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  Mr Lif Interview
interview 0428 added
22.06.06 words: K-Per
technical:
QED
Mr Lif is back. 4 years since his second opus, ‘I
Phantom’, he returns with ‘Mo Mega’ an LP of fitting proportions for one of the most talented and underrated MCs around. Well maybe not underrated, because those that know, know that Lif is a sick MC full stop. You just have to look at The Perceptionists project he is a part of, alongside Akrobatik and Fakts One, who dropped their first LP last year to much acclaim. Solo wise though Lif has always been a bit of a connaiseur’s MC in many ways, and ‘I Phantom’ was one of those LPs you either loved or hated. Since then though the dreaded Lif has been through a lot, he’s toured more than most, and has continue to help establish Def Jux as a label of quality and difference.
With ‘Mo Mega’ he returns to more familiar subjects, such as the socio political ones he’s become known for, but also drops through less familiar subjects such as full out comedy (alongside Murs and Edan) and more personal ones, like fatherhood and relationships. The album sees El-P handle most of the production, bringing through some impressive sonic tapestries for Lif to drop bombs. Also behind the desk on the album are Blueprint, Edan and Lif himself.
So it was only fitting that K-Per go and catch up with the man when he passed through London a few months ago to premiere the album. Sitting down after his sound check in 93 Feet East, he waxes on about his time away from the studio, getting back to solo material, his relationship with El-P, what El-P really is like, the life of this new album, as well as how he keeps his hair looking so fresh, food on the road, comedy raps and much more. Sit back and enjoy.
In the press release the album is referred to as the one you had to make. Can you tell us why?
 Mr Lif: Oh yeah, I mean there are a load of reasons. Once you get to that 4 year point and you haven’t made another record, you better get one made, you know? I don’t know it was just a tough road, even just to get in the studio and to be consistently in there. And touring too… touring is the enemy of recording. Some people have mastered recording on the road, but I’m not one of those people. So it took a while. The label originally wanted me to make this 2 years after ‘I Phantom’ came out and I just wasn’t inspired to make another solo record at that point. So there were a lot of reasons I had to make it. And also I feel that this is such a unique point in time, it’s like right after people realise that they can’t really do certain things to have an impact on the government anymore, or to do things that they used to be able to do. Like protesting and stuff like that is clearly not as effective and we know that violence isn’t gonna work, it failed in the past and people ended up getting fucked and locked up so we’re at a bit of a loss. If you’re watching music videos it looks like everyone is having such a great time, it looks so slick and glossy, and people throw their money around but then you have the real underbelly of dissatisfaction and worry, and powerlessness that people feel so I wanted to make an album that reflected that. And it just seems like the right time to do it.
And with the success of the Perceptionists LP last year, what’s it been like going back to the studio for a solo LP? Especially because it was so well received.
ML: Yeah Perceptionists was a fun record to make and the press really got behind us, it was just a nice thing to be able to do, working with some of my friends. But yeah it felt crucial, after doing a group album combined with the amount of time I was out of the studio, it just felt crucial to get back in there and see if I can still make a record solo. And it didn’t end up being a fully solo effort because in working with El he took the record very much to heart. So it wasn’t like I was just off making my own beats and kinda like putting the album together on my own. El and I discussed everything every step of the way, and we also had a lot of disagreements on certain things because we were re-assembling our friendship as we were assembling the album, because we hadn’t had a chance to hang out in a few years. But it was overall good, El-P is one of those people whose input you welcome, so yeah it was good.
Did you feel the success of Perceptionists weighting on you while in the studio?
ML: Not really. It was more ‘I Phantom’… that was the record that drove me away from the studio for so long. But Perceptionists was the getaway to getting back into the studio. That album enabled me to really be myself, and get away from politics a little bit, have a different tone to what I was doing - uptempo, danceable. A lot of people said that was a more traditional hip hop sound and that was a great opportunity but oddly enough that record, as much as I say I was trying to get away from the more socio political content on there, was great in that it gave me the opportunity to write some love songs, because I was going through a bad break up. So ‘Love Letters’ was at the beginning of when I first met this woman and ‘Breathe in the Sun’ was the end, when I realised it was the end and we were going to need some space and time to move on.
“...Once you get to that 4 year point and you haven’t made another record, you better get one made, you know?...”
