MC Hammer Interview (The Arsenio Hall Show)

[Music] [Applause] oh boy how you doing man all right how are you doing man give me give it up i'm hanging hold it for a minute yes indeed how's the house doing that nice house we keep reading about oh it's doing good you know it's coming along uh slowly but but surely you know cause i'm not there to really uh check it out you know watch everything that's going on but it's coming along real well hopefully uh by christmas you know would be done now you were building bowling alleys at the house too and i know your partner if vander loves to bowl have you ever bowled against him why we got to talk about that well cause he told me uh a story and i want to make sure it's true it's true but he threw nine strikes in a row i thought he was lying nine in a row he threw nine strikes in a row took my 500 dollars he didn't tell you about that part either you know i thought we were gonna bowl for fun yeah he can bow bowls i don't know how to bowl that well so i'm gonna give me a bowling alley together or something and learn how to play so i can get my money back why didn't you build something why didn't you build something in your house that you can do you know i mean like like build a set of dance fever or something you know why build a bowling alley you do you want to learn i guess yeah i just want to learn i need something else to do you know uh and then something else you know a challenge and i think bowling will be fun you know if i can learn yeah i know everybody's looking at us saying forget the small talk we've been reading all the 4-1-1 and everybody wants to know actually i'm concerned because there's some serious stuff going on in your life man um first of all i know when the road manager for boys to men was killed and you know god blessed him he was a good guy and he was with boys to men and even new addition when they were young um when he was killed you were you were around in that area and then i read the other day about the shooting that happened um what's going on would you like to talk about it well you know it's uh you know it's a situation where um unfortunately um society you know it's indicative of the way society is right now uh in chicago uh you know the boys manager was simply asking uh some people to leave who were in the hotel at five o'clock in the morning and uh by the time he got him to the elevator uh i guess a couple of words were exchanged and uh their answer was to shoot him in the head and kill him and uh you know it was a very very tough situation not only for our boys men but for a lot of people on the tour because we had all uh spent a lot of time with khalil every day and uh it was tough it was tough and then we go from chicago from that situation um i was in albuquerque new mexico doing a charity uh softball game and we went to a uh a park to have chicken and you know have a little barbecue you know they try to tell me not to go right but um i grew up in the streets and uh i refuse to become a person who can't go out and hang with the people anymore yeah so i went to the park so uh you know why are we out at the park you know i have my my uh some of my sisters and brothers there people from the fire department some local kids some guy rides by the park yells out of his car i'm gonna come back and spray the whole part now do you take that as a you know as a grain of with a grain of salt or not well me being you know uh growing up in that type of environment i asked everybody to uh get in the mobile home and leave and then i would stay with the fellas until you know the next group could leave uh unfortunately by the time i'm glad all the kids my little daughter was out there you know a lot of kids they all got into mobile home and all the women they left but before we could leave the guy came back and started spraying up the park you know so we had to dive behind trees and it was you know a very real situation uh two or three guys in my group you know you know got shot one shot in the face of somebody in the leg and you know but it has nothing to do you can't blame that on uh rap music you can't blame that on uh you know on uh the city itself that is the way the world is that we live in right now i mean you know the guy knew that that was hammering the park and there were kids there and it made no difference to him he saw the little kids out there he just shot in the park and a lot of people in that area know who he is and um pretty soon uh uh he's gonna be uh you know he's gonna have to uh i say pay for what he's done because a lot of people are actually calling to turn in his name and i believe pretty soon he's going to be caught yeah um you know i don't know you talk about as much of this as you can talk about uh on the air i know a lot of the problems that you've been having have to deal with lies and confrontations you've had with law enforcement situations how much of it can you explain to people and maybe to the people out there who need to hear it well um it's a very precurious position that i'm in uh simply because on the one hand i can deal with the press the lies they write you know in the tabloids things like that every day i was reading the paper last night i stopped at a truck stop coming here from seattle or portland actually and i picked up a magazine and said uh hammer says he was sexually assaulted by a female groupie and you know and uh and uh they got quotes from me and everything of course i never said anything like that but then on a whole nother end um i've been a victim of uh being called you know like you say i'm building a house where i'm actually a man though without a home because on one end in the streets like where i'm from in oakland for a year and a half straight when the police would arrest people they would slam them in the car and say hammer time and slam them in the car and say uh yeah i just put you in uh the brand new car that hammer bought me and they knew that that would hurt with my street credibility with the people