Last week NPR’s All Things Considered ran an interview I conducted with Bun B about one of his (and my, and your) favorite rap albums – Goodie Mob’s Soul Food. As is often the case with radio features the conversation was condensed considerably for time, so I’m bringing you the extended cut over here. Bare in mind that the conversation was originally intended for a bigger-than-rap audience, so forgive me if the questions are a too leading or expositionish. Shout to NPR and the great Frannie Kelley for making this all happen. And to Bun, of course.

Noz: What made you choose Soul Food?
Bun: I picked Soul Food because at the time it dropped I was an artist, I was part of the industry and for different reasons I was starting to become [disenchanted] with the industry. After being on the inside I started not being crazy about everything worked. I was having a lot of issues with sample clearance and being able to promote myself or market myself the way I thought we should have been and I was like “is there still room for an artist to make the music that they want to make?” When I heard Soul Food I realized that [there was]. It was obvious that Soul Food was not made for a record company’s commercial standpoint.

Can you break down the overriding theme of the record?
I think it was just getting back to unity. You think of Soul Food and you think of Grandma’s kitchen and family being together. Usually when soul food is being cooked it’s not just something that somebody makes for themselves or for two or three people, it’s a familiar setting. Soul food is gut food, it’s food that sticks to you. And there’s so many parallels to be drawn from the different foods that you cook, the way it’s prepared, that whole sense of family, unity and community. If the people down the street needed some you gave them some too. And bringing that to a musical aspect shows a different [type] of unity. Because at the time Soul Food was a product of the south realizing that maybe everybody wasn’t crazy about the south being in hip hop music. After the incident with Outkast [getting booed after accepting Best New Artist] at the source awards. It was just a matter of “you know what we’ve got to be sure that we’re in this together and we’re united for the right reasons before we choose to point the finger.” Let’s make sure that we’re sttting down and enjoying some old soul food at the table.

But at the same time there are some very dark moments to the album as well.
Well you have to think that a lot of the food that we eat as soul food is basically trements of slave and plantation lifestyle. The eating of tripe and pigsfeet and oxtails is not by choice but these are the parts of the animals that were leftfor slave workers to eat, rather than sitting in despair and crying about itwe were able to still have fun and enjoy each others company. Because it wasn’t just about the food. It was again about the family setting and the unity and the sense of togetherness that soul food dinners represent. It all comes back to being home. No matter who you are or how big you get you come back to your momma’s cooking and you’re home.

I never really thought about the record that way.
That’s funny because down here that’s the only way to think about it. It reflects on that entire plan of society from the plantations to the civil rights movement and the one thing that you see as the common thread through it all is the sense of family. And in black families in particular everything revolved around dinner. Everybody went to work, everybody did their chores and errands but everybody made sure to make it back home for dinner. And in spite of slavery and murder and lynchings and all these things we still have to stay strong as a family.

Do you remember what you were doing when you first heard “Cell Therapy”?
Oh absolutely, I had just moved to Atlanta when they released “Cell Therapy.” I remember hearing that piano and being like “woah this is kinda heavy, this is real.” And when Khujo just really started going into the dynamics of differnt laws during the Jim Crow period I was like “wow that kind of stuff still resonates today in society.” At the time it was really just the black americans and american indians who were the lesser citizens, but now, people of all races, creeds and colors are being held down by these same type of laws that were used specifically to hold black people down or red people down. It’s now just meant to hold everybody down within a certain tax bracket or a certain class of society.

It’s crazy to think that they went with such a charged record as their lead single.
Well I credit them or being people who were willing to take chances where other artists may have been concerned about commercial viability. They probably sacrificed a lot financially to make an album that really resonated with people. But at the end of the day they were very specific about who they were speaking to and what was being said. It really only scared people who didn’t understand. It really was trying to make you understand is the way they got you locked down in your hood is the way they’ve always had us locked down in society, trying to show you the parallels to this because you probably won’t read the book or do the research. What you’re looking at ain’t just what you looking at. The gates that are around your apartment is the barrier that has been set around you as an individual and people like you for years, so understand what it is.

And there’s a duality in it, as Cee-Lo says – are [the gates] designed to keep people out or to keep us in? There’s an element on both sides of the gate that people have to deal with. There’s issues within our own community that we have to deal with. The same thing that you worry about hurting you from the projects or the inner city is the same thing that the people who live in the inner city worry about hurting them. At the end of the day everyone in the projects and in the ghettos, they just want to live and raise their families.

Would it be accurate to describe this as a gospel rap record?
I wouldn’t say gospel, I think soul is the key. Soul music can be gospel music, it can be r&b, it can be anything that speaks to the spirit. I wouldn’t say gospel because obviously there’s some different language on this album, there’s definitely some aggressive moments on this album. But at the same time it stirs the soul and the spirit. We tend to talk about R&B music a lot of the time, but we don’t really talk about soul music. Soul music encompasses blues, jazz, it goes across all genres of music. There’s are U2 songs that you hear Bono sing that could be [soul]. “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” if you heard a gospel choir sing that, the same emotion is there. It’s still something that stirs the soul.

I see “Dirty South” as being a blueprint for so much music that’s come out of Atlanta and the south since.
Everything that came after Dungeon Family [felt their influence], whether or not it’s directly second generation Dungeon Family like Jim Crow or Youngbloodz. I mean hip hop from that point on, regardless of being from Atlanta. You could go to the west coast, the east coast, the midwest and see bits and pieces of influence from the lyrics as well as the music. I remember this record coming out and I was like “okay, here we go… they’re not gonna like this.” But the reality of the situation as I got older and got around and started meeting people was that people that thought that the south didn’t [make] contributions worth of hip hop were the minority. When I really got up to the east coast and really started meeting dudes and talking to dudes, people actually had love, they knew the music, they embraced us as artists. I was like, you know what? It’s just a handful of cats that got nothing better to do that’s talking like this. Everybody for the most part was feeling it.

