Throughout his catalog, Boston rapper Slaine has worked with an impressive assortment of collaborators. The rapper and actor sat down with HipHopDX to share the stories behind some of his biggest collaborative songs.
“I like to work with people I’m cool with…people who I am friends with,” Slaine says in an interview with HipHopDX. “I have a lot of talented emcee friends.”
Slaine frequently collaborates with Massachusetts Hip Hop mainstays such as Edo. G and Statik Selektah. He says that he tries to develop connections organically.
“I’ve been in the game for a while,” Slaine says. “I’m not trying to get any sort of Pop stardom or anything like that. I pretty much know what I want to do. I got a cool fan base. There are people that I would love to work with that I don’t know. Going about that it has to be an organized way. That’s the only way to do that with any respect.”
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Slaine shares wild stories behind his work as well as how lifestyle choices, such as his recent sobriety, have affected his music making process. His latest album The King Of Everything Else dropped earlier this summer, including collaborations with Tech N9ne and Madchild. Here, he revisits some of the highlights of his most notable collaborations.
Slaine, Tech N9ne & Madchild
Song:“Bobby Be Real”
Album:The King of Everything Else
Slaine Says: “I was at an afterhours party one night. It was like 4:30 in the morning, and I left the party with a couple girls and my friend. The girl had a shitty car, and she was too fucked up to drive. I probably was too, but I drove, and her steering wheel was all fucked up. It was going back and forth, and my boy in the back was like, ‘Yo, watch out for the wobbly wheel!’ For some reason that just struck some lyrics in my head, and I started thinking of that hook. I’m driving down the street, and that hook just popped into my head. So I called up my boy Lu Balz at the studio.
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“Now I have like half a party in tow too because other people following us and all that, which is why I start the song of and I’m like, ‘Mutherfucker shut the fuck up in the background’ because there is like 40 people in the studio. But I had the hook in my head, and for some reason I had that Doors song like, ‘Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.’ I was probably a couple fifths deep and on some molly and shit and flying. That song pretty much materialized in 45 minutes.
“I had two verses on it originally. So fast forward a few months, I’m on tour with Madchild in Canada and we cross cities with Tech N9ne. Tech N9ne, I knew, from 2008 when I went on [The Fire And Ice Tour] with him. So we were on the road together for a few months kicking it every night, and Tech is a cool dude. I was playing him joints from my record, and they both loved that joint. So Tech called me the next day and he’s like, ‘Yo, I can’t get that song out of my head. I can’t get that hook out of my head, man. Madchild wanted to be on it too. I took my second verse off, which I felt like was my best verse. It was one of the best verses on the whole album except it didn’t fit once they put their verses on. I needed the first verse to set the tone for the story, so I had to take the second verse off, but I am going to release the original version for that song, eventually.
Slaine & Demrick
Song:“Getting High”
Album:The King of Everything Else
Slaine Says: “Did you see the video for “Getting High?” It was a lot of other people getting high, and I had my sobriety chip. When we recorded that song I was getting high, but when we shot the video I was not. I got sober six months ago, and the album was almost done six months ago. There is one song that I recorded in sobriety, but [the album] is pretty much like a picture of where my life was at then. So it’s weird to put out an album and be promoting it while my life is kind of a lot different than where my mentality was at with that record. So I had to have creative ways to shoot some of the videos like “Getting High.” I actually shot it for that reason, because it was one I thought I could kind of show the duality of the situation in an interesting way. I like how it came out, but Demrick’s the homie.
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Slaine & Edo. G
Song: “Buidling With Edo”
Album:The Boston Project
Slaine Says: “There wasn’t a whole lot of dudes that were really on that level from Boston when I was growing up. [It was dope] to see Edo. G on Yo! MTV Raps’ number one spot, and I think he had the number one song in the country on Billboard. That was dope, and he was sitting on the steps in Roxbury just representing the city. To work with him years later… I ended up being in a group with him, and it was a great experience. He is also a very good mentor in that way. He’s that dude. I definitely learned from him. It’s funny how in Hip Hop years time goes fast, and you become a veteran real fast. It wasn’t long before I had to apply the same leadership abilities, and that’s why I put that The Boston Project album out. I wanted to kind of shed a little light on the city. I feel like people sometimes disrespect Boston Hip Hop or sleep on it or whatever. I just wanted to show love back to the scene that I came up in.
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Slaine, Kali & REKS
Song:“The Fuckery Hotel”
Album:The Boston Project
Slaine Says: “That was the only song on the The Boston Project that was actually recorded outside of Boston. All the other songs were recorded in Boston. Everybody came into the studio, and we built the beat from scratch with Lou in the studio. Everybody wrote their rhyme right there, and we stayed until the song was finished recording. That song was in L.A., at Matty Trump’s studio around La Brea. REKS was out here, Kali lives out here now, and I live out here part time. And I said we should do that, where we all were just cutting each other off. You spit 16s 90% of the time, and it’s cool to mix it up. Especially with dudes like that that are real quick linguistically. People love that song. It’s funny, and it sucks because the way it’s written you can’t do it live. People at the show will be like, “Fuckery Hotel” but I can’t do it. It needed to be a video too. It’s kind of a foul, filthy song, so it would have to be a filthy video.