So I felt Perceptionists allowed me to redefine myself a little bit, not a huge overall, and on this record, on ‘Mo Mega’, I felt like I wanted to come back to some politics. I felt like this record to me was ‘Enters the Colossus’ all over again. ‘Enters…’ was my first record, I made it in 2000, it was the first CD that came out on Def Jux, and that was in the year 2000. And at that time when I made it I felt like I wanted to come in and kick in the door into the hip hop world and come in and stake a claim, make a place for myself. And after 4 years away I felt the exact same way going into this one. That’s why I think I sound very angry and very intense on this record as a result of the hunger you know?
Makes sense – I remember you mentioning this when we spoke last year for the Perceptionists LP, you mentioned you needed this group thing to break from the solo work and re-inspire you.
And I was wondering how much of your material is actually written before you go into the studio, because it feels like at times you’re freestyling certain lines, it gives a certain edge to your flow I guess you could say…
 ML: Right, right. The spontaneity you’re hearing is probably from the takes, the takes that I decide to keep. Because when I go in I’m actually really calculated about the verses, I sit down and… actually on this album I really tried to make sure that I had all my rhymes fully memorised. There’s been times where I would write a song and go into the booth not fully knowing it, and be relying on the notes but on this one I really wanted to know everything. I wanted to go in and be able to execute it in a way that was ultra sharp you know? But I have a different opinion as to what the best take is as some artists, for me the best take isn’t necessarily the one where I say everything exactly the way I want it to – I like the ones with the most character. There’s takes on this album of stuff where I thought I sounded like I had a speech impediment, I didn’t say stuff right but I thought that I probably could never do that again even if I tried so I’m gonna keep those ones because they’re one of a kind.
If you don’t memorise everything it gives you room to play with it in a sense, you can add more swing into it and it sounds like I’m having fun because I’m not just sitting there reading off a sheet. It’s very natural and it gives that room for… just fun.
On the new album what was the hardest song for you to write and record?
ML: Umm… ‘Ultra Mega’. It’s like the shortest song on the fucking album but it was so goddamn hard to record. I don’t even understand why. It was like El and I just had difference of opinions several times about that song. He loved it and thought it should open the record and I was like ‘no I should open the record by talking to my fans’ you know? Because in ‘Ultra Mega’ I’m just the voice of, I don’t want to say major corporation, I’m the voice of a shopping center really. And you know how they get us to come in there with the big sale signs you know?
“...De La Soul for example had their own language and they didn’t really intend for you to ever figure it out...”
And they’ve got everything you could possibly want, like shop for your groceries and get a lawnmower, so I didn’t want to open up the album after four years away being something other than myself. And then there were different stages in the development of the beat. I wrote the whole song once to the same beat, but it wasn’t as developed, and it was cool but not great. So I asked El to do something to the beat, add something, and he made another version I wasn’t sure of and then he said ‘fuck it’ and put in those big drums that come in 4 or 8 bars into the track before I start rhyming and I was like ‘ok we got a deal’. But yeah it was difficult to make the shortest song on the record.
Ok, this one might be a bit harder, but what was the hardest song to write and record out of all your material?
ML: Ever?
Yeah that you can think of?
ML: You know I would have to really go back and talk about the earlier stuff you know, when I was just getting started. I remember recording ‘Electro’ and just being so nervous. Back in those days, goddamn! I’d want to go to the studio alone because if there were some people in the other room and I knew they could hear my takes I’d be all nervous and I used to get 98% of a verse right and just fuck up the last 2% and have to do it all over again you know? Although my recording styles have changed, where now I do more of a multitracking recording technique sometimes… actually most of the time on this record. I find it actually allows me to create more of an aura where I can hang on to the words longer and stuff like that. So I try to mix that in with one take verses, and stuff like that. But yeah I’d have to say ‘Electro’… that was very nerve racking.
As an artist I’d say you could be described as an MC, a poet or even a life reporter, all these things. How would you describe your writing, your work if you had to choose one?
ML: Usually I wouldn’t be able to say something like this, describe myself like that, but after a few interviews I think I’ve figured it out and cracked it (laughs). I hope that people, and I hate using the word common or average, because none of us really are, but just people from all walks all life that are the working class, I hope they feel my voice represents them.
And I wanted to talk about your inspiration for writing. You’ve touched on it before, with the mention of you being known for socio political comments and rhymes, but what would you say are the catalysts for you to pick up a pen and write, jot down ideas?
