Kwest Tha Madd Lad reflects on his debut album a quarter of a century later. Part 2.
We continue with our in-depth conversation with Kwest Tha Madd Lad, regarding the 25th anniversary of his debut album, This Is My First Album (1996).
In our first installment, Kwest discussed how he got signed to American Records and the process of recording the album. In part 2, he gets into some of the bumps that he faced along the way to getting his debut album to his audience. The album was shelved for two years after its competition, and by the time it dropped, Kwest was a fairly bitter about the whole experience. However, the fact that album is celebrated and recognized a quarter of a century later is a pleasant surprise for him.
Check it out as Kwest discusses label politics, the importance of humor in hip-hop, and this album’s enduring legacy.
Check out Pt. 1 here.
Check out my interview with Dan Charnas, who signed Kwest and executive produced This Is My First Album, here.
Jesse Ducker: You’ve talked about being a battle and freestyle oriented MC before. Was it tough for you to make that transition?
Kwest Tha Madd Lad: No, because I started out writing stories. I wasn’t really into the battling thing, I started out writing stories. I didn’t get heavy into the battle aspect of it until I went into the New Music Seminar. I was battling a little bit in the hood and all of that, but they weren’t really battles, because I was taking people out. I wasn’t getting any real competition, and then my manager at that time had set up a battle in Harlem, and I was like, “Okay, I get to shine here. Let me see if I can really test my chops in this shit.” And that’s when I was like, “Okay, I can really do this battle shit.” I said, “Just being me, and being a jerk, and going off the top of the head, and being funny.” … I’d take a condom and just spit in it, and unroll it, or whatever, and then pull it out, and be like, “Ask your mother where this came from.” … That’s how I started out, just being me. Those were all aspects of me, it was like, you know what, just be funny. Funny wins all the time.
JD: It’s an underrated aspect of emceeing.
Kwest: I’m not going to say it’s lost now; you listen to certain albums and there’s still funny aspects of it. But it’s not as prevalent as it used to be. And I understand, because not to be funny, a lot of shit isn’t funny anymore. The world we live in isn’t 100% comedic.
And even back then, like I said, after I started, I was like, “You know what, it’s not that I don’t want to do the funny shit. I’m not a hardcore dude, so I’m not going to front and do the hardcore shit, because that’s not me.” But I always thought emceeing was all about progression, and just getting better and better. So it was like, “Okay, I’m going to leave the funny shit alone for a while, and just practice on being skilled.”
JD: Do you know why the album was shelved for two years?
Kwest: To tell you the truth, 100%, I don’t really know. I think that they thought it would turn out one way, and then when they heard it, they was like, “We can’t market this shit the way we thought we were going to be able to market it, it’s too crazy.” And then maybe there were other artists that they brought into the label at the time that they felt they wanted to put more focus on. Not so much push me to the back burner, but when you’ve got somebody that’s crazy, you don’t know how to market them, and then you get somebody else that’s equally crazy or more crazy, and you’re like, “Okay, shit, we can’t market both of these people at the same time, we don’t know how. Let’s focus on the newer person. And Kwest is still there people know his name, but let’s focus on somebody else.”
People think that I have animosity with Chino XL because we were on the same label. There’s no animosity. I think they did put me on the back burner when they got with him. … I’m not mad about the shit. It wasn’t his fault, he was nice. He came with something different. It was some shit that people hadn’t heard before, the whole just annihilating emcees, and dissing the shit out of people head to toe. And I get the fact that they were like, “Oh shit, we can push this shit.” Then he had “Kreep”; “Kreep” was fucking dope. I still think that that’s one of the fucking dopest emcees ever. … I would love to do a fucking song with him, I think we and him would kill. It should have been happened.
I wanted to speak to Rick Rubin about [the album’s delay] for the longest, and then like I said, I was so mad with Dan and mad with the politics and shit. Because you hear about the politics, but you never think it will happen to you. So like I said, after it didn’t come out when it was supposed to, then 1995 came, I’m like, “Are we going to drop an album this year or what?” And I’m standing there, writing new shit, and not doing anything with it. And they threw me a couple of bones. They let me do the remix to “What’s the Reaction?” and “Kwest Gets His Rocks Off.”
