This was a lot of fun. The Pharcyde (currently composed of founding members Imani and Bootie Brown) doesn't do too much touring anymore, but in mid-November a local radio station booked them for two straight nights at Ophelia's Electric Soapbox, which appeared to be some sort of combination concert venue and dinner theatre. It's always incredibly nice to find out that your favorite goofy rap legends are exactly how you would expect in person, a fact underscored by the apparent requirement that at least one of Imani or Bootie be dancing to the venue's background music at all times. In transcribing, I realized that the interview sounded a bit like a cliche podcast, the two emcees completing each other's sentences or interjecting enthusiastically. At the slightest prompting, Imani was liable (and, of course, welcome) to speak for minutes on end; by contrast, Bootie would often say nothing until he had a fully-formed statement to make, usually tying his answer into the overall conversational thread. I'll leave it to you to infer what you like about their personalities as artists, or about their preferences in weed strains.

The photo above, and several others, were taken by Adrienne Thomas, who I assume y'all are by now familiar with. So that you can read it in the correct voice(s), a clip of the interview can be heard here.

Coming up, did y'all run into any issues getting taken seriously by the industry as a hip-hop act or was the genre considered commercially viable?

Imani: It depends on how old you are. Because hip-hop is always changing, and how you see it depends on when you jump on. If you talked to the Gs that was from the Bronx, it had been going on since ‘73. I wasn’t even born until a little bit after that. By the time we came around, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince had already gotten a Grammy, MC Hammer had sold diamond. It was in the infancy stages because people always want to make like it’s arrived even as it’s still growing. The people that had known knew that it was still growing, that’s why KRS-One said you can’t even talk about it yet, it’s not even fifty years old. But it was gaining a lot of popularity, crawling out of the basements and the underbellies, becoming a little commercial. First it was some underground shit, then you start seeing it on Frosted Flakes commercials and realize "damn, hip-hop is really here." That’s where we came in, why we was the sound we was, coming back from the underground. There was a lot of commercial, glossy, Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, but at the same time we had this little thing bubbling in the underground. It was a little rebellion.

Given that you were going against the grain, what would you have said were your inspirations or the blueprint that you were following?

Imani: We were from LA, we were dancers, we didn’t rap in the parks, and we weren’t from New York. As far as the emcee perspective, it was different because we came from dancing - enjoying the music and just listening to it. Not knowing the unwritten rules, right? Sometimes when you don’t know, you end up going a route that you wouldn’t have went if you knew better.

What material impact do you think your dance background had on the music itself?

Imani: If I sold drugs, shot people, I might want to make that more of a part of my music - yo, this is what I do. But what we was doing at the time was being young, fresh out of college, going to dances, messing with girls… not getting the girl, sometimes. Dealing with different elements of the city.

Dancing and emceeing used to be a little more intertwined, or at least thought of as more essential to one another. Why do you think they’ve grown apart?

Imani: Money, things change. Ice Cube did a line "I leave that to the brothers with the funny haircuts" - that was us, dancing. Hip-hop is many things, right? It’s not just emceeing. Once, it was all about DJing and the emcee was the guy in the background. The DJ got the break so that the boys could do they thing on the dancefloor. The emcee might do the "yo, b-boys, do your thing / hey DJ, do your thing," but mostly he was a second thought. Somehow, somebody figured they could make some money with this guy with the lyrics.

Bootie Brown: I think in general, entertainment is different. When we were coming in, you had to be a full entertainer. There weren’t so much emcees, there wasn’t a culture that was there for hip-hop like that. You had to entertain on the full spectrum; you had to know how to dance, you had to know how to rap. Now, it’s so large that you have to do less and less to keep the audience’s attention. Back then, you had to give people more because you might be touring with a rock band or an r’n’b act where the audience wasn’t really there to see you rap.

To that point, I guess now if you want to see someone dance you can find twenty different people dancing to a song on YouTube. Anything an artist doesn’t do, there’s a culture to fill in.

Imani: But it’s not totally dead! Lil Uzi Vert, he does the [demonstrates a shoulder roll] and that’s his thing! He gets geeked off that. Chris Brown, people dance. It’s just not their whole thing. The dances have their own names.

Before you had as much sway with labels or as big a name, how much creative freedom were you allowed? Do you feel like your earlier records are true to what you wanted to put out?

Imani: Record companies give you a loan, and whenever you’re dealing with somebody else’s money you’ve gotta please somebody other than yourself.

