You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Get Interviewed aN interviwe with da man, da legend, da rapper.....VIPER by Cisco “da beez kneez” Haywire and David “where am i” DeMark No Fidelity: I’ve noticed you have hundreds of thousands of albums on Spotify. How do you do it? Viper: Man just hard work you know, working in the studio! I’m working on an album right now with a dude named Cali Cash Flow. He’s doing five and I’m doing five: we doing five together. And I’m working on an album right now, The Jaminiest Album You Ever Heard. I’m doing two versions of it, a regular version and a chopped and screwed version, so that’s two albums right there. All my music is original music, I just work hard. I’m blessed because I have my own studio at home, so it’s very cost effective for me. I can do 10 or 20 songs in one day. Because of the way that I rap, and I’ve got so much material. When I was in jail I wrote like 500 songs, man, lyrics for 500 hundred songs, and I dip into those when I am doing stuff. A lot of product, and you know I make my own beats, I can make a beat in ten minutes and flow on it in five, and then before you know it you got a song in fifteen minutes, and then I go to the next one. If I set a goal to get two albums in one day I’ll do it. If you got three hundred and sixty five days in year and I’m making two albums a day, all new material, it shows how I’m doing it. NF: That’s…That’s intense as fuck. V: I set the Guinness Book of World Records, for the most albums released by an artist in a year, 2013. NF: Wait, is that documented? V: It’s not documented, but, if anybody out there wanna get it written let ‘em know. NF: You said that when you were in the pen, you wrote a lot of lyrics. So that’s obviously influenced your work, but are there any other life experiences that you draw on to craft your sound or lyrics? V: My music is constantly changing. When I first started in the rap game in the mid 90s, I was a freshman in college. And basically, you know, I was a lot younger, and I was in a situation where I was just trying to figure everything out, as far as the industry. I was enrolled in business school as well as real estate school, and I had all these different things going on. So, if you look at my music then, you’ll see that it’s changed from now. Now I am a lot more financially stable. So I don’t wanna say that my music back then was erratic, that’s a strong term, but it was more all over the place. And I think that relates to a lot of the younger people. I think that a lot of the
younger people can grab some of my older music and really relate to it. And they can relate to my new stuff, because it’s pertinent to what’s going on today. I address a lot of issues, that you see going on in the media, but I address it on a broad scale. No real specifics, I kind of just address it from my stand point and where I’m seeing things. NF: You mentioned how you spent some time in college trying to figure out the music industry. What conclusions did you come to? V: Well, I was very fortunate man. I came across a lot of luck. And in the industry, it takes a lot of persistence, and it takes a little luck too. You see these guys, with major labels with major deals, that’s like the handful out of the millions. The odds are extremely against you. It takes a constant work ethic. I was constantly just making music man, just all the time. Regardless of what I had going on, I would come to house and make a song. Come to the house and make a song. I tried to get at least one song a day. When I did that man, it kind of made it to where I was learning as I was going. I was fortunate because I learned Pro-Tools when I was real young. I played for my dad’s church, I was a pianist, an organist from age 7 to 17. I already had the playing ability to make music, but at the time in the early 2000s, there was not as much technology as there is now, so my music sounds a little different. Cuz back then, I was using a lot more keyboards, kind of had an R&B-ish swag. Now, it still has an R&B swag, but its going more to an R&B-Trap swag cuz I’m using fruity loops, and I’m using different things, a motif keyboard, bunch of different things. But it’s good to be a one-band-man so to speak, everything goes through me, I do my own tracks, I create my own tracks, I write my own lyrics, everything. Everything is Viper. So when you hear a Viper product, it’s good because you know that it was 100% me, and you know that there was no other outside influence, and you agree or not agree with what I’m saying based solely on me. NF: What are you using now to produce? Have you been doing any sequencing inside FL or have you been configuring the Motif to drum things in via MIDI? V: Basically, what I’ll do is, I’ll play a patch on the motif, you know, keyboard. Then I’ll slide in through MIDI, as a line, and then sync in the fruity loops, because fruity loops is good for the beat part of it, your hihats, your