ML: A lot comes from strife you know. As could be easily picked up from listening to my work, a lot of is based on dominance or strife. Dominance is the MC shit, you just wanna come through and own the place. I think of a song like ‘Jugular Vein’ and it’s like… I grew up during the horror flick era, when the likes of Halloween, Hell Raiser and Nightmare on Elm Street all came out, so I’m just dark, I’m a dark cat, I love that shit, I identify with those guys, I think Michael Myers is pretty brilliant, and Pinhead from Hell Raiser is another genius, he does his thing. So… oh and Freddy Kruger is pretty impressive as well (laughs). So because I’m very dark, a track like ‘Jugular Vein’ I feel epitomises a certain aspect of my character because it’s dark and the beat is almost coming at you sideways, and I talk my shit, trying to belittle the opposition and then I can just slide out. That’s one aspect, and then the other aspect is just like I said, strife. I don’t think I’ve been impacted on harder than anything than by watching my parents struggle. That’s something that as a kid you just see. No matter how much they try to mask it up you know. You know your parents aren’t at home because they’re working, you know when they work overtime, you see the late hours, you see them not being able to spend as much time together, you watch them grow apart, come back together, grow apart again and that stuff is just very tough for any kid.
“...it didn’t end up being a fully solo effort because in working with El he took the record very much to heart...”
And also I recognise the level of investment they made in my education, and that’s why I’m so determined and I can’t let this hip hop thing go right now. I still have so much passion for it, it’s been nine years now and I’m still wide eyed, still finding out what’s going on, looking for energy in different places. So I just still wanna do my thing because I haven’t even really begun to do what I planned to do when I dropped out of school, which is crazy. And what I want to do is to be a dominant factor in this game, and I haven’t put out enough records to do that yet, and now my focus is to follow this new album almost immediately, like a year, with another record and after that another one. I’m working on an album with Edan, I’m working on one I’ve almost entirely produced myself, because that’s a bit of a throwback to the days of songs like ‘Electro’, ‘Farmhand’, ‘Inhuman Capabilities’ or ‘Home of the Brave’. It’s like I’ve had a confidence problem with it for a long time, feeling like I didn’t want to make anymore productions, but I look at those songs and they’ve all had a really positive impact on my career. Especially ‘Home of the Brave’, so I’ve got to keep doing that and I’ve been working very hard. I’ve already got several new songs towards a new album and it’s down to that fact that if I had to turn in a new album in three months I think I could do it at this point. So I’m just trying to really, really rise up and just be a dominant factor in hip hop right about now.
 Going back to politics, I was wondering how you felt about the fact that there’s been a lack of politically active artists in hip hop and in music in general over the last few years. Obviously it’s a matter of opinion, and I’m not saying there isn’t anyone out there, but in music especially, not so much in art, there’s been a distinct lack of albums in the last 6 years that have tried to hit hard, that have tried to carry a message about the state of things, especially in the US. You could probably count them all on 2 hands. So I was wondering also how you saw yourself in the tradition of politically active hip hop artists, especially as you’ve mentioned the new album does carry a message once more. Because there seems to be a lack of it, there seems to not be a P.E for our times, and like you said things like protesting and the such are seemingly losing some of their direct impact, influence on those in power.
ML: Yeah things do feel odd and hopeless to a certain extent. Personally I don’t really know where I could put myself in the scope of that because like I said I’ve just begun and maybe that’s something you’re more able to do when you’re done. It’s kinda hard to see to be honest…
That’s cool, no worries. Going back to the album, El-P handled a fair bit of production on this new LP, so I was wondering how the relationship was, was it quite symbiotic?
ML: Oh there was a lot of collision! (laughs) I probably wrote more songs in the process of making this album than I’ve ever done. With ‘I Phantom’ there were two songs that didn’t make the LP. Because I had a map and I was filling the pieces of the puzzle. Also I don’t think there were any songs left out of ‘Emergency Rations’. And I hear a lot of people saying, ‘oh you know if you make an album you’ve got to do twice the amount of songs you aim to put on there’, and I’ve heard musicians all say stuff like this and I’ve never felt like that. I’m used to having to make a single for which I’ll make 2 songs, and that’s my single, that’s what I was thinking at the time. But for this, I started to record this album so many times before I actually sat down to record it properly that I had so many left-overs.
“...Even if you don’t have a record deal you can make noise on the net and get your music out...”
