SILVER FOX CONT.
2
I’m from Manhattan, and they came from Queens to meet me. Kool G Rap would come to the after hours spot that I would go to. He was always there. Me and him, we was always battlin’ each other! [laughs] Every week he would get prepared with new stuff and be like, ‘Come on Fox – I got you this time!’ It would be friendly rivalry, you know what I mean? So it would never be like where I’m trying to take him out – you know, ‘Talk about your moms and kill your cat, your dog’ type battle stuff. It was more-or-less, ‘Let’s see who runs outta rhymes first’. Me, I had a habit of just goin’ on and on with it. I have rhymes that’s accumulated, where I could just spend all day and just go through it. At that time I was also creating stuff – I wanted to be inventive. Like creating the ‘run-on’ sentence – keep going with things like ‘a’, ‘k’, like, ‘I have a story I must relay, it happened to me on a Monday/ was sittin’ alone in a café, a pretty lady – she came my way/ she said, ‘You wanna share a little Monet? I said, ‘I don’t mind, it’d be OK’/ she grabbed my hand, walked to a Chevrolet, we stepped inside – she drove away/ she said, ‘My name is Faye, got a sister named Kaye’….’ And it just keeps going on and on.Yeah. This was 1983. He came down to the record shop – he wanted to be signed, basically! He was lookin’ for a label. We talked about rap and everything, we was actually just hangin’ out. When L met me, I’m in my twenties and he’s sixteen years old. When I heard him I was like, ‘Aw man! It’s your time, man! This is your time. Don’t you know?’ He knew it. He felt it, but it’s just that nobody was ready. It took somebody like Rick Rubin that had the same vision that he had, and be able to take it and mould it to bring out an LL. Nobody else could see it, ‘cos they were stuck in that other stuff that started out in the 70’s and didn’t want to go to the next level. The music was in its infancy. It was time for a change, it was about to go through a metamorphosis. All the old school rappers were getting older, and there was a new generation that were buying records – and you don’t want to buy a record that your dad’s making, right? And L opened up the door for a lotta these young cats to start coming out. Before there was a Will Smith, there was LL! What I love about L, man – his first album, there wasn’t a curse word on it! Wait, maybe one song [laughs] He did ‘Jack The Ripper’ – that was the baddest! Wasn’t no cursing, no talking about slinging your drugs. He didn’t talk about what kind of gold he had on – he just wore it! He didn’t talk about his watch – he just let you see it! Mel is the one who influenced me to really do it. He just kept goin’ with his rhymes and he was so articulate and he used current events and put it into his raps. How could you top ‘Beat Street Breakdown?’ I went to go see Melle Mel and the Furious Five at a party when the Cassanovas robbed everybody. He said, ‘Throw ya hands in the air…now keep ‘em there!’ And everybody was gettin’ stuck up! I’m looking around, going, ‘Oh, snap! They robbin’ people right in front of me, man!’ People gettin’ punched in the face, people gettin’ stuck-up, people gettin’ their jewelery taken! And I went there by myself because I wanted to see Melle Mel – I wasn’t thinkin’ about the rest of the guys – I wanted to see him. I’m from Manhattan and I’d gone all the way to The Bronx. I always felt in awe of Mel, and that was the only cat in rap that I was actually in awe of. Other than that, everybody else…I mean I liked their raps and I appreciate it, but I only listen to them for a minute and that’s it. When I started creating stuff, I was my own influence.The best battle I had was with Kool G Rap and LL [laughs]. Me and L use to go for days, man. We would travel places and we’d battle each other, sitting on the train – ‘cos he would always want to battle me. We were on a plane, goin’ from Manhattan to upstate New York, and we would be battling each other all the way there! The trip was 45 minutes long, so for 45 minutes we would be battling each other!