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Brolin: This is the fourth Dilated album now. How does 20/20 stack up to the previous works? In which ways is it different and in which ways is it similar?

Rakaa: I would say that 20/20 is probably closer to an extension of Expansion Team.

Brolin: OK.

Rakaa: Rather than a continuation after Neighborhood Watch. In the approach, in the rawness of it and just how we approach it more like rocking 12-inch record--like making records, like we're making 12 inches. I mean it's good to step back and get perspective, but sometimes when you do that you could step too far back and see things on too big a picture and not be as detail-oriented as need be.

Brolin: Sure.

Rakaa: So I think...let's say The Platform was what it was, that was our introduction into the game, that was literally a collection of 12 inches with some new songs. The Expansion Team was the first time we sat down and made a record together, but we were still in that 12-inch mentality, making 12 inches strictly for DJs and trying to figure out a way to fit all those together. Neighborhood Watch was one where we sat down and wrote it like, let's take our song and get into song writing and work with different people and try different approaches to making music, and I think that worked out very, very well for us, but at the same time I think that ultimately you have to understand the crowd of people that you're rocking for. Even if you're live on stage you can't go on stage and act like the people that you're rocking for don't make a difference. The crowd itself is a part of the show, or the person listening to it becomes a part of the record.

You know, just the ears that they listen to it through just let them help...half the time let them know if they're going to like it or not. If they're in a bad mood when they listen to this record, maybe they won't like it, or if their homeboy just said it's whack or whatever, if you're in a good mood and your homeboy just says it's fresh when they hear it, they're going to listen to it with positive ears or whatever, so... You know, ultimately I think that 20/20 is a record that is Dilated at its best. It's definitely a way for people to catch up to where we are. If they didn't know us, this is a very relevant way to show us in context in today's hip-hop scene. This is what we do, but we managed a way to make it relevant for today. So I would say that it's a crazy record man. This is an uncut pure boom bat Dilated record and the exact way that we're feeling right now, so it's an honest piece of work we can announce to the people.

Brolin: And what does the title represent? Is it more just, a clear vision of what you guys want?

Rakaa: Hopefully, that's exactly what it is. It's all about clarity. It's about everything being what it is--just seeing the game clearly, seeing our lives clearly, making clearer decisions, not getting caught up in a lot of the nonsense, not getting caught up in what the label wants, not getting caught up in anything, just doing what we have to do, keeping a strong work ethic and maintaining our focus on the task at hand and focusing that light into a laser beam. So that's what it is, yeah, 20/20.

Brolin: Now you've got "Back Again" is out now as a lead single, which is dope, and it seems like sort of like the perfect, you know, anthem type of joint for you guys. Do you have a second single picked out yet?

Rakaa: We're still working it. There's a good chance it's going be "You Can't Hide You Can't Run." Which is another proclamation song. I mean it's a song about us coming to get--we're coming after what's ours. But it's also...along with that a part of the song also deals with the fact that life is going to bring you what life is going to bring you, and you have no choice but to deal with it. You can try to run from it, but ultimately you're just running from yourself. So stand--you know, dig in both feet and do what you've got to do to make it work, but either way, you know, running or trying to hide from it, pretend like it's not a problem or issue, isn't going to make it better.

Brolin: OK, cool. Now as far as guests on the new album, you've got Talib and Defari, Krondon, B Real, Alchemist--lots of cats who you've all worked with before. Obviously you guys have a good chemistry. How did you connect with Capleton?

Rakaa: I connected to Capleton actually through my man K Salaam. K Salaam is a DJ and producer that was kind of down with Rhymesayers and that whole crew out of there. He ended up moving out to Brooklyn, and he was working with Capleton on some stuff, and we just happened to be talking about the people that we liked, he happened to mention that he's working with Capleton. And I was like, "oh my God, I love Capleton. Man, if there was ever a way, like I would love to work with him." And you know, I just said it kind of matter-of-factly and didn't think much about it. Basically the long story short is it turns out that those cats over there were fans of "This Way" and of Dilated in general. They had seen our videos and heard our music for a while, and they didn't even know that we would know who they were.

Brolin: Right.

Rakaa: And I was like, "Man I'm surprised you even know who we are. You're Capleton. Never mind who I am. God damn it, you're Capleton. We know who you are. What does your mirror tell you every morning?" So we just kind of hooked up through there. I flew out to Chicago when he was on his US tour. I flew out to Chicago and hung out with him for a couple of days, and they just welcomed me, the whole David House crew and the whole Prophecy Band. They just welcomed me in and made me feel like I was at home. I went and partied with them at the clubs, and we ended up setting up a mobile studio at his hotel.

