Saigon: This is the most honest album I ever did, and I went and got DJ Premier, because I always wanted to work with Premier. A lot of people don’t know this, but I like to use one producer for most of my projects. I think The Greatest Story Never Told Chapter 2: Bread and Circuses was the only one where I really didn’t. The Greatest Story Never Told, Just Blaze pretty much did the whole record. When I did All in a Day’s Work, I did the whole project with Statik Selektah. When I did most of my mixtapes, Scram Jones would do the whole mixtape. Even when I was working with Alchemist, me and Alchemist did eight or nine records. But I never worked with Premier up until this point. I had a project on his album, but we never had a Saigon/Premier record. We got four of them on this new album, and he just came with the perfect backdrop for what I had to say. So when I started working with him, the rhymes started coming easier, and I think lyrically, this is by far my best work.
DX: How was it in the studio with Premier, and how did y’all link up for this project?
Saigon: Well I had been waiting for this Premier beat for…not even exaggerating, for like 11 years. Preem will tell you, I’ve been waiting 11 years to work with him. It got to the point where me and Preem were about to fight, ‘cause I’m like “Yo man, what the fuck? You keep tellin’ me this and that.” Like we about to have a physical altercation? But he was like, “You know what Sai, you right, you right.” Because he knew I was right, and I wasn’t just trying to start shit. I’m thinking, “I love you as a big brother,” ‘cause me and him are close, but [he was] killin’ me! Before I retire, can the world hear Saigon and Premier together?
He actually gave one of my records to REKS. The last single on REKS last album, the Premier record, was my beat. So he finally gave me one, then he took it back and gave it to REKS [laughs]. I was like, “Ah, shit no.” He’s such an honorable person, he said, “You know what, Sai? Being that I made you wait so long, let’s go in. Let’s do more than one. Let’s bang out a few.” And when I get in that zone, when I get in my Yard Father Zone, we made some great records. We made some records that are gonna shock the people.
We did one with Big Daddy Kane… Ah man, it’s pretty damn nuts. I got another record called “Mechanical Animals,” where I took four generations of Hip Hop and put them on one song. It’s like Kool G Rap reps the ‘80s… Memphis Bleek, who is so underrated to me as a emcee ‘cause he’s been behind that big ass sun named Jay Z all his career [laughs]. It’s hard to shine behind Jay Z, but Bleek could really rap. But he’ll rep the ‘90s, I will represent the 2000s, then I got Lil Bibby from Chicago who will represent like the 2010s and the new, young era. And we all come together on one song to show that four generations of Hip Hop can rock on one record, and it can still sound incredible.
Read the full interview with HipHopDX here
Related: Saigon Says DJ Premier Has Produced Most Of His Next Album
so the four generations song is basically the same thing as “classic” that preem did a few years ago…