Spyda Team

Spyda Team Mickee 3000: To arrive with a finished project, we had to prepare the ground beforehand, put out tracks and build a loyal audience... "Underground business", "Malade Mental", the net tapes, all of that was preparing for this project, which took a long time to build. It was necessary. You can't just turn up out of the blue.
Caporal Nigga: We believe that making an album requires skill. We started a long time ago, our school is the sound system school, and we've put out several mixtapes... Once the audience has accepted you, then you can aspire to put out an album. The work on "3 000 Niggawatts" was spread over five years. We worked in parallel on a DVD that took a lot of time, and that may come out next year... In the meantime, we also put out net tapes... Some tracks were too old, no longer in tune with the times, so we took them off and redid others... In fact, if you count all the work, we made three albums (laughs)!

Spyda Team Mickee 3000: Exactly. The first project was built that way, and it's a formula that, I think, suits us well. It allows us to express ourselves artistically. Being a duo is a different thing, where on every track there are two of you.
Caporal Nigga: It can even be annoying. We really like being eclectic. I can't see us making an album that is only dancehall, rap or reggae. I like to hear that diversity on the album. On certain subjects I need to be alone, and it's the same for Mickee.

Spyda Team Caporal Nigga: We say we were jack-of-all-trades, meaning that we had a hand in everything, but we didn't do everything ourselves. We don't need to tell you about the state of the record industry in France. Finding a label is very complicated. At one point we nearly lost it, the project had been sitting for a long time, so we decided to put it out ourselves. In the end, we decided to set up our own company, La Toile Productions, and our studio, in Montreuil. In short, we didn't want to do everything ourselves, because that is never a good idea, so we had a hand in everything, but we got help, while keeping an eye on what was being done.

Spyda Team Caporal Nigga: Record companies are very willing to hear certain things from dancehall artists, but sometimes those are things we don't even say. When you're a dancehall artist at a meeting with a record company, the first question they ask you is whether you are homophobic. The second is about ganja, when the Spyda doesn't have a single ganja tune!

Spyda Team Caporal Nigga: When you come into the reggae dancehall scene, it's not a land of Care Bears. At my first sound systems, to get the mic you had to grab it. You have to assert yourself, take your place because nobody will give it to you.
Mickee 3000: It's one of the themes of a dancehall artist's life. You have to stay on your feet; there will always be someone who comes looking for trouble. That's the game, and it remains a positive competition.
Caporal Nigga: Not like in rap, where it has gone off into something else. In France, in reggae and dancehall, it stays good-natured.

Spyda Team Caporal Nigga: We decided to end like that. The title recalls the way we dress on stage. Through the bag, we wanted to tell the story of what led us to this album, our journey.
Mickee 3000: This song sums up our whole journey, even before we met, up to "3000 Niggawatts".

Spyda Team Mickee 3000: The place of reggae in the media is limited to one view: that of violence, drugs... With always the shadow of Bob Marley, as if nothing had happened since. Thanks to these clichés, they keep the music in a certain place...
Caporal Nigga: In this interlude, there is a double criticism. The criticism of the media, which may seem a bit easy in the sense that we know very well that the media love sensationalism; we also caricatured sound systems who play with codes that are light years away from their own reality. Hearing "Do you have your guns?" when you're playing at Reuilly Diderot... (laughs)
Mickee 3000: It's theatre!

Spyda Team Mickee 3000: These are books that made us aware of certain realities. They helped us understand our culture. It is part of us, it accompanies us day to day.
Caporal Nigga: We put it in the booklet to illustrate the lyrics of More and more. In this track, I'm not talking specifically about négritude but about class relations. Those ideas come to me from certain readings. I haven't been a big reader since I was a kid; I came to it late. I find that these books draw a good parallel between négritude as it is perceived in the Antilles and as Aimé Césaire described it, and Africa, with Frantz Fanon who lived in Algeria and Cheik Anta Diop, who speaks of the Egyptians, of the Sudanese empire... These authors must be read. They don't have such a conflictual relationship with Western peoples as all that. When you talk about Africa or négritude with newcomers, they often fall into caricature and Manichaeism. That's why it's worth reading these books.

Spyda Team Caporal Nigga: We conceived the show as a sort of musical. There is a coherence, with a beginning and an end, interludes...
Mickee 3000: We bring you little by little into our universe; it's a story. Not simply a succession of tracks. Live, nothing is fixed, and that's what's good about it.