Interview: J-Zone on fur coats, malt liquor beats and the irresistible allure of music

J-Zone has been a cult favorite since the very beginning. Coming of age in New York during hip hop’s teething period in the 80s and 90s, he developed a low tolerance for time-wasting but a high threshold for curiosity, delving through his family’s record collection and any instruments that were lying around. Once J-Zone realized he could piece together a hip hop record all on his own, the flood gates were opened: he landed an internship at Power Play, and became in-house engineer at Vance Wright’s studio, before attending SUNY Purchase College for audio engineering.

Soaking up all this knowledge and influence lead to his debut album Music For Tu Madre: an irreverent slice of narratorial artistry, with breakneck sampling and honest social observations, full of verses focused on everything from frustration with the daily grind to dating tips. With A Bottle Of Whup Ass, the madcap J-Zone persona became more fully developed, setting the scene for the much loved and critically-lauded Pimps Don’t Pay Taxes with his Old Maid Billionaire crew Huggy & Al-Shid. But as the Billionaires went their separate ways, and after his solo albums $ick Of Being Rich and A Job Ain’t Nuthin’ But Work displayed just as many un-apologetically nonconformist beats and confrontational rhymes as ever, the J-Zone story drew to its (perhaps inevitable) conclusion.

J-Zone opted to retire in 2006, playing his last show with Cee-Lo Green to a handful of A-list friends. Whether the going was rough or smooth, J-Zone could always see a great story through the haze, leading to plenty of good material for his 2011 book Root For The Villain: Rap, Bullshit, And A Celebration Of Failure. Still as unpredictable as ever, J-Zone has returned to music with a new record Peter Pan Syndrome, adding to the catalogue that is a testament to just what you can achieve whether the world is on your side or not. In this edited and condensed excerpt of his interview with RBMA Radio, Chairman Mao quizzes about his career thus far.

You grew up on funk, as opposed to hip hop, right?

I wasn’t initially very into hip hop. I mean, I knew Run-DMC, I had the New York City Breakers’ tape. We used to try to breakdance. But I wasn’t really buying records. I was strictly into funk at that time. But in the late ‘80s, when MTV Raps started coming on my friend was telling me, “You got to watch this show. You got to be more in tuned with what young black kids your age are doing because you’re listening to stuff, walking around with this big fro and you’re listening to records no one cares about. Nobody knows BT Express.”

So I started buying stuff like Word Up magazine and checking out MTV Raps, and I noticed that they were sampling records that I was listening to. I played bass from maybe four to fifth grade to high school. I played sax, a bunch of instruments. I used to buy funk records to play bass to. I thought I was going to be a funk musician – Kool & the Gang, Brass Construction, James Brown, BT Express, Slave, Ohio Players, records like that.

I didn’t have anybody to play with musically [though]. You read about Kool & the Gang – eight guys from Jersey City all at high school together, a drummer and a bass player. I didn’t have anybody who wanted to do that because I was going to school in Westchester County in suburbia. Even in the city, everybody was into hip hop. Nobody was into funk.

I was like, well, I have all these records. I know a lot about music. I have a better chance doing what the hip hop guys are doing by using my musical knowledge to sample stuff and make my own thing rather than pursue the funk thing. It was almost like something l could pursue without anybody’s help. I could do hip hop all by myself, stay in my room, learn to make beats, rhyming.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in the Bronx but I grew up going back and forth between Jamaica, Queens and Westchester County. My parents lived in Rack City, and they left when my mother was pregnant with me because the crime was getting really out of control. My father moved up to Westchester because one of his co-workers lived there. They get there and they realized, “Wait a minute, this is an all-white town.” I was an only child, and I felt alienated a lot because everywhere I went, I was different. You’re not growing up on the streets like those kids in Queens, and in Westchester you’re the only black kid in school. So I spent a lot of time alone.

Was your family musical?

Yeah. I started going through my parents’ records when I was maybe three or four years old. My uncle played drums as a hobby. My dad played piano, flute, trumpet. We always had instruments lying around my grandmother’s house. I’d picked up the bass because I found a record by Slave, a funk group. I remember the bass player, Mark Adams, was playing the bass like a guitar. I had never heard anybody play bass like that. And, to this day, I still haven’t. I would sit there, and I would just play to these records. The very first Earth, Wind and Fire album. Kool & the Gang’s “Music Is the Message” was another one. Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s In the Jungle, Babe.

So when did you get into hip hop fully?

Probably around 1989. By 1991, I had every tape, knew everything. I went back and got everything. In two years, I went and did basically a crash course. At that point I was getting sick of playing bass, and I was looking to do the hip hop thing, so I began to look at the liner notes and see the studios people were recording in. I was like, “I wonder if I could get in there and see how it works?”

