Why Xzibit Is Still Restless

Xzibit not only brought his fire to the album ‘Compton’ but is also the man behind bringing new blood to the project with Jon Connor, we caught up with Xzibit on the day of release of this phenomenal album.

For people who don’t know you’re from the West Coast, you’ve been doing your thing but you’ve worked with Dr Dre before right?

Yeah, I’ve been blessed to be on two of his projects, I was on the last release the Chronic 2001 and now here we are 15 years later still going strong, we just released the well received soundtrack to ‘Straight Outta Compton’ which is called ‘Compton’ and Dr Dre just put another masterpiece in the street.

And he’s worked on your own albums as well.

Definitely man, he gave me opportunities to tour with him and be involved in producing my album so I got a long standing relationship with Dre.

How did you first hook up with him?

I got a call to do ‘Bitch Please’ which was a Snoop Dogg single and that was my first time working with him, he just called me to his studio, cos I guess he got wind of what I was doing in the street, and he was like ‘Ok lets see what he’s got’ when I got the call its been rolling ever since.

Whats it like working with the Dr?

If music is what you wanna do and that’s your endeavour, there’s no other place, there’s no better place to be besides studying under him.

There’s no better place to be besides studying under him

What does he do that other producers don’t do?

You tell me! (laughing) He’s very detail oriented, he hears frequencies and details in the music that takes it from a beat to a production and from a song to a hit. The devils in the details.

All I know is everything that he does bangs, anything that he does sounds huge and sounds epic. Its a great day, I feel like I’ve had nothing to do with the album but I feel like I’ve been involved with the journey.

Well you have man, you’ve been involved in breaking our records, spinning our records and you’ve seen a journey, you’ve lived it with us, its not like you just sat back and just got on and don’t know the history of the Hip-Hop world, where we come from, so you’ve seen it, you’ve lived it so you are a part of it.

Appreciate that. So ‘Loose Cannons’ is the song that you’re on from the Compton album how did that come about whats the story about behind that track?

Its the same way all the other records came about, like ‘do you have something for this?’ yeah! We put it together and it just fell into the pile with the rest of the songs and then when it was time for selection they just finished it up and there it is.

So how you feeling today?

Man I’m feeling like a million bucks, a billion bucks, I should say I feel like a billion pounds cos the U.S dollar ain’t doing too well right now.

You was involved in ‘Chronic 2001’ and he’s worked with you on various albums and a lot of stuff has happened since then in Hip-Hop and its got bigger. Whats different this time round compared to the last time 15/16 years ago?

It moves faster, back in the day it was publications and radio shows that kinda pushed the culture and kinda pushed peoples awareness and now in the day and age that we live, information travels faster then anything. So the amount of people that are involved in this release and the amount of people that are able to tune in at the same time is a lot different and so it gives us different avenues and different ways that we can promote and different ways that we can get out and test the fans in a more intimate way.

Last night was amazing, it really hit me that this was a real collective experience. I was listening to the album with the rest of the world; people in Sweden, Africa, America its crazy. I haven’t done that before.

Around the world, thats amazing. My timeline was going crazy after this, its going crazy right now. Its an amazing response, I’m just thankful man, you know all those fans out here thats been rocking with us, we did this for y’all and hopefully we get to see you guys for some type of show format, that would be great, regardless you gonna see us. We just glad that everybody enjoyed the record as much as we enjoyed making it.

Whats next for Xzibit?

You bet your ass there’s gonna be an Xzibit album, you better believe that player!

Listen to the full #DreDay special with DJ Semtex on BBC 1Xtra now.