I had 4 or 5 songs produced by myself, 2 or 3 by Blueprint, 2 produced by Oh No, Edan and I were also supposed to do more work together… it was just such a fiasco! (laughs) I went through so many versions, that at one point the album was called Fiasco. But I was embracing it, because there were so many people involved. Blueprint was going to do the album at one point, Edan was going to do it at one point, I was going to do half the album… all this stuff and then El-P kinda came in and said ‘I want to do the album’ and I said ‘right on, let’s do it’, because working with El, it’s guaranteed to happen… he owns the label and he’s not going to make me miss the deadline (laughs). So yeah it was a lot of songs done… I hope I’m answering the question actually, what was it again?
Ha ha, it was about the relationship with El-P during the making of the record…
ML: Yes… let me tie it to this. The problem was by the time El showed up I had all these songs and not much direction, so he came in and said ‘ok man, we’ve got to make this record in about 3 months’, or at the time we thought it was 2 months, and he felt confident we could do that because I had so much material, but it required me dismantling some of my songs, you know? For example the first verse of ‘Brothers’, is from this song called ‘Shift’, that I had produced and the verse was longer than the section that we took from it. But he kinda listened to ‘Shift’, and he liked the verse, he liked it so much he kinda carved the song ‘Brothers’ out of the verse. He was like, ‘that verse, ‘brothers is taught to bust shots’, that’s hot!’ So he sampled it and put it on the keyboard and started freaking it, ‘Brothers is taught to bust, brothers is taught to bust, brothers is taught to bust shots!’ And I was like ‘word!’ He also penned the chorus for it, and he had this beat in his archives and he asked me to try the verse over the beat, and when I did I realised it fitted really nicely and then once we had all those things in place he just told me to finish the song – so I sat there and in about 45 minutes I wrote the other two verses, because I was so locked into those topics anyway…
“...There’s takes on this album of stuff where I thought I sounded like I had a speech impediment...”
I was just mad, so it came very naturally and then we had the song, it was done. ‘Looking in’ was originally a beat that Blueprint produced but because of technical reasons we couldn’t use it, so El came through and we created a whole new beat. And we’ll probably release the Blueprint version at some point, on an underground level, and you’ll hear how drastically different they are. So it took a little time for me to adjust to what the song had become. Because I think for everyone who’s collected my vinyl over the years I’ve got something like one remix… in my whole career, the song I did with Opio, ‘Fulcrum’, there’s an Edan and Insight mix, and that’s the only song I’ve ever had a remix of. So for me to come in and have songs that I already liked and for El-P to make a new beat, it was very strange – it took a lot of getting used to. He wanted to kill me and I wanted to kill him! (laughs) But we worked through it and once we worked through it we were unstoppable at that point, it was like ‘oh shit!’ I finally figured out how to speak to him without pissing him off and it was the same with him, and so we could then sit down and make music.
Did you write anything from scratch?
 ML: I did. ‘Collapse’ for example, El already had the beat made, not in its final form, but it was there and I had to write to it. Which is another thing that’s tough with El, he’ll give me a beat, I’ll write a song to it, and I’ll think ‘ok this is the song, it’s done I like it’. And then I’ll be at mine and I’ll get an mp3 sent and it’s the beat fully developed. But it’s almost always way doper. So ‘Collapse’ went from a song I liked to a song I loved, and I knew it had to open the album. The way he put the guitars in and…
Yeah the guitars are sick on that track.
ML: They’re nuts, and then the way he layered the humming voice over it… So that was written from scratch, the last two verses of ‘Brothers’ were done from scratch, second verse of ‘The Fries’ was written from scratch, a lot of stuff. So I still have the opportunity to do that. Then Edan produced ‘Murs is my Manager’, and I wrote that from scratch and it was a lot of fun working on that with both of them…
“...I have two Chihuahuas man, my dogs weight in at a combined 16 or so pounds. And they’ll still kick your ass!...”
Actually now that you mention it, that sounds like an Edan track. I only got the promo album last night, so I don’t really know who did what apart from the El-P tracks.
And actually will anything happen to the Oh No songs, because that’s a collabo I’d love to hear!
ML: Yeah. Akrobatik, Oh No and I have a song together done for Oh No’s album, and I really like it. Some of his new beats are knocking. I’m going to continue to work with him. I’m in a mode where I want to try loads of different things right now. Let’s go and let’s do it, I want to write songs and I’ve got a lot of things to say. I’m into travelling a lot and feeling the energy from different cities, doing pieces of art based on what I’m feeling…
Quickly on the writing tip while we’re there, do you like to write on the spot or before hand and get a chance to develop the subject?
