It’s never easy standing up for anything. Just look at the debacle Talib Kweli has tangled himself in just for recording a song with Gucci Mane. It seems that rappers get labeled as “conscious” depending on what they are against more so than what they are for. In our conversation with Phonte of Little Brother we asked him to reminisce about one of his earlier verses from Little Brother’s “The Yo-Yo.” The verse from their debut The Listening earned him a Hip-Hop Quotable in The Source magazine and shed light on the hypocrisy of rappers who claim to be “positive” and “righteous” while “at the end of the night you still trying to f*ck like me…”
For that reason Te has resisted being labeled a “conscious” rapper despite having album titles like The Minstrel Show.
“Just because I don’t rap about guns or pimpin’ doesn’t necessarily make me a better choice for your children to listen to,” says Te who has some verses that would make Trina and Plies blush. “That’s why the whole conscious rap thing we just kind of wanted to keep ourselves out of it. It didn’t represent the full scope of who we were.”