A lot of the songs that came on the Unreleased LP were songs that I did in-between that we were supposed to figure out how to meld the old Kwest with the new and improved Kwest. I had improved lyrically a lot in that span. I was thinking, “We take certain songs off the album.” I pushed for a few of the sex songs to come off, “Let’s put this song in place of this, let’s put ‘A.M./P.M.’ on here in place of this, let’s put ‘Kwest Gets His Rocks Off’ on in place of this.” It wasn’t happening. I was told it was going to happen, but when the end result came, the album came out the same way it was handed in.
JD: So the album was a little over an hour long, with 17 full length tracks, and it’s all pretty much you on there. Even back in the mid ’90s it wasn’t that common to have no guests on an album. Was that by design?
Kwest: Yeah, it was me. That was by design. I respect the group aspect, but I’ve always been a one-man army. I felt I could hold down a whole album by myself. I wanted a few people from my hood and all of that from my album, I wanted guests on my album, but it didn’t pan out that way. And like I said, I wanted to showcase myself as a total package artist.
JD: So let me ask you a hypothetical: Would you have rather the album, the way it was recorded, come out in 1994? Or would you rather it had come out in ’96 with the songs that you had recorded in the interim? Which would you have preferred?
Kwest: That’s a good question. Because ’94 was a stellar year for hip-hop, and I don’t know if my shit would have been lost in the sauce as is. But ’96 was also a stellar ass year for hip-hop. So that’s a tough question. I think I would’ve preferred ’94 as is, because by ’96, whether it was a big buzz or not, people would have heard of me, and I would have definitely put out a bunch of shit in ’95, or been promoting the album, and doing things in ’95. So ’96 when it came time for the second album, they would have seen the transition.
JD: How did you envision the second album if you would have had a chance to drop it?
Kwest: First, it would have been called This is My Sophomore Album. I was going to keep that shit going until the wheels fell off of it. And it definitely would have been more lyrical stuff and more stories, way less sex. Way less sex. If any sex songs on it. And it would have been shorter.
JD: Is there anything that you felt like you wanted to do but couldn’t for the album?
Kwest: To tell you the truth, no. Because like I said, they let me do what I wanted to do. There are songs that American has, I don’t know if they still have them. It’s probably Warner Brothers’ property if they still have those songs from 20+ years ago. There are songs that people will never hear. Whether I self produced them, whether Dan produced them, whether outside producers did them, there’s at least four or five, maybe more, songs that I did that people will never hear. I’ve never heard them since back then. They let me have artistic freedom. They let me do whatever I wanted. But I guess once the success of “101 Things…” and “Lubrication,” their focus was mainly on me rhyming about girls and they knew that was my persona, that’s what they wanted to lean more towards.
JD: Do you regret anything that did make the album?
Kwest: One of my biggest regrets is “Skincare.” I should have put the unedited, X rated version on the album as well as the self-bleeped version. That’s another song people will never hear the unedited version because nobody has it. I think only one or two people had it. My cousin had it on tape, he lost it. I had it on tape and from moving here to there, I lost it. But everything else, there was really no regrets. You took a kid from South Jamaica, Queens, that had aspirations of being an MC where back then you had to know somebody or have a hook up with somebody. It was unheard of for somebody that was a virtual unknown to come out of anywhere without any backing or any real juice in the industry to get to the level that I got. I really don’t have any regrets. My only regret on my end of it is the album didn’t come out at the time that I felt it should have came out.
JD: How do you feel the album holds up after 25 years?
Kwest: Dude, real shit? I never thought it was going to hold up. Because remember, when I put that album out and it came out, the original format it came out and I was so upset. None of the new tracks I had did were put on it and I thought it would have made it a better, more complete album for the time frame it came out in. Dude, I hated that shit. I’m not even going to lie. I hated that fucking album for a long time. I hated that album up until maybe mid to late 2000s, no bullshit. I wouldn’t even listen to it. People would ask me about it and I’m like, “Dude I don’t want to hear about that shit, don’t ask me about it.”