ML: I like to have the music first. I don’t think I have any songs in my career where I wrote a verse without a beat. The only thing I ever had to do is sometimes, like the first verse of ‘The Fries’, write over a beat that then gets pulled and re-adapt the verse to a new beat. That verse was written to a beat I did a long time which was never good enough to put out so… same thing with the song ‘Phantom’, I didn’t like the beat I’d made but it inspired me to write and then El was able to make a beat which we could put out. Mostly I’ll write to the beat which will be released. That’s what I like to do.
Cool. And so what’s El-P really like? Both as a boss and a friend? Because he has that image publicly of a stern and gruff person…
ML: Yeah he does! He is gruff, but he’s also really hilarious. You hang out with him and he’s got a unique perspective… he’s a boss because that’s just who he is. He’s one of these guys who had to create something because he is a boss anyway. You know? Now that I really know him well I find it so hard to think that he was signed to Rawkus, because how can he be signed to anyone? (laughs) He’s the goddamn boss! That’s why he couldn’t be on any other label, he had to have his own label because that’s the only label he could stay on, his own. But he’s a great friend, he can be very rough, you’ll have arguments with him. I’ve had more arguments with El than any of my other friends but at the same time he’ll bend over backwards for you. He doesn’t mean it… it’s almost like a pre-requisite, it’s like you to have to have a couple of fights so you can have a couple of laughs, you know?
“...My recording styles have changed, where now I do more of a multitracking recording technique...”
But it’s worth it. I can’t really think of anyone who’s impacted my career more than he has. Ever since I met him, and we became friends, when Co Flow was breaking up he brought me on tour with him to Europe and all these places over the world, to kinda fill the void that was left by Big Juss, and he gave me a chance to really step up and shine. He produces on all my records, on ‘Emergency Rations’ he only did one track, but he still had a lot to do with it. Even just the title of the records. He’s helped me with the titles for most of my releases… we just have this thing where it’s worth going through the pain or arguments because I feel like when we’re done we come up with something that’s interesting. And we get to hang out so it’s all good!
It’s funny because I wanted to ask you about the remarks you’ve made in interviews before where you’ve said you feel unfairly burdened with the mantle of being a political rapper and so I was wondering if you’d ever thought of breaking that reputation by making a comedy rap, but then I heard the album and there are 2 comedy tracks on there, including the one with Murs. So that kinda answered the question but did you make those songs because you felt you had to, or because you never got round to doing it? The one with Murs especially because you do kinda make fun of the political rapping in it…
ML: I think it started after ‘I Phantom’, because I felt I just wanted to make a comedy record. I have a lot of funny songs that didn’t make it on this record… this record became what it was supposed to be, I guess, in that it starts being dark and political, then goes to comedy and then finishes on a more personal, sincere point. And that’s how it was supposed to end up like, though maybe there are more dark songs at the front than I originally planned for. I thought there would be 3 songs that were dark and serious, then ‘Murs is my Manager’, and after that another comedy song which I’m probably still going to release, and so the album changed a lot. But yeah it’s important to show different sides to your character. But like I said because of the hiatus and everything else I felt really inclined to get back to my roots on this record. Come in dark, because I’m dark by nature, and then talk about things I wanted to, mainly the global communities of colour, because to the world community it’s not such an emergency if a bunch of black people are dying, as is being seen in Darfour, or Rwanda and even in the ghettos of the United States and pretty much ghettos everywhere. So I wanted to talk about that kind of stuff but to me ‘Murs is my Manager’ is really like the centrepiece of this record, the turning point…
It definitely feels like that. It brings through the second half of the LP really nicely…
 ML: It was just important man, and that’s why whenever I need an ace in the hole, or a sureshot I call up Edan and let him hook me up. Even though he only got one slot on the record he still managed to make it that one slot that will change the record, and he comes through with the goods every time.
So where did the concept for the song come from?
ML: It came from a conversation Murs and I had in Japan about 3, 4 years ago. We were eating dinner at this place and Murs just started talking about being manager and making all these bullshit phone calls. Like calling Busta Rhymes… I mean calling up Elektra at a time when Busta Rhymes was still with them and being like ‘yeah we need Busta Rhymes to do a verse for Mr Lif’s new album but we got no sort of budget whatsoever so we’re not going to pay him, and we need him to lay down the verse and send it to us so we can see whether or not it’s dope enough and we’ll holla back at him’ (laughs). So you know just stupid shit like that, which would just burn all my bridges in the industry and fuck up my whole career. So we took this concept and ran with it. Murs was off doing his own thing and I kept telling him ‘one day we’re gonna make that song, I’m not fucking around man’ and I called him up and made the track like I said I would.
