Sticky Fingaz – Interview

in the fray with sticky fingaz!

Forget any and all preconceived notions you have of Sticky Fingaz. You may have seen him throwing his guns in the air with Onyx and acting a fool in Next Friday, but there is much more to the man called Sticky.

Lucky as I was to get him on the phone, I found it more than just an average ordinary interview. At the end we talked about books that were not only very spiritual, but extremely thought provoking. Everything does change – life, mind, spirit – and to leave one with their past would find us living there as well. Sticky Fingaz lives life in the moment and here is the moment we shared.

How long was the album in the works?

Only like half a year because I was doing two movies at the time. There was a lot of running back and forth.

Was it an easy process?

It was easy because I wasn’t doing any homework. I did everything in the studio in the moment. It was fairly easy.

You just went in there and went after it?

One day I came up with the concept of the album and then I would go there when I had a chance to work on the concepts. I was writing in the studio.

Track by track it goes from looking out at the world to looking inside of yourself.

I think if you are going to do something about something, especially if it’s an album rather than a movie where you are playing a character, on an album you have a chance to project your views and your ideology.

I came away with the feeling that you were touching on things that people don’t want to really talk about without being preachy. “Oh My God” comes to mind. It doesn’t seem like anyone wanted to tackle that concept.

Yeah. (laughs)

It’s a thing I think that everyone wrestles with, but is afraid to admit out loud. Are you still wrestling with the issues?

First, that song had three verses but I chose to give the people just two verses and hopefully they are ready for just that because the third verse was even more iller. Basically it’s like the whole world is built with followers from religions to nationalities to politics and even the concept of time. Time is something somebody else came up with. Everyone else is just following. I want to wake people up and bring them into the moment because most people are just living in their minds and their minds consist of the past and the future, which don’t exist. If you live in your mind, you don’t get a chance to experience the present.

That song gets in your head. Do you think within hip-hop people don’t expect someone to come out and really philosophize and be really intelligent with it?

I think that people don’t expect it, but they’ll accept it. People like to be surprised, they like violence, sex, and all the elements that bring them into the moment. They are so much not in the moment that when they are brought into the moment they love it.

That is the most unexpected track, but “Ghetto” does the same thing. You really need to think about when they say, ‘This is ghetto.’

They do it subconsciously and I knew that. It’s a small, subtle thing. It’s not about carrying guns. It’s about putting salt on your food before you taste it.

“Money Talks” is another gritty track with a lot of truth. It’s something people know, but don’t talk about.

It’s like they know it in the back of their heads but it’s not in the front because most people are unaware.

Do you find people still putting you in the Onyx mode and that this was your real chance to let the real you shine?

I feel like when I first came in the industry to know people have seen me as only one dimensional. They see me as ‘Onyx-bacdafucup-throw-ya-gunz-in-the-air.’ People probably never seen me smile before. I knew people wouldn’t be ready for me so before I give them Sticky Fingaz I made up the character Kirk Jones. That way I could bring Sticky Fingaz through Kirk Jones and that way people could except it a little more. That is where I came up with the whole concept of Black Trash: The Autobiography Of Kirk Jones. It’s about this man’s life and how he goes through all of these changes. And within the changes he experiences different emotions like hate, where he is talking about ‘my dogs and my guns,’ the emotions of curiosity and question when he is talking to God. And the emotions of sympathy when he is talking to his baby brother about not going down the same path or feelings of being sorry for all the wrong done to women by men, even if it wasn’t him who was directly responsible. Because Sticky Fingaz is a deep, deep person and if people see me in all twenty dimensions it might be hard to digest, so I created Kirk Jones so I could relate each dimension.

How much has your life changed since your first time breaking it open with Onyx?

First, you have to realize everything physical changes every second. It’s continuously moving. A rock looks the same as the way you left it yesterday but the components that make up the rock have moved and switched even though they look the same on the outside. Besides that, I have erased a lot of borrowed knowledge out of my mind which lets me think clearly and see the truth versus opinions. Like everything everyone has taught you is not the truth, whether it’s true or not, it’s not your truth. You can’t see reality for what it is. I’ve basically cleared off my mind to see reality clearly, allowing me to tap into other dimensions.

With “Sister I’m Sorry”, do you feel that is a song long overdue in hip-hop? Especially with all the calling woman bitches and ho’s. I’ve been waiting for that song for about ten years.

