
Rolling Stone rang up rapper and humanitarian extraordinarie David Banner recently to chat about the Congressional hearings examining the impact of hip-hop lyrics (where he, along with Master P, testified) and caught the articulate onetime Southern University student-government president in a particularly chatty mood. In fact, he shared with us five major complaints he has about the government, people who act fake, racism and Oprah.
1. Hip-hop still has a bad rap:
“I’ve got this joke that I tell people all time: If a Cambodian immigrant got pregnant by a Chihuahua, they would blame it on hip-hop. I saw not just Congress, but America using hip-hop as a conduit to attack poor people. And they admitted in Congress that things you see are more detrimental than things that you hear, but movies, they don’t talk about Scorsese, they’re not talking about Steven Spielberg or Stephen King, and I’m wondering, ‘How can they do hard movies and I can’t do hard music?’”
2. Racism prevents David Banner from rocking like the Police or Johnny Cash:
“One of my top three groups in the world is the Police. I love the old Police with Sting and the drummer holding the drum sticks the old-school drumline way … I happen to fall upon ‘Murder By Numbers.’ [Sings] ‘Murder by numbers, one, two, three … easy to learn as your A, B, Cs.’ He said in the song the best way to kill a man is put poison in his coffee. You look at ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger,’ that was a stalker song. Johnny Cash said he wanted to kill a man just for the sake of killing him. But that’s ‘art.’ So basically what you’re telling me is that [rap is] not art because we’re black.”
3. Oprah is wack (and all anyone really wants is Sex and the City):
“Come on, Oprah. You’re from Mississippi, girl. I don’t mind what you do as a black leader, but if you’re not going to take up for black people, then don’t criticize them. You don’t have to talk about us — stick to your books. When you talked about us, you didn’t put T.I., Nelly and Snoop Dogg on there. You put Common on there, and Common don’t call women bitches and ho’s, so you’re not talking about him, so he shouldn’t have to defend something he does not do. But if you notice, that same week, she had a birthday party, and they showed her shaking her ass to 50 Cent. So we talk about positive music, but American people don’t buy it. I want you to go buy Talib Kweli. Go buy it! Please do! I don’t care what kind of rap you buy, just by rap music. As long as we leave rap here for another generation, I don’t care what kind of rap it is — gangsta rap, international rap, Russian rap, country and western rap, I don’t give a shit. But the thing is, we are hypocrites. We say we want this, but we really want the WWF. We really want Sex and the City.”
4. Mother Nature is conspiring against David Banner (as is the press):
“Have you noticed every time one of my albums come out, there’s a big tragedy in the world? Last time it was Katrina, so I had to spend the whole time talking about Katrina. I threw the largest urban benefit concert in history — why did I not get the cover of Rolling Stone? If I would have killed someone or got shot a million times … [but] do all the stuff that I’ve done, from Katrina to the scholarship programs, all the stuff that you say black people should do, I don’t get no light for that. But if I tell Al Sharpton to suck my dick, everybody will talk about that.”
5. People should fucking be able to talk the way they fucking want to:
“Why is it that if we talk about ‘Fuck tha Police,’ people concentrate on the ‘fuck’ and don’t concentrate on police brutality against young back men? Why doesn’t Congress listen to our music more as a message? You know it and I know, be real with yourself, dude. That’s how we fucking talk. ‘Shit, man, fuck, man, fuck the police, man. Yo, what up, what’s going down in the ‘hood today, shit is fucked up where I’m from.’ I hate when people get in front of important people and forget who they are and act like they don’t go to strip clubs. Man, half of them people up there are probably freaks themselves. We just saw that with a congressman recently in a bathroom soliciting sex.”
Related Stories:

Email
Stumble
AIM
Del.icio.us
DiggThis
Fark It!



- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC.