This was actually the first time I ever heard Paul sing. I think that what he did was he studied all these different artists, figured out what their flaws were, and then went and took voice lessons for several years while everyone else was just smokin' blunts. I don't know how much you read your own press, but a lot of people said Handsome Boy was a parody of, like, the vain rapper . . . I think they really shoulda done their research, to find out who we were first, who we really were. I don't think it's a parody.
Life is a parody of itself.
And rappers are parodies of themselves. I should get credit for that. What happened was, especially with De La's stuff, we'd give it to the label, and the next thing you know, people at other record companies and, like, radio people would have it. It was the people at the label who spread it out. So what we did was, we gave everybody at Tommy Boy a copy of the record with a different animal sound dubbed over the music.