STILL THE ANTHEM KINGS

STILL THE ANTHEM KINGS


STILL THE ANTHEM KINGS

It’s been two years since the members of Naughty By Nature last performed together as a group. After that storied night at B.B. King’s blues club in New York City, Kier “DJ Kay Gee” Gist, Anthony “Treach” Criss and Vincent “Vinnie” Brown went their separate ways at which time critics and fair-weather fans readily wrote them off. But no more, the guys are back in top form and are ready to release their new album at the top of the new year, tentatively titled Anthem Inc. Welcome back. 
gavin philip godfrey


You guys started out as New Style. Looking back aren’t you glad Queen Latifah blessed you with a name change?
KG: I don’t think it really made a difference … the name didn’t really make us — at the end of the day it’s the music and we had the music.

OK, so Juelz Santana pulled a Fiascogate at the Hip Hop Honors show. Did you feel disrespected and was his blunder a reflection of this generation’s artists having a lack of musical history?
T: I think our era of hip-hop had a lot more respect for our forefathers than a lot of the new cats now … a lot of the new cats now think they are the s—.
KG: On another note, I’ll say that we reached out to a lot of different people in the industry — a whole bunch of people — and a lot of people didn’t show up. [Juelz] made his mistakes or whatever [but] at least he and Big Boi did have the respect and showed up for it.


What do you think about people who question your relevance?
V: I think first and foremost it starts with the people. There’s a market [and] we are getting it together, but we’ve got people that are getting at us, and that’s through touring, through the Internet, through all of that stuff. There’s a market out there. The people make you relevant, not the naysayer that sits on the side, and they don’t understand what the heck is going on.

For fans both new and old, can you tell us what Anthem Inc. will sound like?
T: A breath of fresh air. Like, this is what we’ve been missing. Everybody’s saying there’s something missing in hip-hop. Of course you don’t want the same stuff that was hot in the ‘90s and the early 2000s; you want that new hotness, but on the same type of vibe that was in that era and everything else — that’s what the fans are going to get.

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