After pushing back the debut album indefinitely comes another breaking news. Nipsey is now trying to leave his house Epic Records and going independent. Full interview at HHDX.
DX: I only asked about the label – their responsibility, or if they had any – because recently I spoke to legendary left coast producer Mike Mosley, and I guess he was choppin’ it up with you at the time, and he let it leak that you were about to go back to being independent.
Nipsey Hussle: Honestly, I was always independent before I signed to Epic [Records]. The way that Epic heard about me was thru our movement as All Money In: what we was doing in L.A. as far as mixtapes…as far as the touring we was doing just in our region. So when we got with Epic it was kinda like we started working together. But, just to keep it completely 100, I’m in the process of negotiating my release right now. And we just gonna go back to doing what we been doing, as far as an independent company and serving our region. But it wasn’t really no big fallout with the label or nothin’ like that, it’s just Epic went through internal changes: they fired the president, Amanda Ghost, [after] actually becoming a subsidiary of Columbia [Records]. Half of they staff is gonna be laid off or fired. And the original staff that brought me in the building, that shared the original vision of really what Nipsey Hussle was, they’re all gone. So, being fair, it ain’t really nobody in particular that we can point the blame on, it just kinda was like a [dissolving] of the core team that started on the project. So it serves both interests for us to just go back to what we was doing originally. I’ma walk away with all my masters; I’ma walk away unobligated, with my brand built. And it’s all love and respect for everybody at Epic. We took a chance together. It was a lot of money spent, a lot of success together, and it’s no hard feelings.
DX: You got a distribution situation lined up for South Central State of Mind?
Nipsey Hussle: Actually, we weighing the options right now. We got a lot of offers for it. But I’m just trying to really come up with the best idea of how I wanna do it. I was entertaining new original ways to distribute music, kinda like in the sense of what Prince did with one of his projects he put out in [2007]. It was called Planet Earth, and what he did was he distributed it through a magazine in Europe who had a subscription base of like 1.5 million. This a new era, and I think it was a paradigm shift in how people receive content recently. So I’ma gamble on that paradigm shift and I’ma try something original. And I don’t wanna go in to too much detail, but it’ll be something along the lines of what Prince did with his album…
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