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"  When Souls of Mischief dropped their watershed debut, 93 &amp;#039;til Infinity, more than twenty years ago, none of the nascent Bay Area super group&amp;#039;s members were even old enough to drink legally. The title of their record notwithstanding, it barely crossed their minds to ponder what forever might look like, or what the future of hip-hop had in store. Since then, along with their extended Hieroglyphics family, A-Plus, Phesto, Tajai and Opio have released dozens of projects, and stepped on more than 100 stages annually, with an arc that mirrors the history of hip-hop itself, from obscurity, to the summit of the big label mountain, to the independent underground they helped unearth through early adoption of the internet as a distribution channel.  In anticipation of their sixth studio album\u2014There Is Only Now\u2014a collaboration with L.A. beatmaker Adrian Younge, who&amp;#039;s fresh off producing the hit &amp;quot;Picasso Baby&amp;quot; for Jay Z\u2014and to commemorate the recent deluxe reissue of 93 &amp;#039;til Infinity, we asked all four members to walk us down the paths they paved between the Golden Age and now.       Opio: I had a four-track recorder and I was recording things at the crib. There was a creative outlet for me to do things, even if they weren&amp;#039;t going to be well received by a major label. The thing that was stifling was the business relationship we had with Jive.  1995 A-Plus: The label didn&amp;#039;t like [the second Souls studio album] No Man&amp;#039;s Land. Jive was going through a change in their own structure, and easing away from hip-hop in the way we did it. They were going more toward being a pop label, with Britney Spears and &amp;#039;N Sync. They were keeping R&amp;amp;amp;B acts like R. Kelly, and they wanted us to be more of a poppy group. Their example was Fresh Prince. They had gotten the first rap Grammy, so for them hip-hop was popping. They were hooking us up with other producers for a single and it wasn&amp;#039;t working well.  Tajai: It&amp;#039;s hard to understand in today&amp;#039;s context that rap was still a stepchild of the industry. We were kids, and because of that, they wanted us to be a rap boy band. A-Plus: I&amp;#039;m glad those songs never surfaced\u2014they were bad. Phesto: Jive still trying to push &amp;quot;Taxi.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s like they had their mind set already. We could tell they weren&amp;#039;t that in touch with hip-hop by the things they would suggest for us to do. If we&amp;#039;d done them, we would have sabotaged our careers. That&amp;#039;s also when we first got a website, though, and were able to connect right with the fans. Before that, I didn&amp;#039;t even know what the Internet was.  1996 Phesto: By this time we&amp;#039;d become disenchanted with the labels. We had people who were interested in signing us, but in reality, I didn&amp;#039;t want to go that way again, unless there was some ridiculous deal we couldn&amp;#039;t turn down. We knew the ins and outs of the music business, and we figured we could do things on our own. A-Plus: There was a dude, DJ KOOL EQ from Las Vegas, who we had developed a rapport with from doing shows there. He had a compilation, Beats &amp;amp;amp; Lyrics, on his label [Industry Records], and we put the single &amp;quot;Unseen Hand&amp;quot; out on there. Tajai: When you start talking about underground hip-hop, that record was seminal in establishing that style. It was a big record\u2014for them and for us\u2014but on a different level than what we had been doing with Jive. 1997 A-Plus: We always had the idea that one day we&amp;#039;d do a Hieroglyphics album all together, and the circumstances of life forced it this time. We put out a first Oldies compilation, and put out &amp;quot;The Who&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;After Dark&amp;quot; with a label out of the Bronx. That bought us some time until the first Hiero album came out. Tajai: A lot with 3rd Eye Vision was possible because of the website. You can connect directly with your fans. Before that it was impossible. It made it possible for us to tour and really get that album out there.  1998 Tajai: On the tour, it was us in vans and a rental. Domino contacted dudes everywhere who we met when we were on tour with A Tribe Called Quest. A lot of them had moved up to being club owners by then. I remember Eminem opened for us at one show.  