in my neighborhood so so so young guys who've been arrested like told you what happened during they called me from jail because you know i'm from oakland and uh it's no secret you know the 15 or 20 guys i have out here with me they most of them are from jail and you know because i want to get them out of that i bring them with me and give them a new job and show them a new you know a different way of life but when they when something happened to them they go to jail they pick up the phone they got my phone number they call me at home and they call me say hammer you should have heard what police said to me today he said when the helicopter was chasing me that was the hemicopter chasing me and these rumors have spread all the way from oakland through l.a and because i get people calling me all the time and it's not a good thing and especially when i've been a person who spent a lot of my time you know with the kids trying to help the kids you know to just steal them away from doing wrong things it don't help to have a police you know to destroy the foundation that you're trying to build to be a help when instead of a hurt to the situation okay so let me ask you um to make it fair let me play devil's advocate why would a cop want to destroy your credibility in the ghetto why would he tell him that uh hammer bought us a helicopter that gets very deep because you know there's a lot of reasons why you might not want hamlet to stop some of the guys who doing what they doing from doing you know and see that that goes if if i'm benefiting from anything that's going on in the streets uh why would i want hammer to tell little kids this is not the thing to do oh okay you see because i have made a good impact especially uh in my neighborhood you know the guys who were with me right now they were running things in our neighborhood and a lot of people know what i mean when i say running things they had a trade going they had little kids posted out doing their little things and you know and everything like that but since they've been here for three years have none of them have been picked up and went back to jail for any type of drug thing at all none of them not one in three years okay so somebody somebody somewhere loses money when this goes on now the idea is not to try to hurt uh people's income that's not the idea the idea is to save lives because whether people understand it or not there is a certain amount of murder and depth that comes along with the game that that's a part of doing business so when people stop doing that you know some people are hurt in other areas and you know we don't have enough time to cover all that but basically it's an unfortunate situation because when you when they said that that hurt uh hurt my credibility with a lot of the people in the streets who've known me for a long time because they're in jail fighting with people you know you don't know hamlin you can't say this and you know i have uncles who are not the best citizens in the world they they're called man they could i just had another fight this dude said this about you man and i ain't having it you know and then on the whole other avenue the police contacted me i would say three months ago with a letter say you know what ham we finally figured it out you the kingpin all the dope dealers before the grand jury you know so i mean you know uh if how can i win in either one of those positions one end you kill me in the streets the other end you say i'm the man now i can't beat both of them i got to be uh either one or the other so i've dealt with that because i'm not a person who runs you know i'm gonna deal with it um the third shooting that wasn't really uh made public you know there was another shooting incident i don't know where they come from or who do them or whatever but none of that none of that is going to stop me from uh doing what i'm doing i've even had a record company and i i don't want to lamb blast nobody's name or anything but they told me hey you know what the problem is you're a little too clean here's what we're gonna do why don't you start to uh uh do a few things and maybe uh dirty up your image a little bit maybe we can sell a little more records i've had all that i told them go you know that's not me i lived that life i've been around with people involved in that i'm going to continue to do what i do whether they like it or not i'm going to try to encourage the kids to do the right thing that doesn't mean that i live the perfect life i'm telling them to stay away from negative things so that they won't ruin their lives this wasn't your record label with another record label oh okay we'll be right back with more hammer we'll be back [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh when you were young coming up tough neighborhood uh income problems did you ever think about selling drugs to get this watch quicker did i ever think about it yeah yeah i did i did think about it i got real real close to trying to go full time too i remember and uh although my father doesn't live uh in my house i grew up with my mother um i've always respected my father you know and uh he came by and he heard the rumor you know he heard the rumor that i was selling weed and uh the words that he said to me and and the tears that i saw in his eyes you know uh it kind of you know it turned me around you know and that's why i've also chosen to to be public with my daughter simply to say that i've i've figured out that one of the biggest problems that we have in our community is that the fact that there is just are not enough fathers there to help the women raise the children um you have a reputation for being very strict with the people you employ we were talking to no bones and all the fellas up there and uh i was wondering does it have anything to do with the way you were raised or your naval background or what cause cause you rough man well you know it's a combination i'll be trying what i try to do is prevent things from happening you know you only