Kanye West has been in the news because of Vultures, but Erick Sermon has now shared some details about a separate body of work Ye is cooking up.
In an exclusive interview clip with HipHopDX that was published on Tuesday (February 27), the EPMD veteran talked about working with the Yeezy boss after being “summoned” to Florence, Italy last year.
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“The record I was working on wasn’t what him and Ty Dolla $ign was doing at the time,” Sermon recalled. “I was working on Y3, Ye’s solo album […] Hopefully, we can finish what we started, y’know, ’cause I had him on Hip Hop.
“I was like, ‘You got to rhyme and we have to do the stuff that you used to do ’cause you ill at that,’ y’know? And he listened […] I had [the old Kanye] back.”
During the same chat, the 55-year-old credited Dr. Dre with changing his approach to making music, saying the legendary producer even made him never want to write raps again at one point.
“We go to Malibu,” he remembered. “As soon as I press play, we do one record. I press play again, we do two records. I press play again, we do three records — in one night. The guys said, ‘Erick, we’ve been here for eight years, we ain’t never seen that before. Nobody has done what you did today.’
“I put another beat on and he calls Snoop [Dogg] over. Snoop been working on the records that I did. Then I come back and Dre is working on the record that he rapped on. So I said, ‘Yo, let me rap on that. Let me do your style, how you rhyme and how you put your records together.’”
He then recalled pulling out his pad and pen to write rhymes, before one of Dr. Dre’s songwriters named Smitty told him: “We don’t do that here.”
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“Dre would say the cadence and then we would all say a rhyme, and then if the rhyme sounds good, then we put that down. So there’s no writing; it’s just 16 bars of whatever your freestyle may be,” E. Dub remembered Smitty telling him.
