A Conversation with Naughty By Nature’s Treach & Kay Gee – HuffPost 12.12.11

Mike Ragogna: Treach!

Treach: What is up? Naughty’s in the building! How are you?

MR: Chillin’ with Naughty. You playing tonight?

T: No, we’re playing tomorrow, but we’re doing a sound check for everything. Stepping up for this album release that’s coming out, the first album in a minute. Naughty is coming with Anthem Inc. It will be out this month, December 13, 2011. We’ve got some real great music on it. You’ve got thirteen new songs, and some throwbacks. So, it’s like you’re getting an album and an EP for the price of one album, you’re getting a deal.

MR: We also have Kay Gee on the phone, right?

Kay Gee: Hey what’s up? What’s going on?

MR: How’re you doing?

KG: I’m good man, I’m good. Just gearing up and getting ready for the release of this new album, how have you been?

MR: Good, good. So, you’ve got your new album Anthem Inc. and it’s also your twentieth anniversary as Naughty By Nature. But before that, your group had another name.

KG: Yeah, New Style.

T: It’s been about 25 or 30 years.

KG: One of the producers had posted our first single for New Style on Twitter last night. I said, “Okay, do me one better, find the album.” He said, “I’ve got the cassette, but it ain’t with me now. I will do one for you, I will post the album up,” so I did.

MR: “Scuffin’ Those Knees?”

KG: That’s what he put up. He put up the single “Scuffin’ Those Knees,” and everybody was clownin’ us. I was saying, “Hey man, we’re proud of our history, we’ve been doing this for a long time. You have to know where you come from to know where you’re going.” That just shows we’ve been putting it down and putting a lot of work in, and that shows you that it doesn’t happen over night. I said, “I’m going to do one better for ya’ll, I’m going to put the album up and show you.”

MR: Did “Scuffin’ Those Knees” bring you to the attention of Queen Latifah or was it something else? How did you guys hook up with her?

T: We was just hot in the hood. We was tearing up every single talent show and everything. Everybody in the hood knew us. It was just about finding the best management and people to take us into the right buildings as far as labels were concerned, and take us out of the ghetto element. So, that’s what that was.

MR: You’re talking about East Orange.

T: Yeah, East Orange baby.

MR: Look at all of the guests you have on Anthem Inc., like on “Perfect Party” you have Joe.

T: Man, Joe sang at my wedding ten years ago. Everybody you see on Naughty’s isn’t a reach. We just thought it would be good for the album and we just called this person up. Everybody we called up, and everybody we put on there is within our cipher…they are in our family. It was easy to put our album together. Naughty never makes compilation albums for our albums. We don’t want you to think that it sounds like a gang of everybody else and Naughty was on it. We make a Naughty album and we feature family on there.

MR: Speaking of Queen Latifah, on this album, she’s on the song “God Is Us.”

KG: Queen Latifah has always been there from Day One. When we were New Style, we felt like we had the talent but we needed the political icing on the cake. Getting with Queen Latifah was the icing on the cake. Once we hooked up, every album that we put out always has to have Queen Latifah on it because that’s our family. That’s what we do. We don’t do collaborations, we do family. We keep our family on all of our records.

T: We always get ready to give her enough time to get ready and she calls us. “I heard you’ve got a show in LA, you know I’m going to be there.” She’s always going to show that support and that love. She’s definitely family.

MR: What is the creative process like on a project like Anthem Inc.?

T: The writing is like they always say–if you don’t ride a bike for a while, you still never forget. You jump on and that’s how it just was with the reunion and coming into the studio. We got the track and the writing was no problem. The biggest problem wasn’t even completing it, it was pick and choose. We recorded so many records in the course of a couple of weeks. We’ve got catalogs of stuff. We’re going to release the album, mixtapes, and we’re going to keep the fans busy for all of the years we haven’t been out with an album. We’re going to make it up for them real quick.

MR: When you guys get together to do a reunion and get together like this, is it like brothers getting together again or what?

T: All the families and relatives and all of that, even if the group isn’t putting out new material, we are all still in the same neighborhood, and have the same family, and the same people that’s always around. We hang out together, watch football, and go chill at different sports.

MR: “O.P.P.” was a pretty big anthem.