(laughs) I guess people don’t look at it in the sense of what if that was my mother or what if that was my sister.

A lot of girls I know don’t like hip-hop for that very reason. All the disrespecting of women turns a lot of women off to it.

It’s long overdue.

And not only that, the disrespecting of calling women bitches and ho’s has really become cliché and sounds almost like a parody of hip-hop itself.

I read books like Acts Of Faith by Iyanla Vanzant and it opens your eyes to other avenues. Once you see the sun, you never again look at the flashlight as the sun. If for all your life you looked at a flashlight as the sun and then once you see the sun you can never go back to the flashlight.

Do you look at life much more differently today? And do you believe in karma, what comes around goes around?

You have to look at it like this, as far as what comes around goes around. Everything you do to your body you are going to feel. I’ve come to the realization that the whole world is my body and anything I do to you or the world comes back to me. If I rip your heart out of your body, you’ll die. It’s a part of your body and you need it to live. So if I took away all of the trees, you’d die too. So the trees and the oxygen are a part of your body too, just like the sun and the water. If you take a fish out of the water, it dies. The water is part of the fish’s body too. So whatever you do to the world, you inevitably do to yourself. The world is your body.

That sort of brings me into the song “What If I Was White”. Do you ever wonder when there won’t be this issue of color?

I think right now it is an issue, but it won’t always be an issue. We are living in a time when scientists are passing religion and we are starting to make clones and shit like that. When you start to make clones, then you question what being a human is. When people tell you that they can transfer your consciousness to a whole other body, then you question what being a human is. Basically saying that you are black, white, Chinese, Jewish or whatever is really being racist towards humanity. All you are is, you aren’t even a human being, a being. You are a being like a cat, insect, or whatever. Anything else is being racist towards humanity.

Racism still makes no sense to me.

It exists because people are unaware. I was asking this old man how do you stop smoking cigarettes? He was like, ‘First off, you can’t try to stop, because anything you repress only blows up at a later date.’ Like if I try stopping and force myself a week later, I’ll be forcing myself to smoke packs back to back immediately because repressing only adds to you blowing it up. Like if you repress your money then one day you have a lot of it, then you splurge. I’ll use an example that applies to everything. You might be smoking a cigarette and driving or walking or talking and you aren’t conscious of it. The best way to quit is to be aware. When you smoke, don’t do anything but smoke it and be aware. Smell it, feel it go down into your lungs and touch the cavity of your chest. Do it slow and be there with it and then I guarantee you’ll stop smoking after a week because you’ll see how nasty it is because you are aware. Once you are aware, you can’t do bad things. The problem is that we are unconscious. That is why we do these things. The majority of people wear their watches on their left hands. If you put your watch on your right hand for the whole day and during the course of the day you are going to wonder what time it is and you are going to lift up your left hand where your watch used to be because you are unconscious. If you weren’t unconscious you wouldn’t have gone to that arm. We’re like robots. We do the same things every day and doing them over and over just makes us robots. Living in other people’s religions and nationalities makes us a robot. Believing everything that a history book says that you didn’t witness with your own eyes makes you a robot.

It is really hard to believe what you read today. There are so many lies being used as truths.

Have you been to the movies lately? Do you see what they can do with movies? Now you can’t even believe what you see today. You can’t even believe what you see on the news today. They can do so much shit. I just saw this dinosaur show and the shit looked real. The shit they can do in movies today means you can’t believe a fucking thing you see today unless it’s with your own eyes.

Like the movie ‘Wag The Dog’ where they produce a fake tv war.

They can tell you any fucking thing. That is why I don’t believe shit stink until I smell it. (we both laugh)

With all the thought that went into the album, how much do you want people to absorb the message?

I read this book called The Alchemist, it was an ill book by the way. One of the messages that I got from the book was that when you get better, things around you get better because there is only one choice, either get better or dissolve. So I wanted to get better. I’m tired people coming out halfheartedly. It’s 2001, about to be 2002, and they are still running these prehistoric rhymes. If it takes you an hour to do what you did, then stay for another three hours and open your minds and focus and do better. There are a lot of things on this album that you need to hear consciously. If you listen just like ‘la-la-la-la-la’ then there are a lot of things you will miss out on.

+ charlie craine