Tanya Morgan

(February 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Anyone who mourns a bygone era in hip-hop will want to be sure to peel their ears for Tanya Morgan, a trio of MCs who recall the glory days of the past while, even better, reminding us that there are still glory days in the present and in the future.  Their upcoming full-length Moonlighting has a truckload of good beats and nimble wordplay, not to mention what have increasingly become endangered species in hip-hop:  subtlety and a sense of humor.

Despite their old-fashioned leanings, the way the trio put the record together was pure new-school:  split between Brooklyn and Cincinnati, they shot demos back and forth via e-mail and Instant Messenger.  But chemistry is chemistry, and its evidence is spread throughout Moonlighting.  Donwill, Ilyas and Von Pea took some time to talk about putting the record together, reflecting on the industry as a whole, and celebrating the time-honored rap skit. 

All three of you guys have been making music under a variety of names and with a variety of collaborators.  Ideally, would you like to have one thing take off so you could put all your time and energy into that, or would you like to do it in a way that keeps all those avenues open?

DONWILL:  Probably keep all the avenues open, so we can express different aspects of our artistry.  When we link up with different producers, you hear a completely different story – you’d probably question if it’s even the same kind that you’re hearing in Tanya Morgan.

I know the background on how the three of you hooked up, but when did Brickbeats enter the picture?  How did he come in?

DONWILL:  That would be my story.  I was having car problems.  My mom was like, “Yo, my friend’s son, David, you’ve known him since you were a kid, he does car work.  You might want to give him a call.”  I call the dude up, he comes over, he looks and says “Yo, you got a lot of records.”  I was like, “Why, you do beats or something?”  And he’s like “Yeah, actually, I do,” and he pulled out a beat CD.  I listened to it and I was like “Wow.”  It pretty much boiled down to that original beat CD being the majority of Moonlighting—the beats were that good.  Anything that Brickbeats did on Moonlighting was on that beat CD.  I was blown away.

Where did the cassette tape come from?  [A Tanya Morgan cassette tape figures prominently in the skits on the record, and actual cassettes were created as a companion piece.]

VON PEA:  I’m a real big fan of De La Soul, and my favorite hip-hop album is De La Soul Is Dead.  I thought it would be cool, since nobody really uses cassettes anymore like that, to use that same type of concept, but put a spin on it.  That’s the running story of the album:  our album is on a cassette.  I said it’d be cool to make up some real cassettes, like a limited edition thing.  For those people that have the cassette, it will make more sense to them when they get the album.

DONWILL:  A good point Von brought up the other day was that it makes it almost like an interactive listening experience.  If you listen to the cassette, then you listen to the album, and it comes together better—because you become that person on the skit. 

I love that the skits not only tie together with each other, but involve the album itself, too.  So here’s a question I don’t think I’ve asked before:  what’s your favorite hip-hop skit?

ILYAS:  The first thing that came to mind when you said that was on Redman’s Muddy Waters – “I got a soda.”  (laughter)  He was on the airplane and he amps out on the stewardess and beats her up or something.  The weirdest skit would be when N.W.A. killed the hooker.  Who murders prostitutes for fun on their album?

VON PEA:  I have two favorites.  One that made me laugh really, really hard when I first heard it was on Buhloone Mindstate from De La Soul.  The one called “Dave Has A Problem,” where he was on the phone like “Hello? Hello? Hello?” and then he started having an orgasm on the phone or something.  It was hilarious.  My other favorite is on Like Water For Chocolate, when Common was talking to his female fan and then he stopped and started slapping the prostitute.  I thought that was probably the most genius skit, because everybody knows him as this peaceful, positive brother.  Then out of nowhere he’s like “Bitch!  Bitch!” 

With Moonlighting, I read an interview where you guys talked about fine-tuning the album up until the last possible minute.  Did you get to a point where it was “Alright, it’s finished, done?”  Or is it still “If we only had one more day…?”