Bootie Brown: But as far as the creative level, A&Rs didn’t have any influence on our creative process.

Imani: But the record company definitely had their two cents. Either verbally or by refusing to pay something, they’d let you know how they felt about something. We had a lot of say, we would do what we wanted to do and then they’d cut some of it from the album. But everything on the record came from what we wanted to do.

Bootie Brown: We weren’t an r’n’b act that had a costume artist and a set designer. We came up with what we wanted to do, and it was either approved or shot down.

Going back to being the guys with the funky haircuts, there was all kinds of hip-hop being made in LA in the early 90s. Was there any sort of broader, trans-genre community? Who did you consider your contemporaries?

Imani: LA is so big, right, so you have an entire community contained within a place like Oxnard, where Madlib and that crew comes from. That’s hella far from LA! You’ll never cross paths with those dudes unless you go out there or they come in. There’s a whole slew of dudes from Orange County, and then you got the West Side, Compton, Long Beach. So unless you’re intermingling with all these different cliques, you won’t see them. The exception was this place called The Good Life, which people from all over the city came to. It wasn’t our headquarters, it was more these guys called the Freestyle Fellowship. I’d say they were our contemporaries; I won’t say that the cream necessarily rises to the top, but the people who are serious start to stand out from the rest. So those guys, Alkaholiks, Hieroglyphics in the Bay Area, and everyone within all of those groups. Alkaholiks knew Xzibit and King T, who knew DJ Pooh, who knew Ice Cube. We knew Ice Cube too, through our manager Paul Stewart - like I was saying, it started to come together.

Bootie Brown: For us, it was more or less the dance groups that started off everything. You went to school with different people that maybe you were part of a dance group with. Then maybe you elevated from a dance group to an emcee-type situation.

Imani: Every dance crew in every city had a little local DJ, and they’d go and network and bring the community together because people would step out of their cliques, into parties in different parts of the city.

Was there a sense of hierarchy? Like you hit a ceiling dancing and then you have to start rapping to take the next step?

Imani: Within your own situation, you just figure out what you want to do - some people decided they wanted to make beats. In our clique, it was DJs that started making beats, rapping, designing clothes. Even journalists - hip-hop birthed all these new jobs, you’ve got people around us starting magazines, looking for talent, making clothes. That’s just what was happening - everybody can’t be the rapper. In the NBA not everybody can be on the floor, but you have trainers, you got scouts, referees. It was a whole business model.

Hearing it for the first time in Virginia, Bizarre Ride was a very California-sounding record - did you feel like it had a sense of place?

Imani: That’s crazy that you say that now, because when we came out everybody thought we were from the East Coast. "More love" is probably putting extras on it, but for some reason they totally embraced us around DC, New York, Philadelphia. We did a lot of time over there. I guess at the time the West Coast had a sound, and our sound wasn’t that. It was just hip-hop; it started changing when people started putting titles on it - "west coast," "g-funk," "gangsta." Without that, people would listen to you anywhere.

Did you find that you had any sort of reputation that preceded you while touring?

Imani: Nope, they didn’t even know where we were from. It’s like Cypress Hill - when Cypress Hill came out, people had no idea where they were from. We had to tell people where we came from. So when people heard the music, it wasn’t like "oh, these are LA dudes."

Did you think much about having an intended audience either then or now?

Imani: It was an era where if you didn’t do platinum or gold, you wasn’t shit. We didn’t totally understand the business at the time, so we were just under the impression that we needed to sell enough to make another record. We thought that each time we did it, we could do better. We sold gold on our first record, and everybody that we loved loved us. Mission complete, at least as far as our short-term goals. We should’ve set bigger goals, we just didn’t know. We should’ve tried to sell more records than MC Hammer, but we would never have said that at the time. That’s sacrilegious. But you’ve gotta think big. My goals were what I could see, but my vision was not long range. As you get older and you get to live a little bit, you can see longer down the line. But at the time, fresh outta high school living with my mama, the world was a smaller place. My goal was really just to survive.

Bootie Brown: I think I never really had goals. The only goal was to just make something good and do it better the next time. Something creative that somebody hadn’t did, just to be different. But as far as a goal like a monetary or a sales goal, I never really thought about it that way.

Imani: I would always hear him talk about getting as much information as he could about what we were involved in - as much as I can know about production, as much as I can know about sound.

