Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Part III - Music

When I interviewed the band (well, some of the band, plus Thin C and Ta Smallz) I had just got my snazzy new iPhone 3 and had no idea how it worked, so I didn't trust the thing. Years later I still don't trust any of my iPhones (I'm on my second, right now, the iPhone 4 or whatever) but it certainly doesn't seem to trust me, either, so we're even.

Just in case the new fangled contraption didn't work, I brought my old skool, handheld, miniature Radio Shack tape recorder. Pure analog. I've had it since high school. Layzie Bone even commented on how I had brought two recording devices, and when I told him the story about how I wasn't certain about the new device he picked up the Radio Shack tape recorder and said, "Trusty rusty."

I typed this whole damn thing out playing the tape recorder, pausing and rewinding when my typing had fallen behind. It took a long time.

Now I'm smart enough to just listen to the key points that were covered during the course of the interview, and then just type that out, but at least you guys get to read all of this, right?

Part IV will be out, soon.
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Let's talk about Uni5: The World's Enemy. Compared to all of your previous works, what are you going to accomplish with this new album?

Layzie Bone: We’re gonna take over the world (laughs). I mean, we’ve just come with a message in these turbulent times that even with all that’s going on in the world family really does exist…even though there’s tough times you can still have unity.


Uni5 also means that no matter what you do, the world will unify against you. You’re driving a nice car and someone is hating on you, feeling like you are some sort of Uncle Tom, but he’s also the world’s enemy. Or the president could feel like the world’s enemy because he can pull all these strings but even though he’s trying to figure out this bank situation, he’s the world’s enemy because they are unified against him.

But it’s also from a more spiritual aspect. It’s a good versus evil thing. I really feel like we’re bringing truth to the table…but Satan always wants to bend the truth and we feel like he’s providing a mirage of what’s going on while we’re street reporting. We’ve got folks hating on Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. We’ve got people saying that we couldn’t do it, but we’re unified.

There’s alcoholics and weed heads who told lies to try to defame our character, but the bottom line, the ultimate message of Uni5: The World’s Enemy is that it’s the truth against the world. We already understand that they’re going to try to break us up before we get started so we expect that, so we’re the world’s enemy, period.

We’re on some superhero shit. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, that’s our name, but Uni5 is on some serious Superman shit. Superman meets Hulk Hogan slash Spider-Man, whatever, but the point is to unify and make the world, to change the world, to a degree where it’s a better world for our children. And if we can’t than we are ready to go to war, so deal with it.

I like how you’re saying that you can unify the world, but how it can also feel like the world is unified against you. 

Layzie Bone: Right. They don’t want to see the world come together and hold hands, so the world is like, “Screw you, I don’t like that person over there and I don’t like that person’s face…” so we’re hating on them but they are also hating on us because they don’t want to show the love.

Basically, you need destruction so you can have rebirth. It’s a topsy-turvy thing where you can’t have light without dark. If it was always light outside you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. So we’re trying to bridge that gap of understanding and when I say Bone is unified, we have an understanding of how we have to work together.

We may not see each other all the time…I got Bone Thugs Records, Krayzie got Thug Minds, Flesh is writing movies, Bizzy Bone is pursuing a whole lot of things, you know what I mean? So it’s a unification of grown men understanding each other.

Well, you’ve had a lot of decades in music, and that means you’ve come up with a lot of wisdom. So it makes sense that what you rap about now is different than what you rapped about in your 20’s.

Layzie Bone: Yeah, that shit is hot so don’t touch it.

But getting the whole group back together on such an emotional level must have taken a lot of work.

Thin C: I think with the next album an idea as powerful as the unification of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony is going to take work, like it took work to unify. Because the blessings you reap from something so massive working correctly are only going to come that way. It takes work to play the role that the artist has to play.

Ta Smallz: Bones' have been in the record business for a long time, and this album is about coming together and putting the ego’s out of the way because life is a song, and love is the melody. I think they’re setting an example because it’s different when it’s one man, but this is five different minds coming together. That’s showing a type of love that has to be respected, because it’s not easy.