JB: You’re working on a project right now where you ask random people to send you their first beat ever. What’s that about and what was your impulse to do that?
Lil Ugly Mane:
Yes. I got so many beats, so many, like a stupid perverse amount of beats. I’m excited to listen to them. I’m setting aside a day this week to just do that. I want kids that are merely listeners of music to start to make it. I feel like that’s what’s wrong with hip hop and a lot of forms of music now. There are too many pre-requisites, there isn’t any experimentation, and the experimentation that does exist is trite and dull in that sense that exists entirely to be “experimental”. What made the “golden age” of hip hop so great was the amount of experimentation that was happening. People turned the turntable into an instrument you know. Kids were just deciding to be producers or DJs cuz they wanted to. Now there are industry standards. There is a business end of it. People tell themselves they can’t do shit, people keeping making the same beats over and over. I feel like in order to go into something new, you have to start at the bottom, you have to start at the stages of learning to understand music. I look at some of my old beats and I’m like ‘GOD DAMN what the fuck was I thinking?’ But at that time, I was fucking bobbin’ my head hard as shit. In order to move forward I think we need to go into that zone of completely raw creation that has no enforced standard of how it should sound, and the easiest way to get there is through a very first beat.
