Confirming a string of three upcoming releases in an interview with VladTV, Billy Danze said that DJ Premier is executive producing a M.O.P. EP titled Street Certified slated for fall before producing a full album for the duo.
“The new project is titled Street Certified,” Danze said. “Just to kind of bring it back to where we feel like Hip Hop is supposed to be. Got production on there by Fame, Premier is executive producing it. We’re going to put it out as an EP on Halloween day, just to get people warmed up for the next to come which will be the actual album. Then after that the M.O.P. and Premier album.”
Speaking on release plans for the EP, Danze said that the the project will likely be released on Nature Sounds or entirely independent.
“We’re thinking we’ll just go the indie route,” he said. “We got a lot of stuff on the table where they want to help us out, joint venture deal of course. Some strong indies are talking to us right now. We been really talking a lot to Devin over at Nature Sounds. He seems to be a good dude. I think he gets it. He has that traditional Hip Hop feel. He got an understanding of how to move Hip Hop a little bit. It looks like we might go that route. Nevertheless it’s a hundred percent M.O.P. so we’re pretty much on autopilot so wherever we put it at I think we should be fine.”
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Speaking more generally about the state of Hip Hop, Danze reflected on the culture’s growth and speculated that early innovators would likely want to see it continue to “branch out.”
“Cats from our era or before, they feel like the music that’s happening today isn’t Hip Hop and it’s not good or it’s not quality or whatever,” he said. “I personally feel like we need all of this music because Hip Hop—Herc and Bam and all of those cats from the Bronx that created this thing, I don’t think they meant for it to be stuck right there in the Bronx and not branch out. I think we need everything that’s going on so we can have this wide variety of Hip Hop. Then you gotta look at it like, there’s cats like yourself and myself and other cats that actually come from poverty-stricken areas of these urban communities and we didn’t have the chance to do anything. So now, the same kind of cats that we were or that we hung out with are now multi-millionaires. I love this Hip Hop. I love the way it’s going and I think it should keep growing.”
In February, M.O.P. released the Mobb Deep featuring single “Street Certified.” Around the same time, Danze Tweeted confirmation that Premier would provide production on the next release. In July, M.O.P. released the single “187” produced by Fizzy Womack with scratches by DJ Premier. Listen to the song on HipHopDX here.
