago I didn’t see it coming. It wasn’t until one situation was maxed out and it was time to explore another that I knew that the possibility was likely. But the nail is in the coffin now.
It’s an honor to be inaugurated into a major family. I respect and I appreciate every team player in this family—from Game to Eve, 50, Em, D12, Obie Trice, Dre—*****s do they job. Ain’t no weak links, ain’t no loopholes, ain’t no stupid shit—everybody’s holding the fort down, everybody jellin’ and reppin’ each other’s movement.
The Ambassador Hotel has been quiet for a minute; she’s been standing silent in the mad static that is Los Angeles since 1989. It’s the place where a man named Sirhan Sirhan squeezed a trigger back in 1968. Robert Kennedy was running for his own set of White House keys. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated two months earlier and Bobby was set to revive the dream that his big brother John Fitzgerald kicked off earlier in the decade. JFK’s dream would fade back in ’63 as he rode, down in Texas, with his drop top dropped.
Hip-hop luminaries like Dr. Dre, Busta Rhymes, Eve and the highly anticipated Compton MC The Game—believe it or not—have been shot here too (for this here magazine). Dre knows of drive-bys, but he prefers drive-time radio.
Aftermath Records, his company, is his focus. Busta Rhymes has joined; Eve is back in the fold, The Game is set to blow. The new Aftermath is alive and well and Dre is President. Here’s what the commander in chief and his joint chiefs of staff have to say about their revolution.
Bussa-Bus Down
Busta Rhymes on Aftermath. Do you feel like this is some kind of rebirth?
It’s definitely a rebirth. It kinda feels like, when you’re playing the game—whatever game—and you’ve got different levels and shit, and you get to the grandmaster level. You get an opportunity to see certain moves that could be made in a chess game—and it don’t matter how many times or how long you’ve been playing this chess game—you figure out a new way to conquer the challenge.
First you leave J Records, and then your girl Rah Digga bounces. Is your personal good fortune the end of Flip Mode?
First of all, there isn’t an end of Flip Mode, and second of all, I’m a loyal dude. I’m an extremist when it comes to being committed. So in terms of the Rah Digga situation, number one, I wouldn’t want something that means a lot to me to not be close to me. When I left Elektra it was the same situation—everybody came with me. Leave J Records, everybody gotta come with me. The rap game’s flushing out the bullshitters and all the unnecessary muthafuckas that have been in it for a while.
What do you mean by flushing?
Like just the way that the whole industry is changing, with the firing of bosses and executives, the letting go of a lot of artists on labels, ’cause they’re not really serving a purpose, they ain’t really making the money, they’re not really selling records. This flushing has been a long time coming.
So your relationship with [J Records honcho] Clive Davis is… in the toilet?
No, not at all. Me and Clive—our relationship is good. It’s just that their structure ain’t set up to deal with my kind of hip-hop music. I’ve been in the business for a long time; I understand how to nip shit in the bud to avoid wasting as much time as I might have in the past. I value time a lot more than I did years ago ’cause I understand the importance of every millisecond.
How many milliseconds did it take for you to make the jump to Aftermath?
Me and Dre, whenever we hooked up we’d talk about the possibility of being on the same team. We then had the opportunity to work on the Genesis album together; once we got in the studio I had four or five days to get as many joints from him that I could get. He had a couple of movies at the time—Training Day and The Wash—I was shooting Halloween: Resurrection… so it turned out that we could only work three or four days together. So I slept in the studio.
Anyways, Mike Lynn [A&R] is like Dre’s right hand—he’s the point person that we deal with at the ’Math. Mike Lynn was real instrumental in making this whole thing come together. From Genesis to this point we always maintained communication and kept it open.
That must’ve been a painful process with the contracts.
It was about six, seven months. With me, it was a painful process in itself because it was time being lost over technicalities; that’s really trivial bullshit at the end of the day.
How did your last record do?
I think I did about 700,000. So that kinda thing brings out the beast out of a ***** like me, man. Now there’s no way to go other than to smash everything.
Smash everything, meaning...
Coming out, doing what you gotta do and not compromising the value of the thing in the slightest way, ’cause at that point you’re left with no choice. The fact that Aftermath is my new home speaks for itself.
When are you coming out?
I’m scheduled for July, a hot summer jump-off.
So production on the album is gonna be all Dre or what?
Nah, a lot of these muthafuckas don’t even got a name. That’s something that I’ve always been good at: I fuck with the dudes who are on some straight-starving, stomach-chewing on they back… and then I fuck with the A-list, high-caliber producers too.
Are your hip-hop contemporaries shocked by your Aftermath power move?
Nobody saw this coming—I mean, six, seven months ago I didn’t see it coming. It wasn’t until one situation was maxed out and it was time to explore another that I knew that the possibility was likely. But the nail is in the coffin now.
It’s an honor to be inaugurated into a major family. I respect and I appreciate every team player in this family—from Game to Eve, 50, Em, D12, Obie Trice, Dre—*****s do they job. Ain’t no weak links, ain’t no loopholes, ain’t no stupid shit—everybody’s holding the fort down, everybody jellin’ and reppin’ each other’s movement.
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