So in the summer of ’92, for about two months, I interned at Power Play. I didn’t do anything important really. I would go into the rear room and rearrange the tapes. I would sweep up stuff. I was cleaning out toilets. I was going to get food for people. But it was cool because at that time, pre-Internet, everything was out of reach to the average fan. I mean, I was watching Akinyele record Vagina Diner with Large Professor and Rob Swift. I was sitting there when he recorded “I Luh Her,” and I was like, “Oh, shit!” Listening to him say this crazy shit about his girl being pregnant and throwing her down the stairs? I was telling my friends I was in the studio with these people, and they didn’t believe me.

After that summer I knew I wanted to get into the business. I had some friends that knew Vance Wright, Slick Rick’s DJ, and eventually I was able to meet him. It was a Thursday, 3:00 PM, so I had to cut my last period class. We went to Vance’s studio in New Rochelle. I played them a demo of mine, and he put me on as an intern.

That summer of ‘94 I was interning for free, but I was learning. He said, “You only have to come two days a week.” But I was there six, because I wanted to learn fast. He saw I was hungry, so by the time my senior year started in the fall, I was a paid engineer. Every day after school I was doing sessions. I was making more money doing that than I’ve made throughout most of my professional career, because I was in there all the time. I did that for about three years. When I went to college, Vance shut down the studio – and that was when I started working on my first album.

Your first album was Music for Tu Madre, which was put out in 1998.

Yes. I was a music major at SUNY Purchase, so I had to do an album for our senior project and Music was that project. I put my grandmother on the cover with a joint in her mouth and a 40 and a bat, middle finger up. I just said, “Let me make this look crazy, so people will stop and ask what it is.” Because I didn’t have any famous guests, I wasn’t part of that whole indie scene at that time. I was coming out of nowhere. I’d never done shows before. Nothing.

I was the total opposite of the J-Zone character when I was younger. I was really shy and reserved. I didn’t really like being around a lot of people, I kind of stayed to myself. I was never into girlfriends and shit. I was into music and playing sports. I always was just kind of an odd duck. The on-record persona helped me get out of my shell. Music is much more subdued than my later albums, because when I did my first album that was kind of like how I was.

When I started doing shows and getting around to support Music, that was when I realized that the indie rap scene was really a poor man’s mainstream. I thought it was like the safe haven for creativity, where everybody was cool. But there were rules to it, just like there were rules to the mainstream. In the indie scene, you can’t come on stage with a fur coat. You can’t listen to Big Tymers and E-40, but still be influenced by Mr. Hood. When I came out with Bottle of Whup Ass that was the beginning of me embracing the black sheep role and going further down the road of “fuck everybody.”

Can you talk a bit about Pimps Don’t Pay Taxes? It’s often regarded as your most popular album.

It is. But I had a lot of personal things that I was going through when I made it behind the scenes that give me a bittersweet taste in my mouth. It was probably the least fun I ever had making an album.

Huggy [Bear] and Al-Shid were on my first album. Al-Shid has been a friend of mine since we were in college, and we’re still boys to this day. Hug was a good friend of my friend DJ Double A. It’s not like we were childhood friends who had a group. It’s not like we sat down and said “We’re a group.” We were three separate solo artists. And when it was collaborative efforts, it all fell under the J-Zone thing, so it became J-Zone and the Old Maid Billionaires.

We were young and we didn’t know all the stuff about the business, and we just weren’t communicating. All of us. I was just equally at fault. The buzz after the Bottle of Whup Ass EP was that they wanted a J-Zone album with a Hug and Al-Shid full-length. People wanted more rhymes about Lucy Liu, more accordion beats. I accidentally pigeonholed myself into this corner, from a business perspective. I was like, we got to give to people what they want.  

I wanted to try new stuff, Hug and Shid were solo artists, so obviously they have their own ideas of what they want to do. None of us really wanted to go the route musically that Pimps Don’t Pay Taxes went, but I knew that the album was going to do well on an indie level. We did it because, at that time, distributors were just starting to take me on. I was like, “Let’s just do this album, so I can get myself in a higher position so I could be in a better position to help you out with your solo stuff.” They were like, “All right, cool.”

We did it, but then after that we just started clashing. We wanted to go in different directions. The fans and the distributors and the stores and the writers, the reviewers, they wanted more slapstick Old Maid Billionaires comedy. I wanted to go straight into production and not rap at all; Al-Shid at that time wanted to go into a much more street sound; and Hug, musically, wanted to go in a different direction. I don’t blame them because we had been doing that formula for years. I’m extremely proud of Pimps. But from a musical and behind-the-scenes standpoint, it was really chaotic so I don’t really like to revisit the album that much.

On your next album, $ick Of Bein' Rich, you had a song called “Fuck You, Pay Me.”

That was a reaction to being pigeonholed with my first three albums. It was indie hip hop to “do things for the love,” but I also love to keep my lights on. I mean, I’m a musician. I work. Just because I’m not driven by capitalism when I make my music doesn’t mean that you can ask me for a beat for free. I mean, all the countless hours that go into this stuff, the equipment that was bought...