Ok, and you’ve touched on it briefly, but I also wanted to ask you about the song towards the end of the album which touches on fatherhood, and where that came from?
ML: That I would say is the one spot on the album where I’m playing a character. It’s a look to ‘I Phantom’ in a few ways, a continuation of the song ‘The Now’. But directed specifically at the black family, and I’ve been fortunate enough that my parents are still together, so a song like that is more like an ode to many of my friends who are black men and who don’t have fathers around. I see what they go through, and it also stems from my fear of what is becoming of the youth in America. Because of a lot of the media and music being put out isn’t helping the situation of families and young people.
“...I’m just trying to really, really rise up and just be a dominant factor in hip hop right about now...”
The family structure is weak today in our society, and I’m thinking that in a way we’re breeding all of our children to be drug dealers and male chauvinists, which depresses me. It’s scary. Prison is also a factor in the destruction of the family unit – especially in minorities, a lot of black men are locked up. In America some statistics came out recently that said that in the year 2000, 46% of high school graduates black males were either unemployed, meaning unable to find a job or seeking one, or locked up. And when you get out of jail cats don’t wanna hire you, so you’re stuck again. The word rehabilitation shouldn’t be used because in its majority it’s not what it’s about.
Ok, well we’re nearly done. Albums like Acyalone’s ‘Book of Human Language’ or your own ‘I Phantom’, are well received by critics and praised, but they don’t seem to get that much public attention or public acclaim. And with hip hop being a very single dominated industry, especially in recent years, do you think there’ll ever be a rap conceptual album that will be as popular as it is praised?
ML: Uh! That’s interesting. I think generally if you look at the Mc Donalds’ theory, it’s the lowest common denominator as to what sells, and right now in rap we got a bunch of people making lowest common denominator music. So I think that it would be asking a little bit too much of the collective intellect of people worldwide – because a lot of people don’t want to have to listen to a record and figure it out. We’re so far removed from the age where you could have an album like ‘3 feet high and rising’ or ‘De La Soul is dead’, where you’re willing to listen to the record a few hundred times just to try and figure out what the hell is going on inside it. De La Soul for example had their own language and they didn’t really intend for you to ever figure it out. It makes you think and you can still listen to those records and be moved by them. So I don’t think it would ever really happen to be honest.
Yeah I spoke to someone recently who said the same thing, that people in general need a frame of reference to understand music that is new to them…
ML: Yeah that’s true. But maybe you could have an album like that be successful if every song could really stand alone, or no… no… it would have to be based on the beats. If you had danceable beats that were flashy enough to catch people’s attention, with great hooks and the songs were interconnected but also were their own thing then maybe it could work. It would have to be more a sort of ‘Emergency Rations’ type concept than ‘I Phantom’, and the reason I say there’s a difference there is because ‘Emergency Rations’ had its overlying concept carried out through skits, but the songs were whatever I was feeling at the time. Whereas in ‘I Phantom’, every song was a continuation of the one before it, and so I think that something like ‘Emergency Rations’, with more danceable beats could be ‘successful’. I’ll give it another shot maybe! (laughs)
“...I went through so many versions [of the album], that at one point the album was called Fiasco...”
Cool. And did anybody actually find a golden ticked for ‘I Phantom’?
ML: Yes I think a few people did. I can’t remember how many there were, like 250 or something, but the thing is we had the game designed, the game was, I thought, put together pretty well for some amateurs who had never done one before. And then the problem was getting the prizes to people, you know? The things you could download after you’d passed a stage, that was easy, but I can’t remember what the grand prize was and I still don’t know to this day if it got mailed to the person… At one point we were trying to do something where you’d be flown out to a show and have an all access pass, but then that’s a little too complicated because at that point in time I didn’t know where I was going to be from week to week, so… I don’t even know what happened. But to whoever won that game I apologise if you didn’t get your gift.
Ok and if hip hop was to have its own flag what would it be?
