Al’ Tariq aka Fashion – The Unkut Interview, Part 2

Continuing my interview with Kool-Ass Fash, we discuss him leaving The Beatnuts, meeting Kanye West, forming Missin’ Linx, getting beat-jacked by Dr. Dre and his ill-fated experience signing with Dante Ross.

Robbie: At what stage did you decide to do a solo album?

Al’ Tariq: While we were out on tour doing The Beatnuts joint, we were doing a show close to home at a school, maybe in Long Island or some shit, being on stage and then somebody started heckling us. Talking shit, ‘Yo, you fuckin’ aargh!’ I finally look and it’s Juju. Then he comes and hops on stage and joins in on one of our songs and shit. I was so mad, and I could never understand why Les and Peter Kang didn’t get mad with this dude. I had a few serious run-ins with him.

We met Amanda Shears, who was down with Happy Waters and Ted Demme, that’s how I met my ex wife, that day we went to go meet them. Steve Stoute hooked up a meeting with us with Amanda Shears, Steve Stoute wasn’t even as big as he is, this is back in the day with Steve Stoute. We go, we met Amanda Shears and she was about to be our manager and I get a call from her one day and she’s like, ‘I’m having a problem with Juju, can you talk to him?’ She was saying, ‘I’ll get 20% of what y’all do. I’m about to bring y’all deals to do songs with people, to do beats for people.’ She was crazy connected. So Ju was like, ‘Alright, but if I talk to somebody and I get an agreement to do a song for them, you don’t get no money outta that.’ She was like, ‘You’re doing beats for $5,000, $7,500. $10,000 at the most. I’mma get you $40-$50,000 for beats to big people.’

He refused to share his money on the job. Instead of just giving the 20 on everything, he was like, ‘Fuck that. If I hook something up, why should you get any money?’ I’m like, ‘Yo Ju, she’s not just managing us as producers. She’s about the manage the group The Beatnuts. We’re gonna be on tour with Cypress Hill, Funkdoobiest, rock groups – everything, my nigga! Fuck that little bit of money you’re talking about!’ And like the dickhead he always liked to be…and nobody would say nothin’. Les wouldn’t beef with him, that was always my gripe with Les. ‘How do you see this dude ruining us, putting his foot in his mouth at every turn, fucking up shit, burning bridges with people, nobody wants to deal with him.

He doesn’t come out on tours! You think when we did those tours that everybody didn’t want to see all three of us? They didn’t want to just see me and Les. People, to this day, ask them about me. ‘Yo, what’s up with Fashion?’ So you know at that time they wanted to see all three of us. He was burning so much shit for us that I was like, ‘I can’t be in this group.’ I’m a soloist anyway, so I did like three or four songs. Relativity had a new president, dude didn’t know us from Adam and he said, ‘Because of what this last Beatnut album did, we’re not gonna do two Beatnut albums, and that’s all this Fashion album is gonna be if it’s only The Beatnuts producing.’ So they declined to do a deal with me. As soon as that happened I was out on the market and Correct was the first label that jumped on it. ‘We’re crazy fans, we’re building a young label, we’re gonna blow you up!’ They were based in California. Don Schneider, who’s father was an importer/exporter of computer parts – he was an Israeli dude, new money – back then he was worth maybe $50 or $100 million. Ian Hunt was a descendant of the Hunt family, which is one of the huge, old money families in America. He was a trust-fund kid and they had all of this money to do this label. They had an umbrella company, and then Correct came under it. They had the group Mannish, they had me, they had Gravity, they were trying to sign Kanye. They had done a single with Black Attack and were about to sign him too. As you can see, Les did most of my album anyway.

Had you become righteous around that time?

I already had been educated in Islam already, something just happened and I took my Shahada. I could have still called myself Fashion, but I wanted to make a break because I felt like the energy of The Beatnut thing, the album not reaching the heights that we felt it should have reached. We didn’t even know how well-received it was from the fans, we were so caught-up in, ‘We didn’t get five mics!’ The Source had given us three and a half mics, then they came back and made a correction in the next issue. They were like, ‘We really wanted to give The Beatnuts’ album four mics, it was a mistake.’ But the damage was already done. All the hype and the Yo! MTV Raps and the BET and magazine covers and all the other bullshit? It didn’t mean shit. Rap was becoming big business, so labels were already at that time, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ If the album wasn’t the biggest thing? They were moving on to the next thing. Common, Fat Joe, ‘If you guys didn’t sell 300,000 the first week then we’re off to this.’ It was wack.

Was the ‘Nikki’ song on God Connections the same song from the old demo days?

Nah, it wasn’t exactly the same thing, cos the first one that Tip heard didn’t have Miss Jones on it. The one with Miss Jones was done later on in the studio when we were doing the Street Level abum.

