Everyone has an opinion on the state of hip-hop; not everyone has five decades of credibility like Erick Sermon. The legendary rapper-producer is holding court in his midtown Manhattan studio, starting our nearly two-hour discussion with thoughts on why his veteran peers have aged more gracefully than succeeding generations.
“They made records that was going to surpass and be able to live the test of time so they can still work forever,” he says. “This era is not going to be able to do that, and the era before, because nobody’s going to come watch you say ‘pussy, fuck, suck, bitch,’ whatever, when they’re 40-something years old. They married, they go to church, got kids, got a life. It don’t match them no more.”
The man known as the “Green-Eyed Bandit” tells me that he’s been invigorated by seeing releases from veteran peers such as Clipse and the artists who were a part of Mass Appeal’s Legend Has It… series. He lauds them for embarking on a hip-hop purifying mission that he’s been diligently working towards with a slew of upcoming projects, including his Dynamic Duos, Vol. 1 album, which drops tomorrow. The project features renowned duos like his own EPMD, Mobb Deep, and M.O.P., unofficial duos like Redman and Method Man and Snoop and Nate Dogg, as well as collaborations like Conway and Game, which he says are a glimpse of Dynamic Duos Vol. 2, which is set to drop early next year. The sequel will feature more duos that Sermon composed himself.
He started the project during quarantine, seeking to reinvigorate the rap game and show younger artists a blueprint for rap success. “I knew it was going to have to come to something like this to where [I’m focused on], ‘How do the next five or 10 years look?’ We just trying to give you a little blueprint on what shit could be, and that hopefully y’all take that and move forward.”
Anyone who matches just half of his success will have done great for themselves. He debuted in 1988 as one-third of EPMD with DJ Scratch and his partner-in-rhyme Parrish Smith, becoming one of rap’s early beloved groups with singles like “You Gots To Chill” and “Strictly Business” on their album of the same name. He’s also the co-founder and architect of the Hit Squad collective, soundscaping albums for Redman, Keith Murray, Das EFX, K-Solo, and others (doing the same for Def Squad, a spinoff group created when Sermon and Parrish first split in 1993). As a soloist, he’s known for songs like “Stay Real,” “React,” and the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Music.” He also produced Mos Def’s “Oh No” with Pharoahe Monch and Nate Dogg, Jay-Z’s “Reservoir Dogs” featuring The LOX, Beanie Sigel, and Sauce Money, and “4,3,2,1” with LL Cool J, Method Man, Redman, DMX, Canibus, and Master P.
Leaning forward in his swiveling studio chair, he’s a natural storyteller, regaling me and his producer-protege BooGeyManBeats with tales of his “almosts”: living in Atlanta and having then-young artists like Usher, Ludacris, and Goodie Mobb members coming to his rim shop, and missing out on producing on Nas and Notorious BIG’s first albums. “My story is Ill, nephew. I could have had Game, I could have had 50 Cent, Rick Ross, Yung Berg, Fugees, Akon. People will be like, ‘Goddamn. Imagine if you was a label and you had all these people.’ Can you imagine that?!” he says, wonderment awash on his face.
His affable nature — and cultural stature — probably helped him procure Dynamic Duo’s star-studded roster. He says he simply DMed many of the acts on the project, and aside from a Hail Mary attempt for an Outkast record, and feature requests for Dr. Dre and UGK (he was told there are no more Pimp C verses), the other attempts were successful. He produced every song on the album except Cypress Hills’ “How Do You Know,” which BoogeyMan laced.
The EPMD record came from him getting the creative “itch” after the duo collaborated on Nas and Eminem’s “EPMD 2” from the Queens legend’s King’s Disease II album. For “Kill Shot,” he procured Prodigy of Mobb Deep’s vocals from a mystery person he gave a “favor to” in exchange for the verse. “I had Havoc come to the studio to [record] his verse,” Sermon recalls. “Once Havoc [did] his verse, I played him Prodigy. He left the studio, was gone for half an hour, then came back and said, ‘Where’d you get [Prodigy’s vocals] from?’ He was floored, because you got to imagine he haven’t heard his man in a long time.” And Conway and Game’s “God Mode” came from a trio track originally featuring Lil Wayne, which included two beat switches and a new verse from Conway when he heard the beat that made the album.
