QN5 Music
Interview by Elann Danziger
The Five Tenets of The New Hip Hop:
1) A commitment to quality over quantity.
2) An emphasis on self-reliance to succeed without piggy backing or forced collaborations.
3) A refocusing on the album in a singles driven mainstream market.
4) All releases should contain original production. (ie. No mixtape style beat-jacks).
5) A commitment to musical progression while maintaining the traditions of the art form.
QN5 Music has officially been in the game for 10 years now, establishing their name ever so gradually by finding their
niche among a sea of struggling artists on the underground hip hop scene. Instead of falling in between the cracks,
they have remained a relentless force of artists who continue to grow in numbers and progress as artists by refusing to
dumb down for the masses. Instead, they have gone against the grain by looking forward instead of looking to the past
for answers. With the recent release of the new installment of their acclaimed Asterisk compilation series (all exclusive
tracks blended together by DJ JS-1), QN5 is still out to prove how their reach goes beyond just hip hop as we now know it.
Recently, we got to sit down with Tonedeff, QN5’s founder, along with flagship stable emcees PackFM and Session, and in-house
producer Elite to talk about the release of Asterisk 4 and what’s been on their mind lately. Needless to say, they had quite
a bit to get off their chest.
Philaflava.com: Nearly three years have gone by since the last Asterisk was released. What made you come back to it after all that lost time?
Tonedeff: We had intended on getting one ready in 2005, for our annual Megashow at BB King’s. With everyone already
busy at work on their solo projects, it just didn’t come together in time. All of us were focused on our own grind,
and it just happened to be bad timing. The same thing happened last year when we had the Megashow at CBGB’s. It was
very near completion, in terms of the songs we had at the time. We wanted to make a professional pressing this time
around, but then the timely Queens power outage totally shut me down and I lost all my production time.
Philaflava.com: Did you lose any material?
Tonedeff: We didn’t lose any material, but it certainly didn’t allow us to finish it in time for the Megashow. Time passed, and we
figured, “Okay, there’s no point in rushing it. Let’s just take our time, do some extra shit, make a lot of songs, and fuckin’ OD on the next one.”
Philaflava.com: The list of artists on Asterisk 4 reads as mostly family, even bringing out artists that you’ve worked
with before but haven’t shown up in the Asterisk series before (Masta Ace, Inverse, Supastition). One name I didn’t expect to see
on there was Tanya Morgan. How did you hook up with them? Also, how do you feel about branching out to other artists who aren’t
already apart of the QN5 family?
Tonedeff: Tanya Morgan got brought to us by Kno. He really liked their Moonlighting album from last year, and decided he wanted
to produce a song for them and put them on the record. As far as branching out, we tend to work with the best in upcoming talent of the
Northeast region. Sometimes, we’ll reach out to cats we see on the West Coast too, like Inverse or Immaculate. We always try and find
new talent. At the same time, there are a lot people that are straight up assholes that we won’t fuck with. Basically, if we haven’t
worked with them by now, either we don’t like them, or they don’t like us. Simple as that.
Philaflava.com: You’ve been around for several years now, establishing your name in more than just the Northeast region of America.
When you go out to different cities, is there more love or more animosity directed towards you?
PackFM: I’ve never had a problem with anyone. A lot of people in the scene aren’t very vocal, but then when they make certain moves
and they choose to include you in those moves, it’s like, “Okay, so what’s really on your mind?” It’s not like anyone has any tangible
reach with QN5 at all. But like Tone said, if they ain’t fucking with us by now, they probably ain’t fucking with us at all.
Tonedeff: Basically, I feel like we threaten people. Our sound and what we’re doing independently is a threat to a lot of cats.
We’ve done on our own what a lot of people have not managed to do and will never manage to do: Establish ourselves in a post-Golden Age,
post-Lyricist Lounge, post-Rakwus era with no fuckin’ money, no budget, a hard grind…shows and music, that’s all we’ve done.
Philaflava.com: Talk to me about your distribution woes.
