Prince Paul

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Let’s welcome our man Prince Paul here.

Prince Paul

Thank you, thank you. Well, I feel still like hugging the microphone. That’s hip-hop for you. I should hold it like this [in a proper microphone position], right?

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I mean, you are the guy who is producing, so you should tell us how we should hold it.

Prince Paul

Yeah, hold it like this. [holds the mic upside down to his mouth] That’s when you gangster…

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

How did you get the name Prince Paul?

Prince Paul

Prince Paul was given to me because they said my regular name – that was DJ Paul – was boring. You don’t want to say, “DJ Paul” on the microphone, you know? I’m a humble dude, but I was forced on that whole hip-hop ego thing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Since when do you DJ?

Prince Paul

I’ve been DJing since I was my son’s age [pointing his finger to his son sitting in the audience], that’s him right there. Actually, a little younger than him. When I was ten years old, I’ve heard, I was the fake Grandmaster Flash of my day. And when you’re ten or 11 years old, that’s pretty traumatizing. That’s why I’m here today, it’s to prove the world that I’m not the fake Grandmaster Flash.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Being the fake Grandmaster Flash, who came up with that name then?

Prince Paul

That was back in school. For me DJing started or hip-hop, it wasn’t called hip-hop when I started, I was like my son’s age. I was like ten years old. Hip-hop for me is a lot different from what people see out here now, especially the commercialized side of it. When I was coming up it was more or less DJing in the park. MCs rarely had any substance to say.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So when you were the DJ it wasn’t like that? [posing in front of Paul] “Hey, where’s the DJ? I’m the rapper!”

Prince Paul

The DJ was the primary focus. That’s why you had Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five, Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. It was like that initially. That was the era where I was from. It was a lot different back then. It was all about having fun, you battle people and you did your thing. But it was basically going out to see people dance. As opposed to now, it’s just a little bit different. Well, it’s a lot different. I think once the money gets involved, it changes a whole lot. Coming from Long Island, actually first time I heard hip-hop was in Brooklyn. And that’s when it was actually filtering out from the Bronx down to all the boroughs. What I learned in Brooklyn, I brought to Long Island.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You say that you’re DJing forever, can you tell us a little bit about your first record player?

Prince Paul

Maaaan, I tell you, my first record player, if you really want to get old school, was a Mickey Mouse record player with the hand that was the needle. I remember being five years old and I just bought James Brown’s Hot Pants and “Groove Me” by King Floyd. That was my first turntable.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You’re trying to be really musically correct here. I mean, it takes other people 30 years to come up with those joints.

Prince Paul

My first DJ set was really makeshift because my family didn’t have a lot of money, so what I did was I took a component set that somebody threw out and used its turntable. So what I did, I took a component set... For those who don’t know, component sets are, you have your turntable, your radio and your eight-track player all in one. It was an old one that my family had, I think the radio didn’t work on it. And I took another cheap turntable, I think it was a Lafayette, and I used the balance knob as a mixer to go between the component one and the other one. For those technical heads, I put everything mono, so the balance going left for one turntable, left and right for each turntable. It went through the center and that was how I mixed. I had no cue, but I thought it was pretty ingenious for a little kid! I amazed myself [smiling] – and my friends! That’s how I became the fake Grandmaster Flash.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

I mean, the cue system wasn’t even invented back then, was it?

Prince Paul

Nah. Not that I can remember. A lot of the mixers that I remember back then, were up and down [volume], no cue. It was the big knobs, I think was like the mixers that I remember. Man, now looking back I feel really old because a lot of things really weren’t around back then.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Why does it seem that everyone has had the same mixer back then?

