It’s hard to overestimate the influence and importance of Prince Paul in hip-hop history. Essentially the George Martin or Brian Wilson of the genre, Paul (born Paul Huston) elevated rap production to an art form with albums like 3 Feet High and Rising, and went on to create not only some of De La Soul’s most famous recordings, but instrumentals and arrangements – literally the defining sound - for a wide variety of artists. He’s worked with everyone from RZA to Cypress Hill to Beastie Boys to DJ Shadow to Bernie Worrell (and countless others), and he continues to use his restless creativity to reinvent not only that wide variety of performers, but himself as well.
Most recently, he appeared in Los Angeles at the UCB theater to perform Negroes On Ice, a stage show featuring his son as a one-man raconteur who spins a spectacular fable as Paul provide musical and video accompaniment. CraveOnline recently got in touch with Paul about the inception of Negroes On Ice; additionally, he offered some thoughts about his place within the industry, talked about his musical evolution, and offered a few updates about some of his older projects, including his long-gestating, and still highly-anticipated collaboration with Dan the Automator and Mike Simpson of The Dust Brothers, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly.
Hi, Paul. How are you today?
I'm good. I'm good. How about yourself?
Good – it’s a great honor to get to speak to you. You are my all-time favorite hip-hop producer.
Well, thank you. Hey, did you say that to the last person, hip-hop dude you talked to?
I absolutely did not.
Okay, good, just checking with you. I really, really appreciate it.
Absolutely. Well, let’s talk about Negroes on Ice. I got an email last week saying that this thing was coming, which I was not aware of. What exactly is this?
What it is, is actually sort of say a one-man play, which me and my son had wrote, and he is actually the front man of this whole thing. It’s a small production. We tried to keep it simple and keep it personable to the people, so it’s been like small theaters, and it’s more or less like a day in the life of my son. Kind of the inspiration for it is my son has a tendency of—and this is in true life—just like fabricating the truth and kind of extending like these weird stories and stuff. So it’s more or less an exaggerated day in his life; I mean, all the people participated that I'm about to mention did voiceovers and stuff for the play, but he wakes up in the morning and his girlfriend is Rosie Perez. He eventually goes to RZA’s house, punches him in the face and just randomly looks at RZA’s artwork. It’s like it’s just bizarre, and he goes to Freddy Foxx’s house and punches him in the face, and he ends up at a gay parade and he goes from the gay parade to Peanut Butter Wolf, Erick Sermon is a cab driver, Ice-T eventually tries to arrest him. So it’s all over the place - probably my best way to describe it is it’s like a staged play of Adult Swim, so I’ll put it like this: you will definitely need to pay close attention, because if you don’t catch it in the beginning you won’t know what’s going on (laughs). It’s just it’s a bizarre play.
Obviously for all these people to be involved you have to formalize the structure. So how did it evolve from this penchant for exaggeration into a full-fledged stage show?
Well, I wanted to do a one-man play for a while, like ever since I've seen John Leguizamo and Whoopi Goldberg I thought, “I can do that.” But then time went on and I became an old man, so my son started doing these - like in real life he does sort of really fabricated stories, and then he started putting them on when MySpace was really popular. I really didn’t pay attention to it until a lot of his friends or a lot of kids were really responding to it, [and] they knew all the words to the stories and he started putting sound effects to them, and then a local radio station played one of the songs that he made from the stories. I was like wow. Then I had to take notice; I kind of ignored it for a while, but then I was like, wow, people really are paying attention to this. So I was like, “you know, it’s funny - I came up with an idea to do a one-man play, so let’s sit down, take some of these stories, some kind of real life stuff and then kind of just stuff that’s obviously just bizarre stuff, and let’s just make a sequence of events and make a play and you be the front man.” And he was like “bet,” and it took us about a good year to write it, because working with your kid is a little different than working with somebody else because your patience level is just a little shorter, and then you bring other things into the equation. Because we can be downstairs writing and it’s like, “hey, did you take out the garbage?” So then you get sidetracked – “didn’t I tell you to put up the dishes? And what happened to your room and your homework?” So it took us a while to actually get it done. But I think it’s just bizarre - I think it’s fun.
You are really for all intents and purposes the guy who pioneered the skit, that sort of interactive tapestry that connects all of the songs on an album. How much with this did you connect what might normally be a digression into sort of a full narrative, maybe in the way that you did with Itstrumental or Psychoanalysis?
Well, I mean first and foremost, the skit is like a gift and a curse because it’s nice to kind of make your mark, your stamp in hip-hop history, but then the actual thing is kind of annoying on a lot of hip hop records. But I think the one thing that definitely helped is just prior experience, and just creating kind of what I call a cinema on wax. A good guide definitely was doing A Prince Among Thieves because instead of like in Prince Among Thieves where it’s more like a movie thing, this is more like dialogue, and then scoring the dialogue, or I mean even in the play everything runs in real time obviously and as he’s talking, I'm scoring it. So you know he can—he walks through the woods, “crunch crunch crunch.” He comes through the window “smash!” So everything is running in real time, and we support it by having video that supports a lot of the story. And you know there is music as well, but as opposed to music being the main driving force, the music is actually secondary in our performance.
