Artist: L.E.G.A.C.Y.
Interviewer: Alex Fruchter

The emergence of Little Brother and The Away Team has kicked the door wide-open for other North Carolina Hip Hop Artists. L.E.G.A.C.Y. is poised to be the next Hall of Justus member ready to blow up, literally. His album, Project Mayhem, is lyrically explosive. But it’s not all punchlines, as the emcee is able to weave through songs dealing with wide-ranging issues. On Pain In Life he shares his experiences with Down Syndrome, on others he talks about the shadiness of the music business. But overall, he demonstrates why North Carolina is showing up so much on the Hip Hop map.

SoundSlam.com got an exclusive interview with L.E.G.A.C.Y. In it he talks about the role Fight Club played in the making of this album, the balance between making music to sell records and making music for expression, Carolina Hip Hop, as well as why his crew is ready to do like the UNC Tarheels, win it all and go pro. Check it out!

SoundSlam: Talking a little bit about this album, the first thing that I noticed from listening to it is this big theme of Fight Club and some of the ideas from Fight Club that are running through your album. Could you talk a little bit about why you chose to connect your album with that movie?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Some random chick I used to deal with, she brought it over early 2001. She brought it over on VHS. I smoked. I got high as a bird and I watched the movie. Usually watching movies with this chick I didn’t make it through the movie. But I actually watched this movie. I pretty much fell in love with it. I could relate to it. It was something that was similar to me, and me fighting myself with this music….When it was in the theaters I slept on it. I thought it was just a movie with a bunch of white dudes fighting or some dumb shit like that. It was so much more when I actually watched it. The whole take-over of the government and blow up government buildings and shit like that, it coincided with the album. It went parallel with the album. It worked.

SoundSlam: When you say fighting with yourself and how Edward Norton is fighting with himself in that movie and Brad Pitt is just a made up character or sense of self, is that you fighting in terms of getting your music out and expressing yourself versus….

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: …What they want me to do. Is it gonna be what I’m going to be happy with or what the powers that be want me to do? I’m in the middle of that now. The album is like that. The powers that be had a lot of say so and it’s almost the album that I wanted to put out. Almost, not quite.

SoundSlam: How so? What’s the not quite part?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: There’s a couple songs up there that I wanted no part of. But the label, 6 Hole, it was pretty much no dice if I didn’t put these songs on the album. Those are the items that stick out to me like a sore thumb. Those are those songs….If it would have been the album I wanted, we had a lot of different Project Mayhems in the couple of years, but that week before the final one was made, I cooked up a nice one. I was happy with that. Those two songs in question that were weaker to me, other songs could have been taken off and switched up with these other two songs. I feel it would have been a lot better. There’s nothing I could do though. I had to do what they wanted. There’s nothing bad on Mayhem. There’s just a lot better songs that could have been in their place.

SoundSlam: You never know. Maybe those two songs are going to be the ones that people like the most. They could be someone’s favorite song down the line.

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I’ve been getting that a lot lately. You just never know with the way the game is or the way the industry is. It’s an ever changing thing so the fans are ever-changing too. My least favorite shit ends up being some people’s favorite. Real talk, that’s how it is.

SoundSlam: I read in a press release that you learned through Hip Hop to respect yourself as well as respect for others. What parts of Hip Hop taught you that?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: The whole team thing. I wasn’t used to running with a team as far as the actual music went, that actually gives a shit. Before Justus League, before that I was running with some street cats even with my music. I was running with some more street element type dudes, street oriented type dudes. I was in the underworld. I think Tay but it best once when we were talking, back then it was me leaving Death Row and getting on Rawkus. It was a big change for me. I learned the whole respect for a team, or something you believe in, something you’re a part of. I learned respect that way. Respect for me, pretty much as an artist and as a person. I pretty much stayed out of trouble when I was dealing with them….I think I got a lot further when I got with them dudes. It kept me out of trouble. I learned a lot dealing with them dudes.

