MarQ Spekt “Sometimes a treasure’s better when you have to dig it up.”

Did you yourself release a comic at one point, Hardbody Deluxe?

It’s still not done, man. I’m still working on it. I wanted it to just be a comic, and then we got the comic done and I was like, ‘Yo, it needs to be more, it needs to be on some coffee table book stuff,’ so I reached out: I got Action Bronson to do an exclusive recipe; I’ve got a conversation with Styles P talking about comic books and creativity; I’ve got a bunch of different things in there; some short stories. You know, it’s just a matter of time. The materials I have are timeless, and I think I started doing it [in] 2010, but it just has to be done properly, and I don’t rush anything, so when it’s finished and it’s done totally, that’s when I’ll package it up. But, like I said, man, [with] the conversations and the materials and everything I have in it, it could be done in 2025 and it’d still be fresh, so I’m not worried.

That applies to your music as well. You’ve been holding onto stuff, but then it comes out and didn’t really age at all.

Nah, it doesn’t, and that’s one of the things that people like about MacheteVision so much. They like, “Yo, I could just turn this on and listen to it right now and it still sounds like when I first got it.” That’s what I’ve always strived for.

I know when people like something, that’s all they want from the artist, but my shit is not meant for today.

Speaking of MacheteVision, you’ve always had amazing artwork on your album covers. This latest release is no different. Who did the art for The Grilchy Era cassette?

My man, H2O. He was in a group back in the day called Mass Influence, out of Atlanta, but he’s been around forever, and the thing with me is, as far as being into art myself, I’ve always been into graffiti and I feel like art is definitely one of the elements of hip-hop. You may never see a cover with me on it myself, just a picture of me doing anything.

Who are some your favorite illustrators and graf writers?

I’ll tell you Doo [Matt Reid a.k.a. Matt Doo] from doing the essential Organized Konfusion Stress cover; I think that’s one of the best covers ever done. But if you would ask me personally, I know some of the best: Flux [C. Flux Sing] who has done MacheteVision, JustPlayWitIt, and he’s working on the next one, he’s one of my favorites. So, a lot of times I don’t have to go out of a certain sphere for different things.

Some of the rawest MCs, I know them, but that doesn’t mean I’m bothering anybody to jump on anything with me. I’d rather work with people who are agreeable and who are cool, and at the same time we could work out collaborating. There’s people I could reach out to and get a pretty big-name feature from, and I just would rather not do that, because at the end of the day I also feel like if you copping something, it’s from me, so I’d rather put you on to somebody you never heard, like my man Filadel [Castro a.k.a] Akil Nuru. He was my peer, we had a group in 1995, and he still is somebody I hit up. He doesn’t rhyme anymore, but I be like, “Yo, people don’t know you.” I come from that space where back in the day, you might get a tape and you might hear some other voices on it but you don’t know who they are…

Was that group with Filadel called Invisible Games Of Death?

Yup, that was it. You definitely did some digging on that.

I noticed you had Invisible Games of Death and then of course there’s the Invizzibl Men [duo with Karniege that released The Hidden Hand mixtape and The Unveiling album on Backwoodz Studioz]. What’s the fascination with the invisible?

Just that people could never see me, like they could never understand why I studied things. First, it was Invisible Game, because that’s how we used to move, getting things the invisible way, and you could read into that any way. It was basically broady, you know what I’m saying, broady before Broady. We might go to a spot with nothing, you know what I’m saying, broke, and end up bagging some numbers, getting trees thrown at us, and having free drinks, you know what I mean? We came with nothing and left with everything, so that was Invisible Game. We rocked out, we did a couple tracks or whatever. That was actually the first time I was in a real studio-studio. Then I moved to Atlanta, and we still stayed close. Filadel has a tape right now that, to me, if I was to play it for you now — between 96 and 98 he did this — you’ll still be blown away. Just like, lyrically I think he’s one of the best… ever.

Sick name, too: MC Filadel Castro.

Yeah, but he went by his real name, Akil Nuru. Filadel was the alias. But I feel like that with Broady too. I’ve always been around raw people who just never cared about getting the shine. They always just cared about spitting.

This is just a loose connection, but it occurs to me that you’re a Philly artist who has always had great artwork; that’s kind of in the tradition of Schoolly D, is it not?

Oh definitely, man, definitely, because that’s what I grew up around. People always try to place me in Jersey, and I lived in Jersey for a while and recorded there and definitely took it on as I lived there, but at the same time, I was already me before I moved there. My sensibilities were already intact before I ever moved. I had my first fights, I drew my first pictures, wrote my first stories, did my first poetry: all that was done in Philly, so no matter where I go, I always take that with me.