Prince Paul

Because they only made a handful. Since DJing and the whole culture has built up so much, of course there is competition. Just like you have a billion MCs and DJs now, I guess you have a billion mixers because it’s catering to that demand. So back then, I think, there was Numark, Gemini. There was a company called Clubman. GLI came a little later. There were only like four or five mixers. Gemini just really came out. And a lot of the mixers were like big pieces of sheet metal, with giant faders. Once the crossfader came out, everybody was like, “Oh my god, he’s got a crossfader!” You run to the guy’s house and “oooohhh,” take pictures of it… Things were such a big deal back then, because everything was like a mystery. Where now – not to shoot down what’s going on now, I don’t want to seem like the bitter old school guy – but I think the cool thing back in the days was that everything you had to go and search it. You had to invent your own stuff. For example, now you can go to the internet, which is great. You can go look in magazines and read up on people, which is really good. But then, when it was in its early stages you had to invent things. I think that made a lot of things crafty as far as like the equipment. I guess that’s the reason why somebody eventually made the cue. I think Grandmaster Flash was credited for making the cue. A lot of things that’s on the mixers now you just didn’t have.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you talk of this age of mystery and when not everything was at your fingertips, so to speak, I mean, covering up your records was a big deal back then. How anal was that?

Prince Paul

It was incredible. I have to compare now and then, so you can really get a gist of what’s going on. Now you have breakbeat records and compilations out there and everybody can buy a ton of records. Back in the day, you had to research and really look for your breakbeats. For example, if you found a record, say like Billy Squier’s “Big Beat,” I don’t know if you are familiar with that breakbeat, it’s like, [Paul beatboxing]. Everybody wasn’t just buying those records, like now maybe a 50 Cent comes out, everybody buys it. Billy Squier – no b-boys really buying it. So, if you found something that was so sacred, you want nobody else playing that record. You want that everybody comes to you, to your parties to hear those records. Immediately you go home, you erased all the labels. But the thing that messed a lot of DJs up, and how I got a lot of breakbeats back then, is, they would erase the labels, but they would be stupid enough to keep the jackets. So, me as a kid, I went to the block parties and I watch ‘em. And I looked for the records in the back and you see the record up like that. And I took a little pad [and began to write the names down]. Not that I could afford to have those records but I knew what they were. It was me and Biz Markie, actually. We were going to these parties and started to write down stuff.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Do you still participate in that discipline these days?

Prince Paul

As far as like beat collecting? I don’t know, the cool thing about it then was the fact that you tried to get something that nobody had. I think now people are fanatically beat collecting and I lost interest in it. I mean, I still try to get things I don’t think people have. But I don’t DJ like that anymore, where I go out and play beats. People are not apt to listen to new stuff like that any more. You play new stuff and people be like, “Ohhhhh” [leans back with a skeptic and disgusted face]. And only a hand full of beatheads in the front be like, “Oooh, that’s incredible!”

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And, as we all know, beat nerds are really the ones that really get the party going.

Prince Paul

Oh yeah! Even for production I don’t collect as much. My tastes are obscure anyway, so I kind of have a different collection than most people.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

You just mentioned a big name there, Biz Markie. Can you tell us a little about the people coming from Long Island around that time?

Prince Paul

You know what is amazing is a lot of us, we played together with no ideas of ever making records together. For example, I used to DJ for Biz Markie, he came up as Busy Bee back in the days when I was in the 8th grade, that’s like 14 years old. I used to run into Chuck D and Flavor Flav, which was a little further out from me. Eric and Parrish, who is EPMD, I used to see them a lot. Rakim, his name was Love Kid Wiz, he had a group called the Love Brothers. Him and Freddie Foxx, whose name used to be Freddie C. A group called the JVC Force. There were a lot of us back then. We battled each other in little parks. Records was really so far-fetched. Like, who makes records except Fat Boys and Sugarhill Gang? We weren’t really into it for that, just for the competition and for the love of music. And then later on, when you see people that you grew up with doing tours and making records, that was totally amazing. “Wow, you make records too?” I remember one time Flavor Flav had me in his show called MC DJ Flavor Flav Show. It was out of Adelphi I think. He was doing a little bit of everything. I think it was him and Bill Stephney and Hank Shocklee, the whole Bomb Squad, they had their little show. We sat down, I just joined Stetsasonic, and Flav said, “Maybe one day we will go on tour. Ha, ha, ha, ha. How far fetched is that?” Next thing you know is, that were on the Def Jam tour in 1987, with LL Cool J headlining, Public Enemy and Stetsasonic opening up and Eric B and Rakim, Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Whodini. And in some cases it was Kool Moe Dee, Run DMC and KRS-One on a few shows.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So, even without trying to sound not too much of an old bore, that’s what they still call the golden age of hip-hop. Why?

