Saturday, August 25, 2007

Saigon says Jay-Z is 'Rain Man'

Saigon says Jay-Z is Rain Man (MTV)


"He's gone now!" Saigon's rap career is finally fast-tracked now that he has an official single from his debut LP, The Greatest Story Never Told. "Come on Baby" has been burning up the mix shows, and a video is forthcoming.

"Being that it's rock-influenced, I wanna get a rock band. Remember [Run-DMC's] 'Walk This Way'? I wanted to do it just like that," he explained of a treatment he has in his head. "Me and Just [Blaze] in one side of the studio, doing some rap stuff, they doing their rock stuff [on another side], then we banging on the wall. We wanna use 'Walk This Way' as sort of like a blueprint. The record is real rock-influenced, let's incorporate that into the video, instead of us just being in the club.

"It's just me braggin' about being good on the mic," he added about the record, which samples the J. Geils Band. "I was like OK, I put 'Pain in My Life' out. People know I'm a serious artist. But to get more of a graduation-scale introduction to the world, a bigger scale, I wanted to let them know I like to have fun as well. I'm a human being. I'm not just a preachy type of guy. 'Pain in My Life' was a little preachy, I wanted to show diversity. I don't want to be typecast and put in a category of just a backpack rapper or conscious rapper or gangster rapper. I'm one of the rappers you can't typecast because I can do a song with Dead Prez, I can do a song with Uncle Murda, then do a song with Jay-Z."

Sai has a remix of "Come on Baby" (which you can hear a snippet of in this video) in the works that Jay has already laid vocals to. "Yeah, Jay's on my album. He's on the remix to the single, he aired it out. I still gotta go back and rewrite my verse," the Yardfather told.

"He really does the 'Rain Man' thing, he doesn't sit down and write," he continued. "For mad years, I was like, 'He's too clever, I don't believe he don't write [lyrics] down. He's too on point.' But with this beat, when he came to record to it, he never heard the beat before and his rhyme went so perfect with the beat. I was like he couldn't have wrote this at home, he couldn't have had this in the stash. Maybe this dude do got more brain cells than everybody else. I tell him all the time, 'You an alien, man.' "

Word [...August 25]

“I knew I was witty around the sixth grade,” he said. “I just had that feeling of being smart. We did some tests in the sixth grade and I was on a twelfth grade level. I was crazy happy about that. When the test scores came back that was the first moment I realized I was smart.”
~Rolling Stone 2005