Tonedeff: It’s like this: You can make records, you can make songs, and you can have albums…you can have all of these things
poppin’ off, but if you don’t have a way of getting it into the stores or a way of getting it picked up in other countries, you’re
stuck ass out on the Internet. You’re stuck making songs for you and your boys down the block. Distribution has always been
difficult for us because we’re not playing with a lot of money. Distributors are only looking at you if you have 60-90k to promote
this release, plus another 30k for marketing. Since we haven’t had that kind of money, we’ve been hopping around from label to label,
from distributor to distributor. We’ve been in a lot of fucked up situations. Money has been taken. We leapfrogged to the next
step, putting out music on our own in a confident matter and get it out to the cats who want to buy it in the store. We’re
mercenaries at this point and we’re gonna put out our music however the fuck we can put it out.
Philaflava.com: What objective or constructive criticism has furthered you creatively and fueled you to step up?
Elite: Every time you make music, you get a million opinions from a million people. You have to know what to sort out,
what to pay attention to, and what not to. You need to know how to move forward and be positive. My main thing right now is thinking
positive. The more I’m in that frame, the more good shit comes my way. When I go to make music now, before I make it I say its about
to be the hottest shit I ever made. That’s the mindstate you gotta be in.
Tonedeff: These days I’m a lot more resilient when it comes to people’s criticisms. Everyone makes it a point to find something
wrong. They’ll find the smallest fucking detail and harp on it just for the sake of harping on it and having a unique opinion. You have
to just put on your Teflon and let all that shit bounce off. It will ruin you as an artist. Me, personally, I make music that I know
I love. And I know that if I love it, someone somewhere will respond to it and will love it as well. That’s how I approach it. That’s
how I’ve gotten better and become more confident as an artist now than when I was when I first started.
PackFM: I’m a very determined individual. I set certain goals for myself, so I’m not really concerned with what other people
have to say. For me it’s just about reaching my own personal goals, so when I make music, I make music that I want to listen to. I
don’t care if anyone else likes it…I’m pretty sure they will like it though. I want to hear good music, so I strive to make the same.
I set high standards for myself to keep elevating my abilities. Every single time I write a rhyme, it has to be better than the last.
Tondeff: And honestly, those who have followed PackFM know that all he has done is improve himself every time. It’s scary,
because he just keeps on getting better, so just imagine how he’s gonna be five years from now.
PackFM: Give me a moment to wipe my tears for a second, that’s beautiful…Nah, but it’s just my own personal standards,
you feel? As long as you stick to your own shit and do what makes you happy and successful, you’ll be fine. But if you’re trying
to live to please everybody else and they’re all opposed to what you’re doing, you’re probably never gonna be successful. You’ve
never gonna please everybody all the time. Please yourself and you’ll be fine.
Session: My motivation comes from when somebody tells me I can’t do something, or I’ll never do this or that…. Fuck that
bullshit. I use that to my advantage and throw it right back into their fucking face. I don’t really care what other people think
though, cause if you look at Eminem, 50 Cent, Jay-Z, or any of the biggest artists in the world, there’s still plenty of people who
don’t like their shit. So what, not everyone is gonna like my shit. You don’t like it, go listen to something else. I only care
about the people that like my music.
Tonedeff: That’s the biggest thing that pushes us forward as an artist collective. With all the doors that have been
slammed in our faces, it makes us work all the more harder, and at the end of the day, all of the most successful artists are
the ones who’ve gotten the most doors slammed in their faces. And when we finally get to that mountaintop, we are literally
going to shit all over everybody that didn’t give us a hand and didn’t support us. We are literally---literally, literally,
literally--- just going to eat up and obliterate motherfuckers, and the same injustices will be past over to them.
Philaflava.com: All of these years, you’ve established a very specific audience. In 2007, are you looking to gain a new audience?