Prince Paul

I think a lot of times when people refer to that era as the golden age because a lot of it was just gut. It just was less marketing into it. Rap wasn’t proven back then. Nobody knew really what it took to make a gold record. OK, Kurtis Blow came out with “The Breaks,” Sugarhill and so on. So once in a while a hit came out. But your whole intent was to show a new style or something different that you have to offer to the music. I think a lot of creativity came out because you were trying to differentiate yourself from everybody else. It was just organic as opposed to now. OK, this is a marketing scheme, this is how you’re going to dress, this is how you’re going to look. This hip-hop appeals to down South, this hip-hop appeals to up North, this appeals overseas, this appeals to whatever.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

And don’t forget about the Dirty South in there.

Prince Paul

Oh yeah. I think as far as that being the golden era, diversity was the whole thing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

It was a different concept. What would a night like that, a line-up look like look like? What would a live performance look like back then? What was the difference in getting down on stage?

Prince Paul

The whole thing back then was always just trying to prove yourself. A lot of times you played to crowds that didn’t know your records. So everything was based on your performance. Even before we made records, it was like, OK, a crowd comes in and everybody wants to be entertained. And you don’t have the power of the hit record to make it happen for you. So you had to go out there and you had to show the people something. You had to show them that you are talented, or you had a rhyme skill or you could DJ in a certain way. And I think that was really the whole gist of what the performances were. That’s why a lot of times you hear people, when they refer to the early ‘80s, even late ‘70s to the late ‘80s, “Oh, the shows were so incredible.” Everybody had to prove themselves, where a lot of times now people base themselves on whatever hit they have.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you went out of the five boroughs [of New York], how was it like? Where did you go on the tour?

Prince Paul

The tours back then went everywhere. What was really cool was, you had a package of hip-hop artists as opposed to now because of insurance situations and the quote-unquote “violence in hip-hop.” I guess I can’t say R. Kelly because he’s kinda controversial too. Let’s say now you built a tour with N’Sync and Nelly opening up because it’s a safe thing. What I think what was cool is that it was entirely hip-hop. Everybody was coming together, underground stuff and the popular stuff. LL Cool J was probably the most popular dude then and, yeah, it was his tour.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Was LL Cool J the first one to take his shirt off?

Prince Paul

Well, that’s a good question. I’m a dude, I wasn’t really paying attention.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So what’s this whole thing of hip-hop and homophobia coming to speak of it?

Prince Paul

I don’t know, I haven’t ever dealt with that. You got to ask somebody else. Next question. [laughs]

Audience Member

I have always been curious because I have the 12” of “Go Stetsa,” and on the flip side “On Fire.” I didn’t see any credit for the scratching and I wondered if you did the cuts on that.

Prince Paul

Yeah, I did do the scratching on that.

Audience Member

Dude, that was ahead of its time. That was an inspiration.

Prince Paul

Thank you! Can I say something about me and DJing real quick? People might know me as a producer for the most part, but DJing was always my first passion. I am a lover of music, not just hip-hop music. Some get into it like, “Hip-hop this, hip-hop forever.” I don’t take hip-hop seriously. You can hear it from my records. But I take the music very, very serious. As much creativity as I try to put in my production as being a DJ back then, I tried to do the same thing. Like you said, but I don’t like to be bragging, “I was ahead of my time.” But on a lot of the records back then, I tried to prove that there was stuff that nobody was doing or stuff that could be invented. The first single we were doing was “Just Say Stet” and I did some scratches. I was breaking down the syllables of James Brown’s “Funky,” “Make it fun-ky-ky, fun-ky-ky…” [imitates the scratch] You know, people weren’t doing that back then and I took pride in that. I was doing the crazy scratches, kind of back and forth and chopping it up with the fader. That’s where I take most of my pride being a DJ. I love DJing! And I invented the “LL Cool J scratch” too. You can put that on film: That “LL Cool J is hard as hell” scratch, that was me, that was my scratch! Everybody that was at that battle when I battled Easy G, that how I’d won and made it to the semi-finals. I work really hard in what I do, and I really love what I do. You know, sometimes the money is great, but the credit lives forever.