How did you connect with the Chicago guys like No I.D.?

Because of Common we already knew about No I.D., so he was already part of the family. Correct had Gravity, so I went to Chicago to do a track with him and Ye produced it. That was the first time I met him, and he was a fan of mine. I was looking at him like a talented young kid. It felt good, cos he know all my rhymes and was asking what made me put the King of New York shit in the hook for ‘Crime Pays,’ and ‘What made you put all them black exploitation films in your rhymes for ‘Foxxy Brown’?’ I’m like, ‘Yo, you’re the only nigga that peeped that, man.’ I’ve had people interview me and ask about that song and ain’t nobody understand why I did that.

‘Peace Akhi’ with Ju and Les was great too.

‘Peace Akhi’ was a joint, man! If Correct didn’t fold, because of some crazy shit that happened – some sexual harassment lawsuit – and I had the chance to do more videos that that album would have been way more successful. At the time too, I was going back and forth to court, facing twelve and a half to twenty five years in jail, so it was a crazy time, B.

Where had you met Problemz and Black Attack?

I met Probz and Black when I was still with The Beatnuts. Because of that dude Ronnie, he knew Sterling Kagel from Roosevelt Island. Sterling was messing with this crew called S.O.P. – Smoked Out Productions. They were starting to make some noise, but they had two stand-out rappers and the rest were mediocre, at least that’s what the fans felt. That was Black and Probz. Sterl asked me if I would do a song with them as their first release away from S.O.P. The song came out crazy and I was like, ‘Yo, I want y’all to be on my album!’ They were with it. It caused a little confusion with Sterl, but they weren’t signed to him.

Then you went on to form Missin’ Linx with them and recorded a single, which has an interesting story behind it.

Dre heard our song, and that’s how he even wanted to go get that beat. The dude’s who sold him that beat weren’t supposed to sell it to him because they had sold it to V.I.C., who’s the dude that produced ‘Missin’ In Action’ for us. He heard that shit on the Baka Boyz, ‘Who is that? What is that?’ Found out what it was, what the loop was – took it. Ours was an underground classic, his was a top ten hit. But it’s all good.

So you cleared things up with Vic after your initial reservations?

I was cool with Vic, Vic used to go through the same shit with Juju. The back-stabbing and the back-talking and all the dumb shit. He witnessed it, he knew what time it was. Plus he wasn’t really a racial dude, so he could see all the shit that was going on. He wasn’t gonna shit on Juju, cos that’s why he was in the spot he was in. Even though he had his other connections with Deric Angeletti and people, Vic’s fame is that he was down with The Beatnuts, somewhat.

Why did you only release a Missin’ Linx EP instead of a full album?

We were making a lotta noise with the ‘Missin’ In Action’ song, we had just got an offer from Fat Beats for a nice sum of money to do an album and to do an imprint [label]. Fat Beats is a small, boutique thing, it’s not a major, and they were like, ‘We’re gonna push y’all over here.’ At the same time, I had a boy by the name of Dagen Ryan who always fucked with Dante Ross, and he was down in the business, doing things with DV Alias Khrist and all those dudes. Dagen was making his bones, I known him since we were youngsters, running around in clubs in the 80’s. He was like, ‘Dante just got a deal with Loud – Stimulated – he wants y’all to be his next three man group. It’ll be in the same line as Brand Nubian, Leaders of the New School, and y’all. That’s how he’s gonna bill it.’ So I went with the emotional shit. It was a dummy move, I should’ve never did that. All he wanted to do was give us an EP. ‘Oh, it’s Dante Ross! We’re gonna be on Loud!’ I should have just did the right thing and been loyal to Fat Beats and took the almost $100,000 they wanted to give us to launch our own shit. It would have been a totally different outcome, because they were a force and they really wanted to push everything. I put that on me, making that decision.

Then we had a terrible relationship with Dante. Dante shitted on us, didn’t really give a fuck about that Stimulated shit. He was riding high on the hog because he had done the Santana album and he had the fuckin’ Whitey Ford album out. He was so huge that he never was at the office. He didn’t give a fuck about our shit, we never even did a video for our shit. Then me and him got into a beef because we needed to get money. We did the whole EP already, and you want to be extra critical and talk shit and cause dissention in the group? I’m like, ‘What type moves are you making, man?’ All of us were fucked up. I was like, ‘Yo Dante, we need to do something to get some bread. Can we do a record with Fat Beats while we waitin’ for this EP to drop? Black ain’t got no electricity in his house, Probz ain’t paid no rent, he’s about to get kicked-out. We need bread!’ He’s like, ‘No.’ He didn’t care, man. So me and him got into a crazy phone altercation, which I hate. Beefing over the phone of my pet peeves. I was so heated I wanted to do something to him, and the whole shit just fell apart man. He just shelved our shit, he never put out nothing. It never got no pub, it never got nothing. It was a waste of time.

