Making History
Souls of Mischief appeared on the Dregs One “History of the Bay“ podcast to celebrate 30 years of their debut album, 93 ’til Infinity.
Tajai, A-Plus, Phesto, and Opio shared stories about how a change in direction at the top of their record label, JIVE, set off a chain of events that ultimately led Souls of Mischief and the rest of Hieroglyphics to go independent.
Crucial to that shift was their website, Hieroglyphics.com, which connected Souls of Mischief directly with fans and enabled the group to operate their own record label without the need for a middleman.
Listen below as Souls of Mischief share stories spanning their 30 years of making music together.
Imperium Rising
Dregs One: “Getting dropped by a major label was considered a death sentence [in the ’90s], but I feel like with Hieroglyphics, all of that energy got channeled into the music.
To bring it back to the Bay Area roots of running shit independently—that first independent Hieroglyphics album, 3rd Eye Vision—there must have been a lot of excitement around it.”
Tajai: “At first, we were like, ‘Let’s record a record, get signed, and put it out on another major label.’ But then, as we started to do it, we realized that wasn’t really the way to do it—that there were more outlets now.
You use the major label for the money to produce the product. Once we had the product, we were already sack’d up. Why bring this to somebody who is just going to exploit us?
So, we started doing it independently, and we still had all of the relationships: we could still go to [BET] Rap City. We still could go to MTV. We started booking shows directly.
We had our website—it started in ’95—so we’ve had a website for almost 30 years, too. We had a website probably before Apple had a website.”
A-Plus: “Absolutely.”
Tajai: “Before anybody, right? We were selling stuff directly that way, too.
The entire epoch of us being signed to the major record label was 1992 to 1995. We’ve been independent from 1995 until [today], 2023. So, we have 28 years of independence and 3 years of being signed to a label. It’s a 10-to-1 factor. The longevity is obviously in independence.”
Ground Breaking
Dregs One: “Ya’ll got on the internet early too, right, with the website and message boards?”
Tajai: “Yeah, we may have been the first rappers with our own website—out, real rappers.
It made a huge difference because we were able to book shows, we were able to connect directly with our fans—all of the things that social media enables us to do now, we were doing that 30 years ago.
Shout out to Stinke—Chris Friedberg/Yameen—shout him out, because he really had the foresight to create the website as a fan site and then reach out to us. Shout out to Friendly Traveler for linking us, too—Felix Hwang.
It was a crazy time, and it’s so hard to imagine not having a website. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine not having a TikTok. But to put it into perspective, this was a time when I remember having an email address in college at Stanford University—and nobody to email. It was a completely different time
Since then, it’s been a whole paradigm shift—we’re in the Jetsons world now. The smartphones didn’t come out until we were in our 30s.
When you talk to people about these things, I don’t think they realize that these are huge shifts in the way things happened, because it has all become regular technology that we are used to.
But us having a website in 1995 changed the trajectory of our career forever. Us going independent in 1995 made it so we are having a conversation about something 30 years later, and it’s not about, ‘Vlad, I got locked up because after rap stopped da-da-da…’
Nah, we’re talking about being rappers this whole time.”