Phesto: Everyone started wanting our T-shirts, and merch. I didn&amp;#039;t think the Hieroglyphics logo would become what it is, but then there started being this huge buzz around it. Some people might have thought us getting dropped from major labels was the end of Hiero. But we were just starting.  Opio: De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest were the hottest acts in hip-hop at that time, and being on tour with them and seeing that the relationship with out fans was similar to the one they had with theirs\u2014even though we were new on the scene\u2014it was like we were the voice of a new generation, and all of these people really related to us.  A-Plus: Honestly, to me, I hadn&amp;#039;t felt a tremendous level of success yet. I didn&amp;#039;t feel like it was a breakthrough, or that shit was going so great. We were grinding. We were touring. It was rugged.  1999 Tajai: We needed to have something with us to sell when we went on tour, so [in 1997] we bought some ADAT tapes and a mixing board, and started recording on our own equipment. That&amp;#039;s where the third Souls studio album Focus came from. We couldn&amp;#039;t just be out there with T-shirts anymore. Recording was getting faster and easier. With [Hiero member] Del tha Funkee Homosapien really doing his solo thing like that, we all started doing it too.  Phesto: We&amp;#039;re family, and if all your friends and closest buddies are making music, then you have to make music too. Jive had killed the momentum of our second album, and we all had a chip on our shoulder. When some groups break up, they do their own things, but with us: our families are close. Everybody&amp;#039;s like brothers, and so we kept going. We still wanted it. 2000 Phesto: Focus was looked at as an underground tape sort of thing, and that&amp;#039;s not how we wanted to seal our legacy. That&amp;#039;s why we went with the title Trilogy: Conflict, Climax, Resolution for the next album\u2014it was like ending a chapter. If we move on from this chapter, then great. But if not, let&amp;#039;s seal this. Let&amp;#039;s shift the energy.  Tajai: Clubs were finally taking a chance on hip-hop. We sort of helped to trail-blaze that underground scene. By the time 2000 rolled around, we were on a tour bus with openers following us. The underground had been opened. Club owners were finally realizing that the people who came to our shows\u2014skaters, surfers, whoever\u2014they were the same guys who went to all their other shows too.  Opio: We brought this new form of hip-hop to these areas that were pretty much untouched by the scene. The places that nobody else would go to, we went to. And because people talked about us, got to see us perform and had a positive experience, word of mouth played a large role.  2001 Tajai: My daughter was four. I needed more merchandise, and when we were on tour with The Pharcyde, me and [Hiero Imperium ally and the group&amp;#039;s web programmer] SupremeEx had been going back and forth making this crazy record, Projecto: 2501.  A-Plus: That shit was genre-bending and ahead of its time. It made me think about doing my own project, but we were working on [the second Hiero studio album] Full Circle around that time. Souls had just come back from Australia and Japan, and all of Hieroglyphics rented a house right off Venice Beach. Phesto: In Venice, it was a struggle to drag myself into the studio. There&amp;#039;s beautiful women and beautiful weather. But once I would get in the studio, that energy was different than any other energy. Even though we were in such a distracting kind of place, we were secluded in a way. We also had a lot of people coming through the studio\u2014Goapele, and Planet Asia, and Abstract Rude. 2002 Tajai: By this time, we finally had a headquarters, and a staff. [For the single &amp;quot;Spark&amp;quot; on Chocolate Industries], they just reached out to us, then they put RJD2 on a remix, and that took off from there. We weren&amp;#039;t sitting around saying we should make trip-hop, or a record skaters or the clubs feel. Other artists who were fans themselves were getting at us, like how Gorillaz came to Del.       A-Plus: It was still important for us all to be together. Back in the day when you were little kids, all you&amp;#039;re doing is hanging out all the time. Ten years later, Tajai had a kid, I had just had a kid, and the point [of recording in one dedicated spot] was that we get together away from the distractions.  