Well that record also coined the phrase “Dirty South.” How’d you feel about that all encompassing term?
I liked it, I dug it. When we heard it, it just immediately became a part of southern vernacular. it wasn’t something that was even discussed. Nobody questioned it or anything. From that point on the south became the dirty south and not just to the south, everybody started referring to it as the Dirty South.

Can you explain Goodie Mob’s individual rap styles for those who have never heard them?
I don’t want to make crazy analogies… but.. in using dog metaphors [laughs]… I hope they don’t take this the wrong way, but I look at Khujo as a Rottweiler, very single minded and focused in the delivery of the message. I look at T-Mo as a pitbull, don’t underestimate the package. I see Big Gipp as a Doberman Pincher, very sleek in design but still just as ready to attack as any other dog. And Cee-Lo would definitely be the Saint Bernard, the wise minded one. He’s there to save lives.

How much of Goodie Mob’s real life personalities were translated to Soul Food?
Oh a lot of it, especially ‘Jo and T-Mo. These are people who absolutely care about what’s going on in their community and with their fellow brothers. No one really has an album that speaks to that situation from the street aspect like a Soul Food. I was around during the process of recording this album and there’s a couple songs that they did that didn’t make the album and even when I think about those, the theme was still there.

What did Soul Food do musically?
It went to a darker sound, relaying the whole Dungeon mystique. Doing the Outkast album was a chance for them to reach a lot of people. I think the Goodie Mob record was more about sending those people a certain kind of message, more of a mission statement of the crew. Goodie Mob were the carriers of that message. Sonically this album was bare as far as instrumentation, but that was due to the fact that they wanted you to hone in on the message.

Can you break down the importance of Organized Noize?
Each individual whether it be Rico, Ray or Pat are incredible producers in their own right. As a collective they are one of the most powerful production teams ever to exist in the music industry. [TLC's] “Waterfalls” of course is a song that will live on longer than any of us will. It’s a song that’s been covered by country artists, it’s gonna live. It’s a theme that everyone deals with. So [Goodie was] coming from this collective of people who received their tutelage from the likes of Curtis Mayfield directly. Not just by listening to Curtis Mayfield records but actually being able to go to Curtis Mayfield’s house and sit with him and take direction from him. Eventually when he moved out of his house [ONP] bought the house, which is the new Dungeon. The original Dungeon was Rico Wade’s momma’s house in College Park.

Soul Food was recorded at the original Dungeon. What was the studio like?
Most of the walls were still exposed so you would go in and you would see records and racks and mics hanging from the ceiling. And you would see red clay, literally, right there next to you. You had to be careful where you sat in that joint.

The thing that I always loved about the Dungeon Family too is that everybody in the crew has such a distinct style.
That’s one thing in the Dungeon Family collective. Individuality is key. There isn’t anybody trying to be like anybody else.

Which is why it was a little shocking when they went from Southernplaylistik to Soul Food in one step.
You could definitely say that there was more of a lighter side to the Outkast music than there was to the Goodie Mob music but they were [both] very intent on the message that they were trying to get across and they wouldn’t compromise it by commercial restraints.

Do you think that Soul Food inspired Outkast to mature with ATLiens?
I think it let them know that they could take more chances probably. But that mindstate that you hear on Soul Food is the collective views of the Dungeon Family. Outkast felt the same way as Goodie Mob. Maybe they just didn’t vocalize it in as raw a sense as Goodie Mob did.

It was all about a collective effort. It was all about the collaboration. No one person or no one album truly defines the Dungeon Family. It’s the entire legacy, the entire catalog and the input from everyone. Everybody was in it together and it was just a matter of who came out first. I almost want to say that Goodie Mob initially got them the situation with LaFace but “Players Ball” ended up breaking on the LaFace Christmas album and that propelled [Outkast] out there.

Did hearing the album make you reconsider your approach to making UGK records?
Lyrically yeah. It taught me that you don’t have to dumb yourself down to make street music. There was no sense in me thinking that anything we were doing was over peoples heads. You just had to know how to communicate it to who you were speaking to. Eventually they would understand.

You guys took a big step in that direction from Super Tight to Ridin Dirty.
Yeah I took influence from Goodie Mob, also from Rap-A-Lot, always making records about spirituality and real life rap records. Just like “yeah, we make good street music, let’s make a couple of songs that maybe if they got the message twisted on ‘pocket’ or on ‘feel like I’m the one that’s doing dope,’ then we’ll make a couple where they know exactly what we mean.” To let people know that we’re not just dummies down here making music, we pick and choose what we choose to speak on. But don’t think we can’t speak on anything.

Where do you think the Dungeon Family went wrong? It seems like around the turn of the century the whole movement just kind of dissipated.
I can’t really say because I wasn’t that involved internally. The music is still as strong today as it was then, I can’t say if it was lack of support from the record companies or if there was internal friction. I just know that hip hop is not better off because of it. We definitely lose when the Dungeon Family isn’t united. As hip hop fans and artists we all lose.

A fully reunited Goodie Mob is currently on tour with Scarface. UGK 4 Life is in stores now.

Tags: Bun B, Dungeon Family, Goodie Mob, UGK

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Atlanta, Interviews, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.