At the same time, you have lived in a lot of different places. One of the things I wanted to ask you is something I’ve asked other artists before: Do you feel that the place where you are at the time influences your writing, or do you find that when you write, in your head, you go somewhere else altogether?

The process has changed, but I think just [from] experience, it doesn’t really matter where you are. The song I did last year that featured Aesop Rock and Mike Eagle, I wrote that verse in Paris and I laid it when I got back here, but I always do my best writing, I’d say, like 30,000 feet in the air in a plane or on an island or a beach.

Why do you think that is?

Just because my chakras are open differently. I could write something anywhere, but inspiration just catches me in a different space when I’m away. I’ll listen to some stuff and find that music hits me differently too, because it’s certain things I can’t listen to at the house, but if I go somewhere, I’ll play it non-stop.

“Air Pegasus” is the name of that track.

Yup, “Air Pegasus,” I named it like that because I bought like three pairs of Air Pegasus over in Europe.

One more Philly MC I really admire and always thought it would be cool to hear you collaborate with is Last Emperor. Have you ever crossed paths with him?

I met him once during the Rawkus era, he was a humble dude, and we built, but at the same time we were in two different spaces. I think he was on his upswing when I met him. He had “Secret Wars,” [and] a bunch of things [going for him]. We were definitely fans of his pen, and that’s another thing: Philly dudes get super, super creative and visual with their stuff.

There’s a lot of people you’ve never heard and may never hear, but they’re still based in the street, and what I mean is they don’t care about anything else going on. They don’t care about going to industry events and shaking hands or whatever. As long as they’re on the block and they can just rhyme, that’s all they want, and I kind of came from that lane. It meant something just to have people respect you enough to let you spit.

I come from that era where nobody had computers in the house. You was just in your house by yourself and calling yourself anything you wanted to call yourself. I’m from the era where you have to go outside the house and go on your block, and then they call you whatever you’ll be, and if you were nice you could go to somebody else’s block and then you’d get respect like that. That’s why I say I’m focused really, really, really big on respect, because it was earned. Even to hear people rhyme and get into a cipher, you had to elbow your way in. It was physical, and then when you started spitting if you weren’t nice you could get cut off and possibly assaulted… I done seen people get punched in the face, knocked out, you know, cut, whatever, for being wack. I’m not saying that was right or whatever, but I’m just saying that’s the era I come from. You couldn’t even spit if you weren’t ill, and if you got a verse off, super-nice. So, it’s the principles that were ingrained in me where I kind of do look at this era as pussy, because you never had to do anything other than buy a mic, you know what I’m saying? You had to buy a mic, you bought a program, you stayed in the house and you made shit, and then you got a manager or a publicist or somebody to promote it, and you’ve got big songs out before you even done one show.

Who were some other artists from either the era you came up in or people you were listening to at that time who, like you said, didn’t even care if they got on or not, but were nice?

This kid Aztec was crazy. I remember he was hunting Dice Raw down. [In] the 90s, I kind of remember him telling me Dice Raw was ducking him or something. And then, my man Wayne a.k.a. Enlil a.k.a. Boureaux the Black Russian was super nice.

Wait, did you say Boureaux the Black Russian?

Man, he was crazy. He used to have this song called “Superstar Philly Gram.” It was “Super super star star Philly Philly gram,” and he killed it. It was so hood. He was hard but he had that finesse, like a Beanie Siegel type of dude, where he had straight hard bars, but he still had a little finesse. Then you had Lost Children of Babylon

I remember them.

They were super-nice. I used to be in ciphers with them. It was like five or six people, and the Hologram, Vinny Paz. Back when he was a skater kid running around LOVE Park, he was kind of soaking that up too, because that whole energy was them kids, so you know, I come from that school. Matter of fact, the first Jedi Mind Tricks vinyl, he gave me in LOVE Park, and I still have that joint and it had Lost Children on there.

Ultra was obviously a big influence in certain ways, just as far as the fact that there were no rules…

Yeah, I remember them being deep, with the craziest names too.

Oh yeah, man, they were super-, super-ill, but I think that right now isn’t really conducive to that kind of density, because everybody was reading scrolls and building on real science too, you know? And I tried to mix that in, like I always had the kind of drunken-master style but thorough and dropping gems, reading a lot, and trying to put that into the art as well.

Back to the present, The Grilchy Era cover immediately made me think of the School Of Sharks, which was born of Broady Champs. What’s the current status of School Of Sharks? Has its musical component been absorbed into Philly LoLife AllStars, or are these still separate existing entities?

They’re all separate existing entities. These are just families more so than rhyme partners or anything like that. It always exists and they’re always going to be a part of everything I do, but it’s not defined as a group. School Of Sharks: Karniege is in there, Filadel is in there, all Broady is in there.

