Erick Sermon Reveals He Could’ve Signed 50 Cent Before He Got Shot
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Erick Sermon revealed he could’ve signed 50 Cent before the man went on his iconic run. During a conversation with the My Expert Opinion podcast, the EPMD emcee opened up about the moment his neighbor introduced him to Fif.
“Well, Cory [Rooney, then Senior Vice President of Sony] lived next door to me,” he recalled. “And Cory was with Sony and [producers] Trackmasters. So he [brought] 50 to the crib. And you know, this is early 50. 50 used to come to the house all the time, and we’d do records. So, he was Def Squad… Cory just felt that it was best for him to be over here.”
Sermon continued, recalling when he produced “Da Heatwave” for the Queens artist. The track was released in 2000 and featured a guest appearance from N.O.R.E. The Def Squad rapper explained that this was the last song he did before his infamous shooting.
“That was the first single that I did after ‘How to Rob,'” he said, mentioning that Fif’ shouts both him and Def Squad out in the record’s outro. “That was his first single before he got shot up [in May 2000]. As far as the barking — whoever he was dissing, I didn’t care. If you roll with me, it was cool. I wasn’t tripping on that. If you are with me, then they’re gonna have to say something to me, too.”
Elsewhere in that conversation, Erick touched on the art of Hip-Hop beef. He opened up about subliminal shots between Rakim and EPMD.
“Rakim came out with ‘I Ain’t No Joke’ and said, ‘You could get a smack for this, I ain’t no joke,'” the producer stated. “Then we came out with ‘You’re A Customer’ and said, ‘It’s like a Diggum Smack/ Smack me and I’ll smack you back.’ The hood took it, and they [told Rakim], ‘You heard what EPMD said? They dissed you.'”
As he continued, Sermon recalled running into “the God MC” at their accountant’s office. “It was Eric B., his brother Ant Live, me, and Rakim. I’d [previously] told this girl that I wasn’t feelin’ Rakim’s last album, and I didn’t know that she went and told him. This is the God, and I rhyme because of him. I came in the room, and he was sitting there, and he said, ‘You’re stressin me.’ We were on the 20th floor in front of a big window, I could see me going through that widow.”
“On ‘Follow The Leader’ he said, ‘Stop buggin’/ A brother said dig ’em I never dug ’em/ He couldn’t follow the leader long enough so I drug him into the danger zone,'” he remembered. “That whole sh*t was about with the dig ’em smack and the danger zone from ‘You’re A Customer’ when we said ‘Remember this, lounge you in the danger zone.’ I told Parrish I’m not goin’ behind that. Leave [him] alone.”
Watch the clips above.
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