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“It all happened in a basement sitting next to a washer and dryer,” Bizzy Bone says. “Layzie Bone, Krayzie Bone and myself, we all said to each other, ‘Okay, what kind of talent do we have?’”
Just a week after recalling the tragic occurrences he went through as a youth, which included being kidnapped for a span of two years, Bone thugs-n-harmony artist Bizzy Bone sat down for an interview with Steve Lobel to discuss the making of the Cleveland, Ohio-based group, as well as to explain how their iconic style came about.
During the conversation, Bizzy Bone started off by recalling how the group first came together, citing a meeting between three members of the collective in an unlikely setting.
“Personally, it’s rooted in Hip Hop. It’s rooted in poetry [and] it’s rooted in verse,” Bizzy Bone explains. “It all happened in a basement sitting next to a washer and dryer and Layzie Bone, Krayzie Bone and myself, we all said to each other, ‘Okay, what kind of talent do we have?’ Krayzie Bone said what he could do [which was being] a great producer and this is when we were kids. He knew how to put tracks together and instrumentals. He started off with the two tape decks. [We were] 14 or 15, around there. I told them I could sing. I let them hear my singing voice, they were like, ‘Damn, you can sing.’ Layzie Bone, he was more business. He said, ‘I’m gonna get us there.’
“Krayzie was the oldest at the time, I was the youngest and Layzie Bone was the businessman,” Bizzy Bone added. “We put all of our talents and our sounds together and we became a group. The Band-Aid Boys [the former title of the group] were first. The Band-Aid Boys were elementary school.”
Later on in the conversation, Bizzy Bone detailed how Bone thugs-n-harmony’s iconic and much-imitated style evolved.
“The gumbo of it. The years [and] the timing. Getting booed at talent shows,” Bizzy says. “Listening to the newest artists coming out. Listening to Pimp C [and] Bun B ‘Pocket Full of Stones.’ Knowing that it could be done to go on track and Rap and sing at the same time, and it not be something where we would get booed for at those shows. When we first started off in Cleveland, people were like, ‘You Chinese rapping muthafuckas. Can’t nobody fucking understand [you].’ It just elevated, Lobel. All of us came in together when we were rapping and we started holding onto the last words. Everything that we enjoyed, the hot parts of the Rap, we would all duplicate and turn it into a harmony so it wasn’t as if we were all just saying it.”