2003 Phesto: We were facing what some would call a sophomore slump with Full Circle, but the people who loved it really loved it. We were talking about more adult things, but at the same time, we were still young. People really love 3rd Eye Vision\u2014they it couldn&amp;#039;t get any better. I look at Full Circle though as a more mature album. That was a difficult record to take songs off of. 2004 Tajai: Because of the success of Full Circle, we were able to purchase a building, which is still our headquarters now, and we put out The Building to celebrate. We were also always making solo music, and recording at home. I had a closet bedroom project, Power Movement. I got to tour solo, which is tough when you&amp;#039;re in two super groups.  A-Plus: Tajai releasing Power Movement prompted me to buy my first piece of equipment to record at home.  Phesto: I went back to school to study music theory and jazz theory. I was heavily into just trying to figure out what type of artist I was. I knew I could do lyrics, but I was seeing what I needed to do to grow as a musician. I felt like I needed to learn, and go back to the drawing board.  2005 Tajai: Now we had a bedroom, a kitchen, and a shower at Hiero headquarters. Opio was in there working on his album. We all were. We had a white board to slot time with the in-house sound engineer Matt Kelly. He was a real trooper. Opio: We were always touring and hanging out with each other. There wasn&amp;#039;t a huge disconnect in terms of recording solo projects.  2006 Tajai: We were always touring. Even when people were promoting solo albums, we would go out as Souls of Mischief. We went out as Souls of Mischief to support Opio, and we went out together for A-Plus. We&amp;#039;re like a punk rock band in that respect. A-Plus: Touring is our marketing budget. We have to be face to face with people, because we&amp;#039;re not going to be in any Top 40 rotation. It&amp;#039;s how we stay in the game. It&amp;#039;s how we acquire younger fans. We&amp;#039;re a presence, right in their face, every year.  2007 A-Plus: Tajai had set it off by putting out his solo album, so I said, &amp;quot;Fuck it, I&amp;#039;ll make one.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d been working on My Last Good Deed for years. Thinking back, I put too many songs on it. I really could have made two albums with that. You live and learn.  Phesto: All the guys had solo records out already. I wasn&amp;#039;t really tripping, but I went back and learned from my studies and applied them. I started focusing on my solo tracks and asking, &amp;quot;Who is Phesto Dee as a solo artist?&amp;quot;  2008 Tajai: Things changed fast. We&amp;#039;re living in a fast world. I didn&amp;#039;t have any videos for Power Movement, and just four years later, now Opio has a video for almost every song on his [Vulture&amp;#039;s Wisdom, Volume 1]. As kids we would sneak into the club and risk going to jail to listen to new hip-hop. The experience is visual. People want to see you doing it. Opio: At the time, I felt like the listener would have a deeper connection with the music if it were paired with a visual. Look at a song like &amp;quot;93 &amp;#039;til Infinity,&amp;quot; which is a great song, but people also love the video, and I think that helped the success of the song, because the listener was able to walk away with both a sonic and visual impression.  2009 A-Plus: For [the fifth Souls studio album] Montezuma&amp;#039;s Revenge, we went back to the Full Circle way of recording, and rented a house up in the woods about an hour north of the Bay Area. It was really in the woods, and Prince Paul came and lived with us. It was kind of crazy having him there, since we grew up watching him.  Phesto: I was working on my solo music, but Prince Paul took precedent. We knew him back in the day from when he would come out for certain dates with Tribe and De La, and he wanted to help us get back to the same kind of energy we had at the beginning. So we got on that seclusion thing again\u2014no phones, no TVs. We&amp;#039;re all humble guys, but the thing is, when you&amp;#039;re in the music-making process, you can get stuck in your ways. Paul helped us loosen up. Tajai: Montezuma&amp;#039;s Revenge was a step in another direction. It&amp;#039;s the first record we&amp;#039;ve ever made with an outside executive producer. I would say that record brought us to the forefront as new artists for a lot of people. Our second wave of fans was from &amp;#039;98, the third started around 2009.  