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Erick Sermon has revealed that, surprisingly, neither Method Man nor Redman were fans of their now-classic duet “How High” — at least at first.
“‘How High,’ Red and Meth wasn’t happy about,” the EPMD legend revealed in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX on Tuesday (February 27).
Sermon specified that he was talking about the remix, which samples the Silver Convention’s 1975 jam “Fly, Robin, Fly.” That version was used in the song’s video.
“I made the original version, which is the hard version. But then when I made it popular with the ‘Fly, Robin, Fly,’ they was pissed. Because they come to the video shoot, and they’re expecting to hear something else, and they hear this so-called ‘commercial pop record.’”
He continued: “Russell [Simmons] and Lyor [Cohen] was there, and they made sure that it get done. […] And it went platinum.”
Check out the full video clip below.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), “How High” (the single of which contains both the original and the remix) was certified gold as of October 15, 1995, with sales of more than a half-million copies. The soundtrack to the film The Show, on which the song appears, went platinum.
Elsewhere in the same interview, the EPMD veteran talked about working with Kanye West after being “summoned” to Florence, Italy last year.
“The record I was working on wasn’t what him and Ty Dolla $ign was doing at the time,” Sermon recalled. “I was working on Y3, Ye’s solo album […] Hopefully, we can finish what we started, y’know, ’cause I had him on Hip Hop.
“I was like, ‘You got to rhyme and we have to do the stuff that you used to do ’cause you ill at that,’ y’know? And he listened […] I had [the old Kanye] back.”
During the same chat, the 55-year-old credited Dr. Dre with changing his approach to making music, saying the legendary producer even made him never want to write raps again at one point.
“We go to Malibu,” he remembered. “As soon as I press play, we do one record. I press play again, we do two records. I press play again, we do three records — in one night. The guys said, ‘Erick, we’ve been here for eight years, we ain’t never seen that before. Nobody has done what you did today.’
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“I put another beat on and he calls Snoop [Dogg] over. Snoop been working on the records that I did. Then I come back and Dre is working on the record that he rapped on. So I said, ‘Yo, let me rap on that. Let me do your style, how you rhyme and how you put your records together.’”
He then recalled pulling out his pad and pen to write rhymes, before one of Dr. Dre’s songwriters named Smitty told him: “We don’t do that here.”
“Dre would say the cadence and then we would all say a rhyme, and then if the rhyme sounds good, then we put that down. So there’s no writing; it’s just 16 bars of whatever your freestyle may be,” E. Dub remembered Smitty telling him.
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