During an interview with Vulture, Ghostface Killah took a look back on his legendary career and gave his thoughts on new music.
The Ironman rapper said he doesn’t “discriminate ” when it comes to music and even appreciates tracks from “a few young guys that’s out there right now. ” He continued by talking about the disconnect between artists from different generations.
“People get it twisted, like, ‘Oh, this new rap generation is garbage.’ But you know what? You gotta have the ear to understand what’s going on,” Ghostface said. “Some of them really got talent. You might not be able to understand that talent because that’s not the era you come from, but being an artist, you gotta be willing to listen to everything. It took me a while to start to understand these kids and their sound.”
Although Ghostface said he does like some of the music coming from newer artists, there are some acts that he thinks “sound the same.”
“I’m not saying everybody’s like that, though, because [some of it does] all sound the same,” he said. “But those little guys, they sound the same because they’re not thinking of new shit.”
Ghostface also talked about younger acts not fully immersing themselves in hip-hop’s history.
“I’m all for these young Black kids getting money and doing what they do, but musically, I think that becoming a rapper now, you should know the history, know now who the Spoonie Gees and Sugarhill Gangs was, the Wu-Tangs and the Biggies, all that. Grand Puba, all these guys. You need to know these people,” he said. “You gotta add to that. We got bodies of work. Mobb Deep, Nas, Wu-Tang, Jay-Z, we got bodies of work. These days, you might hear one record and don’t even care about the rest of the album.”
Ghostface knows a thing or two about establishing his own lane. He told Vulture that a lot of his fan-favorite songs from his classic album, Supreme Clientele, aren’t about anything. Instead, he was just pairing words and rhyme schemes together that he thought sounded good in his head.
“When I was rhyming on ‘Nutmeg’ and ‘One’ on Supreme Clientele, I made a style that I couldn’t even tell what it was. I just wanted to use some words that sounded good with each other and everybody’s trying to decipher what I mean when, really, I don’t even know what it means because I had no beat,” he explained. “But something said, ‘Make a record. Write a verse real quick just putting words together, whether they mean something or not. Just put them together.’”
Head over to Vulture to check out Ghostface’s interview in full.
