Catching Up With Twista
Chicago-based rapper Twista is known for his rapid-fire delivery, but his rise to fame has been at a relatively leisurely pace. Perhaps that's a good thing, because he's managed to stay in the game for more than a decade.
Twista, who was officially named the world's fastest rapper in 1992 by the Guinness Book Of World Records, struck gold status with his 1997 album "Adrenaline Rush" and gained even greater mainstream success in 2003 with his Grammy-nominated single "Slow Jamz" featuring Jamie Foxx and Kanye West.
Now Twista is celebrating his longevity with his latest album, "Adrenaline Rush 07."
"It was in '97 that 'Adrenaline Rush' first one came out and I thought, how about a 10 year anniversary, like school? Me being a longevity artist that's been around for so long and still doing what I'm doing I felt like it was important to let people know my whole sound and I thought what better way to do that than to call my new album, 'Adrenaline Rush 07?'" he told The ShowBuzz. "I was able to let my new fans learn about the old thing I was doing and then let the old fans realize, 'uh-oh, Twista's still coming with that adrenaline rush sound' and blend everything together."
Twista explains that, as the name implies, the adrenaline rush sound gets people "real charged up."
Photos: 2007 J.A.M. Awards
"When I first made that album, I wanted to represent what this music really makes me feel like," he said. "What do I get when I feel music? The first thing that came to my mind was 'adrenaline rush' and I've just been riding it ever since."
Producers Toxic and Cuzzo are back with Twista again on this album, along with guest producers Jazze Pha, R. Kelly, and The Neptunes. Twista likes to work collaboratively with his producers.
"Usually I hear something and I'm like 'oh man that's cold, I wanna use that' and then I'll start messing with it. If I want to add to or take something out of it I can tell them," he says. "Or if he says 'I'm not finished with the track,' then I can sit back and see what he does to it or see if he likes it, you know. For the most part it's really up to me to get that last defining sound that I want, but I work with producers who really know how to give Twista what he needs."
Twista also uses his quicksilver techniques on the album's skits, including one where he plays an auctioneer.
"I get silly a lot so we'll be at a restaurant and I'll order something all fast or I'll just do a bunch of crazy stuff," he said. "So one day we were watching a commercial or something and I thought 'wow, man, that's funny, what if I were doing an auction and I was auctioning off crazy stuff like that?' We were just tossing around ideas and it came out in the skit."
Born Cavalier Terrell Mitchell in 1973, Twista says that although he started rapping when he was in junior high, it wasn't until he was 16 that he realized he had a special talent for handling tongue-twisting lyrics at high speed.
Photos: 2007 Rock The Bells Festival
"It was a progressive style. The technique was steady progressive. The when I realized that no matter how crazy of a style I could think of or how fast or how jumbled up the words are that I would think of, I would still have the ability to say it. That's when I realized I had excellent pronunciation."
As he grew older, Twista began to see himself as an instrumentalist. But instead of practicing scales or working on his technique, Twista focuses on honing his freestyle chops.
"I just try things all the time," he said. "Sometimes I'm able to rap and put my lyrics to things, but when I took it to another level was when I realized the way of my thinking was like an instrument. Once I started to realize that I was like a drum machine - an extra instrument to the beat - along with the fact that I had good rap lyrics, that's what took me."
Twista was featured on fellow Chicagoan Kanye West's version of the "Mission Impossible" theme for "MI:III." He said he'd love to work on a movie again, this time on a full movie score.
"That would be the most beautiful thing. Please, why would you even ask? I would jump down so hard," he said. "I would bring all types of different people that do, just, different types of music into the studio and we would get in there and we would bang out a musical masterpiece to a movie."
He's also very clear about what type of movie he'd like to score.
"I like Quentin Tarentino. It's a few I like, but I really like Quentin Tarentino a lot and I like Stephen King movies a lot, too," he said. "I would like to make some hot, dark music."
Tarentino is known for writing rapid-fire lines for his actors and Stephen King has a love of the supernatural, so it only make sense to have a score composed by a quick-tongued rapper with superhuman skills.
Up next, Twista said last week that he's working on something for his underground fans in Chicago, who've stuck by him for the last decade.
"I am working on putting together a greatest hits record of all my old and exclusive material that I have done in my 10 years of being in the game," he says on the Chicago Tribune's RedEye.com. "Also, I'm thinking about putting an a cappella album of some of my old material just to show these new artists why lyrical content is so important and still relevant in the game."
By Judy Faber