Chamillionaire released the last installment of his Mixtape Messiah series with Volume 7 earlier this month and had the Internet going nuts to get the free downloads as a thank-you to his longtime supporters. Speaking with HipHopWired exclusively, he revealed that it wasn't just an end to the series but a change in the direction of his highly respected career as an underground artist.
“It's more than just the mixtape series, it's me rapping on them period. I feel like a lot of times the underground fans just want to keep you to themselves and I've been doing this for ten years plus now and I don't think there's anything else for me to do on the mixtape scene. It's time for some fresh new innovative ideas and I just want to be scalable. A lot of my fans grew up with my music but now they gotta share. People across the country and internationally have complained that they can't get my mixtapes so I felt like we needed to clean this up and make it bigger and newer and make it to where everybody can get it and then make it where its real material. People compare my career on the mixtapes to other people that put out real music. If you really look at my career when it comes to real music, it's not a lot. I've only put out two major label albums but my career is long when it comes to the mixtapes. So it's now time to make a long career when it comes to making and putting out real music.”
King Koopa also feels that the mixtape scene is becoming watered down and everybody and their mama has a mixtape in the streets trying to hock. In addition, Cham also wants to reach beyond his diehard fans who already know how lyrically dope and now let the rest of the world feel his venom.
“It's so many people putting out mixtapes now that are low quality in Texas and the format is over used. So I'm just stepping up and putting out a new brand now called “Major Pains” but it's not gonna be jacked beats and all that. It's gonna be real stuff you can put on the radio, over real beats. Stuff that's quality that can play in the clubs. It won't be coming out every month but more like every six months now but it'll be big with a distributor. It's something to hold me off until the album drops but the fans can still expect some dopeness.
It's about the audience and it's a lot of people out there that may criticize me but that's because they're not hearing all the music. It's like I'm making music for people in this one section in this lil' hood but there's other people outside the hood that don't necessarily know my history because they're not hearing it and I can't blame them. When I go to places like the East Coast and people are looking at me crazy because they only know me for one or two songs, I can't' blame them because they ain't hearing the music so it's time for everybody to here it now. If I'm moving hundreds of thousands of mixtapes underground, shouldn't everyone know about that? Why am I keeping it under the radar for so many years? It's time to put it on the radar. Now my songs that are getting put out through the “Major Pain” projects will be more like authorized leaks and it's pure crack.”
Chamillionaire also gave up the goods about scrapping his highly anticipated third major label release Venom.
“My album will be dropping fourth quarter this year and as far as Venom, I just decided to scrap it. I know there were rumors and conspiracy theories and maybe it was a Universal Records thing and they didn't like it but that's not true. The fact is they were even surprised when I made the announcement and were like, ‘Why you telling people that?' But I just made it known that I wasn't gonna drop Venom because I had already made up my mind if I'm gonna drop a body of work that I feel confident in, I want to drop it the way I want to drop it. As I started putting the project together, people started coming in and getting more excited because time is nearing for all of us to come together as a major label and they started coming in making their little tweaks to it. So I'm cool with that and you have to deal with that because at the end of the day, your label is your boss but then they started tweaking it a little bit too much and it starts changing the concept. I was like nah man, from a creative standpoint, I got to say No.
But they were cool and like you can still call it Venom, it doesn't matter because some people don't think it matters what the title is but I do. It does matter because the reason I called it Venom is because when you think about the dark Spider-Man… on my last album people had thought Cham went a little commercial so it was almost reestablishing that darker side. And the music that they wanted me to add to it just wasn't matching what I wanted to do. And I'm not saying it wasn't dope because it was, it just didn't match Venom. So I'm not the type to sit there and fake it so I said let's just scrap that whole idea and make it cohesive and it works together. The project is definitely still coming fourth quarter though and we coming with bigger records.”Source
}
Comments