Real talk…I didn’t know how my interview with Krispy Kream and Rah Almillio, the siblings collectively known as The Knux, was going to go. Usually, an artist’s music is indicative of their personality (or lack thereof). But musically, the duo from New Orleans is refreshingly unpredictable. For many Hip-Hop interviews, I chug a shot of espresso and brace myself for yet another drug kingpin-turned-rapper background story.

Not so with The Knux. Their self-produced debut album, Remind Me In 3 Days, is in stores now (courtesy of Interscope Records) and it’s just as colorful as my Q & A session with them turned out to be. Growing up in the gritty hood of N’awlins, The Knux listened to a diverse mix of rappers like Nas, Mobb Deep, Wu Tang, A Tribe Called Quest, Geto Boys and 8-Ball & MJG. To lure them away from the ever-influential streets, Krispy and Al’s mom enrolled them in their middle school’s marching band where they learned how to play instruments. The young brothers may not have stayed out of trouble, but they did hone musical abilities that would prove invaluable later on. Live guitars, bass, keys and drums play a heavy role in The Knux’s funky and futuristic beats; a perfect backdrop for their inventive lyrics.

So here’s the chat that I, Khalid Strickland of the Almighty TSS Crew, recently conducted with The Knux, who have earned a spot in my coveted, tough-to-crack MP3 rotation.

TSS: What would you like to accomplish with Remind Me In 3 Days?

Rah Almillio: Hopefully some more artists behind us will have the courage to do what they want to do with their music and not have no outside influences changing their shit; whether it’s the label or cats you hang with or whatever it may be. Basically, open the lane for more creative artists who want to do what they want to do. If we got to bear the burden for that…if we got to sacrifice album sales, you know what I mean? That’s basically what we want this album to be. Just that bridge for Hip-Hop cats and other genres. We have such a large buffet of different sounds on this album.

TSS: What can the uninitiated expect to hear on this album?

Rah Almillio: Really, you can’t expect nothin’ but what you could know is it’s gonna be some original shit. It’s some shit that’s going to bend your mind a little bit. It’s going to be some hard, hard, hard; our rhymes are something serious on there. We like…jump in the stars on our rhymes, you know what I mean? And you can find some very heavy production; not the beats, but like, production on a whole…some good songwriting. This album in particular is going to be the soundtrack of two hood motherfuckers from New Orleans being in Hollywood and adapting to the Hollywood atmosphere, so that’s what the album is about.

TSS: When did you guys start playing live instruments and what inspired you to do so?

Rah Almillio: Real, real young…as fuckin’ kids in middle school. And our mom started us playing these instruments because…In New Orleans, let me explain this to you, if your kids don’t really have nothing to do, they’re going to probably wind up selling drugs or fuckin’ shooting somebody. That’s just real and that ain’t even me over-exaggerating that. So my mom, she comes straight from the projects.

My mom is a good, good hood motherfucker so she knows she never wanted her children to be like the motherfuckers she knew when she was coming up, you know? So she put us in that shit early; in a marching band in middle school to keep us out of trouble and shit. It ain’t really work, but she tried the best she could to keep us out of trouble. So it was our mother who basically got us into playing instruments and shit like that. Playing in a jazz band and stuff like that, it’s not really a big deal in New Orleans because it’s a known thing. You got cats in the hood all day that’s like crazy on trumpet and all types of instruments. It’s like the norm in New Orleans to play an instrument.

TSS: Since Black folks pretty much invented and pioneered Rock & Roll, why don’t we acknowledge it the way we should? Why do niggas act like they’re scared of guitars? They see somebody pull a guitar out and they start buggin’. Read the rest of this entry »

Being yourself in the music industry is probably the most difficult thing for a major-label act to do. With the label heads reaching their hands out for a catchy single, fitting in the narrow restraints that define musical genres, the constant fear of writer’s block stalling an album’s progress, and the paying public wanting to hear something similar to what they heard the last time they turned their radio on, it would be easy for an artist to fall to that pressure of changing themselves for the almighty dollar. Read the rest of this entry »