PackFM: That’s the thing though! If you look at QN5’s audience at shows, you just can’t pigeonhole any of the people
that really follow us. They like all types of music. They’re not the kind of people who just like one genre. You got kids
who are into Rhymesayers, Def Jux, MF DOOM, but then they also like Bjork, Radiohead, The Killers…they like everything. It’s
not like they like anything per se, but they’re very open-minded. And that’s the kind of music we make. We don’t make music
for people who are looking for some Nineties-revisited type shit. We make music for people who want to hear more new shit.
Session: And what’s crazy is that all of us as artists make different music. At our shows, you really see a mixed group
of fans that come together for our individual shit.
Tonedeff: Let’s make one thing clear: we don’t attract hipsters. That’s the one audience we don’t attract. QN5 Music
does not attract hipsters. We attract music lovers. Not people who are down with a specific scene. These are literally people
of all ages and from all walks of life that come through that genuinely love music. With that said, you’re gonna attract a whole
bunch of people you wouldn’t expect to see at a hip hop show.
Philaflava.com: Obviously lyricism among your collective has evolved tremendously over time. How do you feel the production has changed drastically with QN5 though?
Tonedeff: I’m gonna let Elite answer that one.
Elite: When I first started, I would hear any little thing and make a beat out of it. Now, I’m more selective.
I’m trying to be more experimental again, so it’s all coming full circle.
Philaflava.com: Given that your views represent the collective, it would make some sense regarding the “Punk”
track on Asterisk 4, a trance track which is different than anything QN5 has released so far.
Tonedeff: Actually, since Day 1, we’ve always incorporated electronic music in our sound. On Will Rap For Food, Kno had drum n’ bass
breaks on three different tracks. I also had tracks like “Velocity” and “Fast” which were in the same vein. Elite did “Bring It” on
Underscore. “Line Drop” switches between hip hop and bounce. We have no qualms with electronic music, and we have no stylistic limits.
That’s part of The New Hip Hop. As far as “Punk” goes, that’s Substantial’s thing. He had a connect named Berry Corsten, who’s a gigantic
Scandinavian trance producer, internationally known, plays DJ sets for like fifty thousand people. The track was meant to be a single.
In 2003, they called Stan and I in to do a rap version of the song. They gave us the song, we recorded it, we handed it in. Literally,
years went by, and they went back and forth at the label. They weren’t sure if Europe was ready to hear rappers over trance. So we’re
literally sitting on this song for years waiting to hear a definitive answer. Ultimately, it never comes out, it’s not on Corsten’s album.
Finally, we see a new version come out on his newest release…with Guru on it. Obviously, we’re wondering what the fuck happened. What it
came down to was that his label was scared of putting rap on it, but when they heard Q-Tip on the Chemical Brothers track “Galvanize”, they
figured “Oh, okay, now it’s cool. Let’s find another old-school rapper that’ll get on this shit.” So they picked Guru. No disrespect to Guru,
but the one we did is completely more progressive, by leaps and bounds. When we debuted it at the last Megashow, people freaked the fuck out.
We had to put it on Asterisk 4.
Philaflava.com: What’s the status on future projects?
Session: The Spicasso LP has been taking a little longer than I’ve liked, but then again I also haven’t been as focused. Lately
though, I have been. We have a deal through Koch. So I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I was always the one who didn’t want
to do the whole independent/underground thing. My goal was always to sign with a major---go through QN5 to something big. But I was patient,
I was always trying to hold out on it. Koch is good though, I’ve got the motivation. It took age though. And now my shit is gonna drop
real soon. Substantial’s album comes first though.
PackFM: I’m not one of those people who’ll cut a record and then drop another one right away. It took a long time putting out
WhutDoesFMStand4?, so I’m gonna really let it ride for a while. But I’m not sitting at home doing nothing. First of all, I do shows,
and if you know anything about me, I’m on the road every weekend. I am always performing.
Philaflava.com: Yeah, you were in Baltimore opening up for the Clipse recently, right? How did that go?