Audience Member

On the Stetsasonic track “Talking All That Jazz,” did you replay that Lonnie Liston Smith “Expansions” on the keyboard?

Prince Paul

Yeah, I had my friend Don Newkirk play that. I actually produced that song and I never got production credits. I looped up the beats on there and I had my friend Newkirk coming to play the keys. I was really young back than and had no idea of what a producer was and what songwriting was. All I knew was, “I’m in a studio, I’m gonna have fun.” Later in the years, I looked at the writer credits and it just had Daddy O’s name on it. And I was like, “Damn, how did that happen?” They were all getting this big checks and I was like, “How did that happen?” I’m riding around in my Pinto and he’s doing pretty good.

Audience Member

On De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising you used many samples of different popular music. What was the fallout from that, in a legal sense? Was it quite intense?

Prince Paul

Well, let me get you a little pre-history on that. Even to this day, when I make records, I just make it strictly for the love of the music. Back then we sampled from everywhere, but we were smart enough to give all of the samples to the label, saying, “OK, this is what we used.” It was their decision not to clear certain things because we used a lot of obscure records as well. They looked at one record, like George Clinton, “Me, Myself and I” from Funkadelic and say, “OK, we’re gonna clear this, but we’re not gonna clear that other record, because nobody knows this.” Obviously everyone knows about the Turtles lawsuit.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Who are the Turtles in the first place? I think there are so many people who’ve heard about them first time through being sampled.

Prince Paul

Erm, I don’t know. [laughing]

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

[also laughing] Did you ever get paid for that?

Prince Paul

You know, because the record got popular. The label didn’t know the record would get that popular. Tommy Boy hadn’t had a hit record at that time since “Planet Rock,” and meanwhile it’s 1989. I guess, they were like, “This is like any other record.” I remember them saying, “Press like 100,000 copies – if that!” The record did a lot more than anybody expected, so that’s were the lawsuit came in. And the record label wasn’t really prepared for it. But for me, despite the lawsuits, it was still enough for me to make a profit. It was enough to make a down payment on a house and I bought my mom a house, which was nice. But the main focus was not money, it was just the quality of the music. So, regardless of what we sampled or regardless of the lawsuits, it was the final outcome that was more important. We didn’t make that record thinking we’re going to make this unique record, sell all these units and we’re going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams. It was the fact that we stand for a certain thing and that is to be yourself. That was what the whole album was about. Not to rebel against all the gold and the other things that were the cliché of hip-hop back then. We were just like, “This is where we come from and this is our style.” Hopefully we would get a show or two out of it and make a dollar or two. But that was never the focus, it always has been the music.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Speaking of the music, you have being compared being too close to the Ultramagnetic MC’s at that time. How the hell did that happen?

Prince Paul

I played the rough demo of “Plug Tunin’” to Daddy O, who was the lead MC of Stetsasonic. And I remember him saying, “No, I can’t work with them, they sound like the Ultramagnetic MC’s.” He kind of shut me down. That’s why I put De La Soul together because in Stetsasonic I was just the DJ. I hate to say just the DJ, but that’s how I was treated. Plus, I was a lot younger then those guys. A lot of times when we were going to the studio and I said, “Hey, I think this’ll be cool,” I remember I would literally get my hand slapped off the board. I was 17 or 18 at the time. You start to second-guess yourself. Well, maybe I am wack, maybe that idea was stupid, or whatever. I started De La Soul to prove to myself and that I was right, I had to try those ideas. Maybe within that circle of Stetsasonic, I wasn’t a star, but in my own neighborhood I’m the only guy who made a record at that time. So those guys looked up to me, which was good at that time. Because it gave me some kind of opportunity to mold them into what I wanted them to be. The record did well and this proved to myself that dreams really do happen. So those ideas weren’t as stupid as I was told. I went out and proved it. And later on it got pretty crazy, because there were jealousies in the group and stuff. And as time went on, maybe one reason why De La Soul and me separated later was because the early three De La records represented more me and my quirky sense of humor and personality as opposed to what they wanted to represent and they were kind of outgrowing that.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

