“There’s not a lot of dudes making me rewind these days. Everything now is fast forward, next song. Everybody wants to go in the studio and not write their rhymes. What good is not writing your rhymes? It shows!” Blaq Poet’s words drip with venom, his face contorted like a mask in a Greek tragedy when discussing the current state of rap music. It’s hardly new diatribe. But the verbal slings take on renewed vitality when voiced by an artist who participated in rap’s greatest feud —the Bronx vs. Queens— as spearheaded by KRS-One and MC Shan, respectively. In this derivative era of MCs with their noses open, their eyes closed, and their imaginations overactive, Blaq Poet’s unapologetic streetwise bluster is refreshingly welcome. And the irony of getting back to rap’s essence —“bangin’ boom-bap, crazy lyrical content”—as something novel isn’t lost on the grizzled Queensbridge native.
“Back in the day, hip-hop wasn’t everywhere; it was a special thing,” he asserts. “Once the internet and technology became available to people, the music suffered. People started seeing everybody else doing it, they figured ‘Why listen to this dude or that dude? I might as well make the music myself.’ They don’t realize there’s a lot more to it, and that’s where the disconnect comes from. It’s all about who you listening to, who’s teaching you. If the teacher is suspect, so is what he’s rhyming about. With me, there’s nothing put together, nothing fake, no cartoon characters. Everything’s just real.”
Blaq Poet’s vaunted battle rep bubbled for years within the confines of the notorious Queensbridge housing projects. “I just wanted to prove I was the best,” he says flatly. “Nobody really wanted to fight me, so we’d battle instead.” Honoring a dead friend and namesake, he formed the hardcore rap group Screwball, comprised of other QB spitters Hostyle, Solo, and Poet’s cousin KL. Elsewhere, he appeared on the anthemic LP Nas Presents Queensbridge’s Finest, alongside Jungle and Cormega on “Straight Outta Q.B.” Blaq Poet’s refusal to dilute his subject matter or soften his cadence attracted the interest of rap’s most legendary producer, DJ Premier. Preemo, along with fellow luminaries Pete Rock and Marley Marl, laced Screwball’s Y2K album with Poet’s beloved boom-bap. A second album, Loyalty, would follow the next year, thereafter the Screwed Up compilation in 2004. Premier also lent his sonic signature to Poet’s 2006 solid solo debut, Rewind: Deja Screw. Preemo then inked Blaq Poet to his own Year Round Records label.
While preparing his Year Round release, Poet maintained his studio burn, dropping concrete-crusted lyrics on various prominent collaborations. In 2007, he spat on the landmark KRS-One and Marley Marl joint “The Victory,” relinquishing his longstanding rivalry with the KRS and the Bronx. 2008 marked a string of notable guest spots: “Damage” featuring Freddie Foxxx on DJ Revolution’s King of the Decks release; “Militant Soldiers II” with Singapore Cane on Big Shug’s Other Side of the Game album; Premier’s remix of “Just” on Mark Ronson’s Exit Music. Blaq Poet and Premier had successfully set the stage for Poet’s forthcoming album Tha Blaqprint.
“I texture my beats to an MC’s voice and delivery,” Premier notes. “Poet’s delivery is never laid back. Even laid back, he sounds like he’s creeping up to pop you over the head with a baseball bat. There has not been anybody since N.W.A with his kind of attack on the mic. I miss that, but only from a skilled MC, not just someone who’s trying to be angry at the time. It’s using language, whether harsh or not, for the right reasons.”
Poet indeed uses that language deftly on Tha Blaqprint, illuminating the oft-portrayed but seldom understood Queensbridge projects where he still resides. “QB is like everything you heard,” he affirms. “It’s home to those who live there, and it’s definitely not home to people who don’t. My tale is just like every other young dude’s tale from the hood. There were choices to be made. I made certain choices: to run with the goons, to be in the streets. I dropped out of school in the 9th grade. I’d had enough school, I wanted to graduate to the streets. I wanted my own money. I wanted to run with the big guys, the older crowd. It was a real dumb move.”
That’s a poignant narrative for Poet, who off the microphone recedes into a contemplative pose. Everything about him: his eyes, his posture, his demeanor, bespeak a timeworn tenacity and an inevitable exposure to life’s ugliest truths. “I’ve seen a lot of death,” he says quietly. Among those dead as of 2008 is his aforementioned cousin KL, to whom Poet pays earnest tribute on the song “Never Goodbye.” Meanwhile, street life offers other dire perspective: “I’ve had a lot of close encounters with the police too, even to this day. I try not to focus on negative stuff because I’ve seen so much of it. On the flip side, I don’t allow myself to get too gassed on the positive. I was never fooled by the fact that I had people talking about me, that I had a song on the radio. The struggle is never over. I just stay active; people always talk about letting the cards fall where they may, but sometimes you gotta place cards in specific places.”
Tha Blaqprint, due out early 2K9, is Poet’s trump card. Production is entirely Premier, save a joint each from living legend Easy Mo Bee and upcoming beatsmith Gemcrates. Fiery lead single “Ain’t Nuttin’ Changed” is trademark Preemo: sampled hook, pinpoint scratching, and sparse but infectious melody laid over thudding drums. Here, Premier plucks an Akon vocal from the thuggish 50 Cent song “I’ll Still Kill.” “Poet kept saying he wanted to talk about that in the hood, ain’t nothing changed,” Preem recounts. “And I always think about lines from records that’d match. I listened to the 50 record, and without biting what he or Akon did, I flipped it and applied it to fit Poet. Kind of like how “Unbelievable” worked for R. Kelly and Biggie.”
The product is unadulterated street heat; both the beat and lyrics bounce with a raw hunger. The appropriately grimy video, shot on Poet’s very block in QB, features Premier on the turntables amidst Poet and his concrete cavalry. “You never dispose of the DJ or the MC,” Poet fires off. “The only way this ends for me is when I stop breathing. Kids have had fun for years dancing, but now it’s coming back to lyrics and beats. It’s time to get serious again. A lot of dudes are looking at me as the answer, as they way out. I got Queensbridge on my back. The Bridge is never over.”
DJ Premier fleshes out the purist theme: “I need this right now to put the balance back in hip-hop. It’s still serious to us as a music, to speak for people who ain’t really got shit, so they can get their medicine and at least feel a bit better about their lives. You have to speak that language and Poet does that. It’s easy to tell if you’re deep rooted in it, and we are from the day it started. The feeling of what we completed, knowing that we’re doing the right thing by putting it out, always comes first. We’re proud of what we have with Tha Blaqprint. And Year Round Records will keep putting out cutting edge albums that are ahead of what everybody else is doing so we appear to be the architects of it. Everybody else is carbon copies; they fade out, our ink stays.”
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