T: Yeah it’s crazy. It’s in stadiums. I go into a party even before the DJ knows I’m in there…you’ll hear the record and the response from the crowd is just amazing. It’s a good feeling. That record is twenty years old, and when it’s played, people are singing it like it’s brand new.

KG: Even “Hip Hop Hooray.” When you turn on football on Sunday or Monday night, you hear “Hip Hop Hooray” all of the time. Those records just wont go away.

MR: How does it feel all of these years later to have made contributions that big?

KG: It definitely feels great. As kids and us starting off and growing up, our dream was to always get into it and we didn’t want to get into it to not make an impact. When you feel that twenty years later you’ve made an impact, it’s a dream come true. You’re sitting and you’re proud of it, even through the ups and downs. No matter what, we beat the odds. There’s definitely odds to get this done. There are so many talented people that are out there that are never going to even get an opportunity. They may be just as talented or may be more talented, but the reality is they are never going to get the opportunity. We were blessed enough and lucky enough to get an opportunity. To be here twenty years later even after getting that opportunity, we’re just glad.

MR: Treach, what’s your observation of this?

T: Let me tell you man, it’s been such a crazy, fun ride. You know you’ve been having fun and handling business and you look back and think, “Twenty years? It seemed like five years that we’ve been doing it.” Thank God we haven’t been locked up for years doing the career. We’ve always been up in your face with production, whether it was with other groups, whether it was movies. Even if the albums weren’t out, we toured worldwide. It stamped the brand and the twenty years looking back, and if I was gone at any point in time, I wouldn’t be mad. I’ve seen things people wouldn’t see in thirty lifetimes. It’s a big world. Our Muslim brothers and Christians worldwide, we’ve been traveling to Muslim countries. I’m a straight Christian, I’ve got a cross on tattoos. They put out the red carpet and say, “Any problems, let us know.” We’ve done USO runs with the Armed Forces. We’ve performed for soldiers. We go to markets where a regular rapper doesn’t go and they call us the ambassadors of freedom. We’re the ones that can go in different areas, and they don’t look at us like Americans, they look at us like, “These are our boys that we grew up on, we want to see the show.”

MR: This album is called Anthem Inc. Now, you guys are no strangers to anthemic records with big choruses. Are you making a statement overall with this album?

T: Yeah, not too many artists have come out in the span of twenty years and put out material that has matters. There has always been a stigma in hip-hop that when you hit thirty, you need to retire, like you’re playing sports and your knees are bad. In hip-hop, you can make music no matter what. Every other genre has respect even if you’re seventy years old. Paul McCartney is just going out on tour again, and he’s like seventy something. Why do I have to retire because I’m in hip-hop? If the music is hot and you’re feeling it, don’t think about how long we’ve been doing it. Look at how good the music is. That’s what we pride in ourselves. Everybody that hears what we’re doing say it’s that classic Naughty, but it’s not dated. It doesn’t sound like something we’ve done in the nineties, and it’s perfect. So, we pride ourselves in that.

KG: Also with the title, it’s not like we’re putting pressure on ourselves with making anthems. It’s been twenty years, the fans said, “You guys make anthems, and you guys are the anthem kings,” and we just titled it Anthem Inc.

T: Check it out, it’s traveling music. If you’re on a train, in the car, on a bus…if you’re hitting the backstreets, you’re going to be bobbing your head the whole time. You’re going to be doing something and moving. Anthem Inc. is not going to be a disappointment.

MR: One of my favorite tracks and one of my favorite titles is “Impeach The Planet.”

T: Yeah that’s one of my favorites too man.

MR: Also “Feel Me Flow” is another one of my favorites.

T: Wow, we shot half of the video in Vermont and half of the video in Miami.

MR: You guys have a new video for “Perfect Party,” right?

T: Yeah, that’s out, it’s getting mad hits right now.

MR: You still love making your videos?

