If you know anything about underground Hip Hop, the name Vinnie Paz should mean something to you. Whether being called God Of The Serengeti, Pistelero Pazzy, Boxcutter Pazzy, Ikon The Verbal Hologram, or any of his surnames, Vinnie Paz has spent the last twenty or so years performing, writing, producing and rhyming. From Jedi Mind Tricks to Army Of Pharaohs to multiple mixtapes and a successful solo career, Vinnie Paz is about as real as it gets.
Outside of a denizen of Hip Hop, Paz is a huge fan of punk rock, hardcore and metal. Having been raised in Philadelphia with one foot in the hardcore scene and the other in Hip Hop, Paz has brought his love of the heavy into his music. I got to sit down and talk with Paz, and that’s what it became, a discussion. What started as a straight interview, got very interesting very fast.
Check it out.
CRAVEONLINE: Let’s start with how you and I came to this. I mentioned your love of late Slayer guitar icon Jeff Hannemen in the obit I wrote. How did you find out Jeff Hanneman died and what was your reaction?
VINNIE PAZ: I had known he was sick with the spider bite thing. I had gone to the big four show at Yankee stadium and I knew Gary Holt from Exodus was filling in for him. There had been rumors about Jeff being super depressed about not being able to play. I saw something on my Twitter feed from somebody reliable, either Brian Slagel from Metal Blade or my friend Howie Abrahams.
CO: I also know Howie.
VP: I knew that! I knew when I read it that his death wasn’t a rumor but I did a quick dig to investigate and found out it was true. I was hoping they were wrong. When I found out for certain it was like part of my childhood died.
CO: It’s interesting to me. Few in hip hop claim to love heavy metal and even fewer have more than a basic knowledge of it. You really know your stuff. How did you get into heavy metal?
VP: There’s a lot of negative shit that comes with having two brothers eleven and twelve years older than you. Lots of ass beatings and wedgies and lots of getting picked on. One very cool thing was at four years old these guys were fifteen and sixteen and playing me the first Merciful Fate album and Sabbath and Motorhead. Stuff from Shrapnel Records. I never played with toys or anything as a child, I was only ever obsessed with music and boxing.
My brothers worked their jobs to buy records from the record store every Tuesday. My brother Lenny would open up the vinyl by just splicing the opening with a razor blade so the plastic still stayed on. Then he’d play it once just to put it on cassette and then put it away so the vinyl was pristine. I’d ask him to dub me a tape. I’d stare at the vinyl and the insert and I was only six years old. I have very vivid memories of that. They were cool enough to let me tag alone on shows. Slayer on the Reign In Blood tour, Merciful Fate on the Abigail tour, Anthrax. Actually DRI opened for Slayer on that tour.
CO: Was that before they became a metal band?
VP: I guess it was that transitional thing, like crossover thrash. I don’t remember their set very well because of how insane Slayer’s set was. Like, I remember seeing Danzig play and Soundgarden opened for them. I’ve seen some weird things. A couple years after that Soundgarden was the biggest thing in the world but at that time, with a crowd that was a mix of metal fans and Misfits fans, they didn’t go over too well.
CO: I haven’t seen too many bands go over very well opening for Slayer either.
VP: That’s not a very enviable position to be in. Even if I was in a metal band I’d have to think, yeah it’s a great opportunity but I’d have to wonder, if I’m ducking eggs and cabbage every night, is it really worth it. (Laughs)
CO: Even well established bands get treated badly.
VP: I couldn’t agree more. I’ve seen the audience yell Slayer at a gig where Slayer aren’t even there. I’m good friends with the guys in Terror, the hardcore band. They were on a tour maybe summer of ’05 or ’06 and I was backstage with them and Cannibal Corpse was playing. I went to the side of the stage to watch them and between songs kids were yelling Slayer. (laughs) Corpse was like “Yeah we love Slayer to but why are you yelling it at us?”
CO: You’ve also worked with other buds of mine. Freddy Madball and Ezec, though Ezec is known as Danny Diablo now. It was awesome when Danny’s hip hop career blew up. He’d been wanting to do it for a while.
VP: Yeah absolutely. I brought him on tour with me a few years ago.