PackFM: I did my thing. In fact, all the other openers after me got booed, and they wouldn’t have gotten booed if they had gone
before me, because everyone before me was exactly like them. They even wanted an encore out of me! I did the damn thing. As far as
new material goes though, I’m working on an EP with Domingo, tentatively titled Brooklyn Bridge 11201. I felt like there were a lot of
things that I didn’t get to cover on WhutDoesFMStand4?. I did touch on quite a wide range of material, but there’s just something that
PackFM does on the mic that I didn’t get to touch on with the last album. So with this EP, I’m gonna fuck up a lot of people. Put some
dudes in headlocks, rob some people…I’m gonna do the PackFM thing. I’m taking it to Brooklyn. I’ll be touring for the EP too.
See, some people wanna keep dropping record after record. But when this culture started, albums were made a lot differently. A real
album shouldn’t last three or four weeks and then people forget about it. A real album should last at least a year or two and let
people come back to it like, “Yo, that shit was hot!”
Tonedeff: It Was Written didn’t come out until three years after Illmatic dropped.
PackFM: Redman for a while was dropping an album once a year!
Tonedeff: DMX, he overdid it.
PackFM: I just don’t want people to forget about my record. You want to buy a PackFM album? Buy WhutDoesFMStand4?.
Tonedeff: And there’s nothing wrong with that. Because if you look at it, you make a solid album that is playable
front to back, and your fans will wait. They will love that record, they will let it sink in, they will examine every little
piece of it. If you have the quality, you can sustain your career. But if your record sucks, you have to put out eight
records in a row to keep your name out.
PackFM: I put out a mixtape three years before I dropped the album. I held my fans down. I’m probably the only person
to drop three singles off of a mixtape! If you put out the music, they’ll wait for the album.
Philaflava.com: What about you, Tone? Chico & The Man is a joint project solely consisting of Kno on production,
and you on the rhymes. Two tracks have been released to date, and clearly both of them follow a specific theme,
lyrically and musically. What can fans expect out of this album, and how has Archetype influenced the material you’ve written?
Tonedeff: Kno is completely responsible for the sound, I’m basically being used as an instrument. But as far as how Archetype
will influence Chico & The Man…well, obviously Archetype represented my artistic progression. I learned a lot making that record.
In terms of this album though, the sound is going to be completely different. With “No Hope” [off Asterisk 3] and “My Lady”
[off Asterisk 4], the album will definitely veer in that direction. The production will be extremely lush in typical Kno tradition.
Both of us as artists are completely elevating our games on this record and doing something that no one has ever heard before.
Philaflava.com: Has QN5’s artistic mission statement ----manifested through “The Five Tenets of The New Hip Hop” you’ve established--- evolved at all?
Tonedeff: Not at all. We thought really hard about those five rules before committing and going public with them. We
literally all sat down in a room sometime in 2005 and brainstormed, like “How can we improve the music scene? What is wrong with it?”
With hip hop, kids we have…they either want to be super duper fucking frou-frou poetry art rap, fronting like, “We’re so complicated and
different for the sake of being different. We’re artists!” That in my opinion is such a self-indulgent point of view from an artist.
Like, who the fuck are you? A lot of those artists can’t even stay on beat. How the fuck are you going to tell me how art is when you
can barely master the basic principles? That’s like going to art school and you’re going to paint a Van Gogh when you can’t even draw
a perfect circle. And then you have the other side of the coin, where it’s like “We’re gonna take it back to when hip-hop was pure!”
Dude, it’s 2007. It’s a different time. Reagan ain’t in office anymore. We’ve got a different asshole in office. Essentially, you
can’t recreate history, it’s not gonna happen. Why the fuck is everyone trying to take it back when we should be taking it forward?
