El-P Says Killer Mike "Wore Me Down" to Produce "R.A.P. Music"

Critics and hip hop fans are calling Killer Mike's album RAP Music one of the year's best releases. But in our Rock the Bells interview with El-P, the album's producer, we learned the Brooklyn rapper was very resistant to produce Mike's album in the first place. 

"We hooked up through a mutual friend at Adult Swim," El-P says of meeting Killer Mike. "I went down to Atlanta and we just hit it off. It was instantaneous. We were immediately friends, we were immediately having fun and we were immediately making what we thought was exciting music. And they stepped to me and said, 'Yo, do the whole record,' and I was like, 'No.'"

El-P says he was reticent to take on another project given he still hadn't wrapped work on his own album, Cancer 4 Cure (which ended up coming out one week after Mike's).

"Over a period of a couple months they just wore me down. I couldn't front on it. I was trying to do my record so I was like, 'I can't put the time in,' but we just had no much fun. [I realized] we gotta do it.

"Mike flew out to Brooklyn and we stayed in my home studio for a couple months and just banged it out," El-P says. That's especially impressive when you consider the three to five years El-P takes between his own albums. "I consider myself lucky to have met him—we're really kindred spirits musically. We're going to do it again. We're going to keep doing it as long as people let us keep doing it."

Nice! It sounds like this isn't the last collaborative album between the two. To hear El-P talk about all that, plus the "possibility of pirates" hijacking the Coachella Cruise he and Killer Mike are performing on, watch the full clip above.