Freddie Gibbs & Madlib Discuss Finding Each Other's Music

Earlier this week the highly awaited album from Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, Piñata, was released. The project marked milestone for a collaboration that had been years in the making, and judging by the amount of positive feedback it has gained since it’s release, it was well worth the wait. Gibbs and Madlib recently caught up with HipHopDX to discuss first discovering each other’s music and uncovered some of the prior opinions they each held of one another in those early days. Read some excerpts below, or head here for the full interview.

“If you would’ve told me five years before I met Madlib to do a record with him, I probably wouldn’t have did it,” Gibbs says. “I ain’t understand that shit, and I wasn’t experienced enough to appreciate what he did. But now I am. I appreciate it, and I see what he does—the crowds and the love that he gets. He gets the respect. So it’s just like, ‘Alright, I want to set myself apart from the rest of these rappers.’”

“The first thing I heard him do was over my shit—“Thuggin’,” Madlib says. “That was supposed to be an interlude, and my man Lambo was like, ‘You should rap over that shit.’ We got him to rap over it, and that’s my favorite joint still…just the feeling of it. It’s gloomy, raw.”

“Before we got in the studio or anything, we were hanging out…just drinking and smoking,” Madlib says. “He’s like one of my cousins, and I got family just like him. It’s the same old shit. He’s a comedian; don’t get it twisted. He had me laughing all night. He was singing R&B songs and shit. It was crazy. It’s all about having fun and not taking it too serious.”