Nipsey Hussle is often credited with having a revolutionary mindset. While he was no Black Panther, he did try to make moves during his life that improved conditions for his fellow residents of Crenshaw, Los Angeles, such as his “Our Opportunity” initiative and giving chances to people through his various businesses that other businesses never would have offered. As it turns out, a big influence on his community-minded outlook was Dead Prez’s classic 2000 debut album Let’s Get Free. Today, on the latest episode of Cipha Sounds’ and Peter Rosenberg’s podcast Juan Ep Is Dead, M1 and Stic.Man stopped by to discuss an intriguing request Nip made before his death.
Wow Nipsey planned to redo the Dead Prez "Let's Get Free" album. I had no idea … @JuanEpIsDead pic.twitter.com/Un0N3c4ASz
— Peter Rosenberg (@Rosenbergradio) February 16, 2021
Rosenberg shared a clip of the convo on Twitter in which Stic explained how, a year before his death, Nipsey reached out to the Floridian duo for permission to remake their seminal debut as part of his three-album deal with Atlantic Records. After releasing Victory Lap and an as-yet-untitled second album, Nipsey planned to complete the trilogy with an updated version of Let’s Get Free sharing his views on self-determination, entrepreneurship, and innovation. “We this hour-long conversation about what he had been trying to do up to that point as an independent and how he wanted his situation to be with Atlantic,” Stic recalls in the clip. “What he wanted to talk to me about was his three-album mission.”
“His final album he owed Atlantic would be called The Spook Who Sat By The Door [After the 1969 Sam Greenlee novel about a fictional first Black CIA officer]. He told me he wanted to re-do Let’s Get Free and he wanted our permission to sample and to really re-do for what he called his generation… We just had a heart-to-heart, back-and-forth and obviously, we didn’t get to go there. But I just wanted to speak to the type of heart Nip had.”
Although those plans didn’t come to fruition, Nipsey Hussle does appear on an album with a forward-thinking perspective alongside his mentor and hero Jay-Z, on the song “What It Looks Like.” You can view the clip about Nipsey above and the full episode of Juan Ep Is Dead here.
