RIME Exclusive: Get Busy Committee Break Out The Uzi

If the Blues Brothers and Cheech & Chong merged then made like the Wonder Twins and took the form of a hip hop group, they’d probably sound something like the Get Busy Committee. They wouldn’t give a fuck whether they sold millions of records, because they know in their hearts the shit they’re putting down is priceless. They’d make music from the gut, no limitations, 100% independent, categorically all their own.

In real life GBC represents a funky fuse of rap royalty, rock metal, hip pop and some shit you’ve never heard before. Safe to say this crew does exactly what it likes and its musical boundaries are nonexistent.

Uzi Does It, the official debut of Ryu, Apathy and Scoop Deville, otherwise known as the GBC, is more than an album. It’s a product that you have to have one way or another.

There’s the traditional physical copy CD, which comes enveloped in blunt rolling paper (in its casing). It’s on sale at iTunes, comes free of charge with the purchase of a GBC t-shirt and is available for download on the group’s official website —“ getbusycommittee.com. Then there’s the sub machine Uzi USB that has the album preloaded on it, which is also available on the site. Finally, one can win a free download of Uzi... by doing simply passing the word on?

“What we do is, if you come to getbusycommittee.com, click on ‘get the album for free,’ then you enter your email address,” Ryu explains. “We have programs that follow [social networks] to see what people are talking about. So we can see what people are talking about. If somebody goes to our website and then goes to their twitter account and says, ‘Hey, I’m downloading the GBC,’ we can see that and we’ll shoot it directly to their email address.”

Bound together by lifelong ties, it took this long for the Get Busy Committee to materialize because they were learning how to market and promote their own product by simple observation. From their affiliation with the Demigodz (which remains intact), S.O.B. and other underground phenomenons, to severed ties with big labels such as Atlantic, it was just time to start using the knowledge they acquired over the years. For the betterment of hip hop and perhaps music in general, Uzi Does It, does the trick.

Think Guns N Roses (first album), then remember the feeling you had when you heard Illmatic or 36 Chambers. When you’re finished, sprinkle a little BBD and BDP in there and top it off with some Eazy Duz It.

Now listen and let your mind be free...

Your album certainly has a lot of momentum... Dutch (manager) referred to it as the best rap record of the year.
Ryu: Dutch is an asshole first of all. You can’t listen to anything that guy says. I mean, he’s in Thailand most of the time anyway. How are you going to manage us from Thailand?

Apathy: He’s always on the beach somewhere.

Ryu: We manage ourselves. Fuck him. He’s fired. All he does is sell houses and does shitloads of cocaine, then goes on vacation. What a manager.

You’re not serious. You’re being facetious right?
R: No! I’m dead serious. That’s the way he is. I mean, he’s one of those dudes, I’m sure everybody has one. He’s like a good friend of yours, but he’s a fuckin’ asshole? You know the good side of him, but everybody else doesn’t? I mean, Dutch does have a good side of him, but one of them isn’t management. It just so happened that that’s who we’re stuck with. But he does have money. So everytime we go to the club, he pops bottles. So we keep him around. He does some good, but he screws us out of shows more than he gets shows for us. Somebody will call to book us in Mazola, Montana and Dutch will purposely not tell us about it because he doesn’t like going where it snows. Then we’ll find out about it three months later on myspace. Not the most efficient way to run business.

A: Who was that that he walked up on in the middle of the mall...? It was a basketball player... Dominique Wilkins. He walks up to Dominique and says, “Who are you? I should know you right?” He’s like the biggest douche bag in the world, but he’s awesome.

He seems so woven into what you all do, almost like a fourth member or something. I figured there was a little more to it.
R: Well, there’s more than that. I mean, it’s like Dutch has always begged us forever to like, ‘put him on.’ He’ll come to the studio and think he can get on tracks. Shit like that, and he can’t. He just always bugged us to get on so we put him on. We don’t know exactly what you do, but we’re going to put you on.