2010 Opio: Recording as a solo artist didn&amp;#039;t move me away from Souls of Mischief; I actually think it helped because it made me a stronger performer and a stronger songwriter, as each one of us developed in that way it just made our unit stronger.  Tajai: We always stepped back into the limelight as Souls of Mischief. No one has ever gone solo. We go out as satellite ambassadors. 2011 A-Plus: Around 2010 I put out an instrumental LP called Legrowlize It! Then came the idea for Pepper Spray. I had started a production group with this dude AAGEE, and it was his idea to do a whole project over Red Hot Chili Peppers samples. We couldn&amp;#039;t sell it because of the samples, but it would be cool to give it away\u2014no pun intended.  Phesto: I&amp;#039;d been sitting on music before releasing [a first solo album] Granite Pedigree, and after the experience with Paul, the stuff I had was ready. I&amp;#039;m over-analytical sometimes, and Paul helped us free up our style. A lot of people record, but they never mix and master. Next thing you know, two, three, four years go by. I was ready to put my music out. 2012 A-Plus: We had our first annual Hiero Day in 2012. It&amp;#039;s a free event in Oakland, and it&amp;#039;s actually pretty huge. We have all our friends from the industry come out.   Heiro Day / Shomari Smith Opio: The first Hiero day was amazing; it was something that we tried to do but didn&amp;#039;t know what it was going to look like. There is a culture in Oakland that spreads throughout the world. The way they walk, the way they talk, their attitudes. That culture is something that highly influenced me. We had family and close friends there, but Hiero fans are like a family within themselves. 2013 A-Plus: We spent a lot of time in L.A. last year recording There Is Only Now at Adrian Younge&amp;#039;s studio, and released [the third Hieroglyphics studio album] The Kitchen. It was a busy year. We also toured sixty-something dates for the anniversary of 93 &amp;#039;til Infinity. Tajai: We were in an awesome place doing this next record with Adrian Younge\u2014he&amp;#039;s going to be recognized as one of the premier producers, if he&amp;#039;s not already. He has an analogue technique; he can make a sound that sounds like it&amp;#039;s from any era. He creates worlds.  Phesto: You put the projects in different silos. When I&amp;#039;m with Souls it&amp;#039;s easier. It&amp;#039;s like a think tank\u2014when somebody hits on an idea, you take the baton and run with it. It&amp;#039;s like we can always do so much more than what we&amp;#039;re doing. With them, I&amp;#039;ve always looked for ways to push myself. 2014 Tajai: We&amp;#039;ve passed a lot of milestones, but we don&amp;#039;t feel like that. We still go to shows. We&amp;#039;re still fans.  A-Plus: Even with everything, there&amp;#039;s still room to grow. I&amp;#039;ve always been into electronic music, but I wanted to try my hand at making it. With [the new collaboration with AAGEE] Molly&amp;#039;s Dirty Water, I wanted to make a hybrid, out-my-lane-completely kind of stuff. Opio: When we were recording 93 &amp;#039;til Infinity, we looked at our present situation and we were surrounded by greatness and had been raised in hip-hop. We came up on extremely talented rappers with crazy fundamentals, like Rakim, EPMD and Big Daddy Kane. We were just trying to live up to that standard. Looking back on it all now, it&amp;#039;s humbling.  Phesto: Everything just kind of builds up. You don&amp;#039;t just wake up one day and say, &amp;quot;I finally have this thing figured out.&amp;quot; There are no rules set in stone. What happened last year could change next year. The only thing that doesn&amp;#039;t change is the way we approach making our music. *Chris Faraone is the News + Features Editor of DigBoston. He occasionally covers Wu-Tang and other hip-hop essentials for Esquire.com, and has collaborated with Get On Down on projects including upcoming re-issues of classics by Cypress Hill and Non Phixion. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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