Interview with Willie D - Geto Boys

Willie D Interview
By Matt Sonzala

“I don’t understand these motherfuckers always acting like they real hip-hop and it’s all about this legend shit and authenticity and all this shit, and you got a Geto Boy album coming out and it’s a question whether they gonna get a cover.”
Willie Muthafuckin’ D, 2004



Why in Houston, where the Geto Boys helped build the major radio station in the city, a new Geto Boys single doesn’t get dropped directly into rotation? We need to hear it.
Motherfuckers just disrespectful man. There ain’t no integrity in the music. It ain’t no integrity as far as people who write the music, who report it, who play it and make their money off the music. There’s no loyalty whatsoever. So if the people that’s pullin’ the strings don’t say “O.K. We gonna make sure that the history is preserved and we gonna make sure that people never forget.” Then you know, what the fans gonna do? All they do is buy what they hear on the radio and see on television. So they just gonna go with the flow. You look at people like Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth and Jim Brown, they ain’t gonna never let you forget them dudes. The sports people ain’t gonna never let you forget them cats. They always got stories on these cats cuz they understand that these guys are symbolic of what the very essence of the sport is. As much as the people that’s pulling the strings always talk about integrity and authenticity and respect for the music and all that shit, they don’t. And then the people who do, it’s ironic that they’re usually the people who are not the decision makers. They in there because they love it so much but they can’t get anything done because the people who are making the ultimate decisions are the ones in the power positions. But let the shit fuck around and blow up then everybody on our dicks all over. Especially with black culture, the people who pull the strings, they don’t respect shit but death and money. Even the fans only respect death and money. They sit around and argue and fight about who got the most money. And the artists are disrespectful too. They calling each other out calling each other bitches and hoes and motherfuckers and kill your baby and all this kind of shit. But when a motherfucker get killed then that’s when everybody want to get Farrakhan and call a truce. It’s that old adage man. Do you really need to stick your hand in that fire to realize it’s hot? There’s some hard headed motherfuckers in the music game.

Well people are losing money now and I think the industry is in a panic.
Well they got tricked with that popcorn rap. All that bling bling shit, they fucked around and supported that shit, which is a good thing, I like to hear people talk about different shit in music. I like the different genres of rap music. You got this guy he’s a conscious rapper, this guy is political, this guy just talk about money and partying and this guy just talks about fucking and this guy talks about killing motherfuckers and all of that shit to me is good as long as you get a fair balance of it. What happened is the system got overloaded with the bling shit and that shit backfired. Cuz the fans were like “Yeah yeah we like this, we wanna shake our ass.” Now they’re starting to say, “Shit man, I’m tired of this. All they talk about is shaking they asses. That’s all I see every time I turn the videos on is hoes and cars and diamonds. Man talk about my pain, talk about my struggle man.” The fans wake up and say “Hold up man, I ain’t got none of this shit. This ain’t what the fuck I went through.” When the high wear off, when the hoes disappear, when that bitch walk out on your ass and key your car up, you need some information on how to get around that shit. When the cops pull you over and violate your civil rights, your human rights, you know you need answers. And you ain’t gonna find it in that ass shaking music. Now all of a sudden everybody want to hear some real shit. They want to get back to the streets. They want to get back to the essentials, ala Geto Boys. It’s a uphill battle with the powers that be cuz all they know is shit, Geto Boys haven’t put an album out in seven or eight years, so they couldn’t give a fuck about us, even though our shit still jam. All you gotta do is listen to shit and you’ll know we kickin’ ass, but these motherfuckers will write you out of history in a heartbeat in this rap game.

You think it’s because Rap A Lot doesn’t play the games that the industry wants them to play?
I don’t know about that, cuz you can have all the money in the world, but it’s clickish. You got to be in the click.

But here in Houston y’all should be leading the click.
You know you got a lot of people in Houston who ain’t from Houston in the first place and they can’t respect the history of Houston in the first place. Many of the people on the radio out here, even the PD’s and MD’s, they ain’t from Houston, they ain’t even from the south, so they can’t even respect the music. They can’t respect what people like out here, they can’t respect the history. The biggest problem too is the fans don’t hold them accountable. So when a new motherfucker come in here and he ain’t getting with the program, he not being held accountable by the consumers. They not raising hell. You damn near have to have a all out boycott, demonstration or hostage situation to get a motherfucker to change how they view playing music out here.

What can the Geto Boys do to fix that?
I’m just gonna keep slapping motherfuckers when I see ‘em. Cuz I get frustrated from time to time. You catch me on a bad day, there aint no telling what’s gonna happen to your ass. Cuz there’s s many of these motherfuckers that’s acting this way man, you can’t do it by yourself man. You’ll spend a lifetime trying to change this thing by yourself. One thing the Geto Boys can do is sell records. When you winning everybody want to fuck with you.