CO: It’s funny because I first heard of you through that and then my friends Jaimie and Tank here in Ohio told me about you. Both love hip hop and MMA and since you also write for a boxing website, they were both fans. I hadn’t really heard your stuff outside Jedi Mind Tricks. Being an old man the golden age of hip hop for me was 87-95, so I haven’t been as up on the art form over the last, oh, two decades.
VP: (Laughs) Hey, I have no problem with that man. I know exactly what you mean.
CO: I just hear people say “I’ve been listening to Jedi Mind Tricks since the beginning” and I know they’re lying to me. So I wanted to be honest with you. The Philly thing also intrigued me because there was a time when Philly was a big hip hop draw and then it vanished. Why?
VP: Absolutely. In the early 2000s they were signing everybody from Philly. After Jay Z signed Beanie and Freeway everybody was getting deals. You’ve been around the music industry enough that you see this leeches from major labels. If they sign ten people or twenty, clearly the sound is gonna get played out and not all of these dudes are going to go gold or platinum. I never got caught up in that because I would see it happen in punk rock, hardcore, metal or hip hop. Yo, Obituary and Deicide is bubbling so now everybody is signing a death metal band and in the early nineties like twenty death metal bands got signed and then that shit the bed.
CO: It was like the punk movement in the late seventies.
VP: Exactly. Malcolm McLaren was putting the Sex Pistols together because of the Ramones. I was getting major label offers when I was too young to sign a contract. I was up at Ruff House right before my sixteenth birthday and they were trying to give us a ten album deal. Luckily I was too young to sign a contract. So like, eight or nine years later in the early 2000s, I’m seeing major labels come to Philly and swarm, I knew I would never indulge in that because I know how the machine works.
I also came from a punk rock and hardcore background so I saw how Revelation Records worked and I was more influenced by that and the DIY ethic. Even though not everybody that was with me came from that I would explain to them how it worked. I was running our label and half the dudes understood it and half didn’t so we explained to them we could do it on our own and keep it gutter. We wouldn’t have to water down the griminess.
CO: Didn’t the DIY ethic save Hip Hop? Hip Hop became very popular between ’88 to ’95 and some labels were signing Hip Hop acts just as tax write offs. So in order to sell records the genre started watering itself down itself leaving us with an era that lost what it once was. Then the underground comes bubbling up saying fuck you major labels.
VP: I agree 100%. You had people who had fingers in both worlds like Rick Rubin, he understood. Howie Abrahams understood, y’know he was signing hip hop acts but he was also signing Madball, 24-7 Spyz, that kind of thing. There were dudes who understood. Rick produced LL and Beastie records and in the same breath doing Slayer records or Black Crowes. There was always some people who understood that hip hop and hardcore were born of the same thing.
You look at Lou from Sick Of It All and he could be some guy who likes hip hop. He was rocking Adidas sweat suits and that kind of thing. So the worlds were always colliding. As I grew into who I was, these things just seemed natural to me. It was weird to me later in life that not everyone came from the same world where you listened to Public Enemy and then Gorilla Biscuits in the same day.
CO: That’s how my friends and I grew up. That world exists in the underground but nowhere else. I had to move to Ohio to experience a different way of how the world works. People say they’re into Hip hop and it’s Lil Wayne or Kanye West.
VP: Of course. I see the same thing when I tour. When you’re growing up you kind of see the world with blinders on when it’s just you and your homeboys. Then you travel and see why Jay Leno is number one in the ratings. Your brain or my brain can’t wrap ourselves around how a band like Nickleback could sell a hundred million records. That may be the worst band in the history of Earth. It was a good thing that we found like minded people. Then you go out into the world and you realize “oh shit, I’m a fucking weirdo”.
CO: My friends from small towns, their hatred of where they grew up and the desperation to get out makes a lot more sense to me. I grew up in New York City, I’d get picked on at school but then go and hang out with other friends who were like me. Small town weirdoes don’t have that.
VP: Exactly, imagine if you didn’t have the lower east side or I didn’t have Philly, we’d probably be one of those kids that blew their brains out at fourteen or became fucking junkies.