You still went on to work with Juju and Les a few times again. How are things between you all now?

We havn’t done nothin’ since ‘07. Me, Les and Problemz did an album, Big City, on Nature Sounds. That was another one where we had a falling out. Les wanted Devin to pay him money over to go promote his own album. Devin had booked shows for us to do, Les wanted to do Beatnut shows over those so we never did one show together. We did a video and the video never got shown anywhere because Devin wouldn’t put no more money into it, because Les refused to promote it unless Devin gave him money upfront. The reason that album came about is me and Probz were doing an album together, our first single was gonna have Ol’ Dirty on the hook. Ol’ Dirty passed away, so we were a little set back. I get back up with Les, and Les is not in a good situation in life. He was going through a messy divorce with his wife and shit just wasn’t good for him. I brought him to Devin so that Devin could hear the album he put together. Dev wasn’t impressed with the album, but he suggested, ‘Why don’t y’all just be a group and do an album? I’ll put it out.’ It took us two years to do the shit, cos Probz and I were both gainfully employed. Then Les went and talked shit about me and Probz on AllHipHop.com or some shit, saying he only did the Big City album to help us out cos we wasn’t doing shit. Yo, that was some of the best shit you did in years and you’re talking about, ‘You needed to help us out?’ You were fucked up! Sleeping in your car and then living with this dude Chris, this singer from Chicago.

Before that, we had done a tour together where I found out at the last minute that them even doing the tour was contingent on having me as a part of it. It was a European tour with an American leg on it. ‘One of the main reasons that we got this tour is because the promoters in Europe said you had to be on it.’ No wonder these fuckin’ dudes just call me out the blue to do this shit. And then they were giving me peanuts! This is the last fuckin’ straw. Then they did the Take It Or Squeeze It album, we did two or three songs together. I remember Chris Lighty coming up to Chung King studios, talking about the first single and shit. They wanted ‘No Escapin’ This’ and I was like, ‘My nigga, ‘No Escapin’ This’ does not sound like ‘Off The Books’ or ‘Watch Out Now.’ The reason they’re big is because you can dance to them, you can play them in clubs. What y’all should put out is the Greg Nice joint.’ So Juju said, ‘Who made you Power of Attorney? How you get to run shit?’ So again I bit my tongue and let them go ahead.

Were you proud for them when they had those two hit singles?

I’m in the ‘No Escapin’ This’ video, on line in the club, so I was around those niggas. I remember people coming to me saying, ‘Yo, they’re talking about you in their song, ‘Do You Believe’.’ They were talking about me, saying slick shit, but I didn’t really care. I was like, ‘I’mma start this label.’ I wanted to have my own artists and I wanted to be sit back and be that dude on top. There’s other stuff I wanted to – movies, I wanted to do this singing album with a band – all types of other shit. Regardless of whatever you do, that’s just gonna make me go harder, cos I’m gonna feel like I’ve gotta be bigger than whatever you did. Envy? Yeah, you can say that. Never jealously, never hate, never mad. I’ve been on stage with them and performed them songs like it was mine, and I’m proud of it because that’s a part of my family tree in this music game. Their success? I revel in it. I know I’m a part of the history of this group, before them songs and after those songs. But there was something else meant for me.

Are you still living in New York?

I’m at Westchester, about 35 minutes outside of the city, which is beautiful for me. I’m close enough to the city that I can enjoy it, but I’m far enough away that I don’t have to deal with the concrete jungle.

What’s next for you as far as music?

I wanna do one album for me, I wanna have closure. I wanna end my career as a rapper my way, I want it to end the way I want it to end. I have thirteen kids, and part of the reason I came back to Westchester was to be a dad for my kids. It started being more and important to me. Then I went through this crazy situation up here in 2004 where I was involved in this crazy federal case. My first cousin, who’s like my brother, was murdered by these dudes that I knew from up here. They killed him in a crazy drug deal, it was all over the news. I was in a raid, it was 60-something people arrested. It was one of the biggest drug arrests in New York State history. Kidnapping, murder, all types of shit. When that shit happened in 04 and I lost my cousin, it made me really evaluate everything and take stock of what my life was and what the fuck had I been doing, how I wasn’t taking shit serious. I was just living. That made me feel like what was important was family and having a legacy with my kids and being something for them. Not just hopping all over the pace and living my life on my terms, I had to live it being responsible for other lives, and I never was living like that until that time. That changed everything for me.

Will there be another Al’ Tariq album?

Of course. I have a name for the album, it’s called B.I.G – Before I Go.

This interview is also available in the limited-edition book, Past The Margin: A Decade of Unkut Interviews, available here.