ILYAS:  Being that we’re all perfectionists—I know myself, it’s like when I listen to myself, all I hear are the mistakes.  That’s just how critical I am, you know what I’m saying?  Time progresses and it’s “Uh, I could have did this better, changed this line, maybe we could have done that.”  You can keep on changing it if you want to, but it’s like I’d rather leave it as is, because it captures the perfection of that moment in time, you know what I’m saying?

DONWILL:  The only thing I would change if I could…I’m siding with Ilyas for the most part, and I wouldn’t want to change anything about my vocal performance except minor, minor, minor things—superficial stuff that nobody would notice.

VON PEA:  As for me, I’d just make the sound quality perfect.  Other than that, the album is fine for me.

DONWILL:  I kind of like the sound of the album.  Personally, I was thinking about that, too, Von—the mix now.  But I was realizing when we were out in Cali shooting the video, we were listening to something and I miss that kind of grimy sound like, you know, like the Wu-Tang had.  You can’t really get that sound unless you use analog stuff, you know what I’m saying?  Some people have told me they like it better when it sounds kind of grimy and it’s not perfect.  Word to Von Pea, I was reading that Rakim Told Me book and KRS-One was saying that the first take of “Bridge Is Over” is what you hear today.  That little piano thing, it’s not even a loop, it was actually him playing a piano, tuning it up at the beginning.  A lot of times they overproduce or put this electronic sheen on stuff, but you listen to the old masters, man, and it’s what you get, you get.  Dope is dope.

VON PEA:  That’s true.

For someone who’s coming into Tanya Morgan for the first time, is it best to start with Moonlighting?  And then get into Sunset and Sunlighting after that?

ILYAS:  Well, see, Moonlighting was done first and then we did Sunlighting and Sunset.  This is how I take our projects:  Sunlighting is like when you’re at a bar or club and you meet a girl and you’re just trying to be playful to make her laugh so she’ll call you.  Sunset is the date; you’re still cracking jokes, but you’re a little more serious, letting her know what’s going on in your life.  If you’re really feeling each other, then Moonlighting is letting her in—“hey, this is me.”

We did an interview with Casual of Hieroglyphics and he was saying that he thought hip-hop was still peaking commercially, but not creatively.  What’s your take on that?

DONWILL:  Maybe it’s after reading that book, Rakim Told Me—that’s a dope, dope, dope book—I mean, look at the way they had to pioneer certain technologies and bend them to their will, you know what I’m saying?  That was the first time samples had been used, they were recording on two-inch reels, they were using all this old analog stuff—they had to be creative.  I feel like creativity knows no bounds, and if they were to invent an all-inclusive sampler/drum machine/car engine/coffeemaker, you would somehow make it the dopest shit on earth.  It’s like how FruityLoops is a big deal now.  Creativity knows no bounds, and technology makes it really easy.

VON PEA:  And I would add to that—a lot of things that were so important in those earlier times, not to take anything away from anybody, but a lot of it was no-brainers.  Somebody had to be the first person to sample rock, somebody had to be the first to sample jazz.  It was gonna happen.  On the album, we did a song paying homage to “Paper Thin” by MC Lyte, and I’ve heard people run with that, like “Yo, that’s the first time a rimshot was used in hip-hop.”  And I’m like, okay, but it was going to happen.  All those firsts had to happen.  They just make our job harder.

ILYAS:  I think hip-hop has reached a great place commercially, but I disagree with saying that with creativity, the better days are behind us.  I feel like in the commercial world creativity has fallen behind, but I believe there’s a lot of creative cats coming out with crazy ideas, like MF Doom.  It’s really creative stuff, but it’s not getting the commercial exposure it used to.  Back in the day, De La and them were playing on the mainstream radio.  Now you don’t see that, now you hear everybody rehashing the same songs.

VON PEA:  A lot of people don’t recognize creativity anymore because they’re not looking for it in the mainstream.  You do have people like The Neptunes or Just Blaze or Kanye that are doing things just as clever and creative as any of the undergrounders, and they take their chances, too, but people aren’t expecting it, so they don’t notice it.