Bootie Brown: I’m not saying things happen by chance, but I do think that we really don’t have control over certain elements. I would’ve never thought that we’d catch on with a majority white audience. That wasn’t who we saw at our shows - we were from South Central, you know? So to have a large, college-type following like that was just totally unexpected. What you may think of as your audience or as your level of success can be totally wrong. If you get too wrapped up in that, you can fall into a rut like me, thinking "man, I don’t really want to do this anymore because you’re not attracting the type of crowd or selling the amount of records that I thought I was going to sell."

What was able to re-ignite your interest in the project?

Bootie Brown: It’s like waking up every day, it’s a fresh set of ups and downs. Do I have a lot of bills today, or is my mailbox empty? There wasn’t any one thing that got me back into it. Looking at our group’s situation, I think every group has a bad situation; there’s no perfect musical group out there. Maybe it’s drug addiction, maybe it’s whatever - everybody has had their down points in the industry. It’s whether you can sustain. Time is basically your only enemy within the industry, because things change and you can’t stop it. The music is going to change to different styles, and you have to be persistent about adapting. It’s like mountain climbing - when you grab a rock, you don’t know if that rock will hold your body weight or not. You really don’t know, but you can’t just stay on the side of the mountain and scream "help!" You go up or go down.

Twenty-five years on, what would you guys say is the key to longevity?

Imani: Luck. Luck is the heart of it for sure. Everybody wants to live long, but if you don’t take care of yourself you have no chance to get lucky. If you’re drinking wrong, eating wrong, living wrong, you just took away all your opportunities for luck. Health is wealth. If you can’t do what you was doing, you can’t do it, right? And you’ve got to have the attitude that you’re doing yourself, not worrying about the outside noise.

Bootie Brown: We were coming from the era where people were getting record deals - you can be broke as fuck, and then the next day wake up and have a $300,000 record deal. Those days are gone, nobody’s getting that these days unless you sign your life away. That’s just one of the adaptations, recognizing that those days are only. A lot of people in our generation are spoiled artists, not recognizing that at this point you’re going to have to pick up a little more work.

Imani: A lot of people thought that the internet was just a fad, and now they’re scrambling to try and figure out how it works. You’re lucky to have had the right perspective to have said "ok, maybe I’ll give this computer thing a chance." There were people that made the same conscious choice not to get involved, but the thing popped off.

Hip-hop has changed. There wasn’t no 60 year old hip-hoppers when we was doing it. That’s weird. Our parents music was different, and their parents music was different. Me and my son listen to the same shit! We like some of our parents music, but it’s not our music. Hip-hop is our music, and our kids listen to hip-hop. I can’t say "man, what you like ain’t hip-hop;" he’s telling me what hip-hop is! So when people say "man, fuck this mumble rap," they’ve gotta pump their brakes! You can’t just take a whole thing and say fuck everything. That’s like saying "fuck these backpack rappers." You gotta take your time, let the dust settle, and the cream will rise. There’s gonna be some dope mumble rappers and some wack mumble rappers, just like there were dope underground rappers and wack underground rappers.

Bootie Brown: After a while, things kind of complement each other. You may not see it right then, but think about jazz - lots of jazz musicians didn’t like that we were sampling jazz records in hip-hop. But down the line, now hip-hop has brought a focus back to jazz that it might not have otherwise. Those guys are going back on tour again. Sample digging is a whole thing - who is this? That’s Roy Ayers, or that’s that. Right now, we might say mumble rappers or whatever but as soon as one of those guys mentions their parents brought them up on this or that artist and see how they come back into the fold.

Do you guys think much about your influence or legacy among the newer generation of rappers?

Imani: You’re influenced by all things, directly or indirectly. Even if you don’t like some shit, that’s an influence. That’s a loaded question, you just want us to say who we think be biting our style.

I’m just kidding. I would assume that just like so many people who came before us influenced us, it’s safe to assume that we influenced a few people. Somebody might hear us and think "I hate that Pharcyde shit, I ain’t never gonna make some music like that," and that’s still an influence [laughs].

It seems like people are trying to play up the intergenerational conflict angle in rap nowadays, but if some 16 year old rapper gets asked what he thinks about The Pharcyde in an interview and says he’s never heard of y’all, I feel like that’s completely reasonable.

Imani: You know how many rappers I’ve never heard of? Everyone thinks they’re all that, but there’s so many dudes that I don’t know. In r’n’b right now, I can tell you about the popular people, but there’s so many that had that one song and wouldn’t come to mind right that second. It’s too many. I wouldn’t be upset, I’d just say they should come to a show or google us. Then they’ll know what’s up. But it’s pretty fucking vain to expect somebody to know about you just because you’ve been out. I’m not that dude.

