The legendary emcee, Big Daddy Kane and Noah Callahan-Bever sat down together in Brooklyn, NY in celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. The two discussed Kane’s iconic career, getting the only sample ever cleared by Prince, hitting the studio with Rick James in the ’80s, being left of the Batman soundtrack, and the many challenges he’s faced in his career and how he’s continued to persevere. He also asked questions from Eminem, Nas and Pusha T.
Interviewer: First question comes from Mr. Marshall Mathers, Eminem, who is curious — because you were doing it so early in your career when most rappers weren’t, how did you know or how did you learn how to do multi-syllable flow, like when you said: making sure every lyrics is done fine and make one line bright as sunshine?
Big Daddy Kane: Em asked me that question before. Yeah, he has asked me that before. I don’t know, I guess it’s the type of thing when you’re running out of rhymes, you figure out the ways to match words together to keep the rhyme going on. What I think Eminem originally asked me about was ‘Rap Prime Minister, some say sinister Non-stopping the groove, until when it’s the…” He points out, Sinister, Minister, okay, but now what else rhymes with that? So, I just put ‘Non-stopping the groove’ until ‘when it’s the’, say fast enough ‘when it’s the’ and it rhymes with Sinister. I just run out words and you create your own, you know. In all honesty, when I did that, I never paid attention to that I was pushing the entire genre until Eminem mentioned it to me a couple of years ago, I never paid attention to it.
Back in 2021, Big Daddy Kane confirmed that he interviewed Eminem for his upcoming Netflix documentary, titled “Paragraphs I Manifest.” The release date of the docu-series is still unknown… You can watch the new interview below: