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11/14/2005 "Mr. Excitement" is finally out. How does that feel? Like any other project. Failures and successes don't matter to me anymore. I'm just putting out music right now because I like putting out music. What was your state of mind recording "Mr. Excitement?" Just adventurous, different, entertaining. That's what "Mr. Excitement" stands for. You have a lot of different topics on "Mr. Excitement," what did you want to give the listener? Just versatility, man. More versatility. I'm adventurous, I'm entertaining. I just wanted to entertain. The entertaining element of Hip Hop is going down the tubes. That's who Mr. Excitement is, he's an entertainer. Songs like "Get Down" have heavy West Coast influences, how did that come out? I was on the West Coast when I recorded that song. People that don't know me think I'm a New York dude. They don't realize that I've traveled around the world. I've heard different state's music. In every state, there's different music that people listen to. D.C. has Gogo, Down South is the bounce, and Texas has Screw…I just kind of mixed it up and put a little of everything on here. I made it universal. Do you feel like some tracks on here will catch some Wu fans off-guard? I don't know. My whole shit is, I don't even know who my fans are. I really don't. I've always been the black sheep of the family so I never know who fucking liked me anyway. I don't care. I don't know who loves me. I can't calculate that, so I'm not catering to nobody. I'm just catering to the markets I know I got people in. Was getting out of New York beneficial for you? Of course. It always is. New York is just a bunch of people trying to be stars when they're really not. People have positions of power and they take advantage of that shit and try to crush the little man. It's all about money up here. I like going other places where I don't have to kiss ass. I'm not no ass-kissing dude. Why do you feel that you're the black sheep of the Wu? Because I'm the light-skinned dude in the group. That's the reason? Yeah man. That stems from slavery man. The light-skinned ones were always the ones closest to the master. The field negros hated him more. It stems from a long time ago. I get prejudiced against by white people and my own people for being light-skinned. They think we get every fucking thing. Even in the Wu? Yeah, I would think so. Who or what is the reason that the Wu seems separated? The Wu is not separated. Everybody just wants to build their own shit. We built RZA's shit. We're the ones that built RZA. RZA acts like he built us. We built each other. It's crazy. I can't put my finger on one situation. All I can tell you is there's money…I can tell you when dudes didn't have shit, those were the good times. Once we got money, you start seeing different people. People turn into kings and get this dictator shit going on in their head. That goes for any group, Cash Money, Bad Boy, Rocafella. It's not just us. I'm probably the only one that's talking about it. I'm probably the only one that's willing to bring it to the table, but I'm pretty sure that everyone else is going through that shit too. How do you respond to critics saying "U-God is the weakest link in the Wu?" Where did you see that? In some old reviews. That was RZA putting out that corny propaganda shit. That was propaganda. Go pick up "Mr. Excitement" and go pick up "Bobby Digital," and you choose. Back then, I had just come back from doing two years in prison. I went to jail for taking care of niggas on the block. If it wasn't for me, them dudes wouldn't be living. RZA knows I'm that dude that hit him with a half-a-brick in 1988 and put him on his feet. Dudes talking about I'm a weak link? I'm a weak link? It was RZA that said I'm a weak link. You can't point out where weak links are, everything is circular and things change. Some niggas get stronger, then get weak, others are late-bloomers. You can't say I'm a weak link. I'll tear a niggas head off now. I'm in tip-top shape. Dudes can't fuck with me. You could say that three years ago when I came out of the penitentiary that I was a weak link because I was trying to find myself and fit in a nine-man group. In the beginning, yeah, I probably was weak. But now, I will tear RZA's ass up. He can't fuck with me. I don't care what anybody says. Can you talk about your inspiration for "Drugs"? That was about my man that died. He was a drug addict. I can identify with drug addicts because I grew up around drugs my whole life. In the ghetto, that was the culture at one time. That's about my man that died who brought me a lot of money on the block when I was hustling. When I heard that he died, I made this song from him. His famous quote was "I don't love the drugs, the drugs love me." Ebony Burke is on the album twice, who is she? I just met her in L.A. I got introduced to her through Prodigal. She came in, and I had "Carry On" playing. I had already written the hook. I told her I wanted it to sing it this way, she went in there, and sung the words exactly how I wanted. Then I put her on "Long Time Ago," and she murdered that too. She's nice. She can do her damn thing. She just has to learn how to be an entertainer now. It takes some people some time to get confidence and come into yourself. It took me a long time too. Now that I'm older, I see shit for what it's worth and what it is. What advantage does someone like yourself with more experience have over the youth? Substance. They don't got nothing to talk about. They haven't lived anything. These little kids write dream raps. They talk about the shit they wish they did. I rhyme about a lot of the stuff I went through. That's why I call myself a late-bloomer. I study music, and in that process, you learn what the great ones before us did. You try to see their formula while bettering your formula. For the youth out there, they don't have any substance. Everyone's trying to follow 50. They can't do themselves. That's the mind-state they need. If they don't do that, they're a follower. They start to sound like Jay-Z, Eminem, or someone else. There's already a Jay-Z and Eminem, so you have to bring your style and bring some substance