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Slaine, Statik Selektah, Newz & Lecks Get It On
Song: “Rats Maze”
Album:The Boston Project
Slaine Says: “I spend ridiculous hours in the studio with Statik Selektah. We’ve worked on a lot of stuff. I think this was the first album that he actually has a track on it that came out, because the original version of A World With No Skies had like four or five songs on it that I had to take off for sample clearance issues. So that sucked. Me and Statik did a full mixtape project together called State Of Grace. We recorded that in four days. Statik has a work ethic like me, and me and Statik like to drink together to, so we would be recording until way past the sun coming up. The sun would go back down, and we were still recording. That’s my brother right there. Statik is my homie.
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Slaine, Cyrus Deshield & Edo G
Song: “Jumpin’ Out the Window”
Album:A World With No Skies 2.0
Slaine Says: “I think people think about me as this evil mutherfucker, or they put me in that horrorcore lane. I think if you really listen to my shit, it’s not really like that. Most of my shit is storytelling, and it’s emotionally driven. It’s just that when you were living the way I was living, I had kind of a dark existence. So when people think shit is dark that I’m doing, I don’t necessarily see that. I’ve read some of the reviews for the new album, and to me this new album is like the most light, fun album I’ve ever done. But people were like, ‘This is very dark.’ I guess my perspective is just off. It was basically recorded in a freak-out time in my life. It was like The Town had really taken off and blew up. La Coka had been doing its thing. Without noticing, all of a sudden, I was walking around the city that I lived in my whole life, and it seemed like everybody fucking knew who I was.
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“It was fucking overwhelming to me because everyone wanted to take a picture with me, and I felt like I was not home anymore or something like that. I was bugging out. Somebody jumped out of their car and wanted to take a picture with me. I freaked out. I went to the studio, I called up Everlast, and was talking to him like, ‘How do you deal with this shit?’ I talked to Ben Affleck, and I talked to Danny Boy from House of Pain. Danny Boy gave me the best advice out of everybody, he was like, ‘I’ll tell you the good news and the bad news. The good news is, it isn’t gonna last forever. The bad news is it isn’t gonna last forever.’ That kind of settled me down, and I called Edo over because that was the song that I made up that I had been writing that day. It had been just a reflection of starting to achieve your dreams and jumping out the window, but I just won’t touch the ground. It’s about when you are taking the ultimate risk with the confidence that you are gonna fucking make. The reason I called Edo over to the studio to jump on that was because I felt like he could relate. I know he told me stories about when his shit started popping off, and it got really intense. You got the love, you got the hate and just the arbitrary attention that’s weird. It’s just like a weird place to be when you are just a regular, blue-collar dude.
Slaine, B. Real & Jaysaun
Song:“Crazy”
Album:A World With No Skies
Slaine Says: “DJ Lethal signed me to a pre-production deal in 2003 before I had anything out. Some of the tracks from that were on The White Man Is The Devil Vol. 1. That ended up being the beginnings of La Coka Nostra, and that’s how La Coka Nostra started. Danny introduced me to Lethal, Lethal signed me to a pre-production deal. He signed Big Left and Opto at the same time, but we were all signed to individual pre-production deals. Then he didn’t know what to do with all three of us at the same time, so we ended up doing a group project together. We were cool, and we clicked up. Lefty was in La Coka Nostra from the beginning, and Opto was in some other shit. I kept working with Lethal, and that turned into Ill Bill and Everlast coming back with lll Bill coming in to the frame. That’s how LA Coka Nostra started. So one of the first songs we did when everybody was in the fold and that point was “Fuck Tony Montana” with B. Real. I think that might have been early on. With Muggs, we went over to record some stuff, but we never finished. The song “Crazy” doesn’t really have anything to do with that. I just did the song “Crazy” with B. Real and Jaysaun was on it.
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Slaine, Blacastan, Sean Price, Ill Bill
Song: “The Boulevard”
Album:A World With No Skies 2.0
Slaine Says: “I don’t remember exactly how that track came to be. To tell you the truth, I think I started with a different beat and had to remix it. I toured with Sean Price, and I’m cool with Ill Bill. I knew Blacastan because he used to come up to Boston a lot from Hartford. We toured with Sean P. with Special Teamz. We did this tour in Canada. Some dude got murdered at one of the shows and homicide shutdown the thing came and questioned us at the hotel. It was bananas. It was nuts. I think the murder got solved on YouTube.
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“My girl was listening to that verse the other day, and she was like, ‘This verse is filthy,’ but she likes that. I couldn’t remember how filthy it was until I just listened to that song the other day. It was pretty disgusting. There’s no hook, and that song was more just on some cypher shit with everybody spitting doing what they do.
Slaine, 7L & Esoteric
Song: “Olde English”
Album:Moment of Rarities
Slaine Says: “Back then I had just kind of met 7L & Esoteric. I knew who they were because they were around forever. They were really making records when they were 20 and shit. They were like ahead of the curve. I saw Eso out at a De La Soul show…I met him out and there was some issue with something, but he ended being a cool guy. Me and Eso been tight ever since, and that must have been 11 years ago when I met him. We got in the studio in the South End and did that joint. I still remember the rhyme for that. We did “Olde English Part 2” on The Devil Never Dies mixtape, because when I was married. I used to walk, and his son and my son are a month apart. It was like worlds colliding; I don’t like nobody being around my wife and my son. I was like, “Leave my wife alone; just leave my wife alone.” Maybe we will do a part three sometime in the future.
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RELATED:Slaine Reveals Recent Sobriety & Moving From A Warehouse To A-List Movies [Interview]
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