Brolin: Now on that "Firepower" track--you guys get into politics and you talk about Bush and the Katrina situation, which is something that obviously is huge but a lot of artists have avoided addressing that. What made you decide to go there?

Rakaa: I mean to be honest man, sometimes almost to a fault. I just can't help it. Like I get these images that have to be expressed, and if I don't get them out of my head then I'll go crazy and probably snap and flash and end up doing something to somebody in the street or something, so... for me I've got to vent. I'm one of those cats that has to vent, and that's really just what I was feeling at the time. You know I'm hearing all this s***, Kanye West is this and Kanye West is that, and it's bad for America, and it's bad for the morale of the country and dah, dah, dah, dah. And then at the same time you have somebody like, you know, the person who raised the president, the wife of a previous president, coming out making crazy-assed statements that further inflame and divide the situation even more--or further and even more, that's redundant, but you know what I mean.

Brolin: No doubt.

Rakaa: And I think that that's really what the media's focus needs to be on. Like, if this is the mother of the president and this is the wife of a former president and she thinks this way, then it's no wonder why the state of things is the way that they are. You know you're only genetics and environment, and if you were raised around this type of attitude saying, "Well things weren't that bad anyway so after Katrina to come here to Texas, that's like, you know, some of these people are much better off." Like what? You mean to tell me they're missing family members and their house just floated down the street, they're better off to be sitting here in a gymnasium in Texas? All right, Mrs. Bush. You know what I'm saying? And so things like that are totally ridiculous to me, and when I have a song like--when I have an opportunity to flex--I don't want those to be just a thought then I come out just rhyming about what everybody else rhymes about because that's what the record labels want me to do. I fight with Capital Records all the time.

Brolin: Right, right.

Rakaa: They would love for me to be--they would love for me to get a bunch of girls in G-strings and rhyme about you know, gun fantasies and gang fantasies and all that because it would make their life so much easier, but you know what, I'm not going to do that, because that's not the...the reality of it is there's plenty of sex and violence in Los Angeles or any city for that matter.

Brolin: Sure.

Rakaa: But the true reality is there's much more to Los Angeles than that, there's much to hip-hop than that, there's much more to rap music than that, and we're not going to let the mainstream media and the temptation of--you know, the dangling carrot of money--get us to go out there and do things that we know are fundamentally wrong. It's not going to happen.

Brolin: On that note, speaking of Capital, you know, these days everybody talks about being independent or everybody has their own label or imprint. You guys have been on Capital for a while now, and you're still thriving, you know, you're still on label, still doing well. How does being on a major differ from when you guys were on ABB Records?

Rakaa: Well, first of all we're still on ABB. That's part of our deal with Capital is that we were still going to work with ABB.

Brolin: They do the vinyl?

Rakaa: Yeah, they still do all of our vinyl. They do a lot of our street promotions, a lot of PR work, things behind the scenes, but we still make sure checks are coming into ABB, whether we're writing them or whether Capital is writing them. We make sure that they understand that without ABB, Capital wouldn't have known about us. Yeah, without ABB, Capital wouldn't have been able to be nearly as successful with us as a group. ABB did a gang of the groundwork. In fact, the early entrants in Capital's hip-hop rolodexes when we got over there was really Beni B sending over contracts so that Capital didn't destroy our career, you know what I mean?

Ultimately the independent game, it's a gamble, but so is the major game. The independent game is you get paid eight times more per record but you might sell eight times less records because you don't have the marketing and promotion machine because radio stations or video stations...everything is so monopolized right now, and everything is so follow-the-leader right now that if you're not on a major label then a lot of these video stations aren't going to even want to play your video no matter how dope it is. If you're not on a major label a lot of radio stations aren't going to play your record no matter how dope it is. If you're not on a major label a lot of the major publications aren't going to do a write-up on you or an interview on you or even review your record because their impression of it is, if a major label didn't sign it then it's not worthy of our time either.

Brolin: OK.

Rakaa: And really that's not the case a lot of time. A lot of the time the major label stuff is the most redundant, ridiculous, you know, regurgitated music, where the independent scene is where the cutting edge, where the hardcore raw--what I call the concentrate. The independent scene is the concentrate, and the major labels and all these other artists that are on major labels, they go listen to an independent record and they extract what they think they can do. They dilute it with some water or whatever they dilute it with, and then they put out that record. But it's really just a diluted pop version of something that's already going on in the underground, and that's the same for all types, for hip-hop in general, for any type of cutting-edge art, especially youth street art whether it's punk art or hip-hop art, you know, graffiti art or whatever the case may be.

Brolin: Once the corporations get hold of it, they water it down for the masses.