to the table. Your words have to have meaning and emotions. That's one thing about Wu-Tang, we've always been lyricists. Some of us have gotten better, some of us have gotten worse. I'm trying to be universal and write songs that everyone can relate to. When you listen to me, you can say "damn, I was feeling the same way." The "Drugs" song sounds like a nigga on drugs! I'm pretty sure, watch, you'll see dudes pop up out of nowhere with some drug songs and try to write a piece like that and take it for their own. That's another thing dudes are doing. They're biting. They don't come up with nothing on their own, and they try to smother whoever's winning. That shit is corny. Nobody has their own style. Look at Mike Jones, now everyone is doing those two-hook joints. Dudes that's in power are really taking advantage of this and aren't doing nothing with it. Really, the whole Hip Hop nation took Wu-Tang's formula. They took our formula and ran with it. Now that the formula is old and tired, they don't know what to do. Now they're stuck. Here we are in 2005 and they don't know what to rhyme about anymore. You can only rhyme about drugs for so long. Who would you blame for Hip Hop being this way? I blame the radio and the fucking DJ's for fucking Hip Hop up the way it is right now. It's a power control thing. Radio is a very powerful took and dudes are taking it for granted. Look at New York right now. You don't hear no more New York artists in New York anymore. You know why? Because niggas in New York can't stand the DJ's and the DJ's can't stand us, so they play out-of-town music to get the niggas twisted. We was the trend-setters once and now we're the followers, and that's because the fucking radio is brainwashing us. It's twisted right now. Everyone is trying to keep their little labels and they're putting out a lot of fucked up shit. For instance, I'm hearing that Jay-Z and Puffy are trying to buy the Source. If they get their hands on that, it's going to be corrupt. It's going to be all Def Jam artists and all Bad Boy artists. For real, that means the game is over. It's going to have to be destroyed in order to be rebuilt again. It's on its way down dog. It's not making the impact it was a few years ago. When we was blowing up, Biggie was blowing, Mobb Deep was blowing. Now, you only have one dude out there, and that's 50. The other marketing out there is dry. Rap is getting uglier. It's sounding mad ugly. Do you see it getting better? It's going to get worse. Right now, I see a lot of labels collapsing, a lot of labels running out of money, and just not being majors anymore. Another group of labels is going to come up. Rap is under reconstruction right now. Shit is wack right now. The only reason 50 is winning is because he has the nice, well-oiled machine behind him. If we still had Loud, we'd be giving the nigga a run for his money right now. Should Wu-Tang be on top of the game right now? There is no top of the game. What makes us so ill right now is that we've been on top, and we've been at the bottom-bottom. You have to survive on the bottom like you survive on the top. A lot of the dudes probably wouldn't be able to make it if they were to get dropped tomorrow. No matter what, we've managed to stay out there. That "on top" shit, that's an illusion. This is just music man. Dude (50 Cent) is making it personal because he has gripes when dudes shitted on him when he was trying to get on. He's trying to make everything personal. That's all propaganda. The nigga is rich. I don't know why the fuck he's all mad for. I don't know why he's trying to stunt on niggas like that. Leave it alone man! He's got his own little arrogant style and pet peeves, and that's what keeps him bopping. You could be up top and slip to the bottom of the earth next year. If we come back with a dope-ass album, and niggas get on our meat again, it ain't going to be like that for us. It's not that we're back on top, we never went anywhere. If people could see what's going on in the inside, they'd be like "damn, this shit is fucked up." They look at it on the TV or the radio, and that's all they see. I even got people in my own hood who try to shit on us because they think we're down and out right now. It's funny because you see who your true friends are and the fake motherfuckers. They don't know that we go out to Europe and make $300,000 a show. Niggas don't fucking know about all that shit. We're the Rolling Stones of this shit. The only group that can do it like that. We're the only group that's still around. And we're all in different places, but after Dirty died, God bless the dead, we're the only super-group still around. Bad Boy's gone. Cash Money's gone. Rocafella's gone. We're the only dudes around. When we come back, it's going to hurt (laughs) It's going to hurt! We're the original Hip Hop fam, everyone else is fabricated. Do you think Dip Set learned a lot from watching Wu-Tang? They were inspired by us. Even Kanye West said he was inspired by RZA. We never fell off. We can still go out and get shows. We can still go out and pack arenas. We can still make two or three million dollars a year together. All we have to do is come back together, and y'all niggas is grits. Our problem is that we have to settle some issues before we come back together, and that's what's taking us so long. Going back to the album, how was it working on "It's a Wrap" with Letha Face from Hillside Scramblers? Letha Face is my man. It's like Batman and Robin. When we come together, it's a different story. We're off the meat-rack! He's the illest nigga on Staten Island. He's nice on the beats, but I don't know how his work ethic is, so I have to step back and do me. Some people liked their album, some didn't. I don't care what you think. Everybody ain't going to like me. Everybody ain't going to like the Wu. That's one thing that you have to admit to yourself. You can't get everybody to like you. If you could, you'd be a bad motherfucker. What's going on with everyone else from Hillside Scramblers? Those are my peoples from the projects. I tried to give them a shot and a chance to do their damn thing. What happened with those dudes is they don't have no money and they think