Are the Geto Boys still winning or are the Geto Boys broke?
I don’t know what the case is for the Geto Boys, I can speak for myself. I’ma tell you like this, Geto Boys just like any other group, definitely ain’t got all the money that they deserved, but the Geto Boys have made enough money to where they could have taken their money and invested it in certain shit. Cuz when you think about it, how many people done took $100,000 and turned it into $100,000,000? A lot. A number of people have done that, even with less. So if J. Prince got $50,000,000 and I make $500,000, I ain’t got no excuse to be broke if I made $500,000 in a year or two. But if I get out there and I live outside my means and I make bad investments and I give my money away and buy a bunch of bullshit I don’t need and my next record doesn’t get played, then I’m fucked. It’s easy to feel bitter, but I’m the kind of man that whatever happened in my life, I ultimately shoulder the blame. If I shoulder the blame, that doesn’t give me an excuse to fail. But if I sit back and say they, they, they, did this they did that, then I won’t be shit. It’s like yourself, you love this music game and you’ll stick your neck out for this shit. You understand that you have limitations based on dealing with people that have certain limitations over you. Now you could sit back and be bitter and say “Man it’s too hard man. We should have this, we should have that, we should be doing this and you could just sit there and absorb this shit and let it just drain you out. Or you can use that shit as motivation and say, “You know what, I didn’t handle that shit right. Yeah, they did this and they did that but I shouldn’t have been fucking with them anyway.” Or when I did fuck with them I should have fucked with them like this and then I would be in a better position today. So you can use that as fuel for your fire and go out there and really make a difference. So even though Willie D hasn’t made all the money that he could have made and hasn’t gotten an ounce of the recognition that I deserve – they always seem to write me out of the history books. You could find a list of a thousand of the best MC’s and Willie D ain’t on that motherfucker. They come out with these Top MC lists and Willie D ain’t never even on the list, and I done wrote all this shit? I done wrote shit that saved niggas lives, helped them with they relationships, motherfuckers have written me talking about killing theyself, but they didn’t because of certain shit I said. I been everywhere and rappers who are considered to be the best rappers tell me that I’m their favorite rapper and I’m not nowhere? I’m totally excluded from the history books? Come on man.

Well I got real nervous when I watched the VH1 Special and I saw the gangsta edition with NWA and didn’t see y’all. They put you in the “regional” episode.
But see what that does, when they write the Geto Boys out of the history books, they discredit themselves. That means that whatever the fuck article they are writing, whatever story they covering, whatever footage they shot has absolutely no credibility. I don’t care if you cover all the other artists that came up at that time, if you don’t have Willie D in that motherfucker, your shit has no credibility whatsoever. And you can put that shit in bold print with a “Fuck You!” at the end. I could see if I was just another motherfucker that was rappin’ and I thought I was good and I hadn’t penned all these songs that are in the annals of music. But I put the work in. Like I said in the song, I read the magazines, I read the motherfuckering magazines.

I like how you rhymed that with “faggot scenes.”
Hell yeah, “don’t watch award shows, too many faggot scenes.” A motherfucker going to pick up an award that got on a record and said “blah, blah, blah” and he walking off with an award? Come on dog that’s some faggot shit if I ever seen it.

Well the award shows are ridiculous, they’re a joke.
You can’t sit up and just look at TV. You got 999,999 eyes watching television and say “That’s a hot ass video.” But there’ll always be one dumb motherfucker that will say something different and then some other bullshit ass video or song wins the award. Anytime you have people standing and judging people, you gonna always have chaos. You gonna always have chaos and you gonna always have misrepresentation. The shit is flawed, just like the legal system.

Well on a more positive note, what are you up to right now? There were rumors that you had moved to Paris, but now you are in Azerbaijan. What happened to Paris?
I did initially move to Paris man. But me and my wife realized quick that Paris is not a place to raise kids. We were at this hotel resort in Paris while they were getting the apartment ready for us. We were gonna live in an apartment while we built a house out there. So we were at the resort and this woman comes up and says “You may want to get your kids out of the pool about seven, because people gonna start taking they clothes off.” And sure enough, seven o’clock comes around and here come people taking they clothes off and getting in the pool. Swimming, all in the sauna. Then I’m watching television about 10:30 at night and fucking come on out of the blue. Just out of the fucking blue, fucking comes on. I’m watching regular television and fucking comes on. I didn’t push any special buttons to order no sex or nothing. So I start pressing buttons and stuff trying to get this shit off and I call downstairs and I’m like “Hey what’s wrong with this channel?” And the lady starts laughing, “Oh I’m sorry Mr. Dennis, I forgot to tell you that.” This is some regular shit. They just wide open with that shit out there. You go up in McDonalds, motherfuckers standing in line tongue kissing in McDonalds. You know my kids are seeing all this shit so I’m like fuck this shit. We started searching for another place to live right away that could accommodate all our needs. For me Paris was gonna be my thing where I could deal with the music in Paris, but the very next place that we saw that could fit both of our needs, my wife being an engineer and me doing music and real estate, was Baku, Azerbaijan. The real estate market is big time happening over there right now and you can get in on the front end. Also it’s a much better place to raise kids. They’re at an international school. My son, he’s 5 years old and has 17 kids in his classroom from 14 different countries and my daughter has 20 people in her class from 15 different countries.