A: He’s always trying to play us house records like we give a fuck.

R: He doesn’t even listen to rap music. He thinks he knows everything. But this interview is not about Dutch. Fuck him.

Kool. So let’s talk about y’all. It’s really unique the way you’re promoting the album. From what I understand, fans can get a free copy of the album if they put it on their myspace page. Is that correct?
R: Myspace, Twitter and Facebook. What we do is, if you come to getbusycommittee.com, click on ‘get the album for free,’ then you enter your email address. We have programs that follow [those social networks] to see what people are talking about. So we can see what people are talking about. If somebody goes to our website and then goes to their twitter account and says, ‘Hey, I’m downloading the GBC,’ we can see that and we’ll shoot it directly to their email address. Essentially our fans are helping us promote at the same time. So we’re scratching each other’s backs. We’re giving you a free record and you’re telling people about it at the same time.

A: The biggest thing with this promotion and this album is just letting people know there’s a new group. Letting them know what we do, who we are and getting them familiarized with us and spreading the word. I think that’s the hardest thing to do nowadays because the market is so oversaturated. So you just gotta kick people in the dick off the bat.

Why do you think that approach is working for you?
R: We weren’t really interested in selling a CD. That obviously doesn’t work unless you’re fuckin’ Jay Z or somebody. So what we decided to do was sell products that people can’t live without. We have a format where we released our album in a USB Uzi, because the name of our album is Uzi Does It. So we have a company and I’m not going to say their names because we’re the only ones that have that, make us a USB stick where you pull the clip out and it’s the USB with the whole album preloaded on it and we sell those for $20 a pop at getbusycommittee.com. And we sell more of those than actual albums, because people have to have that. Then with our t-shirts, if you buy one of our t-shirts, you also get an album for free. So we’re selling product and providing an album for free. And you can also buy an album if you want it off the website as well. And you can buy it off iTunes and all that good shit too. These days you’ve got to give people three or four reasons to buy your record and I think we came up with five or six.

How much is the CD by itself?
R: $6?
A: Yeah it’s six bucks and the Uzi we’re selling for $20, that’s a 2 gig USB. Once you take that and download it to your computer, you can do whatever you want with the rest of the 2 gig hard drive.
R: Even our actual CD. If you buy the [physical copy], there’s three CDs in there. There’s one for you and two to give away.
A: And you can smoke weed with the packaging of our shit.

What do you mean you can smoke weed with the album packaging?
R: You take the wrapper off and the cellophane thing is not cellophane at all. It’s vegetable rolling paper. So you can actually roll blunts with it. Scoop does it all the time. He goes through albums like crazy. (laughter) So that’s how we do it and I think we got a good situation goin’ here.

Yeah, definitely. Tell me about the title of the album. I know one of your main influences was Eazy E, among others. But tell me about how that came to be.
R: I don’t think there was a deep meaning behind it. It was jus—“
A: I mean, what’s cooler than a fuckin’ Uzi? Since you were a little kid you were runnin’ around with fuckin’ machine guns and shit like that. I mean that’s the coolest thing in the world. Uzi Does It is just our way of saying we do cool shit.
R: Then there’s the whole double meaning like ‘Eazy Duz It,’ but we all know this is not an easy game. So sometimes you gotta bring the Uzi in.
A: Our whole thing is we hate when rappers try to give deep meanings for their stupid shit. Like, we just thought it was some cool shit to do and we did it. Like take DJ Khaled and his whole statement about elevating yourself. Fuck all that shit. It’s just talkin’ shit.

You point to three different main influences in Eazy E, BDP and BBD. Why those three?
R: Cause they all rhyme.
(laughter)
A: Nah, but that’s exactly it. If you listen to our shit, that’s exactly what it sounds like a combination of. Nothing’s harder than when you’re chillin’ somewhere and the beginning of Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison” comes on... or if you’re chillin’ and you hear Eazy E’s Boyz In The Hood or BDPs “My Philosophy” or “The Bridge Is Over.” They hit you so hard and that’s what our sound is. That’s the exact formula and it all rhymes.

