Interview Magazine: Ghostface Killah

The acclaimed Ghostface Killah, rapper from the legendary Wu-Tang Clan, sits down with Interview Magazine direct from Iceland to divulge in everything from fashion to Justin Bieber and spirituality. There is no absence of Ghostface’s playful pandering and social commentary in this entertaining, albeit insightful interview.

BEVINS: Is there some kind of contradiction between being gangsta and sitting backstage with Icelandic models?

COLES: Nah, you can be whatever you want. You don’t physically gotta be a gangsta, where you just killing something. You can be a gangsta in your frame of mind. If you know how to get money, that’s your gangsta. You get money. You don’t gotta be a gangsta everywhere like, “Yo, I’m trying to threaten you,” or anything like that.

BEVINS: You definitely seem nice right now. So, would you agree that music on the radio now isn’t really what you’d call gangsta?

COLES: Nah man, it’s for little kids.

BEVINS: [laughs] Well yeah, I guess even Justin Bieber has hip-hop, right?

COLES: Right. So, we’re older, we expect something different. There’s no message or nothing. There’s no nothing. Look: When Wu-Tang came we was dropping bombs, like, you know, a bomb atomically, like Socrates. We had messages. There was something behind it. Like Nas, Mobb Deep, Biggie, Tupac.

BEVINS: I mean I’ve been using this word dangerous, but Wu-Tang was socially explosive, right? It reverberated throughout culture. Is there a chance that something like this could happen again?

COLES: I can’t promise you that, because everybody’s not in that frame of mind. Times change. When Wu-Tang came, Wu-Tang was for that era, right there. When Dre had it in the West Coast, it was for that time. Biggie and them, it was for that time.

It’s a whole different time now, we’re trying to get it back there, but everyone’s mind, even within Wu-Tang, might not be on that. It was a lot easier for us then, because we were just on the streets. Now we got families and babies, we thinking about a lot of shit. I had more fun then than I have now.

BEVINS: Is this here fun?

COLES: Yeah, I guess, but I mean, I’ve been doing this forever. It’s not new to me. In ‘93, it was new to me.