The next album will emulate the track, eschewing well-known duos for more unpredictable collaborations; he teases a song with some lesser-heard Tupac and Biggie verses. He says he has three more projects set to drop, all about two months apart, starting in January: Dynamic Duos Vol. 2, Erick Sermon Presents BooGey Nights (where BooGey will produce tracks for artists such as Nature and 38 Spesh), and his solo album The Sermon. Of the latter, his first solo since 2019’s Vernia, he calls it “that shit that you would get from those albums of a Jay-Z or somebody,” referring to more mature lyrical content.
“Everybody ain’t good, nephew,” he says. “You trying to tell me while all this shit is going on you good? Ain’t nothing going on wrong in your life? I’m going to speak about some things that’s going on that [you] might can relate to, so maybe it can help you with it. That’s what music does. Nina Simone said that every artist is obligated to tell [their] fans something that can help them. You are obligated no matter what because they’re your fans.” Bun B, Jay Electronica, Freeway, and the late Craig Mack are set to be on the project.
“I really think that [with] all that I’m doing, we took our time on all of it. And I feel good because I don’t have to put myself in that system,” he says, claiming there are “packages” that he alleges labels pay to radio conglomerates for their biggest acts. “It’s a $200,000 package. There’s a $900,000 package, there’s a $1.5 million package. I don’t want to put people business in the street, but this is just the real shit. Everybody has a package. How much you pay is going to determine how big your record gets. I seen these packages. They come to all of us. They go to every label, and you can print it if you want to. It don’t matter to me,” he says.
It feels like Sermon’s at the “fuck-it” stage that so many veteran entertainers reach, where they speak their truth apathetic to any consequences. But that doesn’t mean he’s out of the loop. In November, he posted an Instagram photo alongside Lyor Cohen with a caption, noting, “Today I became a partner for the future of A.I.” There was some backlash to the announcement, with some fans worried that he was poised to follow down the path of Timbaland, who is gungho about his AI-generated artist Tata Taktumi.
Sermon tells me that he’s curious about generative AI, but he’ll never get to the point where it’s doing any music for him. He recalls debating a fellow producer who used AI to concoct a melody and defended their usage because they changed the lyrics: “I’m trying to figure out what’s the ‘okay’ part, that you changed the words?” Sermon asks incredulously. “These are talented producers using this in that manner. Listen man, I just ain’t there yet.”
For him, the fun is in human collaboration, like his 2023 sessions with Kanye West in LA and Italy. The Chicago icon previously pushed back on Sermon’s recollection that they were working on music for a Y3 album. Sermon says regardless of where the music was meant to go, he values the time because his ailing mother passed as soon as he landed in LA, and he was comforted by Kanye. “[He] said he got the same phone call from his aunt when his moms passed away. So he says, ‘Eric, what I did was I went to work. Come to work the next day.’” The two met up the next day at Kanye’s compound in LA. “We was doing hip-hop records, rhyming and everything,” Sermon recalls. The session apparently went so well that Kanye didn’t want the magic to stop; Sermon recalls that he told Kanye he planned to spend the next day mixing Dynamic Duos, but Kanye came to where he was staying anyway to pick him up for more work. He scrolls through his phone and shows me a May 16, 2023 text that he says is from Kanye noting, “Yo I’m downstairs.”
Persistence aside, Sermon says he admired not just Kanye’s skill and ingenuity as a beatmaker (“he needs no one,” Sermon asserts), but the fact that he was focusing on multiple different projects at once. “He had the presidency in one corner. Kanye for president on the board, the whole nine,” he recalls. ”Then he had the people from [Asia] that was doing the [Yeezy] clothes on one. And then he had [an architect] that was making the new Kanye West store that was going to be on Sunset and Wilshire.” Sermon says that even when Kanye was seemingly occupied in another corner of the room, he’d chime in on the music.
Months later, Sermon caught up with Kanye and Ty Dolla $ign at Sting’s studio in Italy. He says the tracks he heard, which later became Vultures, bore no resemblance to the traditionalist hip-hop they worked on. During dinner, he asked Kanye, “What happened to the rapping that we was doing?’ [Kanye] says, ‘Everybody stop real quick. Eric is asking where the rapping was. We got to go back in there and start putting raps down on these records.’” Sermon reflects, “He listened to me a lot to the point where people used to be like, ‘yo, Erick, you go tell him and ask him to…’ He had mad respect for me.”
With over 37 years of experience, it’s hard not to respect Sermon. Toward the end of our conversation, he takes a salad out and begins eating — he’s so passionate during our talk that he forgot to eat his lunch. I leave him as he’s enjoying his meal, then prepping for another studio session with BooGey.
