#176: Phonte

A Waste Of Time with ItsTheReal

ItsTheReal

Music

4.8 • 817 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2018

⏱️ 133 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week on A Waste of Time with ItsTheReal, we welcome the amazing rapper, actor, producer, podcaster, and personality Phonte - whose new album No News is Good News is available for streaming everywhere now - to the Upper West Side! We discuss Phonte's youth in Greensboro, North Carolina, his East Coast musical influences, what Biggie's Ready to Die album and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle album meant, being bused to a mostly white high school, focusing on sports, performing with his first rap group, The Fu-Tang Clan, making beats on a TASCAM four-track recorder in his room, how his creative writing developed significantly in 11th grade, and attending college, where he met Big Pooh and 9th Wonder. Phonte talks about how he and 9th and Pooh were friends way before they were making music, giving up football, joining the school's drama program, starting a college rap group G.I.M.M.E. (God, I Murder Many Emcees), watching in awe as 9th made beats on Cool Edit Pro, and making records on records on records until they felt their song "The Finest" was about to hit. Phonte speaks on having a child right out of college and balancing his 9-5 at Blue Cross, Blue Shield with the freedom that his budding music career brought, moving forward as Little Brother, the power of the internet and specifically Okayplayer, touring California, taking meetings with Jive Records, ultimately signing with Atlantic Records, what it's like to turn in an album like The Minstrel Show, and how quickly their support system at the label fell apart. We get into the expectations, the environment, the fallout, the bounce back, and ultimately the dissolution of Little Brother, and how Phonte found himself in a place in 2011 where he was ready to create and release a solo album. Phonte talks Foreign Exchange, doing 80's covers, losing loved members of his family, getting married, producing music and TV, writing music and TV, and championing others, finally determining that he had a second solo record ready for public consumption in 2018, and the overwhelmingly positive reactions it's garnered. All that, plus stories about Kanye, Drake, Jeezy, Combat Jack, Oprah, Danny Glover, South of the Border, Petey Pablo, The Source, BET, The Breaks, Sesame Street, and so much more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Jeff. Hey Eric. How are you? I'm pretty good. How are you? Doing well, thank you. Back in New York City after a very, very successful trip down to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. And to recap it, I figure let's just go through a bunch of categories and say what our favorite things of this entire trip were. Is that good for you? That's good for me. I have not seen the categories. All right. And let's not double up on anything. If you have
0:21.3	one answer, I will pick something totally different. Cool. Favorite app. Favorite app. This is going to
0:26.0	be tough for you because the reason that we went down there is we were flown down by the app station
0:29.9	head. Shout out to our friends at Stationhead. That's Ryan and Murray and Eli and Serena and the whole team.
0:36.4	Stationhead is an app that we've been fucking
0:38.1	with for a few months and what you do is you run your own radio station using your Spotify or Apple
0:45.8	music account. Very dope. And you can also do interviews on there. You can talk to the audience that
0:52.2	you've accrued in there. Yeah, there's a chat room or you can call different people.
0:56.3	And it's honestly crystal clear.
0:58.0	You hold your phone near you, away from you.
1:00.2	It sounds like it's live radio.
1:02.8	It's crazy.
1:03.5	Yeah.
1:03.7	And so we were doing interviews with people like Nardwar.
1:06.3	We interviewed Oz Cohen from 300.
1:09.0	We interviewed Andrew Barber from Fake Shore Drive. a few others. Like it was just a very, yeah, very dope app experience. And you know what? Yeah. And this is not because they flew us down. This is honestly true. Stationhead was the talk of this festival. Everywhere we went, people were talking about it. They sponsored the good music house. It was really cool to be a part of this wave and we're really, you know, thrilled that they, that they brought us down there to be advocates on their behalf. Yeah, for sure. And also, it should be said, now it is actually open to the public. And so you can follow us on there at It's the Real. Just one more place where you can follow us. So wait, so if you go to the, if you go to the iTunes store or the app store, whatever it's called now, you can download Stationhead for free and sign up and own and operate your own pirate radio station. You can download it for free, but send us $500. There you go. You said Stationhead, I'm going to go with Uber. Okay. Because Uber was not around last year. No. So it was much easier for us to get to the airport this year. Last year, and this is true, we ended up on a separate tarmac at a different airport. We don't know what was going on. It was very strange, but I'm glad that Uber is around this year. Favorite performance of South by Southwest. We saw a bunch, so I'm going to name a bunch.
2:18.1	Okay. Okay. So I'm going to start with JPEG Mafia. He was great. Who was so intense and so good and so funny. That was at the Move Forward Music Pigeons and Plains show. Yeah, their 10 year anniversary for Move Forward music. And that was so intense. He hates Morrissey. and has a song about it.
2:33.5	Has a song about it.
2:34.7	I would also say Ray Shremard was great.
2:36.9	S-O-B-R-B-E was great. was so intense he hates Morrissey and has a song about it has a song about it I would also say
2:35.7	Ray Shremard was great S-O-B-R-B-E was great they were both at fader fort um but if I'm being really
2:41.5	honest with myself yeah the best performance I saw while at South by Southwest was Disa
	...

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