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Don’t call it a comeback! Naughty By Nature is still down with
O.P.P. (and Pink!) on the new album IICONS.
By Anastasia Silva
With Treach’s chiselled good looks and Vinnie’s baby face,
Naughty By Nature could easily be poster boys for PrayTV. But a walk-on
part in Spellbinder, the Harold Robbins novel about corrupt TV
preachers, is the furthest thing from their minds. Like the Sugar Hill
Gang quipped way back in ‘79 on ‘Rapper’s Delight’,
it’s all about the “hip hop a hippie the hippie to the hip
hip hop, and you don’t stop” for Treach and Vinnie.
And it always has been. Naughty By Nature are the
golden boys of hip hop. They live it. They breathe it. And with the
release of IICONS, their fifth and latest album, they consider
themselves hip hop heroes.
“Well, you know, as far as the States is concerned,
we’re a nation at war,” says Treach matter-of-factly. “And
as far as the world is concerned — from the Middle East on —
the world is at war. So Naughty By Nature, basically, we feel we are
hip hop heroes. We come and we bring this ‘feel good’ music
to the world and give the world a relief from the everyday stress and
drama.”
Treach is referring to ‘Feels Good’, IICON’s
first single, which features teen singing sensations 3LW. He and Vinnie
are in Toronto to shoot the second half of the song’s video (the
first half was shot in NYC and L.A.).
“You look at the news and you don’t see
nothin’ but killings and slayings and this and that and the other
craziness,” says Treach, sitting comfortably in a wife beater and
a pair of black denims. “It has to be resolved. ‘Cause when
you clash, man, with war, you never make money. You lose money and you
lose lives and people and relations.”
Needless to say, 9/11 has deeply affected these East
Orange, New Jersey natives, too. “There’s two sides to every
story, but there’s a truth to it all,” says Vinnie, leaning
forward for emphasis. “You have to defend your home. If I live
in my house and someone comes to harm my house, I have to defend and
protect my house and my children and my family. Bottom line.”
There’s a lot of bottom lines with these guys.
Since his much-publicized 1999 wedding to Pepa of Salt-N-Pepa and his
equally publicized divorce last year, Treach has recently been linked
to Pink, another collaborator on IICONS. He seems so sincere
in his denial that he and Pink are an item that you almost believe him...
almost. “Nah. We’re just real cool,” he says of their
relationship. “We did a lot of studio work together and we hang
out. If you see a guy and a girl together, they can’t just be friends
and just be hangin’ out — there’s somethin’ else
that’s gotta be goin’ on. So people can write up what they
think. My bottom line is ain’t nobody’s business who I’m
sleepin’ with or datin’.”
Although I don’t press further, I’m no fool.
With a career in music and acting, Treach, who’s played a criminal
in the HBO prison drama Oz, is a good actor. Even during an interview.
After all, this is the man who persuaded Carl Thomas, Method Man, Redman,
Freddie Foxx, Lil’ Jon, Chyna Whyte and Queen Latifah, as well
as Pink and 3LW, to collaborate on IICONS with a simple pager
message.
“You always have a picture drawn of how you want
the album to go and where you wanna take it,” says Treach. “But
with these artists comin’ and doin’ what they done with the
album, it was nowhere near expected that it was gonna be anything like
this. A lot of people didn’t come through because of political
reasons and labels, so it was really crazy and depressin’ and deterrin’
at times, but those who came through really came through.”
While the world remains at war, Treach and Vinnie
are fightin’ the fight in their own way — with beats and rhymes
that the whole world can relate to.
“We are our icons right now,” says Vinnie.
“We know those in the past and in the future, but we’re here
to put it down for the present. So the icons are Naughty By Nature.
God is the ultimate icon, but besides that, we put all faith in ourselves.
God first, and then ourselves. We take us where we need to be. The controllers
of our own destiny.”
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