Bootie Brown: I realized things were different when people would talk about "My Prerogative" and mean Britney Spears, not Bobby Brown. At that time, I realized there were people so young that it just didn’t mean anything to them. It wasn’t in their generation. Is it on them to go out and explore and find origins, or is it on you to go out and do something new to show people where it came from?

And that’s for music lovers, a lot of people don’t care. They like what they like. A lot of people like sports but don’t really get into it like that. I’ll be like "yo did you see Kobe score 45 on the Knicks last night?!" and they’ll be thinking yeah, I like that guy’s shoes. I get it. I’m not into soccer like that. It’s not that fun to get around people that make you feel stupid for not knowing shit.

Even in terms of longevity, it seems like there’s something to be said for not feeling like you have to keep your name in the news at any given point to stick around. I think it’s hard to do that and have it age well.

Bootie Brown: I think once you set the tone of what you are, it’s not worth trying to prove anything unless you’re trying to prove something to yourself. What you do have is the opportunity to be yourself - when you are younger, you have to shift and fit in because you’re in that race of going out every night to impress a record label or get involved with all the other acts that’s out. I don’t think John Coltrane was worried about Kenny G. You know what I’m saying? I just go out and play what I play.

I’m curious about how you guys handled creative collaboration. Obviously emcees trading verses can lend itself to group work, but how did you decide things like group identity?

Imani: If you talk to anyone who has been in a group, it’s always the same story: compromise, give and take, sacrifice, am I doing too much or not enough? It’s just hell. It’s something that you really have to fight for if you want it. It’s just learned from being around people. I’ve gotta go back to my sports metaphor: Lonzo Ball doesn’t have that cohesiveness with his people right now, but the more repetition and the more you get involved the more learning moments you have.

You guys have had some pretty fluid membership through the years: people leave, come back, the whole group temporarily reunites -

Imani: I like how you say "fluid membership," but that’s not what it is at all. It was decisions made by people that wanted to change the decisions after they made them. Like I just said: in a group, you can’t just say "I changed my mind!" without coming back to see if we all agree. You can’t have knee jerk emotional decisions, it’s gotta be thought out. With some of our members, I don’t think their decisions were 1000% thought out. I’m not going to sit and bash anybody because people make decisions, but mine was to stay and I haven’t gone back and tried to reverse it.

That’s the other tricky thing with group work, I suppose - any individual decision is a collective decision as well. Have you guys thought about going back into the studio, or is performance more fulfilling these days?

Imani: No, we never stopped recording. It’s just that the temperature of what’s happening with the internet makes it a different game now. People are used to doing a record, radio, a video for MTV. Nobody gives a fuck about MTV. We feed our fans, the audience that we play to, and through our different venues we feed our fans - at the shows, with Soul Unit Recordings, or individually. We just stay creative, and there’s no real timetable.

Bootie Brown: It’s not a thing where there’s a big release that we’re waiting on, some album or single that all the publications need to know about. We’ll just make some music and put it out, and see what that does.

Imani: I think if we were signed to a label or something that we have to pay back, we’d definitely be in a hurry to put something out and get the fuck off that contract.

Bootie Brown: Money basically changes everything, like with the fluidity of the group. There’s groups out there that say "oh, it’s a compromise because somebody needs the money more than they need their ego." We explored that and saw how money can keep a group together, but it often seems like it kills the creative situation.

Is there any sort of creative freedom or relief that comes with knowing that your legacy is secure?

Imani: I don’t think about a legacy, that’s what the media thinks about. Back to my sports analogy: a lot of people don’t worry about none of that shit. Hall of fame? They worried about getting they paper, next Sunday, next game. Pundits talk about it, but you don’t really think about that shit. When you gaming, you gaming. When you see the end of the game and getting closer to retirement you might start thinking about that stuff, but I think we’ve done great. It’s surpassed anything that I thought in my head. I would sit in a classroom in Compton and look out the window, knowing it was a big world out there but with no idea how I was gonna see it.

Bootie Brown: After a while, it wasn’t really a major artist sort of dream. It was just knowing that my close family, my mom, my peers, understanding that what was done was not just a waste of time. When your kids are younger, they like the music that they like, but when they go around trading music with their friends and can say "yeah, that’s my dad" - that means much more to me.

