Schoolly D: Funk Upon A Rhyme | Hip Hop Interviews

Twenty five years have passed since Philadelphia's Schoolly D burst onto the rap scene with a string of reverb soaked gangster fairy tales like “PSK-13” and “Gucci Time.” In the years he's dropped several Rap classics and expanded his resume to include not only Rap pioneer but also film composer and found an entirely new audience through his theme to Adult Swim's Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Schoolly School recently reached out to HipHopDX to remind us just how the fuck he got so cool.

HipHopDX: So what made you want to get into rapping?
Schoolly D: Are you serious? [Laughs] After 27 years, somebody seriously asked me that shit again? You could have just Googled that shit! How about I make an answer up... It's the same shit. It was all magic, it was bound to happen. When I was 10 years old, I knew exactly what I was gonna be doing when I grew up. It was like keeping your eyes on the prize, as they say. It was never a question in my mind. Either I was gonna be a recording artist or a painter or something [where] I didn't have to go sit behind a desk or change oil on a car or deliver mail. I just felt I was destined to do big shit. And that's what I was told. I grew up in the '60s, when it was like "yes young man, you too can be an astronaut or a president." We believed that shit! Langston Hughes, Issac Hayes, WattStax. I believe in all that shit. Superfly, Bruce Lee. All that shit inspired me. All of it.

DX: Why do you think you were drawn to Hip Hop specifically?
Schoolly D: Well I couldn't sing that good but I damn sure knew something about music. And when you heard it, you was just like, "Wow I could do that." But I was in the era where people were still amazed at the shit that they heard and saw. So if you said you could do it you had to be really confident because we didn't have computers. There was no drum machines out, turntables were still belt-driven, so if you really wanted to do it you [had to] find a way to do it. And it wasn't even a job description then, think about it. You couldn't say, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna be a rapper, I'm gonna start my own record label." You would get fuckin' laughed at. But when I heard Funky Four Plus One and Spoonie Gee, that shit just made it for me. I was on my way to being a painter and [moving] to the south of France and [instead] I said I want to make Rap records. I think I got something to say.

DX: What sort of a Hip Hop scene did Philly have back then?
Schoolly D: Thank god I had moved back down to Atlanta to finish high school. I was back and forth between Philly and Atlanta, if I had stayed in Philly my whole life, I think I would have had a different view of the world. I travelled the east coast and lived in South Carolina, Kentucky, so I had a different point of view. I didn't just have a from the hood point of view, so I knew there was something else outside of 52nd & Parkside. But when I came back it was vibrant, it was colorful, it was like the birth of Jazz. It was all you heard on every block, every weekend. You just wanted to do that, you just wanted to be part of that. You wanted to get the girls to like you. That's another part of being a musician - we all do it for some pussy. [Laughs] It was huge in all the black and brown communities. Everybody else thought it was a fad. So it was something to fight for.

Read the whole interview here............
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/interviews/id.1440