I'm supposed to give them money for every fucking thing they do. That's not the case. I got babies to take care of. I don't need no 35-year-old or 27-year-old babies coming to me for money or "can you pick me up?" When we were first coming up in Wu-tang, we had to get there ourselves and we had to come out of our own pockets with money. If dudes can't show initiative, I can't work with them. Why do you think Don King chose your tracks to be featured on his boxing specials? Don King is my peoples. Let me tell you some real shit about me. I don't ever talk about the people I know or the people I associate with. Why? Because I hate people going "oh I know that nigga too!" I hate people trying to tell me who they're associated with. I'm not even going to tell you how I got my shit up there because then a hundred-million other niggas are going to run up and try to do the same shit I do. Let me put it to you this way: I know a lot of people. I know Oscar-Award winning actresses. I know a lot of motherfuckers. Do you want to get into other forms of writing? Yeah, just put me down for everything. I don't like telling what I'm going to do because I always got somebody in my fucking crew or out in this fucking world that wants to beat me to the punch. Don't do it because I want to do it. Do it because you got some type of art form that you want to capitalize on. Niggas be doing this shit just to say they did it. That's what I don't like about corny motherfuckers. Say I go out and get a distribution deal, then someone else comes out with one saying "I got my own distribution deal." You ain't doing it because you want to get in the business of making records and getting into the industry. I hate that corny shit. That's why I don't do music to be competitive. I do music from my soul about the shit I'm going through. I used to have a different reason why I rhymed five, six years ago. If you listen to my rhymes, I was trying to have the best darts, the best eight or 16 bars. I wasn't worried about hooks or songs. Then I got hit in the head with some artsy-fartsy shit and it just totally hit me in the head. I don't know the types of chords, but I can definitely play something out and make it sound good. That's one thing I learned how to do, and I love this shit. I love doing music man. I want to tell people, I'm not just a rapper. I can write R&B music, I can write country music. I can do a lot of types of music that people don't know I'm capable of doing. That's why I wrote "Jenny," just to let you know. If I had someone singing on that shit, it would have been totally different. I can write R&B. I can write country. It's basically the same shit with rap. I wrote everything on "Mr. Excitement." Me and Letha Face team up and we do our thing. That's the only dog I fuck with. We do the damn thing, and that's what it is. Everyone else can kiss my black ass. I'm not with that ghetto-to-ghetto shit. I'm just trying to get it popping. It feels like I'm a new artist. I'm trying to get my whole career popping again. I'll start from scratch all over again. There's that classic Wu-Tang sound with the dusty samples and the hard drums. Do you ever feel trapped in that? That's the situation. When I do my solo albums, I'm adventurous. RZA is his own dude. He's going to be the one at the end of the day that makes the final decisions. I always tell him that he has shit closed up in a cage. Rap music is so big now. You can come with those dusty samples, but everybody's doing it. That shit doesn't seem special to me. I can give you an album like that if that's what the people want. I can do that shit so fucking easy that it's crazy. It's nothing. But then you have to get sample clearances. Once you cut into sample clearances, you start cutting into publishing. Then your money gets shorter. Speaking of sample clearances, I heard you had a lot of songs that couldn't get cleared. If I could have cleared everything I had, you would have heard an entirely different album. A lot of that shit on the album right now probably wouldn't have made it. I recorded over 100 songs. Out of those 100 songs, I had to pick all of the songs that I loved with samples on it and take them off. The sample dudes were taking too long coming back to me about the publishing. Some samples were owned by three different publishing companies. Shit was going crazy. What I did was, I came up with this album. I listened to the beats on this album, the beats are still hot. I know hot music. Just because it didn't come from Kanye or Dre, I know it's still hot. I put my shit on the big speakers and it still thumps and there's no pops in it. Everything is raw. How would you compare "Mr. Excitement" to "Redemption?" I wouldn't even compare it. The funny shit about that is I was listening to "Redemption" the other day. That shit is hard! Let me tell you some real shit about when I was recording "Redemption:" I was scared. I was still learning myself. I wasn't really confident in myself yet. Not like the way I am now. I'm more confident musically now than I've ever been in my life. Being that "Redemption" was on Priority, I was able to get more samples cleared. That's the reason why it came out so much harder and grittier. That's what I'm trying to work back to, where I can get my samples cleared. I got some fire! I still got fire. I got enough for at least three more albums, and I keep recording more new shit. Hopefully I can get some music from RZA one day so me and him can make some joints. What do you think it's going to take to squash that? Stop trying to tell me what to fucking do, and stop trying to act like you can crush me as a fucking man. I'm a grown-ass man. You can't crush me. I've been through too much shit to get crushed. What's next for you? I'll finish up another album in the next couple months. Independent is an expedient spot. You can keep putting albums out and keep it popping. What do you want to say to everybody out there reading this? Thank you for all the support for what we did and for all the years of supporting us and loving us still. All the fans that stayed with us even in our fucked up times. We will be back.

By Brian Kayser

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