Masta Ace interview on The Sound of Young America

[YoungAmerican]

I interviewed Masta Ace on my public radio show / podcast The Sound of Young America which ran this week, and I thought people might be interested.

You can get it on the web here (http://tsoya.blogspot.com/2006/08/podcast-symphony-with-masta-ace-and.html), or you can get it (free) in iTunes here (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73331298). I'd love to hear what you think. The other guest on the show, by the way, is comedian Patton Oswalt.

[gotti capone]

I interviewed Masta Ace on my public radio show / podcast The Sound of Young America which ran this week, and I thought people might be interested.
You can get it on the web here (http://tsoya.blogspot.com/2006/08/podcast-symphony-with-masta-ace-and.html), or you can get it (free) in iTunes here (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73331298). I'd love to hear what you think. The other guest on the show, by the way, is comedian Patton Oswalt.



subs

[Bonecatron]

will check it first chance I get, been refreshing myself with his whole catalogue this summer, I like Sittin On Chrome more now than I did then!

[YoungAmerican]

(See below)

[YoungAmerican]

Jesse Thorn: My guest, Masta Ace, is a hip-hop legend who’s been in the game for 20 years, from his first recording, the one we just heard “The Symphony” to the most recent “Disposable Arts” and “A Long Hot Summer”. He has been critically acclaimed although he’s never become a superstar. His influence has been heard across the hip-hop spectrum and particularly in superstar rapper Eminem. Ace, welcome to “The Sound of Young America”.
Masta Ace: How you doing Jesse? Thanks a lot for having me.
Jesse Thorn: I’m doing OK. Tell me, we just heard “The Symphony”, and I’m sure a lot of interviews you do start with “The Symphony”. How old were you when you recorded that track, and how did you end up making that be your first big record?
Masta Ace: Well, I was about 20 or 21. I had just graduated from college, so I was probably the oldest one on the track, and it was really by a strange circumstance that I wound up being on that song. The song was originally slated for Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, Craig G and MC Shan was supposed to be the fourth rapper on the song.
Jesse Thorn: And at the time, if there’s people out there who don’t know, that was the Juice Crew with Marley Marl, who were probably the most powerful crew in hip-hop at the time.
Masta Ace: Right, and MC Shan was at the top of the game at that time. He was the most well known. He was the, out of all of us he had the biggest name, and he wasn’t interested in being on the song with those guys. He felt like he was on a certain level as an artist, and he didn’t want to. He felt like he was I guess to a certain extent, you know, taking a step down to be on a track with a bunch of unknowns at the time. So he elected not to be on the record. I just really just tagged along to the studio session to see, to watch the recording process. I was really just there to watch Kane and G Rap do their thing in the studio, and when it got time to do the recording of the vocals, there was a big debate about who was going to rhyme first. No one wanted to rap first. And so Marley Marl called on me to kind of just warm up the mike and get those guys loosened up, because everybody was kind of tense. And I went in and spit my verse just really, just to kind of set the tone. And Marley liked the verse enough and wound up keeping it on the song and the rest is history.
Jesse Thorn: One of the interesting things about your story, or especially the story about your recording career, is that there is kind of a gap where you’re doing records with other people and stuff like that but you don’t release anything under your own name in mid-, late-1990s. What was it that precipitated you sort of leaving the game for the most part for a while?
Masta Ace: Well I was at the time I was signed at Delicious Vinyl, and that was for my second and third albums, “SlaughtaHouse” and “Sittin’ on Chrome”. And after “Sittin’ on Chrome” came out, I signed a new deal with Big B Atlantic Records, and that was the label back in New York City. I recorded with that label for about a year and a half, but the album that I was doing never came out. So between probably the whole year of 1996 and part of 97, I recorded that album. At the same time I was also executive producing for an artist of LaShay [sp] and another female artist by the name of Paula Perry, and she was on Mercury and subsequently wound up on Motown. And what happened was during that time between 97 and 99 my album got shelved, the one that was supposed to come out on Big B got shelved, so I had 17, 18 songs done, never came out. And then the two projects, the Paula Parry project that I was working on, that got shelved. And the LaShay project fell on bad fortune being signed to Warner Brothers and that whole major label thing. So there were three projects in a row that just really didn’t work out the way they should have and I was a little disenchanted. I wasn’t really interested in being a part of the music industry. I was a little angry, a little bitter about a lot of things, and so I stepped away from the music for a while.
Jesse Thorn: What were you doing while you were away from music?
Masta Ace: Well, I went into production really heavy. I started kind of running around, shopping beats to artists and managers, trying to get work on the production side. I decided that being behind the scenes was, you know, maybe something I really wanted to focus on more. So I started shopping around tracks and trying to get production work.