Well that’s strange to hear coming from the guy who wrote “Let a Hoe Be a Hoe.” Those songs were extremely explicit and you’re worried about the late night porn on the TV?
No doubt, cuz I got kids. If it was just for me it wouldn’t be a problem. But just like you gotta let a hoe be a hoe, you gotta let a kid be a kid. Even though I make explicit music, that don’t mean that I should be sitting up in the house writing my song and my daughter come in the room and I say “Hey, tell me what this sound like – I fucked the bitch in her ass and then I…” You know what I’m sayin’? That don’t mean that my kids need to be hearing that shit. See what’s happening today is the parents today, they lazy. They don’t want to take no motherfuckin’ responsibility. The only time they want to take responsibility for they kids is when they kids do something good. When they kids are the outstanding athlete or they kids can dance good or are a straight A student, that’s the only time it’s they kid. When they end up in jail, if they flunking out of school, if they kicking somebody ass in the streets all day, if they selling dope, it’s the rappers fault. They listening to that rap music. It’s the rappers fault, it’s George Bush fault, it’s your first grade teacher fault cuz she didn’t want to talk to you. It’s everybody else fault when something wrong with your kids. So even though I had a lot of fucked up experiences growing up, there was some ways of life that I had growing up that I had to respect. That I felt was a good lesson learned. When adults are drinking or doing they thing, having an adult conversation or they smoking, you send the kids to the next room. Kids don’t need to be all up under adults listening to adults conversations and watching what adults do because the next thing you know, the kids gonna be in that room playing and they gonna be emulating what they saw you do. So you let the kids hear the music, and they rapping the music and you think that’s cute. Then they go to school and say that shit, get kicked out of school, now you running around that motherfucker looking dumb, missing days of work. You let the kid from the age of one all the way to five cuss people out and you think it’s funny and shit, cussing grown people out and saying fuck you this, fuck you nigga and all that and then when they get to school they can’t integrate because they too wild. They got no home training and now you want to beat they ass because they can’t stay in school. You gotta come to school every day, but you taught them from day one to kick somebody ass if they do something to you. Call them a motherfucker, call them a bitch, kick ‘em in the ass, now the little motherfucker can’t stand school. He’s five years old and been suspended 23 times. So I ain’t claiming to be perfect but I think you know you make small sacrifices. I jam all kid of music, but when I’m jammin’ something explicit and I’m picking my kids up, I turn that shit off man. Cuz they’ll get to that shit sooner or later and certain shit, they need to get to later. Some people say naw, let them see it they gonna see it anyway. Oh yeah? They gonna fuck sooner or later too. Should you let them start fucking when they five? Since they gonna fuck sooner or later anyway you want to let them start fucking when they three? People want to be parents when it’s convenient for them to be parents.

That’s the biggest problem too.
You know, I don’t like that sixteen hour flight to Baku, but I’m gonna jump on that motherfucker next month to go see my babies. I ain’t like the idea of coming up with $40,000 to invest in my daughters college fund, but I had to. I ain’t no rich motherfucker, but shit, certain shit you gotta do.



Did you have any feelings like “Man, I gotta get the fuck out of America?”
Hell yeah man. You know what, my feeling was I’m not finna be broke. I’m not going back to Day One. I just know that the world is bigger than the United States. I finally realized that. I didn’t think like that, even up to five years ago, but I know now. The world is bigger than the United States so when things slow down here, it’s always happening somewhere.

That’s something that I think kids need to learn explicitly. This is a big world. Now I consider myself to be pretty worldly, and I feel like I’ll live just about anywhere, but when I think about getting out of here, Azerbaijan doesn’t really pop up on the radar. You didn’t just move to Europe, you went to a whole different culture really.
Yeah. Sometimes desperate situations call for desperate measures. Sometimes you gotta just shake it all the way up. I can understand it, but some people are so caught up in they comfort zone that they won’t even leave they neighborhood. They’ll never move to another neighborhood. Then you got people that’ll never move out of they city or state or country and you know, for me, I been traveling for a while anyway. Even though Azerbaijan is an adjustment, it’s not all that bad when you’ve already traveled.