Is the listening audience getting lazy or is it the labels not taking chances on people?

DONWILL:  It’s the labels.  The listening audience, yeah, but they’re kind of just like cattle, in a sense.  The record labels will pay a million to some radio conglomerate to keep pumping this song, then it’s “Okay, since it’s playing so much, it must be a good song.”  I feel people honestly don’t feel what good music is anymore.  Our parents were listening to Gladys Knight and Whitney Houston and The Commodores and stuff like that, so we had a standard to work with, but now I feel that the kids are listening to the radio and they assume it’s good just because it’s on the radio.

ILYAS:  I feel like good music still exists in any genre, but the music industry is in the business of selling music.  If that’s what sells, they’re gonna sell that—it’s not an issue of if it’s good or bad music.  The radio is what it is, videos are what they are, but you gotta dig deeper, especially if you’re programming shows for a teenage audience.

VON PEA:  You know what else?  I truly believe that everybody is better than what they put forth.  When you have Jay-Z verify that “Okay, I dumb down myself sometimes”—he’s a tastemaker.  So many rappers look up to him.  You could be somebody who sells just as many records, but you still look up to him.  In R&B, you have somebody like R. Kelly and you’ve heard him make good songs, but then he’ll turn around and make a song about touching your butt (laughter).  Everybody can make better music than what they’re making.

DONWILL:  A perfect example of that is Fabolous.  Fabolous is one of the best multi-syllable MCs in the game, and he made “Baby.” 

VON PEA:  Yeah, look at how Ghostface puts out a corny single, but the album will be crazy.

ILYAS:  Even 50 Cent, for example—you hear him on the radio and everybody is dissing him, but I remember probably about a year ago, I was in North Carolina and my boy was playing a mixtape and I’m like “Who is that?  Damn, that’s not 50!”  “Yes, it is.” 

VON PEA:  Everybody is better than what they put out for the masses.

Kind of taking that idea to a different level, what are some things you wish people would pay attention to on a larger scale?  How could we all live a little better?

ILYAS:  I wish the citizens of this country would get more involved in politics, and stop being bullied by their governments.  Also, in general, I feel like the black community in America is in a really bad place.  I feel like part of that blame goes to the hip-hop community. I would like to somehow use any type of position I would potentially be in because of art to help make people more politically conscious in general as U.S. citizens, and to make the black community more conscious of their position, the state of being that we’re in as a culture and community.

DONWILL:  One of the topics that we’ve been throwing around on e-mail, me and my homeboys, is race representation and political affiliation—how the Democrats take the black vote for granted, the Republicans don’t think they have the black vote, so nobody is doing shit for it.  It’s a lose-lose situation.  I guess it’s about getting more representation on both sides of the ballot, so we can have more of our causes and struggles represented.  Outside of that, I feel like the oldest issue in America is race, but it’s a dead issue.  It’s not race, it’s finance.  If the powers-that-be would stop using distractions like race, gender and sexuality and start addressing what actually matters—which is finance—then we could possibly elevate as a society past a lot of these troubles and issues.  Church burnings are going to happen because people are blinded by race.  But the whole thing boils down to those people being kind of ignorant.  I’m not saying that money would take them above their ignorance, but if afforded the opportunity, that possibly wouldn’t happen. 

But if I can just say one more thing….in terms of sociopolitical topics in music, I think Dead Prez can do that, I’m not going to say it doesn’t have a place in music, but my causes and affiliations I kind of just emit.  I don’t know what I’m trying to say, exactly…

No, I know what you mean.

ILYAS:  Basically you’re saying as far as your music is concerned, you may not put a political message in it, although outside of music, as Donwill walking around the community, you would probably get involved.

DONWILL:  Exactly!  (laughter)

ILYAS:  I got you, man.

VON PEA:  And I just want to chime in and say Moonlighting, April 4th.  Album comes out on April 4th.