5. Roc MarcianoMarcberg
I heard that when it first came out in 2010. I’ve got it on CD. He was a member of the Flipmode Squad so he’d done his time already I think. He probably felt like an old bastard as well – he’s probably older than me! You’ve got the obvious misogyny in there and there was lots of that, but there was this real interest in the history of the pimp, which is a controversial subject, but it’s almost like he’s done his research on it and looked at it in a political sense.
It’s not just blatant misogyny as well, but then it is, it swipes over to that, and then it swipes over to gang on the corner, shooting, drugs. I get the impression that a lot of the time this is stuff he has observed. A lot of the time, these rappers like Conway the Machine and West Side Gunn, used to be dealers but had to step out of it to go professional. So they have this whole memory bank of experiences to draw from and then in that environment it’s probably very close to you.
You must have your own memory bank of experiences to draw from?
Very much so, and I dress them up in this tension I got from hip hop, the anger, the hopelessness, the destitution. I try and give it a theatrical thing, coated in all of that that I got from these hip hop albums. The idea of fucking up all the time, getting yourself into these situations. Not being able to drink or do drugs socially, just sitting in your room.