Jesse Thorn: What was it that drew you out? You released a record a couple of years ago called “Disposable Arts”.
Masta Ace: Right.
Jesse Thorn: Which is an exceptional record and was exceptionally well reviewed.
Masta Ace: Thank you.
Jesse Thorn: And, you know, independently successful. And I wonder, what was it that drew you out? What drew you into making that record?
Masta Ace: It was two, the main thing that happened was, I did a small tour in 2000 overseas. I did like 15 shows over in England and a couple of spots over in Europe, and I was just amazed at the response I got from people overseas. The turn outs at the shows were incredible, the response, the love that I got being on stage, gave me, when I got back home I had this renewed energy and faith in hip-hop and the fans. And I came to the realization that there were people out there that still wanted to hear me make music. And when I came home from that tour at the end of 2000, I was in the studio at the top of the year 2001 recording “Disposable Arts”.
Jesse Thorn: Both of these records are very high concept sort of story records. And I wonder, how did you end up moving that direction starting with “Disposable Arts” and then with “Long Hot Summer” which follows the same story line but earlier on the timeline?
Masta Ace: Right well, from pretty much from my second album “SlaughtaHouse” through “Sittin’ on Chrome”, there was always sort of a theme to each album that I had done. So this wasn’t really anything very different from what I had done, except that there were, the only difference was that on “Disposable” and “Long Hot Summer” I had kind of main characters with actual lines and that kind of thing. “Sittin’ on Chrome” I had a main character, my cousin Jerome was a character on that album. But It’s was just me kind of feeding my need to be a creative writer. I’ve always been into writing. So it’s a way for me to not just make a record, but kind of to fill that thirst to write. And so I get to write kind of scripts in a way, and I get to write characters and character traits and I put all of that into the records just to kind of make it more of a fun experience for listeners. I try to make a record that I would like to buy and hear and enjoy. So I’m thinking that way when I’m in the studio putting these projects together.
Jesse Thorn: This is a song off “Disposable Arts” called “Dear Diary”. And I want to talk a little bit about what motivated this song and what your perspective in writing this song was. But let’s just let it roll for now. This is a song from Masta Ace’s album “Disposable Arts”. It’s called “Dear Diary”.
[music: Masta Ace’s “Dear Diary”]
Jesse Thorn: That’s Masta Ace with his song “Dear Diary” from his album “Disposable Arts”. I’m your host Jesse Thorn, America’s Radio Sweetheart, and Masta Ace is our guest. Now Ace, I mean I’m sure you know that but that’s a harshly self-critical song for like a grunge rock song, much less a hip-hop track.
Masta Ace: Yeah well it was, that song was recorded. I had a battle, a battle, I had had this battle very like right before that song was recorded and I was real angry with myself because I let myself get even get involved in the battle and then I wasn’t properly prepared and I took a bad loss. I’m my own worst critic, so it was kind of a way for me to kind of exorcise some demons and kind of get at myself, and kind of beat myself up a little bit.
Jesse Thorn: There’s a lot of that on “Disposable Arts”. There’s a lot of darkness on that record, a lot of sort of surprising self-introspection thing like that, that you don’t necessarily hear, you know, at least maybe outside of the context of, you know, violence on a hip-hop record. And that’s something that’s really striking about it.
Masta Ace: Well, it’s to me I think honesty, people respect honesty. I think that the fans want to hear honesty. And the best thing that I ever did was record that song “Dear Diary” because in certain way I was able to say the things that I kind of felt like people were saying. I kind of said it for them, and then in that way I was able to kind of take away some of the power of their words, or their negative words, if I just let it be known “Hey I know what you’re saying. I know what you’re probably thinking.” And then maybe you know I’m thinking the same thing or feeling the same way sometimes, and so that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with feeling that way. I can take it, and I can still be me and still thrive.
Jesse Thorn: So the story line of “Disposable Arts” follows a protagonist who’s just been released from prison and he goes to a school for hip-hop and he’s going through. He’s trying to find a new place in his old life. The story line of the new record moves back before the protagonist has gone to jail, and I wonder what made you want to go back to that perspective?
Masta Ace: “Disposable Arts” when it came out didn’t get the type of exposure it should’ve gotten because the label that it was on, they folded right after it came out. So only a certain amount of albums was ever pressed up. And I was trying to think of a way to make people go back and get that album, because we were planning on re-releasing it on CD. It’s on vinyl but we’re going to re-release it on CD. And I just wanted that album to get its fair shake. So I thought the best way to do that would be to connect the two albums together. So if people heard “A Long Hot Summer” but had never heard “Disposable” they would be tempted to go find out the rest of the story and thus go back and check out that album. Which is, I feel like that album needs to be heard.
Jesse Thorn: You are listening to “The Sound of Young America” on “The Sound of Young America” audio entertainment network my guest is Masta Ace. We’ll be back in just one short minute.