It’s a network more than anything. I’ve always been a soloist but Broady, even that was just friends coming together. We ran around doing stuff for years before we even cut a record. Then Sub Verse had a showcase during Rocksteady. Man, we went to New York and tore it down at the Knitting Factory, prime time. Coming from out of town, being an unknown group, and you’re hearing chicks screaming and all different types of people throwing weed at you — come on, man. We thought we were the shit, and then we went to New York City, which was like the proving grounds, and then they told us we were the shit. I went to the label and Fiona was like, “I’m deaf because a chick was screaming in my ear the whole time y’all were performing.” I was like, “Man, what?!” I banged up a couple jawns, went back to Brooklyn and celebrated, but it was one of those events where you knew something and then when you saw it, realized it; just made you feel 200 times better. That was 2001. I’ve always gotten love in NYC. It’s gotten a bad rap — the East Coast in general, Philly, NY, Jersey — it’s always dog-eat-dog, but I always knew where we stood up there. And my team moved the same way. Half my team is from Brooklyn and Bronx, so that’s family more than anything.

I think, as a gem to any readers, the best groups are people who were just friends first, and the music and everything else comes extra. We’re still family even though we don’t even record. You’ll hear them sprinkled all over The Grilchy Era too. I didn’t really go outside at all. All the features are people that you’ve heard me around: Karniege, Filadel, Lex Boogie, Nyce [a.k.a. Huey P. Capone], Clever 1: it’s all people that I feel are ill who the regular general consensus doesn’t know like that.

Between the words “Grilchy” and “Broady,” there’s a very distinct vocabulary at play in your work. Even back on “No Dessert Till You Finish Your Vegetables,” in the phone message you’re saying, “Let me filtrate that.”

Well, I’m from the hood, man, and in the hood we come up with slang so crazy every day.

But how much of this is dialectical and how much of it is you yourself coming up with slang on the spot?

Like 98 percent me, because I was that dude. I would come up with different words and people would just start using it. That was always me.

As a lyricist too, you come up with all sorts of left-field references and complex multis but in near-rhymes so it’s not always precise.

I love people who think, man. I don’t like giving away everything. Sometimes a treasure’s better when you have to dig it up. I mean, if it’s just on the sidewalk, anybody can get it. You’ve gotta dig a little bit and stumble across something. [I’ve had people tell me], “Yo, something you said back in like 2004, I just understood and got it now.”

I had my first fights, I drew my first pictures, wrote my first stories, did my first poetry: all that was done in Philly, so no matter where I go, I always take that with me.

As a writer, how do you challenge yourself from a technical perspective?

I try to all the time. I don’t know if anybody realized this, but [on] my last two releases, I tried to use a different style every track. Maybe not so much on JustPlayWitIt, but on MacheteVision I used a different cadence and a different flow every song, because I don’t like when people who are talented rely too heavily on one style and rock that style the whole project. To me, that’s kind of corny, because it’s like you’re not challenging yourself at all. And a lot of ‘em sound like they at poetry night, like some spoken word shit, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, do you want anybody to feel anything beyond [those] sitting in the house with head phones on? Is that something that we could hear you spit in the street and be wowed by?’ No, it’s boring, you know what I’m saying? A lot of people just don’t press themselves.

Me, I’m just like, ‘OK, this is this beat, alright, I’ma write like this: everything’s gonna rhyme,’ or ‘Only this and this are gonna rhyme,’ or my delivery’s gonna be harsher and more abrupt, or my delivery’s gonna be smoother and calmer, or it’s gonna be faster or slow. I don’t have just one little handle and style, so I consciously try to do something different every track.

Would you say that carries over beyond the writing to the execution itself, to the performance and the recording of the work?

Oh yeah, definitely because it’s easy to get lazy and just rely on one style and be like, ‘Alright, I’m done,’ and just get in the booth. “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh,” come out the booth, go back in, “Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” I mean, I know when people like something, that’s all they want from the artist, but my shit is not meant for today. I don’t write for today. I write for somebody to get it 10 years from now and be like, “Yo, this is a gem, this is crazy.” That’s why I’m tryna release most of my stuff now. Between now and the end of the year, I’ma release a bunch of stuff and then I’ma chill, because I’m giving people enough to go back 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

I collect records. A lot of the records I like are jazz records, like a Lou Donaldson record that he was doing in 69 where you can still feel the energy. Art is supposed to be timeless, so you might look at a picture today and be like, “This is this, this and that,” but then five year from now you may look at the same picture and get a whole totally different view, so I try to design my art like that as well.

Most Read



Etc.