Interview with Mr Long - One Half of Legendary Hiphop Group, Black Sheep

Its a fact of life that once you make any kind of dent in this Hiphop industry that you automatically lose your ability to tell the time. It often seems that while Jacob The Jeweller can make million dollar watches that look amazing in photographs of your favorite emcee, the one drawback is that they don't seem to work properly. Rappers never show up for interviews on time - its Industry Rule Number 4082 (4081 of course being "Kanye only opens his mouth to change feet.")

Anyway, imagine my surprise when I scheduled an interview with Mr Long (formerly Mr Lawnge) and my phone rang precisely on time as planned. After I picked myself up off the floor, we got to yakking about his new album "Class Of '89" and his role as one half of the legendary Black Sheep¡­

Talk to me a little about this new "Class Of '89" album...

Long: "Class Of '89" is an album I put together from the heart, because of the state that Hiphop is in today, and how I feel it should really be. I called it "Class Of '89" because that's the year that I graduated,­ and back then, coming out of high school, that was one of the hottest eras in Hiphop music - you had Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, KRS-One, LL - that was the era of the 'real' emcee. The music was dope, the samples were hot, the lyrics were ill - everything was fresh and original, and it was a sin to not be original. That's something that I based my new album around, and it's a topic I touch on a lot.

So is the album gonna be a flashback, musically, to that era and sound?

Long: I'm sampling records, but its not really about me trying to mimic that time. Its more that the album carries the whole undertone of that era - yes, I'm sampling records from that era and before, but everything is crisp and clean, and sampled in stereo as opposed to mono like how it was back in the day.

And is it a true solo album, or do you have any guests on the mic or on the boards?

Long: Strictly me - all production and all rhymes fully produced and written by me.

No Dres at all?

Long: Nah. Not at all.

Ok. Well we'll address that in a second. Why did you switch the spelling of your name up (from Lawnge to Long)?