You wouldn’t go into CVS and ask for some medicine and just say, “Give me this medicine for the love of hemorrhoids.” No. If you got hemorrhoids and you go get medicine, and you take it to the cashier and pay for it. You want to get your transfat on at White Castle. You don’t say, “For the love of transfat give me those onion rings.” The music business is the only field where people step to you for product and expect to get it for free.

After you felt like you were pigeonholed, you did a lot of different stuff. Can you talk about some of those projects?

Around 2004, I decided that I wanted to start doing more side projects because I felt the J-Zone persona had caught up to me. The slapstick and antics of those records began to overshadow the fact that I was a serious musician. So I said I’m going to focus more on things that highlight my production and less of my personality. I said, “Let me try to see if I can turn my career around.” Because the interest of J-Zone solo records after A Job Ain’t Nuthin But Work was then near-dead.

First, I tried some remix stuff. Then I had a group called Boss Hog Barbarians. I figured if there was another rapper there with me, it would balance it out. It was still like a J-Zone record, just with another person there. After that I was in the doghouse, so I said. “I’m just going to be a serious producer.” That’s when I did the Hendrix tribute [Experienced] and the To Love a Hooker instrumental records. When [J Dilla’s] Donuts came out, everybody was making instrumental songs. I thought, “Let me try to do it with a concept to make it more than just a beat tape.” All those records didn’t catch, though.

With Chief Chinchilla - Live at the Liqua Sto, I was inspired by the St. Ides [malt liquor] commercial. I knew that the concept was going to be too much for the people. And the voice drew the Quasimoto comparison. It was sort of like I couldn’t win. All those projects were meant to try to get me back into contention as a serious producer and create less emphasis on my persona as a rapper. It didn’t really work that well for me, but that was the point.

You left music in 2008 or 2009. Why was that?

It was something I couldn’t see coming because I have been active as a musician since I was four or five. When you’re maybe 31, 32, 33, there’s a pressure. You look around, you’re on Facebook and everybody is getting married, having kids, getting promoted. You’re kind of just hanging on to hip hop by a hangnail, making no money, your profile is down. You don’t want to be one of those artists where you just feel like everybody in the room is looking at you like, “Damn, your time’s up, but you don’t know it.” Just the thought of being that guy scared the shit out of me. So I tried to enter the “real world” and started looking for jobs. I didn’t have the money to go back to school. I was starting from the bottom.

At one point, I was working from 8 AM to 11 PM and making $150 a day after taxes, gas, expenses. I was drinking Speed Stack to stay awake. I was falling apart. I would be driving home from my second job and I would stop on the side of the road and go to sleep for 10, 15 minutes just so I could make it home, and I’m looking at my bank account and there’s still nothing there. I’m like, “If I keep doing this I’m going to die.”

That was an unhappy time around 2010. I was working these jobs, and I was getting letters from distributors telling me they were going to destroy all my vinyl. Then my digital distributor said they were going to pull all my shit off from iTunes. And then somebody wiped down my Wikipedia page. Like, all this shit happened over the course of three days while I’m going to work and dealing with this shit... I felt like I had to just vent. So I started working on a book to try to demystify some of the music business stuff and talk about what happens when you leave music. You don’t hear about that. All these artists over the years who were big in the past or even had marginal success. Where did they go? I was like, “I can’t be the only one going through this shit. It’s just nobody wants to admit it.”

How did Peter Pan Syndrome come about?

Some of the stuff from the book felt like they might make good songs. So the new album, Peter Pan Syndrome, is just addressing what I’m dealing with now. You’re not married. You don’t have kids. I live with and look after my grandmother who’s 90 and senile. My life is not like everybody else. You start to doubt yourself sometimes.

I addressed a lot of the stuff with humor because that’s how I cope with stuff. I’m avoiding reality completely and doing whatever the hell I want. I’m doing 90 headed towards the brick wall and laughing. I know I’m getting myself into a hole, but that’s really what the album is: It’s maybe my last hurrah before reality finally wakes me up and I realize that I have to make some kind of change.

Your book is subtitled “Rap, Bull$hit, and a Celebration of Failure.” Can you explain that a bit?

You have to learn to embrace failure a little bit because it’s inevitable. Everybody is so busy trying to not fail, especially in American society. Everybody’s expectation is so high that failure is inevitable. I was able to make a living doing what I love, to a degree. I still am, but I didn’t make it big. People still say, “Who?” when you say my name. I was a commercial failure, but I was able to put out the music I wanted. Failure or success is, to me, totally subjective. It’s really how you react to it.

Life is so quick. I’m looking at my grandmother, she’s 90 years old. She can’t remember anything. Her memory is all messed up and everything. You have to look at the grand scope of things. If you nitpick over every little failure, it’s going to be a long and bumpy ride. It’s much easier to cope with it when you just say, “fuck it” and laugh at it.