The men of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony speak on how they changed the rap game, artists that sound like them, and possibly taking new artists under their wings.
Emily Berkey: A lot of newer artists have been compared to you guys. A$AP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar… dudes with real chill flow. Who else can see your influence in?
Wish Bone: Tech Nine, MGK
Flesh-N-Bone: Dre, everybody. Wiz Khalifa. They’ll tell you – you can look in the interviews and they’ll tell you. That’s what’s been happening as of lately.
Krayzie Bone: Just listen to the radio. It doesn’t just start with rap. There’s R&B like Mariah Carey, to R. Kelly, to Usher, Trey Songz. If you listen to those rhythms and you study them and you know music, you know where it came from.
Emily Berkey: Do you see yourselves in any older cats out there? Can you see that they’ve used some of your techniques and ideas?
Flesh-N-Bone: (Jokingly) They probably used that element, they had to reach some type of level of success, so in order to do that they had to add the element of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
Wish Bone: Take a piece from the pie.
Layzie Bone: I mean the bottom line is we added a challenge to the game, something fresh and new. If you can’t do it then you really ain’t challenging yourself to be the best you possibly can be. We started off wanting to put more words in a bar like “who can put more words in the bar?”. Just learning how to structure our songs as teenagers. We came out double-timed the rap flow. Now it’s like who can do it the fastest? You got Busta Rhymes, all these cats. Just really like the harmonies. Using the harmonies with the fast flow – we added something do the game. That’s a part of music now.
Flesh-N-Bone: What none of them is thinking about doing is adding harmonies and melodies to their flow. There’s a couple of spitters out there definitely, but none of them were adding part harmonies to what they were doing. That’s an ace in the hole right there. That’s what makes it all-original flavor that we’re talking about.
Emily Berkey: I know you some of you have smaller projects like your own record labels. Do you foresee yourselves scooping up any smaller artists and making them your pet project or helping them out? Telling them they need more harmonies and melodies?
Flesh-N-Bone: No, we’ll tell them to do what they do best. They better come with their own twists and things. You should inspire them to do whatever, but I like to hear something that’s different. I don’t want to delve too much into the artist and make them do anything, or make them just like Layzie or Krayzie or whatever. I want something original.
Layzie Bone: Anybody that we work with, we’re gonna critique the song to the fullest anyway. So anyone we work with we brush shoulders with, we make it a team effort when you’re making music, from the instrument to who’s arranging and writing the songs, and of course we’re going to critique it.