How are you accepted over there and how are you accepting the changes? What are some of the things that you have to adjust to?
Well number one you gotta adjust to the food. Going to any new place, the food is hit or miss. You gotta make adjustments anywhere you go, cuz you used to certain stuff. I never ate green peas so hard before in my life. They got some green peas in Azerbaijan so fucking hard. As far as the infrastructure, you can run a pair of shocks into the ground in a day. The roads are very rugged. We got a Land Cruiser but them roads are still rugged. The women are pretty friendly with me. I’m sort of an oddity out there. They look and they kind of like go about they business. But when I’m in the restaurant, most of them don’t speak English and they want to come up and ask permission to rub my bald head. Now the men, they can be annoying at times because they’ll look at you and snicker and shit cuz they ain’t never even seen a black man in the flesh. So every now and then, depending on how I might feel on a certain day, I might throw up a fuck you sign to a group of ‘em and keep on going. The fuck you sign is universal, they do understand the fuck you sign. That’ll change real soon cuz the US military on its way in and you know the US military got a bunch of niggas.

Do you see a lot of folks coming out there doing what you’re doing? Is this a hot area?
Naw there’s not a lot of people doing it cuz you have to be in the loop. You can’t just go out there just cuz you have money. You have to go to the embassy to get permission to do business. Then that don’t mean they gonna give you permission. Whoever you dealing with has to be somebody that’s connected to the country, gotta be a citizen. They’ll tell you how much of your business they want. You have to give them their cut. They’ll straight up tell you they want 40%.

And it’s still worth it?
Yeah it’s still worth it cuz think about it, if you can go out and buy some premium land for $100,000 today in a country that’s on its way up, and in five or ten years flip that same land for $10,000,000, if your cut is $6,000,000 you have to say it was worth it.

So you’re in it for the long haul?
Yeah see that’s what I had to learn. See, me being from the streets, I always made money the fast way. My whole life I just been in the fast lane. When I started boxing at ten years old it was because I wanted to make a bunch of money fast. When I started in the rap game it was because I wanted money fast. I wanted to work short hours and make long money. Well, a lot of times that can get you in trouble because a lot of times when you make money fast, you spend money fast. When you work your slow grind and you set up a plan and it’s a five or ten-year plan and it comes in slow, it’s usually more consistent. It comes in more constant, and that’s how real estate works. So now I’m disciplined enough. I’d have $100,000 and I’d want to see $200,000 in a week.



So is this all you’re doing over there?
Yeah but I got a partner out there and we’re in negotiations right now to build a club out there.

Do the Geto Boys have fans in Azerbaijan?
Yes sir, shit I saw the UTP video on TV in Azerbaijan. They have one McDonalds in the whole country, in Baku, and after school all the kids that’s from that area they come out there and they watch MTV, and on the weekends it’s the most jam packed McDonalds you’ll ever see in your life. They’ll literally have a couple hundred people in line all day. When I got out there, to my surprise I met this guy from Colfax, Louisiana, who happens to own the second most popular restaurant in Baku. They sell American food and it’s called Fisherman’s Wharf. But all music that’s bought there is bootleg. There’s no genuine music out there period. The music goes for $2.50 per CD. Tower Records couldn’t survive in that motherfucker.

Is it more like Eastern Europe or Middle East out there?
It’s Middle East. It’s like 2 ½ hours out from Russia. And on a plane it’s about 3 hours to Iraq. It borders Russia, Georgia, Iran and Armenia.

Have you gone to Russsia yet?
Naw I ain’t going to that motherfucker. They still call black people “nigger” in Russia. It’s not even supposed to be a disrespectful term. They just took “nigger” off of black Russians drivers licenses and shit. But when the little kids got killed in the school in Russia by those Chechens, Putin, the president of Russia, said “We have x amount of Russian children killed and one nigger.” The president! The fucking president said this shit man! They have black Russians, not a lot, but some black Russians in Azerbaijan. Just a few. Shit the whole country don’t have but ten blacks and I brought three with me.

How is daily life over there different for you? Is it really different?
Naw it really ain’t. The only difference is you don’t use the phone too much. It cost too much. In the states it’s not expensive to call, but there I only know a few people so I only make a few phone calls. You can’t use the internet, there’s no high speed internet, it takes all day to log on and it’s just forever. It’s a timely process. The only high speed they have is at the Hilton Hotel. Even the government don’t have high speed internet.

Azerbaijan is right on the Caspian Sea, is it beautiful over there?
It is beautiful man. Some of the buildings are shabby because it is a poor country overall but the landscape is just beautiful man with the water and the hilly country. It’s reminiscent of Athens. They got a lot of buildings that look like Russian buildings because when Russia invaded they built shit like they had. The buildings go up to no more than ten floors. They have a few that go up to twenty floors, but that’s it. I don’t know why. I do know they get an earthquake every ten years. There’s one due in the next year or two.

What’s your plan for the music? Are you home strictly to promote?
Yeah strictly for this. We getting calls for shows right now. We’d like to do something real big, get a few cats that’s doing something good and do a stadium tour.