 ML: For some reason I just thought of some project building exploding, like the people living within it their rage, their uneasiness, dissatisfaction and misfortune almost just built up into something and exploded. Because what hip hop was when it first came out, it was a blast from people living in low income areas, and just looking for a way to survive. Their beacon of hope was hip hop, so…
And what do you think of Google censoring itself in regions like China?
ML: To put it simply it sucks… I mean I didn’t really know much about this particular incident until you just told me now, but since 9/11 it’s been almost like a mission statement of the US government to use this incident to completely change the face of liberty you know? Let’s take people’s freedom away piece by piece… and tell them they’ll be safer by letting the government do so.
Do you see the internet as a sort of digital frontier for freedom of information?
ML: Yeah I do. As a musician I see it as the new frontier for how music is shared, which it already is, and it’s also empowering because even if you don’t have a record deal you can make noise on the net and get your music out.
And having grown up as an only child, which would you have preferred, a younger brother or an elder sister?
ML: I always wanted a little brother man. Someone I can play football with, but then I got older and realised I’m fine about it. It helped my imagination too, I had to be creative and come up with shit, so you know?
“...Akrobatik, Oh No and I have a song together done for Oh No’s album...”
You released ‘Live from the Plantation’, on the last album, and I was wondering if you ever had a 9-5 job like that and if you did what was the worst thing that you did whilst there? Because in the video for it, there’s some pretty funny shit about mistreating your co-workers and manager…
ML: Yeah this was based on a 9-5 job I had. I didn’t do anything violent though, unlike in the video, I just ran up his phone bill which is what he hated about me I think. I was working but at the same time I was trying to launch my career and at the time my boy was working in New York, I was in Boston and he was trying to help me release my record so I was always trying to holler at him, and you know the boss would find out I had been making calls, which wasn’t going down too well. And the thing is, we were in cubicles but some people had individual ones and I worked in a row of desks, so I’d be on the left side and go to the back row and try to make a quick call, and I’d see the top of the boss’ head coming through, just like in the video, and hang up quickly but I got caught a lot of times. That’s why for a while after I made that song I kinda wanted to stick it to him, hoping that he heard it… but in retrospective he let me work flexible hours, but he wasn’t paying well. 6.50 an hour, even in 98, shit sucks…
And who would be your ideal tour sponsor?
ML: (laughs) Some good food company, so I could always have good food no matter what. I don’t know who though. It’s interesting going looking for food places… but good food always on hand is better… It’d be nice to have a selection of just nice food to choose from, but only the days when I can’t find it myself. You can’t take the adventure out of touring you know?
Ha ha, yeah. And how do you keep your hair looking like that?
ML: Ah… just don’t comb it!! (laughs) for at least a decade and you’ll be alright.
Who would be your ideal political representative?
ML: Um… brother Murs man! Murs in office, straight up. He’s not actually my manager, but he’s given me some of the best advice anyone’s given me about staying in this business. And I think he has such a refreshing perspective on life, I want a brother like Murs in office man that’d be good. He’d do some shit none of us can think about, he’d make life fun.
And describe Mr Lif in 3 words…
ML: Need more sleep! (laughs)
“...[El-P is] a boss because that’s just who he is. He’s one of these guys who had to create something because he is a boss anyway...”
Finally 3 things about Mr Lif people wouldn’t know?
 ML: Well I’m much more a fan of, and student of, relationships, human relationships, than people might think. That’s really a thing I’m much more into than politics for example. I’ve had serious relationships and maintained them, and anyone who’s been in a relationship knows that it’s a lot of work, and I’m a young man still but I’ve always thought in terms of family, and finding someone like that. You always face ups and downs, and so I’m always trying to refine myself and become a better man. Just be a better person in a relationship, listen to people and give good advice… another thing would be… people might not know that I played ice hockey for 9 years, and if I wasn’t a rapper I’d probably wanna be a goalie in the NHL or go into real estate, which is one of my other passions…
Really?
ML: Yeah I’m big into buildings, I love them, I’m so into it. And then one last thing would be… goddamn… yeah that’s it, I see all these rappers with huge dogs in videos and things, walking round with Pitbulls and Rotweillers, and to me that looks like they’re trying to compensate for something else (laughs). Either they think they need the dog to fight for them, or they think people will assume they have big dicks, I don’t know exactly what it is (laughs). But I have two Chihuahuas man, my dogs weight in at a combined 16 or so pounds. And they’ll still kick your ass, you know? (laughs)
Mo Mega is out now on Def Jux recordings.
- Kper
With additional questions from Pootle
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