T: Yeah, we love making music. It’s all a part of the creative process. You have to put it in to get everything you can out of it. We put our hearts in it and we try and make our songs sound like no other songs out there right now and our videos look like no other videos. That’s a Naughty video and a classic Naughty song.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

T: Man, you’ve got to keep your day job until you get a deal. You’ve got to work hard. Don’t think you can get rich and famous overnight. It’s a job way more than a nine to five. Come in knowing that you have to put in work to get anything out of it. If you just come in like, “I’m an artist,” and you say, “I’m not going to do press, or interviews, or be around, and I’m going to be a diva,” it will come back on you. The same people you see coming up, you see them same people when you’re falling down the ladder. Somebody might be seeing you fall down and say, “Man how is he falling, he’s a good dude,” and he’ll help you back up. If not, then you aren’t going to last long in this industry, it’s a lot of people but it’s a small industry.

KG: I would say definitely stay true to yourself and be original. Right now, like we always say, you go to record companies and you go to try and get a deal, they used to say, “He sounds a little bit too much like…” Nowadays, you go in to a record company and they say, “I want something like…” Just be original, be true to yourself, do “you,” and make sure nobody else that’s working for you or with you wants it more than you. Nobody should have to push you, you should be pushing your team or you should work with a team where everybody is on the same playing field. Make sure they’re just as hungry as you. The record company should not be pushing you to do things because that’s not how you make it in this game.

MR: What do you think about the kids that are watching TV and saying, “All I need to do is be on American Idol and I’ll be set”?

KG: Like I said earlier, talent alone isn’t necessarily going to make it. There are so many people that are out here that are super-talented and aren’t even going to get an opportunity. It’s the extra stuff that we’re talking about now, it’s the work ethic. There’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes that make it work too. You’ve got to have the right teamwork. You can’t do it in this business alone. You have to have a great support team. You can doAmerican Idol and you can have the great talent and that’s one thing. You have to have the right politics, you have to have the right team for it to fully work.

MR: It seems that if you go on American Idol, in general, there’s not a lot of longevity for most of the contestants, as opposed to when you grow a loyal audience over the years.

KG: Yeah, because you’re building it up. With that, it throws you on the pedestal too fast. It gets you the opportunity and you never want to knock the opportunity, but it kind of throws you on top too fast. That’s what I was saying about what I was telling the guys on Twitter yesterday. “You guys can laugh at that old picture all you want, but that shows how much time we’ve put in and that’s why we’re here twenty years later.” You might think “O.P.P” wasAmerican Idol-like, but it wasn’t. It jumped out at the top, but we put in years before that record came in, and that’s why we’re still here.

T: Let me tell you something. You can’t go on American Idol and be upset because you lose because you’ve won so many viewers. I’ve seen so many artists going on American Idol, not winning, getting record contracts, going platinum, and getting their whole career off the board. You want the exposure, but you have to get everything you want out of it. You have to put those calls in, you have to make those moves and have people working for you and you don’t have to win. Jennifer Hudson and people like that didn’t win. Use all of that exposure to your advantage.

MR: Maybe some of them don’t want to go the pop star route, and they build a slow career the rest of their life using that.

T: Some of them might not even perform and some of them might just be writers. They don’t have to do anything but walk to the mailbox and get checks the rest of their life, because they’ve written some of the best songs ever. A lot of the people behind the cameras get more money than the people in front of the cameras.

MR: What’s the story behind “I Gotta Lotta,” and when you guys go into the studio, what’s your recording process?

T: It depends. Some of the songs, we go into it thinking we’ve got to make some anthems, we’ve got to make some conscious love anthems, we’ve got to make some love sexy tone anthems. When certain tracks come up like when Kay got “I Gotta Lotta,” it’s that type of sick em’ and let them loose, take the chain off. It’s a pit bull just getting unleashed and attacking, they just let me attack the track.

MR: And “Flags” is one of the album’s singles.

T: Yeah. We’ve been throwing it out and letting everybody know it’s coming.

MR: What’s Naughty By Nature doing a year from now?

T: We’re gonna be Naughty. You’re going to be seeing a lot of different angles for what we do. We’re always gonna get material, whether it’s films, whether it’s songs, you’re always going to see the brand, other albums.

MR: You guys all still have your Grammys from Poverty’s Paradise?

T: Yeah, the Grammys, the AMA’s, the Hip-Hop Honors… We have different awards from all over.

MR: We’re going to stop there but I really appreciate you guys spending time to talk.

Both: Thanks man.

Transcribed by Theo Shier