The RZA did a thing a few years ago in LA where he was actually mixing video, scratching cartoons and doing things with video mixers. Do you do any of that kind of stuff, or is it pretty straightforward in terms of assembling footage that accompanies what he’s talking about?
Yeah, it’s pretty straightforward. I mean, the video thing I've done that a few years ago with Peanut Butter Wolf and he’s just been doing that a whole lot, and then even before then with Handsome Boy Modeling School, when they first made the CDJs that had video to them, we were using that in our live performance to take the place of some of the artists we couldn’t get, and we made videos to support the show. But in this case it’s not necessarily that; it’s almost like a slide projection - some videos are in there, but like I said, a lot of these things are mainly to support the dialogue as opposed to being like “the thing.” But to me it’s kind of multifaceted because you have an audio portion, a video portion, and then you have him acting onstage, so hopefully at some point we don’t lose you because there is so much going on. Hopefully it’s not overstimulus, but there is a lot of things going on.
Do you appear onstage?
Yeah, but what I am is more or less the sound effects, scoring guy as the thing goes on, and I'm onstage with them. I have a turntable set up, and we do banter along the play, because in real life that’s what we do. We try to make it as much of what we do at home, because for some reason like people who come over, my friends, his friends seem to get a kick out of our relationship. You know, in a lot of ways it’s typical dad, but at the same time we just snap on each other all day. Like with my son is and my kids in general, I've created my own best friends, so at the same time there is definitely a level of respect, and I'm the dad and what I say goes, but at the same time it’s like we have a whole lot of fun. So that’s what we try to show onstage and hopefully at the same time, if kids come with the parents or whatever else, it opens up some dialogue, because there is definitely a difference in generations, but then again it kind of shows that there is thin line, especially my generation and his generation. As before with my parents and me, we seemed like miles apart. I think nowadays maybe it’s because of media, maybe it’s because of just, you know, “30 is the new 20” and “50 is the new 40” makes this generation gap a lot smaller you know, but there is definitely a lot more things we compare and contrast at the same time.
I feel like you’re one of the most candid performers in hip-hop when it comes to your music really communicating sort of where you are or how you feel. Like Politics of the Business was sort of half-satirical and half-if this comes off, it will kind of almost cynically be like a weird triumph. Was this something you undertook because you felt like you weren’t making as many inroads with music as you wanted to, or what led to this for you?
Well, it’s two things. Part of it is just boredom - especially for music, I've been there and done that. Like, thank God I've accomplished highs and lows in my music career, but luckily a lot of highs. But I’ve always been one to like kind of make everything I've done visual; part of it is just still being a child and still being imaginative and, you know, enjoying kids’ records when I was little and kind of listening to the story and kind of see it out. That’s one part of it. And the other part of it is watching my son mature. And I'll admittedly say I didn’t really pay attention to what he wanted to accomplish musically because he DJs, he produces, it’s almost like a miniature version of me. I never wanted to make or have that situation where - and I always kind of downed it - when you see the parent of somebody who has a certain profession, or certain amount of fame whether it be actor, actress, musician and then their kids come along and you’re like “oh, it’s the watered down version of this other person.” Or you know you look at it and you go, “he’s only down because his parent hooked him up.” I've always despised that and I've always been ride or die for music and it’s by the heart, so I’d always I just thought that what he did was just be default because it’s what I did, but it wasn’t until I noticed that he actually had a talent - and his talent is different from mine. It’s similar in some ways, but he’s a lot more animated, and I don’t know if it’s because he’s younger, I don’t know if it’s because he’s been raised into it, but he’s a lot more animated in his imagination and his humor than me, and I think he’s really, really funny. I think he’s a lot funnier than a lot of people give me credit for, and not because he’s my son, but just basically because I just think he is. So when it came time to put this together, it was easy to make him like the front man. And like I said, it’s another generation; I like to see him become better and greater than me, if it’s in what I do or with whatever he does. And at the same time for me it’s like, you’re bored man. Like every record I've made, if you noticed, it’s almost schizophrenic because it goes from De La to Gravediggaz to Handsome Boy; I mean, I’m kind of the common denominator of all those things with my sense of humor, but that’s just the way my life has been. You say, oh God, okay, all right, next thing.
Are you still as interested in music as you ever were? In the last few years, you’ve been doing these internet radio shows and stuff like Be My Valentine with Peanut Butter Wolf.
Wow, you know all that stuff. That’s all the bizarre stuff. I forgot about that.