Rakaa: Yeah, they take the uncut pure...they say we can give you guys the uncut pure but if we dilute it with, you know, five parts water to one parts concentrate, then we can sell a lot more of these things to a lot more people. You know, it's like dope, like you give somebody uncut dope if you want to but you're just cutting into your profit margin, so these cats break out the baking soda. And that's what 20/20 is; it's baking-soda-free uncut pure, you know what I mean? It is what it is.

Brolin: Nice. Now being in a group with two emcees, how do you guys break down, like, writing duties? Do you and Evidence sit around and come up with concepts and lyrics together, or do you write separately and then bring it together in the studio, or how does that work?

Rakaa: The best way I could answer that is to say yes.

Brolin: OK.

Rakaa: Because there is no particular way. Sometimes it will be a beat that either Ev or Babs or maybe Alchemist or Joey Chavez, or somebody will send to us, and we'll say, like, "Oh, this beat is incredible. Let's work on this." Sometimes I'll be sitting on a chorus and out of that, it will just come to me. A lot of times I have dreams that I'm battling people or doing concerts, and I'll just wake up and remember one line or one phrase or one chorus if it was repeated over and over again in my mind. I wake up just with it already as a gift. So when those come I'll just write it down and keep notebooks. So a lot of times it's just scraps of paper or scrapbooks and whatever. But there is no method to the madness. We get down and whatever the spark is we just allow it to go. There's no particular way...we just...we've worked together so long that we just recognize when the spark is there, and then we fan the flames into an inferno with a song. There's no particular way that we spark it though. We just let it spark and do our thing.

Brolin: I know you're a student of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu and you've been involved with that for a long time. How does that training help you as an artist?

Rakaa: A couple of ways. First of all it allows me to find a place of peace, some place to go--again to go vent, to go let off steam, where I can do it positively. You know, if I'm going to be fighting somebody, I'd rather it be with no malice and no anger and intent to hurt anybody in dojo than rolling around on the street in front of a nightclub scuffing up my knees--you know, I might get arrested. So I would say working with them first and foremost is that. Also, it's a big family so it's almost like a small promotional street team, because if you're down with them, they're going around telling everyone. You know what I'm saying? It's one of those things, like, they're talking and there's a lot of them and they're fighting all over the world and they know that you're supporting them. They're supporting you as well, so it makes the family bigger.

Brolin: Nice.

Rakaa: Also, my man Ralek Gracie, which is one of Rorion's sons, he raps, and I've been working with him for like maybe a year and a half. He raps under the name Rio Life. I've been over there for years man, so it's just good friends and good family and it's school. So you come out of there learning something that you didn't learn before, refining something that you thought you had, and now you have it better, and it's a beautiful experience. I suggest anyone who has an opportunity to check out something--if they're not involved in anything physical or even if they are, if they want to find something that's for, you know, for self-defense, for confidence, for whatever the case is, if they want to get into mixed martial arts, if they want to do security, whatever you want to do, the Gracie's Jiu-jitsu Academy. I trained at the original academy in the states, which is in Torrance. It's a crazy thing man. Go down there, they'll give you a free class, introductory class, and you'll probably be like me man. I went for the free introductory class, and that was it, and I've been over there ever since, and it's been years. I got Ev over there. Ev's been over there for almost probably about a year now.

Brolin: Right on man. So all right, I've got one more question for you. You know, these days everybody wants to be a rapper or a producer or a DJ. You guys have really made it happen, big label, videos, touring the world. What advice would you give to all these young cats that are just trying to get their foot in the door?

Rakaa: My advice is listen to the radio all day, get yourself a really good rhyme dictionary, and disrespect DJs at all possible times and let them know that you're the rapper and you're in charge, and you'll have a really, really healthy successful career. No, really I would say don't bite first of all. Be original, because if you bite, no matter what, you're going to be a year behind. If you bite what's on the radio right now, by the time you go through the process of making a record that comes out, you're going to be a year behind.

Brolin: It's gonna be played out already.

Rakaa: So don't bite. The second is respect the DJ. The DJ is the backbone of hip-hop culture. Without the DJ you don't even have a job, Mr. Rapper Man. So respect the DJ, connect with DJs. DJs are still the taste makers, DJs are still the people that get the record played in the clubs, DJs are still the people that put out the mixtapes and ultimately affect, even if it's down the line a little bit further now, because of the monopolies, they ultimately affect what's on the radio as well. So respect DJs, take the time to study your history, and study the past and the culture of hip-hop rather than just the music of hip-hop. And get yourself a good lawyer and watch his ass closely.

Brolin: All right, cool. Well thanks a lot man. Good talking to you.

Rakaa: Thank you man.

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