have to go down the road a few times you know it's like even the incident that happened uh in albuquerque you know um it's not to say that we were prepared for it is to say that i've always told them you know and you can't go certain places you know certain things you can't do i'm trying to keep them out of as much trouble as possible it has to do with my mother my father and my life in the streets you know people say a lot of bad things about the ghetto right but had i not grown up in the ghetto there's no way i'd be able to survive the things that i'm able to survive right now i read lies about myself every day but since all my partners used to talk about me anyway it don't matter you know they used to talk about me for free they lie on me every day yeah so when i read you know i i i pick up a review on my concert the next day i haven't been to a hammer concert yet where people sat down i've never seen that i would pick up the paper the next day and read as 20 000 people sat on their hands while hammer did too legit to quit and i just look at it and i say well you know that's the way it goes but it's okay when tabloids do that i've even read in the usa today you know uh stories that are tabloid type stories you know and that threw me for a loop you know because i read in there that i set outside in new york in a limousine while sinead o'connor was in a a club and i refused to go in until she came out and then i sent two of my dancers in to give her a hard time and tell the dj play hammer records until she leave and that's stupid but you know i read that in the usa today you know i said man it did you know it's tough you know it's that way in the press the press write basically what they want to write but i can deal with that from you know being brought up and my discipline thing is simply to try to help people from getting into trouble because i got in enough trouble my friends have gotten enough trouble i'm only trying to do some preventive maintenance that's all yeah um being a musician more specifically a rapper i want to get your opinion on the sister soldier situation well i don't have all the details you know i've been on the road i only got bits and pieces and uh when you only got bits and pieces you know you can only uh so i can only comment on you know uh you have to be like real specific for me because i know i know the perimeters of what were involved with what she said but i don't know actually what she said so um i i feel like you know i don't know i know she has a right to express herself and i know uh bill clinton don't know nothing about her i know that you know and he probably doesn't know anything about the issues he was trying to raise but i don't know what the actual issue was so i'm not qualified to really comment let me bring something even closer to home i was talking about tipper um [Laughter] the iced tea situation is constantly in the news uh and freedom of speech i can comment on that one yeah yeah i work with them now that you know the song itself to me that is a waste of time for uh the people to spend a whole lot of time trying to say he made this song they brought more light to the song more people know about the song now than if it would have been a top 10 hit and the problem is this anytime a person wants to express themselves like that it's a reason for it like in my case right now you know i'm not i'm i'm i'm gonna be a person who'll say yeah let him say it not i have known ice t for seven eight years he's not gonna kill no cop i see if you're making movies in hollywood doing doing records that's not what he's saying what he was basically doing is expressing the frustration with the harassment that goes on uh in the inner city with the police that's all he's doing he's not recommending that anybody go out and commit murders and shoot cops and that type of thing i i i know that from knowing ice t and i feel as though he does have a right to express himself that way if that's what he uh chooses to do yeah um we should vote for ice-t for prison [Laughter] [Applause] oh my phones will be ringing off the hook now um yeah voting's important you know oh but voting is something that in the past i didn't do you know i i didn't vote because i felt like i had a choice between the devil and his brother you know so you know i couldn't eat who i'mma pick you know yeah he'd be grown next year you know so uh so but you know i thought about it and unless i exercised my right to vote and try to at least change things and watch them happen then i don't have a right to complain so i went out and registered you know got myself together yeah when the l.a riot started where were you watching from uh somewhere in the midwest somewhere in the midwest actually towards down south actually towards the south and uh i wasn't shocked because once the verdict came i know the anger that i felt you know as a person forget the hammer stuff that's a whole different thing as a person i felt betrayed you know i felt angry um you know uh uh i wanted to to do something myself i i don't know about going out and do all those things but i felt the anger i wanted to i wanted to do something and uh you know i expressed that in my concert you know because i just couldn't see it you know there's no way you know uh uh ray charles could have saw that you know yeah i mean you know you know you know um thanks for stopping by i got to let hammer get out of here because he's going to change suits and head for the los angeles forum or the great western forum and perform for two nights right yeah i'm at the forum tonight tomorrow night and i'm in orange county on sunday you know six days a week six days a week 130 shows i'll be finished in september so wow doing my thing too legit to quit jill did yet to quit this is hammer [Applause] [Music] [Applause] i know i know i should use

Channel: 90's RetroTV

Views: 30,656

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Id: 8usXqvWtC0U

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022