You two come from major label situations but this project Uzi Does It is 100% independent. Did you do that intentionally? Did you not want to fuck with the majors? Was there a bad experience you didn’t want to revisit? What was the methodology behind going 100% independent?
R: There’s a couple different reasons. One being, if we went to a major with it, it would take eight months for the record to come out, if that. We’d get thrown on the bottom of the pile and that would be that. I don’t think we’re the type of group that’s going to sell a million copies, so that’s not really a situation that we want to be in.

Apathy was on Atlantic and I was on Warner Brothers. And honestly I think we know how to do it better than they do at this point because they’re failing miserably. So we basically took everything we know from being in this business and applied it to our project. We’re actually getting more out of it than if we were on a major at this point. Most people get off majors and their bitter. They want to do hardcore material and that’s not really our intent. I think we’re actually really happy that we’re not in those situations anymore and that’s where Uzi Does It came from It’s actually a fun record. There’s not a lot of bitterness in there.

A: A lot of it had to do with how we wanted to put the record out and maximize our options to make money too. Here’s the bottom line: I’ve been doing music for so long and I want to make money off of it. If a major label came to us and said, “Hey, you know what guys, we’re going to give you a really fair deal where we’re all cool and we’re not going to try and rape you or fuck you and all.” Then that would be cool. I’d be 100% down. But now, these major labels want to do these 360 deals and they want to do this and they want to do that... it’s not that we hate them or we’re mad or bitter; we’re just not interested in that type of business. We’d rather make the money ourselves and be 100% in control. Can you offer us that?

I know you’ve been longtime friends, but what exactly brought you all together musically as a group?
A: We’re best friends anyway. We’ve already been crew and we’re like brothers. Me and Ryu always hang out, so it was only natural for us to get together. We got tired of doing the same old records over and over again. Battle rap, battle rap, 16 bar, battle rap battle rap, hook, blah, blah, blah, hard beats... we were bored with it. It’s not even the kind of music we listen to. We don’t cruise around listening to too much of that shit. Our music is mad eclectic and what we listen to is real different. We just wanted to have fun doing it.

That’s another thing. When we were teenagers, we had fun doing the songs. When you do them over and over and over and over, it’s like a video game. If you play the same video game straight for fifteen years, eventually you’re going to want to play something different.

R: And we all think the same way. It really happened naturally because Scoop thinks the same way we think. Everybody just kind of fell in line with what we were doing. It really wasn’t planned out that deep. We just let the sound do what it was going to do.

Scoop is primarily a producer, but he contributes some rhymes as well. Is he the only one on the boards on this album?
R: Ap and Scoop share production duties and I chip in with my little two cents every now and then. But I don’t push any buttons. I just kind of sit there and conduct.
A: Scoop and I pretty much do the same amount of production for the whole thing. That said, Scoop’s definitely more of the hitmaker. He’s got the bigger records on the album.
R: Then, Scoop as a rapper, he’s always rapped. People just don’t know he raps cause they never ask him. So since we’re around him all the time we were like, “Spit something on this shit.” And he’s actually developing into a really dope emcee.

What else?
A: I’m producing on Cypress Hill’s new album. We’re still doing a bunch of other indie stuff. We’re already working on the next Get Busy album. Too many things to mention... solo joints. Demigodz album, Ryu and I self titled. Our Demigods crew got an album comin’.
R: Scoop’s pretty much becoming the producer of the year. He did the “I Wanna Rock” single for Snoop Dogg as well as the one with Jazmine Sullivan. He’s in the studio with pretty much every big name rapper on the planet right now. So the market is going to be flooded with Scoop beats this year. And me? I’m just watchin’ the kids playing [video games] and that’s about it.