[YoungAmerican]

Jesse Thorn: My guest on “The Sound of Young America” is Masta Ace. His new record in stored is called “A Long Hot Summer”. He also has another one stores that we have been talking about, “Disposable Arts”, along with a number of records he recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ace, you’ve worked with such a broad array of producers on these records. And the producers that you’ve worked with for the most part are not name brand producers by any means. These are the most underground of underground producers, and even, you know, we played a track earlier in the hour that you recorded on your new album called “Beautiful” that’s produced by a guy who lives, apparently from the liner notes, in Croatia.
Masta Ace: Yeah.
Jesse Thorn: And I wonder, how do you go through this process of finding all these beats? You know, I know you mentioned that you had been trying to be a producer for a while yourself. But I wonder, how do you pick and choose all these different people, you know, all over the world and yet still maintain a single sort of musical perspective on the record?
Masta Ace: It’s difficult because when I’m working on a record, there’s got to be 20, 30 producers all submitting tracks at the same time, and each CD might have 30 beats on it. And it’s a lot to sort through and I do my best to sort through all of it to try and find that one gem on a CD. But the Kool Aid thing worked out because his manager.
Jesse Thorn: Kool Aid the producer of
Masta Ace: Kool Aid of “Beautiful”.
Jesse Thorn: “Beautiful”
Masta Ace: His manager was in New York during the time I was recording “Disposable”, and he was actually acquainted with Paul Nice, who’s another producer off that album. And Paul had already heard some of the beats, and he kind of gave me the inside track. Like you know, “This guy’s in town from Croatia. He got some nice tracks. You should check them out.” So I met him over at his studio and sat down with him and listened to a bunch of beats and you know that’s how the relationship got started, and this is on “Disposable”. So we worked together on “Disposable Arts” and then our relationship just carried over to the new album.
[music: Masta Ace “Beautiful”]
Jesse Thorn: Was it a conscious choice to reach out to such a sort of broad variety of producers, or was it in part dictated by necessity that you can’t afford to buy a beat from Timbaland? What was what led you have so many different voices on the production?
Masta Ace: Well definitely cost was part of it, because you can only afford so many name brand producers and that had to be a consideration. I’ve always throughout my career worked with kind of these unknown kind of talented producers and it was kind of just really along the same lines of how I had been working. And the other thing with that is that I’m kind of a hands on artist and I get involved in the production process and so a lot of times with the bigger name guys they’re very hands on and they don’t want anybody kind of touching their tracks. But the younger cats are a little more open to you know letting you do your thing and so that’s why it kind of worked for me that way.
Jesse Thorn: Well, Ace, we’re practically out of time. I want to give you a chance, we’ve got one track left. This is a single from your new album. It’s called “Good Old Love”.
Masta Ace: Yeah.
Jesse Thorn: It’s produced by Ninth Wonder, who’s actually, who I interviewed on a different show before his record. He’s in a group called Little Brother.
Masta Ace: Little Brother, yeah.
Jesse Thorn: Before the Little Brother record came out, which is like two years ago, something like that, my timeline is all messed up, but it was definitely before I graduated from college, so that’s like two years ago. Tell me a little bit about how you hooked up with Ninth Wonder, and tell me a little bit about this track that we’re going to play for your outro.
Masta Ace: This track was on a CD maybe seven other producers’ tracks. It was presented to me by a young lady who was kind of brokering deals with producers. I heard the track. I had no idea who produced it, but I knew I wanted to use it. I found out later that it was Ninth Wonder. We wound up meeting before we recorded the track because I had a show in Raleigh/Durham, that’s where he’s from, North Carolina. Went out there. Did the Show. Got to meet him. You know, he’s a real cool dude. And maybe 2, 3 weeks later, he sent the track through the mail and, you know, we got it done.
Jesse Thorn: Tell me a little bit about what you’re talking about on this track “Good Old Love”.
Masta Ace: It’s really just saying to fans, the hip-hop industry, the world, that, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Maybe there’s a little feeling of underappreciation, and on this last go around, show me some love here.
Jesse Thorn: Our guest on “The Sound of Young America” has been Masta Ace. Ace, your website is MasterAce.com, all one word?
Masta Ace: Yeah, all one word.
Jesse Thorn: Ace, thank you so much for coming on the program.
Masta Ace: Thank you, Jesse. Appreciate it.
Jesse Thorn: Hey and thank you for making the records as well.
Masta Ace: Thank you.