My cousin, would play songs when I go over, and I was like, “Bro, take that shit off, I don’t care about that shit, I don’t want to hear that shit bro.” “You should be proud of that shit.” “I’m not, I hate that shit. I hate it. Don’t play that shit no more.”
So for the longest, I had animosity because I felt bitter because of what had happened and how everything transpired. But years later when the Internet took hold and it became firm in the MySpace/Napster era and everything? I would go online and see people mentioning it. And I’m like what are they talking about my shit for? And it was all positive?
And I’m like, “Oh shit, people really like this shit?” I thought it was a drop in the pan and forgotten shit, I really thought people didn’t know… The handful of people that bought it at the time when it came out, I thought it was just that, it was going to be some, “Oh well, he put out an album. Nobody ever heard from Kwest again besides a few singles and records. He’s just another forgotten artist.”
And then I saw that people really liked it. And it wasn’t just here: China. The Netherlands. Japan, Amsterdam, Russia, Italy, London, and on and on and on. Holy shit, people really like this shit. And then when I got online and became fully immersed in it and started actually conversing with people, 99% of the people I spoke to didn’t believe it was Kwest. They didn’t believe I was me.
I asked a couple of times, like why, and they was like, “Because honestly an emcee of your a caliber…” I’m like, “What the fuck you mean of my caliber? I’m just an MC that put out an album, I’m a fucking nobody.” Really I believed that I was a nobody. They were like, “Kwest, album changed my life, I used to listen to it in high school and I listened to it in junior high and me and my boys used to play that shit riding around in a car. I’m like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I’ll say between 2010, 2015, the accolades really started coming in. I got written up in The Village Voice. … They said my album was one of the 10 Best Forgotten New York records. I think I was number seven on the list. I don’t give a fuck, dude, I made it on that list. That shit blew my fucking mind! And then to see me in Complex as one 10 most slept on rappers from the 1990s. And the gave me a spectacular write-up.
I’m looking at it and I’m like, “Holy shit, people really like this shit. They really look at it and be like I’m a fucking somebody.” That shit, I don’t get big headed about stuff like that. It humbled the fuck out of me because I’m like wow, what I did, I thought as a kid from growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, where a lot of kids don’t get the opportunity to shine. There were a lot better emcees than me that I heard, that I knew of, that never got the chance to shine.
That’s little old fucking Thomas St John. They looking at me like I’m this star and they’re reveling in this shit I did. That shit is really mind blowing man. Today when people call me an OG and a legend and whatever, it humbles me and it makes me step back and look at what I did and I’m like, “I didn’t do it in vain. … If one person buys it or a million people buy it, I thank that one person that bought it because they got it and they understood and they cared enough to spend their money on it, and that’s all that mattered to me.” Just to put something out there that my artistic endeavor, this is what I thought I wanted to contribute. My contribution wasn’t taken in vain. I’ve heard it called the sleeper hit, a classic, cult classic.
To be called a cult classic, that shit is something in itself too because there’s movies… Dude, people call Wild Style a cult classic. So for my album to be looked at in the same vein as that? … I wouldn’t put my album in that shit but somebody might be like, “Go listen to Kwest last album.” Yeah boy, I laugh at this shit too but I’m sitting here, I get humbled. I feel like a little kid again every time somebody mentions that. Or I go on YouTube and see people commenting on the songs and I see write ups and people like you ask me to do interviews about the albums, dude, it really makes me feel good, bro. It really does.
I didn’t think it was going to be people from around the world saying, “This album was this to me,” and “I listened to this when I was going through this.” And like I said, I’m a humble dude, I never looked at it like that. Years later, different things mean different things for different people, and I’m just glad that people appreciated what I did.
Check out the interview with Dan Charnas right here.
