24: To our online audience who may not be familiar with who you are, please Introduce yourself.

I am SL Jones.

24: As a child you were subjected to a lot of moving around. Briefly tell us about that and give us a little insight about your background growing up in Arkansas.

I’m from Little Rock, Arkansas. I was born from in Flint, Michigan and I bounced back and forth between Flint and Aberdeen, Maryland and Little Rock. I have family in all three places. Just like everybody else grow up and have their stuggles; poor people have their struggles, rich people have their struggles and that was one of mines. I bounced around a lot. I went to 13 schools. I was always the new kid. As far as Little Rock, growing up there, it’s a gangland but Flint is a gangland too but it was predominantly Vice Lords and G.D.’s so it was like, most of my family in Flint were GD’s, so living in a Crip neighborhood in Arkansas wasn’t that hard to adjust because I grew up around it. I was already familiar with that lifestyle.

24: What inspired you to rap?

I never really just wanted to be a rapper. There was never a point to where I was just like “yea, I’m finna be a rapper”. I knew that no matter what my mentor told me, no matter what you do, make sure that you love it. Find something that you love and that you good, that you would do for free and figure out how to make money off it.

I told myself the only way I’ma rap is if I get good at it so I started listening to people I could sort of mimic or who I liked, artists like Playa Fly. I would try to imitate his style, I would write rhymes and play around wit it but I could never focus and really sit down and write a whole rap so it would be like, I might play with a couple of lines and later on I was like “I’d rather make beats”. I use to want to make beats but it cost money to get all that equipment so rapping was easier to write plus I was good at English (laughs).

24: Who was your favorite MC to listen to coming up?

Jay-Z. Hov was one of my favorite artist because his voice wasn’t like Biggie or Mystikal. He came in an era where as soon as you heard their voice on a record you knew who they were, whereas with Hov, he just sounded like a regular nigga to me but he was just goin’ in. It ain’t like I was just born with this voice where the minute I say “ugh” and people are like “oh shit”. I got a regular voice but if you go hard enough on a track, you gon’ win. If your consistent enough, you’ll win.

24: Your style and flow is very different from what most people would expect from an artist coming out of Arkansas. Who were some of your influences?

The artist I really attached myself to when I was like “I really wanna try to learn how to write” was Noreaga, Bun B but he was so complex. I was like “Damn! How can I write like that?” so I rapped like, I don’t want to say simple, but with an easier style because I needed to learn how to count bars. I learned how to count bars listening to Jadakiss. His style was so “1,2,3,4”, “1,2,3,4” and he would always land on the four. In a song where he said all he needed was one hot sixteen or sixteen bars, and I was like “sixteen bars?” so I kept on counting that verse until it added up to sixteen bars and that how I found out how to count bars. Another artist was Busta Rhymes. I use to count the bars in his music as well.

24: What era of hip-hop would you say had the biggest effect on you and your music?

I caught on to the East Coast, like the heyday late. I didn’t even start listening to Nas until his second album. I had missed “illmatic” completely. All we listened to in Arkansas was gangsta shit. That was it. I didn’t understand anything Wu-Tang was talking about and then I had a cousin in Flint, because I would go back and visit my cousin, and he had gotten into that “five percentage” shit so he use to be talkin’ that “blah blah blah” and you know when they first get brand new on that shit, they be wanting to convert everybody so I use to be around him as he would tell me about it but I’m a sponge so I just get a kick out of learning new shit. So he’d be telling me about that and I was actually a fan of AZ at a time and the album “Pieces of A Black Man” was out. Everything my cousin would say about the five percentage, I would translate. I never knew what he [ AZ ] was talking about in the verse, I just liked it but it started sounding like plain English. I was like “Damn, so that’s what he’s talking about” and out of the Wu-Tang Clan I always liked Method Man, I messed with Rae, I never really knew what Ghostface was takin’ bout all the time but it was just certain people I would latch on too and I could understand what he was talking about from what my cousin taught me.

24: What makes SL Jones unique as an artist and stand out amongst other rappers from Arkansas?

I’m just me. In Arkansas, there’s a lot of different styles. We in the South but we right up under the Midwest. We’re under Missouri, right above Louisiana and we’re between Texas and Tennessee so we’re a mixture of all of that so depending on who your influences are, that’s who you gravitate towards but what makes me different is I have a lot of textures to my music. I know the difference between glamorization and documentation. I can speak on something and make it entertaining but it still won’t lose the truth in entertaining you with it.

Part II Coming soon…

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