The music is stagnant. People have been making the same music for the last 14 years. Let’s do something new already. That all being
said, with these Tenets of The New Hip Hop in place, anybody can follow these rules and create something within these guidelines that is
going to progress the music. Now don’t get it twisted, we’re not saying “QN5 are the inventors of The New Hip Hop and this is a whole other
style of music.” It has nothing to do with that. All we are saying is that anybody that is pushing forward while still holding on to the
traditions of the music…that is New Hip Hop. If you follow these five rules, anyone can join in on this movement. It’s an artist movement,
not solely a QN5 thing. In fact, it’s important that others join in on the movement, and here’s why: Every fuckin’ show that we’ve gone to
ever since we’ve started out, they play the same fuckin’ records from 1994 that never, ever, ever go out of rotation. Every new artist in
2007 that is reading this interview right now: As long as these wannabe start-up DJs keep coming up with this elitist bullshit with their
fucking vinyl DJ starter kits, going to Fat Beats and copping every record from 1994, playing the same shit over and over, your record
will never get played. I’m all for the classics, but let’s mix it up with some new shit. So join the New Hip Hop movement, and altogether
we can get our shit played, grow the music, sustain the music, evolve the music.
Philaflava.com: Wow. You’ve obviously got a lot planned for the future. Between this mission statement and all the solo material coming out, what’s the status with touring?
PackFM: Right now, the Cunninlynguists and I are hitting the road pretty heavy together. Session is coming along for a few dates, as
is Tone. But mainly it’s CL and myself. We’re about to do a heavy push in the Northeast---Vermont, Boston, New York. We’re rolling
with Devin the Dude right now. Then we’re heading to the West Coast. You’re gonna see us touring all over in the spring. Check
www.qn5.com for all the details. It’s amazing how you can get so much information by typing
six letters. Every one of our shows are listed up there. Be on the look out between April and May, we got a good ten to fifteen shows lined up so far.
Philaflava.com: What’s been in your rotation lately?
Session: I only listen to beats. I keep up to date with new shit, but I don’t really listen to anyone right now. Like I’m feeling this that and the other, but I don’t have a favorite…
PackFM: Well, me, I’m…
Session: …And Dipset.
PackFM: …On the real, I’m been heavy into Redman. Redman is a big influence on me. What’s hard about being an artist is that
it’s hard to say you’re a fan of another rapper. But I feel him because he’s still rapping. He’s still out there spitting. A lot of
cats, they’re just trying to dumb their shit down and they’re trying to fit in and they’re trying to be current. There are so many
emcees that just don’t wanna spit anymore. This is a guy though, that if you listen to his new material, he’s still spitting like he’s
trying to get a deal! It’s good to hear that artists are still kicking rhymes. Because that’s what we do, we kick rhymes! We’re not
trying to make a hit. Kick a fuckin’ rap! That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not just dumbing it down to get the video played.
Say something while you’re at it! So right now, I listen to a lot of Redman.
Tonedeff: I basically listen to everything under the sun. I absolutely have no prejudices. I listen to everything except for
country. I just can’t get into it, I’ve tried, I’m sorry. Lately, regular rotation is an album by a group called Midlake out of
Denton, TX. They basically made a concept record about living in the woods in the 1890’s to the tune of Fleetwood Mac. It’s
phenomenal. There’s a group called The Presets out of Australia I really dig. They’re an electronic duo that does some
really hard shit. The new Arcade Fire’s been bumping in the whip too. Most of all, I’m a fan of anyone who’s a singer-songwriter
and anything that has great melodies. There’s a cat named Finn O’Reilly out of NYC. Some Irish folk rock dude, he’s fucking amazing.
His album just came out on iTunes, it’s called Spawn of the Beast. So yeah, anything that’s huge, epic, has a lot of melody,
tons of layers, and great production I am a fan of.
Philaflava.com: Anything you want to say to the good people of Philaflava reading this right now?
Tonedeff: We just want to say hello to all the frustrated artists on the board.
PackFM: It’s cool to be a fan, nothing wrong with that. It’s weird though, cause I really read the site. You
know, I get bored. And I read these cats, and they take everything so seriously! They take themselves so
seriously! I’m not trying to offend anybody, but…be a fan. That’s all I’m saying. There’s nothing wrong with
being a fan. Because a lot of you all think, “Okay, fine, because somebody posts on the same board, we’re on the
same level as them.” And you’re not. You just share a fucking server space.
For more info on QN5 music, check out these websites:
http://www.qn5.com
http://www.myspace.com/qn5