SoundSlam: Did you notice your style changing or that you were starting to write in different ways?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah, definitely….Matter of fact I just did this thing, some new thing, some website, some magazine’s trying some shit like you review your own album. I called it straight down the middle. I wasn’t biased at all. I definitely see what I have to do the next time out. There was times when I might have been bored on this album as far as the flow. I didn’t put enough emotion in or I didn’t say this the way I could have, I could have said this a lot better. I look at it now, that’s how it is. There’s two types of people, those that make mistakes and they just fuck up. Or those that learn from their mistakes. I’m learning from my mistakes in this music. I write a lot different now. I’m switching cadences and flows. Lyrically I’m dumbing it down a little bit. I’m still clever but I had to dumb it down a little bit.

SoundSlam: Why do you feel that pressure to dumb it down a little bit?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I feel like it’s necessary at this point. More people will grasp it. You’re not going to get a lot of L.E.G.A.C.Y. material the first time you hear it. It’s going to be later on that you’re going to pick it up. I like that to an extent. I want to grab the masses but yet keep the people that really dig for lyrics and wordplay. It’s a hard game to play. I love this shit but it’s hard. I try to stay in the middle. I try to please people and try to please me at the same time.

SoundSlam: Does that go back into the Fight Club theme again of you battling how clever you feel can be but still having to conform a bit.

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Exactly.

SoundSlam: What’s the Carolina Hip Hop scene like, something people might not know about it?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: There’s a lot of talent down here. I think we got it all down here. Being right here, it’s pretty much middle-East if you’re looking at it on a map. You might get some bouncy influences from down South, the Atlanta people or the Florida people for that matter. We might get the up North influence from New York. It’s a melting pot here. There’s a whole lot of different artists. North Carolina’s like, honestly I’ll give it a few years before this is the new Mecca of Hip Hop. Everybody has their run, all cities, all areas, blah, blah, blah. But I think it’s almost N.C.’s time. We got it all down here. Singers however you want it, we got that. Girl deejays, girl rappers, whatever they want. Some street shit, we got all of that fly shit down here. We cover all grounds. In any genre of Hip Hop or any music, we pretty much got it covered here. It’s coming to the surface now. It’s coming full service now.

SoundSlam: Do you think that it’s being slept on at all or pigeon holed because people might think, ‘oh North Carolina, that’s in the part of the South that’s just going to be giving us Crunk music.’?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah, we were branded. It still comes up on little write-ups about us to this day, ‘From the state where Petey Pablo had everybody swinging their t-shirts…’ That happened, but he was pretty much the first to kick the door in and go mainstream, mainstream screaming out North Carolina. We got some country shit here, but we got some city shit here too. We got a balance here. It’s one of the few places where we have an actual balance that’s pretty much equal. We got pigeon-holed, definite, definite. But that’s cool. You listen to any of my team’s music, anybody I deal with, it sounds nothing like anything crunk. I’m not knocking that sort of music, it’s just not me. I can say it’s not me.

SoundSlam: Talking about balance….You listed some influences within Hip Hop and also Kurt Cobain and the Doors outside of Hip Hop. Do you think that going outside Hip Hop for music and influences gives you a leg up or advantage that people only listening to Hip Hop wouldn’t get?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah. I can go and perform in front of a pretty much rock crowd. Or I can go over here and perform in front of a regular Hip Hop crowd. I can do either because of my influences. That’s why I’m this way. I love Jim Morrison. I emulate the dude on stage and all of that. That’s what I do. I love Jim Morrison, forget about it. I study the legends of the game that could have been around for years if certain circumstances wouldn’t have ended their lives early. Or those even still living that are legends, that I see as legends in rock or whatever that just aren’t around anymore. I’m trying to learn from them musically and learn from them on the bad things also, the hard drugs and shit like that.

SoundSlam:.…You have a song on your album that talks a lot about pain, Pain in Life. You say, ‘It’s hurts too much, I could barely finish this verse,’ talking about a kid with down syndrome-

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah, that was real. I was talking about that in an interview earlier, I still don’t know if that was too personal to put out to the world. I don’t know. I did that song live one time and I remember this girl coming to talk to me, ‘yea, my little brother has that.’ I touched somebody. I was like, ‘fuck it then. Go ahead and run it.’ That shit hurt! The pain in life is a good song title. It works.

