Jime: Can you guys talk about your art and how you came to develop as artists, individually?

Brutha Los: "I started as one of these jerky kinda show off kids in my mom and dads basement arranging the chairs and making everybody watch me perform to Michael Jackson records top to bottom. But really as far as the opportunities to be in the performing arts, my parents worked hard to provide me opportunities to be in different arts institutes or whatever from the time I was about eight, and I wrote my first rhyme when I was like ten years old, so that's twenty something years ago."

Treat U Nice: "I just kinda stumbled into DJing really. I was like I wasn't really into what everyone else was into and they just kinda appeared, and my mentor was like here you can have them, that was maybe when I was 15 I think, maybe 14. I've just been doing it since, thats all, I'm really good at. That's all I do."

Rashidi: "I started off as a dancer, I started off dancing, breaking, B-Boying. And I got into hip-hop dance, then I went to house. House is when I really kinda came out mixing that with my hip-hop and then came back full circle to bringing all that to breaking and beyond freestyling. Then I got into writing and it just kinda happened. I just ran into the people that wanted to be out there performing and they were like "Do you want to come?" and I was like yeah. So, did that, that's how it started anyway."

Jime: How do feel that you work fits into a continuum of the tradition of cultural activism within the Bay Area?

Brutha Los: "Oakland is a place where both Too Short and the Black Panthers came to light so it's like, and the first cats really who was rhyming in Oakland before Short was doing the same thing that a lot of cats was doing as far as just imitating New York because that was kinda where the overall culture of hip-hop really exploded from, it's kinda the birth place or whatever. But when Short came along and really went for Oakland and put Oakland on the map like that, that's definitely a lot of what we do is big up in Oakland but we also from the place where the Panthers is from..."

Rashidi: "...It's always been a place of change and revolution, it's always been a place where people try to do something different even if it wasn't the best, the most sought after, or like everybody looked at it and praised it or not. Like you said Too Short and the Black Panthers, just for an example, the Black Panthers were promoting Black Power and taking a militant stand and Too Short, he was talking about pimps and hoes, but still a lot of people were like "what you doing" so its that same kinda energy. Not that it was the same kind of change was created by both but the same kinda energy. So when we come through we try to keep it true and try to remember the side of the ancestors of the revolutionary and try to bring that through 'cuz we've all been through, like I grew up listening to and hearing all this pimp and all this stuff and seeing it, around it, I grew up in Oakland. And I didn't want to see too many people to get lost up in doing that, I wanted to do something different."

Brutha Los: "Well and that too though, and that too 'cuz that's the truth of the matter. We from a place where pimps still look like it's 1976 and it's not no reason to pretend that it's some place else or that it's something other than that. An even in what they call the conscious rappers in the Bay Area you look at The Coup, ourselves, Zion-I, Prophets of Rage, you can still definitely hear that vibe and we all make reference to that being the truth of the environment, it's where we at, it's Oakland."

Jime: What has been your relationship to La Pena and how has La Pena supported your growth as artists?

Treat U Nice: "I remember coming here when I was in grade school, probably fourth grade, third grade, for a music class, it was in that room over there. So been here for as long as I can remember they just let me do whatever I want to do. Just coming here and seeing tight folks. Going home. Coming here videotaping the shows and going home trying to figure out how to do it."

Rashidi: "For myself its just been a spot that I've always been familiar with. Like I said back in high school and right afterwards I was performing with a crew here I did a couple shows here for different people. DeJa used to throw shows here and put me and my folks on there, Naru. After that group I was in another part of the group and we were doing shows here. I would come here and see Zion I. It was just all these people. I remember the first time I saw Prophets of Rage probably was here. And a little bit after that being on with that cat. We've grown from the time we first performed here to where we're at now and picking this guy [Treat U Nice] up on the way. He's incredible. La Pena has just always been there."

Brutha Los: "As far as Company of Prophets' career overall, La Pena has just been absolutely instrumental to everything that we do. And I don't think that there too many of the now top billing artists out here, whether its hip-hop or soul that can't say that. Just from observation of history and our experience, Zion I definitely owes a lot of what they're doing now to this place, Goapele owes most of what she is doing to her opportunities to develop as an artist here at La Pena. She really got her skills as a performer together with the audiences at the first couple Collective Souls. We've had opportunities from before Collective Soul all the way through and for me personally its allowed me to develop as a producer, a promoter, all of us to develop ourselves into a promotion team, have a larger promotion team that came out of here, that also came out of a larger political movement as far as trying to stop Prop. 21 in '98 that's where a lot of the first audiences for Collective Soul really came from. As much as the work that we was doing in the streets the work that we did here is what has made everything that we've done since and everything that we will do is a direct consequence of that."

Photo by Francisco Villaflor