Phonte’s Top 5 “The Cipher” Q&A Gems: “In The Days Of Slavery, Slaves Used Drums To Pass Messages To Each Other” [Audio]

Written By Shawn Setaro

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[The great rapper, singer, and now actor (on VH1’s The Breaks) Phonte Coleman recently sat down with hip-hop personality and SOHH correspondent Shawn Setaro on his popular “The Cipher” podcast. Listen to the full interview and check out five gems Tigallo dropped during the Q&A.]

On teaching actor Antoine Harris how to rap for The Breaks:

“It’s like, if you’re a person who’s been working on an assembly line, and building cars is just something that you can do now, it’s almost like having to deconstruct the car, and seeing all the work that goes into it. It’s like, goddamn, there’s a lot of work that goes into this! That’s the best analogy I can give. It makes you have to be really sharp and really on point in the information that you’re giving.”

On dealing with constant questions about a Little Brother reunion:

“Whatever you first make your mark as in the game, that’s what people are always going to be drawn to. That’s always going to be what people have near and dear to their hearts. I’m sure Tina Turner probably gets tired of motherfuckers asking her about Ike. So if Tina Turner can deal with it, then I can deal with it.”

On why he retired his “Percy Miracles” character, an R. Kelly-style r&b parody singer:

“With R&B, and with black music, it became harder to parody something that often parodied itself. I would be listening to the radio, and seeing the records that were hot at the time. If you took ‘Cheatin’ by Percy Miracles [Phonte’s R. Kelly/Mr. Biggs parody], and you put that in a lineup with ‘Laffy Taffy’ by D4L and ‘This Is Why I’m Hot’ by MiMS, or ‘Chain Hang Low,’ all these ringtone records that was hot at the time – if you were to put ‘Cheatin’ in a lineup with all those records, and then you asked me to tell you, okay, pick out the parody song, nine times out of ten you couldn’t do it. In the context of those records, ‘Cheatin’ sounded reasonable.”

On the impact of Big Daddy Kane’s 1988 debut Long Live the Kane

“With Long Live the Kane, I heard myself in a lot of ways. Kane could be the ladies’ man, he could battle rap, he was witty, he could give you punchlines. He was the total package. Hearing Long Live the Kane, that was when I first saw an emcee and was like, that’s who I want to be. I want to be that guy.”

On the use of samples:

“In the days of slavery, the slaves used drums to pass messages to each other. Now we do that with samples. We do that with sending messages in these records. Samples are definitely a way of communicating. They are a way to re-contextualize something and put it in a way that’s more palatable to an audience that may not have gotten the first thing.”

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Written by Shawn Setaro

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