SoundSlam: When you were actually finishing it did it actually serve as some type of therapy for you?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah. I vent through that. A lot of the dark shit that I go through it comes out in my words and the shit that I write. That’s me. I put a lot of what I go through in the song. I make a lot of comparisons to it in one way or the other. It’s all me. It’s all real.

SoundSlam.com: I like that song and I like a lot of the rest of your album because you are going deep into issues. And at the same time some of it is crazy rhymes that are just clever and not too serious. You have a lot of layers there. I was thinking about that with the Fight Club movie and the theme of being forced to be a certain way. He’s struggling with his own masculinity and you’re taught to be tough all the time, and on this album you’re going deeper and going into issues that some hip hop cats might think, ‘I feel that way but I can’t let people know.’ How were you able to just say, ‘fuck it. I’m going to write what I want to write and just express myself.’

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I probably couldn’t have gotten away with some of that stuff on a major or what have you. They tend to sort of water you down. Luckily I went the indy route. I had a lot of freedom as far as what songs we were going to use, to an extent of course. And the concepts and what I wrote about, that was me. Pain In Life, I did not want that and the Broken Hearted joint to be up there. I really didn’t want both of them up there. Those are real personal. I recorded them so I guess that’s when I decided to take them public. It happened.

SoundSlam.com: You have other movie quotes throughout. Did your love or appreciation of movies drive you to paint these lyrical pictures like someone is listening to your album lyrically listening to a movie?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I tried to go that route. The movie clips kind of tied it together as an album instead of a bunch of damn songs, random songs. A lot of the stuff it coincided. The insomnia clip, that went with the Fast Girls joint. That little clip worked right before it. That was all Chrysis. The original Mayhem, I was just going to say all the quotes of the movie. He had an epiphany or something, he had a vision one morning. He woke up and got the Fight Club DVD and he added the shit where he thought it should of went. He brought it to me and I liked it. I was like, ‘fuck it. Run it then.’

SoundSlam.com: You’ve been around for a little bit, but nationally people might not know that much about you. What are three things that you want each fan to know about you?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: You need to see the live show. Two, you need to listen to the words carefully. Three, I’m pretty damn down to earth.

SoundSlam: With the L.E.G.A.C.Y. name, and that stands for Life Ends Gradually And Changes You. Where did you get that from? When did you learn that in your own life?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I don’t know when. A lot of people close to me were dying and what not. I tried to turn it into something, silver lining in the clouds type shit. It got to the point, I don’t go into these deep thought type things, some shit comes to me and that came to me years ago and stuck. It’s true though. You’re living but at the end you have to die. At the same time you’re living, you’re dying. That’s how that came about.

SoundSlam: Have you thought about what you want your legacy to be in Hip Hop ten to fifteen years from now?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I want to go down as one of the best lyricists. That’s my main focus. That’s what I do. I’m a writer, a song writer. I’m going to do certain things, a lot of my core audience is going to be like, ‘what the hell is he doing?’ But I do it all for a reason. I’m a writer. I want to go down as one of the best writers in this shit.

SoundSlam: Do you think that Justus League is the hottest crew? Is this the most talented crew?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: Yeah. I would go out to say that. I would say Hall of Justus, myself, 9th Wonder, Chrysis, The Away Team, Joe Scudda, Sean Don, Litte Brother, I feel like we pretty much got it sown.…We had a big show the other night, a Little Brother show at Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I watched their show. As I was watching their show I was watching from a fan’s perspective. They rocked that shit. Nobody is really seeing us right now. We got projects on deck to last a while now. We got projects on deck. We can come up with another project like that, it’s nothing. Quality wise, I really do believe in my team strongly. And nobody is seeing us now real consistent.

SoundSlam: What do you hope that this album does where at the end of the day you’ll sit back and say this was good, we’re moving forward with this?

L.E.G.A.C.Y.: I hope that, sales wise everybody wants their album to sell as much as possible. But I want it to go down as remembered. I want people to put it in down the road and say, ‘this shit was pretty much classic. This shit is still hot and it’s damn-near 2012.’ I want people to know it took a lot of time. It took a lot of work to make this album. I’m happy with how it came out. I’m content. I want the people to understand what went into it. I want them to listen to it later on in life and be like, damn, ‘that was the shit.’

Project Mayhem is in stores now!