re: Name a better 90's rap album than Aquemini...

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What about other music; soul, funk?

I grew up in a house, you know…my dad was a trumpet player, he used to play with a jazz cat Solomon Burke…and a lady by the name of Barbara Lynn. He cut some records down in LA before he moved to Texas and they sent him to that Vietnam war and tried to frick him off, kinda. When he got back home from that war a lot of his hopes and dreams to be a professional musician got put on the back burner, he had to work and get his family goin but he always surrounded me with music. At an early age I was listening to BB King, what have you. Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith, Jimmy Mcgriff, you dig? With the obvious Marvin Gayes and the Motown records. I mean I think everybody that growed up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in them households heard them kinda records. I was getting records that normal people might not get to hear, like the deep jazz records and real blues records and then, times he would be actually playing trumpet in my house. I would see that and he would get me instruments, I mean I had a real organ and a real drum set when I was a child; learnin and just playin by ear.

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I mean, I was going to producers trying to buy the song but I couldn’t get what I needed out of em. I would go to em an tell em: look, sample this record and sample this and put this together…and they would try to bring my ideas out of my head and put it onto the tape but they couldn’t quite get it, so at a certain stage I said frick it and bought a drum machine. I already knew how to read music from high school and from playing instruments and shite, and I knew how to play by ear from being around my dad. My Dad’s name is Charleston Butler, by the way. My dad had taught me at a young age and by watching and listening, I learned.

Then my parents broke up when I was about 6 years old, right? My mom ended up remarrying a few years later and ironically my stepfather—his name was Norwood Monroe—he was a band teacher. He knew how to read music and shite and ironically, I don’t know how I got put in that position but he ended up teaching me how to read music. At one point in junior high school he was actually my band teacher, my step-father was. And he would hear me—I always had lil drum machines and was trying to do lil things, whether it was putting two tape decks together and doing dub mixes like that or later on when we got 4-tracks and what not—you know every year for Christmas I got another piece of equipment, and he was listening. I didn’t know he was listening but he told me one day, he said “Man, let me tell you something, that shite you makin is noise. That rap shite is noise,” he said “but let me tell you something before you get mad at me. Man, try to put some music in that shite. I betcha if you can put some music in that you can dominate and you can get rich, know what I mean?” And I thought about it cause at the time, we talking the heyday of New York hip hop, we talking ‘88, ‘89. shite was… you had the Bomb Squad at that time, you know what I mean, shite was kinda noisy back then. It was: take a bunch of samples put ‘em together and you know, a lot of bass and a lot of noise, which at that time was the sound. But he heard something in it that some people had caught on to, like Too $hort.

He was one of the first guys to actually play all the instruments on a record and actually have bass-lines and do that shite for real. By that time I had accumulated a whole bunch of vinyl and shite so I had a bunch of old school records and things of that nature. He told me put some music and that was one of the best things he coulda told me, cause that’s what I did an it worked, man. It worked for us at least. That’s where I get the organ influence, the live bass and the live guitar and the real acoustic pianos and shite like that. That’s where I get the way I make music cause I always remember what he told me. He passed away in 1993, right before the “Pocketful of Stones” remix came out, in fact. The day he died was the day I got the master back before it was about to go on Menace II Society. I got that back the day he died. He told me put some music in that shite, boy, and you gonna win.

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top 10s are nearly impossible

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