Is it funny at all to have such a specific moment of your youth preserved and put to tape?

Imani: It could be a lot worse. All these Corey Feldman stories and all these crazy Hollywood pedophile stories, my story could be a lot worse than me smoking weed and having fun sharing my joy for the world to enjoy. Versus having my pain recorded and shown, and having people getting off on me being in a fucked up place. I did it my way, right? There’s levels to it. You have the people that are really successful - Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast, Run-DMC - but it’s way more that people will never think of again. We had some good times, that’s all you can ask for.

Bootie Brown: Our whole thing was that we were blue collar emcees. We’re working class, it’s not a super struggle but at the same time it’s not the high gloss that you eventually fall off from. We’ve always had to work for the position that we’ve been in, and that’s helped our longevity.

Imani: Hip-hop is crazy man; everybody that’s a fan of hip-hop do it. Other kinds of music, sometimes people just like it. But in hip-hop everybody’s got an opinion, everybody make music. Long after we’re gone, hip-hop’s gonna be different, but whatever what we’re thinking morphs into, that’s gonna be the real shit. People were really saying that we weren’t hip-hop… hindsight is a motherfucker. "They dancing, they singing and shit, that ain’t hip-hop," and now it’s like "man, y’all are that real hip-hop!" That’s funny to me, you can’t get comfortable.

Bootie Brown: For a journalist like yourself, you may never make it to Rolling Stone or Billboard, but maybe you write a piece on some group that blows up - you were the first person to really put them on. That’s not gonna go nowhere, and at some point people go back to it. Would it make a difference if you ever got to Rolling Stone, knowing that people saw you write about this group? That’s golden.

On that note, what are y’all listening to these days?

Imani: I’m back into house music. There’s so much shit that it’s overwhelming, so I gotta go in cycles. I was on some Fela for a minute, had to go back to James Brown. Not really EDM, but different sorts of BPMs similar to house music. That just helps me think. I like to smoke weed and listen to house music, take my shirt off, take my shoes off, look at the sun with my feet in the grass. My kids think I'm a hippie, but that’s the shit that keeps me grounded, man.

Bootie Brown: Same, right now. My dad’s a carpenter, handyman, whatever you wanna say. He’s like a Jimi Hendrix head, Doors head, Mamas and the Papas-type stuff. That’s what we listen to while we’re working. That’s kinda how I got into music, going back and figuring out where it all started for me.

Are there things outside of music that you guys can find fulfillment in?

Imani: Like, how do we live? Music is only part of my life. It’s the foundation.

Bootie Brown: But at the same time, music is our lives. After you do anything so long, it becomes a part of everything that you’re doing. I like to take pictures. Then all of a sudden, pictures become the artwork for an album cover.

Imani: Every life needs a soundtrack. Music works, it never bothers you. You can always have it.

Bootie Brown: Even having kids, you have a baby and then people are asking about whether you’re gonna write about having kids. Like you said, everything’s an influence on what you’re doing. It’s what we love, so it’s not really looked at as a job, but everything that you do ends up filtered through music in some sort of way. I like designing clothes, but I’m always thinking about ways I can incorporate it into a video or something. I haven’t found a way to separate it. Maybe fishing, if I took that up.

Imani: The people that I admire the most, I know the least about. I only knew the music, and so I keep them in that frame. Now that I know so much about these artists, I don’t like them as much. You know me because of my music, and that’s how I like to keep it. Just know that I do whatever it takes to keep a positive outlook on life. Before reality TV and shit, you didn’t really know about Michael Jackson, he had that mystique. "He’s coming on the Saturday Night Special, I never get to see Michael Jackson!" Now you see the motherfucker playing baseball, eating cake, and you don’t even care about the artist no more. I like the songs that people make, but I’m just not into their whole artistry. In that moment I’m feeling their song, but I don’t really become a fan. That’s a big thing. I’ve gotta follow you, give a fuck about your perspective.

Bootie Brown: I like ignorant music. It’s kind of like watching a movie. You like Scarface? Yeah, you like Scarface. Would you ever live like Scarface? No! But it’s good to watch, it’s exciting. If I’m in the car, I love listening to ignorant shit sometimes. I don’t really want to go out and do that stuff, but it feels good to let out some steam.

Imani: You can pick and choose, some things are gospel. Drinking lean ain’t the gospel, but "Ten Crack Commandments" is the gospel.