So finally they got rid of the “abusive” producer?

Prince Paul

Nah they didn't get rid of me. We had a nice mature conversation in my house while working at Stakes Is High, which is the fourth album, and we were just butting heads, you know? I wanted to go out with the production style in the way of just having fun. But since Buhloone Mindstate didn’t do that well they felt that it was time to have another good hit record. Since I cannot promise a hit record, because the first record we did we just did it for fun. I never knew how to make hit records. I knew during the production of Stakes Is High, it was a good time to step back and let them do their thing.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

Can you tell us more of the actual production process doing 3 Feet High and Rising?

Prince Paul

People at that time were not really into layering samples. They had usually one main loop, maybe some scratches. When we produced, we used pitch-shifting and we made samples fit through that technique. We put our music in key. When we heard a certain bassline, we pitch-shifted it to make it fit with some horns. That enabled us to layer a whole lot of sounds on top of each other and make it sound like they belong together. That gave us a little edge.

I didn’t know too much about equipment or technique in production, it was just asking questions. I think that’s the best thing in production when you ask yourself questions, “Can I make this go backwards but only the snares go forward?” And then you start to find out the answers to those questions and that, I think, enables greater production.

You see a lot of people say, “No, that’s impossible.” But when you constantly work on those questions, it can make your productions far more advanced than most pepole. So that’s what we did when we worked on that album. We asked the engineer how to do that and learned about the pitch-shift. Or filtering. Filtering was new back then. We also brought a lot of different records together to sample from. It was a competition almost. DJing and hip-hop is competitive anyway. Everybody came up with really great source material and we combined it and you hear on that record that all our influences were different. Back then everybody digged records from the same places. Obviously, James Brown got some funky stuff. When you see an Afro and a band, “Oh, that has to be funky.” You know, I’m a ’70s child and in the ’70s, the radio played a wide variety of different music in those days, so we were exposed to a lot more. We grabbed from all these different places. Almost anything and everything that was good. We also listened to Afrika Bambaataa, that helped a lot. Technically, he was never a great DJ, but his records were incredible. He played everything from a Mickey Mouse record to Lynyrd Skynyrd to a James Brown record. It was just a wide variety.

TORSTEN SCHMIDT

When you switch on MTV these days and see some person from the UK doing a cover version of a quite popular Hall & Oates song “I Can’t Go For That,” which you’ve sampled, has the whole thing come full circle? Because I’m pretty confident they’ve heard it first rather in the sample than in the original version.

Prince Paul

People tell me a lot of times, “Sampling is not creative, can’t you play a lot of stuff over and blah, blah, blah.” But I come from a DJ era and DJs play records. So, the sound that we liked was on that record, so we sampled it. We as producers and artists were never at fault for sampling. If it was so unlawful and so forsaken, the label should have said “no” and the lawyers should have said “no.” But everybody was seeing money coming in, so that’s why it wasn’t stopped. The finger that gets pointed is always the artists. Well, we don’t know any different. That’s where we come from. As a DJ I played Billy Squier’s “Big Beat,” I sampled it. I played the Honeydrippers’ “Impeach The President,” I sampled it. A lot of us don’t play instruments. But as far as hip-hop is concerned, it’s based on two turntables and a microphone and that’s it. So, if there’s anybody to blame, blame those who put out those records. Those, who have the power. They’re the ones who put the record out. And I get a lot of flack for that. I didn’t get the bulk of the money, the label did.